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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 agree that some things are never coming back. Believing in God just because, assenting to a teaching just because — that’s gone. Intelligent people need to be persuaded. They can be persuaded on rational, phenomenological, social, or utilitarian grounds. But the era of “here’s some Thomism”, “just trust the Bible”, “just trust me bro” — this is totally dead. Not a lot of serious people can take every teaching literally just because they have been told to do so.
If conservatives can be persuaded to join the army to help a Godless empire plant poppies to flood their rivals with heroin, then they can be persuaded to sacrifice some pleasure for the only Empire that has ever mattered, the Kingdom of God. What made them join the army? The unthinking intuition that they can find glory there, some benefits, some camaraderie, and someone told them that their enemy is satanic. Christianity can do all of this but better, in the right form. Not only can it induce stronger allegiance to a perceived Good, but the Good is actually Good.
I go back and forth in my mind debating how much the supernatural is required to promote ideal behavior. It’s worth noting that Marxism and Nazism were both able to promote ostensibly selfless collective behavior despite having no interest in the supernatural. As were the French revolutionaries, or even the soldiers under Napoleon, or the Kamikaze pilots of Japan. But why would someone give their life for communism? Because it was seen as utopian and just and a fight against evil, and men bonded fraternally over these conclusions. This made it morally obligatory and a great way to die. You had Japanese soldiers still fighting into the 60s after WWII ended, only for their emperor! So if people are willing to die for a cause that has no supernatural aspects, why shouldn’t they be willing to live selflessly for a Christ that has no supernatural aspects? It’s worthwhile to ponder this. If obedience to God can usher in utopia, God understood in a certain way which precludes the supernatural, then it can promote ideal selfless behaviors without veering into unevidenced supernatural assertions.
I think this has pretty much always been the case. Apologetics is a very old discipline for this reason.
This is underdiscussed (in part because of what those people did) but people absolutely are and this explains a lot of the last century and a half or so. Progressivism took some moral cues and language from Christianity but in practice was often essentially materialistic. I think this was truer in Europe than in the United States but as I understand it lot of mainline Protestantism was retreating from the supernatural and fiddling with cool new social causes to usher in a utopia as you say. Embarrassingly, those causes turned out to be things like "eugenics" and "banning alcohol" and a lot of the "progress" that was made was unwound and then memory-holed, but people are absolutely willing to live selflessly for a Christ with no supernatural aspects.
Part of the problem is that when you strip the supernatural aspects from Christ, there's not much left that isn't subject to radical reinterpretation (if you read the Gospels Christ arguably tends to rain on utopian parades in favor of, well, the supernatural gift of everlasting life). Hence the modern progressives are basically radically opposed to their forebears from 100 years ago even despite the much-remarked-upon resemblance of "woke progressivism" to a "secular" "religion" – the through-line is essentially the same. What's missing is consistency – progressivism has flitted from cause to cause and emphasis to emphasis from decade to decade. I don't think religions are free of this at all, but grounding the authority of a religion in a transcendent supernatural does provide a focal point for a religion to return to. Progressives of today can't return to the writings of their forebears from the 1880s or 1920s because those guys were all incredibly racist by today's standards and nobody – not even the authors – are claiming to be inspired.
Marxism comes the closest to this – and perhaps this explains its enduring power – because it claims to be a MATERIALISTIC SCIENCE and thus inevitable, which is a sneaky way of claiming to be infallible WITHOUT invoking the Divine.
I agree with this. For example, look at Aquinas (though he was hardly the first of course) - dude spent a huge amount of effort trying to make rational arguments for tenets of the faith. And he was hardly a modern thinker, he was very much medieval! Moreover, I would go further and say that contra @coffee_enjoyer, the people who could be convinced without apologetics are not gone. There have always been, and will always be, people who don't engage with things on an intellectual level. They go based on vibes, or what is cool, or things like that. I think it's easy to figure that sort of person is gone because to most of us, they may as well not exist. Most people here exist in a very skewed bubble of smart people who like to discuss things intellectually, but there are definitely plenty of people today who don't enjoy that sort of thing (and who would even be put off by it).
Also, I think it's very much the case that even with apologetics one still has to take a leap of faith. I have my reasons for believing, but at the end of the day I don't know. I decided that the arguments for belief were stronger than those against, but the arguments for still could be mistaken. I'll only truly know when I die (if even then, because perhaps I'll go into an endless oblivion where I won't even exist to know I was wrong in this life). But I still believe, even so.
Yes, I absolutely think this is correct. Even think about the New Testament – it's very clear that the very Apostles who had Christ appear to them had to have faith that God's promises to them would be fulfilled.
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