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I'm going to sketch out a pretty broad and thin theory here, about Christianity and how the Protestant Reformation has had downstream effects on American politics for a while. Please feel free to poke holes in this, I'm really just spitballin'.
My basic idea is something like this: the Catholic church in Western Europe went way too hard enforcing the persecution of heresy, especially against mystics and those practicing contemplative-style prayer outside of monasteries, where they could be easily controlled. You see this especially in the persecution of the Cathars, which while their gnostic ideas were obviously wrong, I think the Catholic church made a huge mistake by not incorporating the obvious need for more direct mystical and experiential understanding of the faith amongst the laity, and disaffected factions.
Fastforward a few hundred years, and you have the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, and all the wars. Christendom in the West is basically fractured entirely, with the Protestants generally attracting folks that are more into mysticism, experiential acts of faith, and contemplation. Whereas the Catholic church tended to keep those focused on structured, ordered discipline and an explicit, rational understanding of the faith.
Ok, this is where the theory gets a bit out there. Personally I believe this split has continued into the modern day, with the modern progressive and conservative movements. I think that by and large the spirit of Protestantism has shifted away from explicit religion and into the more progressive, ideological wings of especially American, and increasingly world society. People on the left are by and large much more focused, in my experience, on experiential states, following the heart, and of course contemplative, mystical spiritual practice.
Because of the fact that the conservative branch of Christianity (even many Protestants, like the extreme Southern Baptists) continued to be staunchly against mysticism, ultimately they acted as a foil to the Protestants who wanted more of this mystical, experiential relationship with God. This is why the New Age/Buddhist/Eastern traditions are so appealing to folks on the left, because they are able to indulge freely in their mystical experience, without having any mean conservatives telling them they need to you know, get a job, and raise kids, and generally have structure in their lives.
Ultimately I think this is a major issue, and one at the core of the modern 'meta-crisis.' Taking a page out of Jordan Peterson's book, I think that much of especially human society can be seen as a dialectical tension between chaos and order. I think that the left I've broadly sketched here represents chaos, and the right represents order.
We desperately need both in various ways - we need order for structure, discipline, and to ensure the trains run on time, so to speak. We also need chaos for renewal, for fun and play and joy, and to make sure that authority doesn't get too corrupt, that people have a direct line to God, or if you're more secular, at least to a deep range of authentic human experience.
Overall I don't see the culture war rift being healed until we are able to conceptualize this breakage that has it's roots far in the past, and try to bring the two sides of the culture together. To help progressives understand that they need conservative structure, discipline and order, but also to convince conservatives that we need renewal, revitalization, and a check on corrupt authority.
As to how to do this, well, that's the million dollar question. I'm definitely curious if anyone has thoughts!
But isn't it the exact opposite?
Ok, maybe not the exact opposite. But it's more complicated than any 2D schema would suggest.
Leftists are not anarchic chaos agents. In fact committed leftists are inordinately concerned with order, justice, fairness, morality, and so forth. "We must stop Trump at all costs to defend American democracy" is order, not chaos, even if you think it's an order that's based on faulty reasoning and ulterior motivations. "Yeah let's let the reality TV star become President and see what happens" is chaos. Ironically, self-identified anarchists often have a fetishistic preoccupation with structure, discipline, and power. The responsibility for actually enforcing this discipline is "distributed" (or so they claim) in order to avoid individual culpability, but the underlying structural dynamics are clear.
The dream of Marxism is a fully transparent social order grounded in pure reason. It's irrational that billionaires get to own multiple yachts while there are still people who can't afford medical care. We can use our brains to figure out a more fair way to distribute resources, instead of leaving it up to the irrationality of the market. There are no limits to what the unfettered human mind can accomplish. That's the basic impulse.
Of course, you might start to question how "rational" your opponents really are, if you think they're tenaciously holding onto premises that are incoherent or have been falsified. But, naturally, they would just turn that back at you and say that you're the one who's reasoning from incorrect premises. So we're back at square one.
Rejections of leftist utopian ideals are ultimately grounded in a rejection of the infinite power of reason: there are limits to how much reality can be rationally known and managed, there are things that can't be controlled or changed, etc.
(And while we're on the subject of Jordan Peterson: femininity is obviously order, and masculinity is obviously chaos. Wild how many people get this wrong.)
On a similar note, progressives accept the teachings of the Church (known colloquially as "academia" and "the media") at face value. Conservatives think the Church (academia and the media) are corrupt and self-serving, and instead favor more localized self-study of scripture and reports. The former helps with message discipline, keeping everyone aligned to Current Thing, and it saves a ton of mental effort if you can just read the headlines and trust that the contents prove the description - presuming the Church is trustworthy, as all good and decent people do. The latter is a much higher variance approach, producing shining spots of brilliance and insight in the midst of broad swathes of "How the fuck did you come to that conclusion?"
Obviously that is painting with an overly broad brush, but I do think there's a bit of a comparison to be made there. In this metaphor, Scott would be something like an autistic monk whose intra-Church, well-intentioned criticisms got picked up by the Protestants, to his considerable dismay.
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