Where are freedom and secularism leading us? Part 2

Concept

Progress has meant a movement toward the fulfillment of a particular form of society where individuals are unhindered by social mores, so that everyone picks their way of life and being as freely as they can without government and social interference, and everybody else tolerates completely the decisions made by everyone else, nobody feeling grudges at the choices of others. In few words, everybody’s particular pursuit of happiness has no negative or positive influence in the pursuit of happiness of anyone else living in the same place. In few words, progress is a moral agenda. The practical consequences of this moral agenda will be discussed in a further entry. It only suffices to say that it depends on the destruction of any notion of a common good that depends on a shared system of values and traditions.

There is another understanding of progress which I consider misleading: progress as economic development. We owe this notion to the British, who at the opening of the modern revolutionary times triggered the massive economic development of the industrial revolution. Some people commit the tempting fallacy of arguing that the more economic development, society progresses toward the moral ideal described in the previous paragraph. I will not develop my ideas concerning this notion. It suffices to say that I disagree with it. Development and progress are two different things, and if there is a casual relationship between them we don’t know.

Conservatism aims in the opposite direction; first it was expressed as reactionary ideology and behavior: avoiding the moral and social changes posed by progress. Later it was expressed as nostalgia: recovering the traditions that a decaying civilization was destroying. Today is almost depressing pessimism: the memory of a social identity almost gone. This is also a moral stance, not an economic one. The mingling of the word conservatism with economic neoliberalism is nothing but confusion, and it has coinage strange expressions as “fiscal conservatism” (simply neoliberal would fit better, especially because it literally means what it says).

Being a moral stance, conservatism is antagonistic with liberal progressivism. One aims at an imaginary society, assuming that that society is possible, but with little empirical reference whatsoever. Conservatism aims at a real society: ours. It refers to a historically empirical experience.

The real problem lies in our concepts of justice and fairness. The truth of the progressive discourse lies in the injustices and unfairness of the old society, and it is in this critique that their entire agenda bases itself. Conservatives usually lack an effective response to this criticism, because after all the old society was filled with many if those so-called injustices. This is the main reason why conservatives are usually labeled as members of what used to be the group of people privileged by the old status quo, and many times it is an accurate remark.

Where are freedom and secularism leading us? Part 1

The question that haunts my mind...

  

History

Two hundred years ago, when the Ancient Regime was still powerful and pervasive in the Western Civilization, the revolutionary idea of dethroning royal families and removing cardinals and bishops from public offices was a noble quest. The royal families ruled despotically, the caste society was unfairly repressive, the church had lost the spiritual function to which it was intended. For a middle class bourgeoisie of the time there was no better option than being more or less revolutionary. Things had to change. And they changed.

Seeing history backwards always helps understanding where we are now. But comparing the ideals of those times to the ones of today also helps gauging the value of our own time. The question goes: Where are we? And by “we” I mean the Western Civilization. I’m explicitly discounting the worlds of Islam, Hindu, Africa, East Asia and maybe the Slavic Orthodox societies. I’m counting in most of Western Europe and its former colonies (except those in Africa). In few words, I’m talking about the array of national societies that emerged from Roman Christianity some way or the other. Where is the Western Civilization going? To me it seems to have disappeared almost entirely. And to me that is a sad, unfortunate and tragic fact.

We can divide the history of the Western Civilization as before and after the French Revolution of 1789, because it was in the French Revolution where the modern debate of freedom and secularism slammed into our history not to leave the center stage ever again. In every country this event manifested itself in various forms, but given that France was then the peak of European civilization, a momentous social movement like this spread like wildfire. Even the Anglo American revolution of 1776, which began more than a decade before its French counterpart, was a consequence of the intellectual and social forces that where being cultivated in Paris’ slums.

From the French Revolution of 1789 emerged the revolutionary ideal that convinced so many people from Jefferson, Hegel, Bolivar and Proudhon, to Juarez, Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara, and so forth. Paris’ massive rebellion became an icon, then an ideal, then a conviction, then a way of living. If we look at the French Revolution as nothing more than a successful plebeian rebellion in the capital of a particular civilization at the moment of its cultural peak, we start to wonder if everything that came afterwards was nothing but a misinterpretation, if not a huge misunderstanding. It was just a rebellion like many others in the history of mankind; however, this one was interpreted as a definite moment in a historical phenomenon usually referred to as “progress”. And it was the impression that there was a historical progress that put so many bright minds in the path of searching the direction of this phenomenon.

