A central theme of “neoreaction”, which draws a direct line from 17th-century New England to post-modern liberalism, is that modern Leftism, and therefore the cultural, ideological, academic and political framework of the 21st-century West, is a religion in search of a God. (As someone once said, the easiest way to understand the state of affairs today is to assume that “Massachusetts conquered the world”.) I’ve been banging on this point myself for years now.
Among the foremost candidates for the God-role have been equality, “social justice”, and Nature; among the religion’s many Crusades (or, as Anne Hutchinson or Cotton Mather might have put it, “missions into the wilderness”) have been abolitionism, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, civil rights, the “sexual revolution”, feminism, pacifism, abortion, environmentalism, and, lately, multiculturalism, gun control, “white privilege”, and “climate change”.
(If you would like to learn more about this unbroken chain of ideological heritage, I urge you to read The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, by George McKenna, and Paul Gottfried’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy. You should also, of course, read the influential essayist ‘Mencius Moldbug’; a good place to begin is his Gentle Introduction series, which you can find links to here.)
It seems now that this realization is beginning to seep into the mainstream. Here’s Brett Stephens, pointing it out in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
In human affairs the religious impulse does not die; it just takes new forms.
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A pre-emptive note: that one may or may not see each of the “Crusades” listed above as having a positive social value is, emphatically, not the point here. Please absorb that before commenting.
OT: Sorry but I wanted to drop this here. I find it horrifying.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4ad_1446489189
Hey! Where’d that “Open Discussion” post go? Stated something like … if a pressing issue needs brought up
And if this ain’t pressing I don’t know what pressing means!
http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/middle-aged-white-americans-are-dying-more-than-they-should-be/
I took it down, because nobody was using it.
But I also have had my eye on the link you just posted, and was planning to mention it in another post.
Relief!
I was aware of that ol’ sayin’ “death and taxes” but the way whoever it was constructed that headline … well that person needs sent to the Principal’s Office.
The quasi-religion that the Left has deteriorated into is something I’ve been saying for years. (Of course, many people have come to the same conclusion independently, I firmly believe.) They guiltmonger in order to sell relief from that guilt. They have tithing (i.e., taxation). They even have saints, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, F.D.R., et cetera. About the only religious trapping I haven’t seen a parallel to is confession.
I wonder if, at some point, they’ll start selling indulgences.
Confession.
Indulgences.
I don’t think Susan B. Anthony is in favor with the Left anymore. She was anti-abortion.
I’m not sure I quite agree with those examples. The confession thing seems more like a hair shirt on a monk (since academia is like monasteries in that both are a prime source of theological “innovation” for their respective forms of organized morality) or some sort of fake-y forced apology made by a Jew (the “Officially Approved Bad Guy” to Christians for much of history) for killing Jesus, than it seems like a matter for everyone to do regularly as a matter of course, as confession is to Catholicism.
Tradeable carbon credits seem to me more like syncretism than indulgences. That is, each is a compromise with reality– in carbon’s case, the reality of the free market; in syncretism’s case, the reality that most “Christians” were really something like seven-eighths pagan and so it was a good selling point for Christianity to let ’em keep their holidays. A parallel to indulgences would be more like taking campaign contributions to make an electoral equivalent of “I don’t criticize socialist countries”. (Which for all I know some people may actually be doing already.)
By all this I should stress that I don’t mean I don’t see where you’re coming from. For example, carbon credits are, undeniably, the ability to commit future “sins”.
The battle of the New Religion and their never ending hunt for a new god figure. Their good–the “isms” vs the “ists” that someone wrote about which are the useful devil. Before many more years pass, modern Leftism will discover the useful workability of traditional values and learn there is comfort in these long-known-to-most-of-us ways of living. All the leftist has to encounter is that which will eventually defeat him — Consequences. He may talk “1960s” but begin to live “1950s”.