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Good morning! Hope your week is off to a good start fellow Mottizens. I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently, and I strongly agree with nara that this place is one of the best, if not the best, places to find genuinely open political discourse on the internet.
Anyway, I want to talk about religion & modernity. The so-called 'RETVRN traditionalists' and neo-reactionaries, and how some insights from them play into the broader culture war. I was reading a post from a friend of mine on Substack, and he makes a great point with regard to religious folks trying to turn back the clock, so to speak:
I strongly agree that we live in a liberal time, and have deeply liberal instincts. We can't just pretend that we don't live our lives in a liberal way, and I suspect most people talking about a return to traditionalism are, as @2rafa has (perhaps uncharitably) opined on before, simply LARPers.
This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
Going off that last bit - once you get some years under your belt, it becomes clear from a personal standpoint that a more controlled lifestyle is just better. That saying that you have no head if you aren't a conservative in your 30s rings true in large part, in my humble opinion, because of this personal understanding. If you drink all the time, eat unhealthy food, smoke constantly, etc, you will very quickly find that your 'personal freedom' isn't worth much when you constantly feel terrible.
While convincing people may be much harder, I am convinced (heh) that it's the best way forward. As someone who changed my mind on the more traditional lifestyle largely through argumentation and personal experience, I am living proof that changing hearts and minds is possible on this front. Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.
I won't deny that modern liberalism has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to the religious context. However, as I've argued, going back seems foolish and not that desirable even if we could. I'll end this with a further quote from the article I quoted above, as I think it ends better than I could:
Edit: ended up writing this into a more full Substack post, if anyone is interested.
I very much don't feel like a LARPer. I don't think Feser - one of the staunchest modern defenders of Scholastic Metaphysics - is a LARPer.
I also wouldn't describe myself as a Trad, because that means something very specific in my religious tradition. I attend a normal mass at a normal parish.
But I also 100% believe in all of it. Heaven, Hell, the way of Illumination, Theosis, Divine Simplicity, Trinity of Lover, Beloved, and the Love that Unites, submission to local bishop, souls that are the form of the body, demons, etc. These things are more real to me than the Declaration of Independence and I have had as much personal experience with the governance of the Church as the governance of my civil authorities.
I believe true freedom is the freedom that comes from discipline and learning how to work within a system outside of my experiences. The freedom of playing a piano well is not the same as pressing keys as the whim takes me. Enlightenment conceptions of freedom seem to me more like a toddler banging on a keyboard "freely."
I'm sure there are some LARPers somewhere, but there are still many people who were born into these traditions. If both mother and father or just father attended church weekly, their kids have a 1/3 likelihood of attending church weekly as well. Converts are a small group compared with those who are hereditary Christians.
Those who are Amish are already Amish. I don't know where the idea comes from that we will lose technological advances if we start having a more pre-modern outlook on usury, for instance. The rate of acquiring new advances might decrease, but some total collapse back to the bronze age isn't necessary or desired by anyone I'm aware of.
I agree with all this, and agree that we must believe in it to be seriously Christian. I suppose I'm more talking about forcing people to believe via authority - that is right out.
Unfortunately much of Christendom seems to want to return to the era when ecclesiastical authority was the rule, and to cross it was to risk death. I disagree that Christ would've wanted such a setup.
I'd like to push back on the idea that crossing ecclesiastical authority risked death. I feel like that's a model of the Middle Ages that is more conceived on 18th century propaganda instead of the actual historical record. Even when the Papal States had an executioner, he was part of the civil courts, not the ecclesiastical courts. He executed thieves and assassins, not heretics. Ecclesiastical courts were not allowed to kill anyone at all, and there is good reason for that. That's not to say they were infallible bastions of perfect goodness and mercy, but they aren't the opposite either. They were courts.
People accused by civil authorities of crimes begged to be tried by the Inquisition because the Inquisition had a higher standard of evidence. And so on and so forth.
What you might object to most strongly crosses over into the other aspect of your comment - forcing people to believe via authority. So I will touch on that first before a deeper discussion on persecuting heretics.
In the Middle Ages, people were not forced to believe via authority. Forced baptisms are illicit, and pagans converted in droves without threat of force. Rather, people believed because it was the air they breathed. Not being a Christian would be like being a Flat Earther today.
Taking the analogy further, lots of people today believe the Earth is round because that is how it is depicted in art. Maybe they were lucky enough to be exposed to a globe as a child. They heard stories and have seen relics of people going to space and seeing the round Earth. They are not forced to believe the Earth is round under threat of torture. It'd be frankly bizarre for them to think the Earth was Flat.
Any American today had the opportunity to take high-school level Trigonometry and be able to prove that the Earth is round based on measuring shadows and traveling 100 miles, a trivial feat compared to how difficult it would be to prove to oneself in the past. But why would they? Who is suspicious enough to do so?
And moreover, basic facts about the world, like the shape of the Earth, shouldn't be accessible only to those with above-average intelligence and a car. It would be bizarre to make a society that is agnostic about the shape of the Earth because we wouldn't want to unduly influence belief.
The Medieval mind was as convinced about the truth of Christianity as we are about the roundness of the Earth. Those with the intelligence to prove it made sure that this important knowledge was accessible to all. And I believe they did prove the existence of God and that there is more proof today than there was in the past. And that anyone smart enough who goes through 4-6 years of specialized education and spiritual formation (that is very hard to get these days) will agree, if we could just get them to take the opportunity cost to get there.
Here is where the analogy is inadequate - the problem of heretics. Because it doesn't really matter to a functioning society if there is a group of people who think the Earth is flat. We pity them, we ignore them, even if one of our own children became a flat Earther we would still harbor a vague hope that they could still life a good life, even if you stop trusting their judgement on other things.
But in the case of Christianity, there is a huge emphasis on Orthodoxy (right belief) and Orthopraxy (right practice.) And if you tip the balance so that the ignorant masses are now divided in belief, they are going to believe all sorts of things, very few of which are results of a systematic fact-finding methodology. And if you have midwits choosing beliefs randomly, you have disagreement and dissension and civil wars and that is why the CIVIL authorities executed heretics and waged crusades against them.
Because the Cathars had beliefs that were society-ending and spread them at an alarming rate to people who didn't know better. Because if you're a Protestant Lord and some of your subjects are Catholics then they have an obligation to defy your authority at times, and you can't have that.
The problem the Medieval were trying to solve wasn't that everyone is by default agnostic and they needed to be forced at knifepoint to be Catholic. The problem they were trying to solve is that people all too easily believe whatever their slightly-smarter neighbor tells them is a good idea and this can upend society. Like "marriage and sex are evil" and "men and women are interchangable."
But wait, didn't we enlightened Americans figure out a way for multiple people with a plurality of different ideologies and religions to live together in peace and harmony without society collapsing?
...I certainly hope so. But I think only time can tell.
Good points I've actually defended the traditional church hierarchy many times by appealing to this kind of argument.
I suppose I just get fed up sometimes with how uhh well frankly foolish and disconnected much of the church hierarchy seems to me. Not claiming they are, just that I have difficulty understanding their motives. This goes for Catholic and Orthodox and Anglican, btw.
You do make good points though!
That's kind of a different matter. Yes, they're bumbling idiots, but they're my bumbling idiots!
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