But if we consider the possibility that there was never a progressive movement; if we consider the option that this impression was nothing but an idiosyncratic feature of a civilization reaching its peak of self fulfillment; maybe then we can understand why we seemed to be at a complete lost today: because we were looking for something, and framed the most comprehensive discourses about something that we were sure was there, when it wasn’t. This is the most paradoxical feature of all progressive political discourses and movements today: that they move an agenda based on a north that is purely ideological.

My new Executive Auto Biography

 I was born in Caracas, Venezuela. I lived in New York City for two years hoping to one day become an American citizen, but the U.S. environment toward Hispanic immigration of any type has become so hostile that I decided to move to Mexico City after finishing my M.A. at NYU.

Now I'm starting a new life in this wonderful city founded by the Aztecs and re founded by Hernán Cortés, with the most wonderful woman I've ever met, a native "chilanga" named Quetzalli, after the nahuatl word which means "precious one", and the root of the name of the famous Aztec god Quetzalcóatl.

After seeing everything that is happening in Venezuela from abroad, after seeing the heretical cult to the personality of Hugo Chávez that has been building up, I've decided that I no longer want to belong to that community of servile people, and no longer call myself Venezuelan. I will not belong to a Maoist form of society, even though international regulations bind me to this ridiculous passport.

I've always denied the thesis of a post national world, but if we are moving in that direction, at least in what regards to culture and identity, then I claim to belong no longer to the Venezuelan nationality, with the hope of finding something new, something extravagant, if not imaginary, a name I could call myself.

If gays have this right to change their natural sexual orientation, why could we not demand to be called differently? Better be a homeless gypsy than something you dislike so much.

In a more positive tone, I consider myself more a Roman Catholic than anything else in the world. My internationalism is expressed through the Church of Christ. To me it doesn't matter where you are from, or the color of your skin, or the language you spoke when you were a child, or the language spoken by your ancestors; if you are a Christian, you are my brother or sister.

All Christians are citizens in the Kingdom of Heaven, and we enjoy equal rights under the same supreme monarch Jesus Christ, and we all receive perfect judgment and universal peace and love, for in the Kingdom of God no difference is of any matter.

If this is Civilization, I choose Barbarism.

I share this news with you. "Four activists from Ukrainian feminist group Femen stripped off in St. Peter's Square on Sunday in a protest for gay rights just as Pope Benedict XVI was reciting his traditional weekly Angelus prayer." http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/topless-feminists-stage-vatican-gay-protest.aspx?pageID=238&nid=38944

This is another bold demonstration that we no longer hold to a true and sane notion of freedom. Where freedom becomes irreverent disrespect for sacred things, then freedom becomes something sick, insane and ultimately evil.

We are way into a moral dark age, where individuals in the name of their individual pride, in strife for self-gratification, for bodily pleasure, for dirty, pig-like, debased and debauched forms of love and lust and licentiousness, are even willing to come to a sacred place that is not even the center of their own religious cult (Ukranians are Christian Orthodox after all), to insult and humilliate those that do not share their moral decrepitude.

This is another act that proves that individuals must be guided in their freedom, and that freedom must be somehow guided by a superior intelligence, for when they are left to themselves, many human beings become ugly and savage animals, like this feminist group from somewhere outside Roman Christianity.

What has happened with the freedom Locke and J. S. Smith defended so ardently? These men where Christians that understood freedom to be a wonderful gift from God. The moment it turned against God, against the sacred, it ceased being freedom and became a work of the devil.

I cannot help but ask myself, is our civilization worth defending? Is this culture of freedom something we ought to protect? 

After all, we are being challenged by the Muslim world in ways that are startling. But at times like this I cannot avoid raising the question if the Muslim world does not have the better side in this debate. They remain steadfast with God, and if they will create their form of freedom any time soon, it doesn't seem to depart from their respect and yield to God. If that would be the case, why would we, Western Christians, side with our own decrepit civilization? If freedom means protesting topless in front of the most holy place in all Western Christendom: is it something worth considering as a good?

Two core values of modernity are falling short of my highest expectations: democracy and freedom. Democracy, because it's the weapon of the mass of uncultivated against merit, and the modern understanding of freedom, because it's a debased and corrupt form of individuality. Both are willing to assault things that are not to be touched by human beings. 

There is no legitimate right to disrespect sacred things. Anyone willing to do so is a rogue of Creation. I propose to call all these liberals rogues against Creation, like communists, atheists, and the family of infidels that turned their backs against God, and that now want to use the government to turn all of civilization against Heaven.

There is not right to send society down Hell. If you want to go to Hell, then do it on your own. Don't ask all of society to accompany you. Liberals are an army of evil harlots and incubus that want to see us all burned so that they can enjoy the pleasures of a few years of debauched life.

If this is civilization, I choose barbarism.