Sobornost

I have noted often in these pages that in the absence of a natural and organic social framework, order must be imposed artificially from the “top down”. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 2014 post, The Death of Culture:

To create the new metaculture, muticulturalism cannot not add cultures together, due to the points of contradiction and conflict that are, in turn, manifestations of the innate differences of the peoples whose cultures they are. Instead, it can only proceed subtractively, by stripping away particularities, until it finds commonality at some baser level ”” and as more peoples and cultures are added to the mix, more and more must be pared away. Among the first things to go are the natural cohesion and public trust that organic cultures enjoy; these natural assets must be replaced prosthetically, by an act of power imposed from above. That this artificial, top-down structure in turn creates new inequalities even as it scrapes away familiar liberties must simply be tolerated as the price we pay for our salvation.

In May of 2015 I commented on the dissolution of our own organic culture:

All of the erosive forces at work here ”” demographic displacement by poorly assimilated immigrants, low birthrates among cognitive elites, multiculturalism, galloping secularism, centralization of Federal power at the expense of local government, anti-traditionalism, hedonistic apathy, instutionalized disparagement of America’s history, mission, cultural heritage, and mythos, and behind it all the universal acid of radical doubt that is the “poison pill’ of the Enlightenment itself ”” all of these things attack and corrode the horizontal ligatures of American civil society, leaving behind only an atomized population with no binding affinities save their vertical dependence upon a Federal leviathan that is, increasingly, the source of all guidance and blessings.

Today I have for you an essay, posted by Mark Citadel at Social Matter, on what sort of organizing principles are necessary for the coalescence of a cohesive, organic society. He argues that mere abstracta will not do; they form the basis of what he calls “artificial collectives” that lack the sinews and ligaments that a living society needs to survive existential pressures.

The survival of a group, preyed upon by others as it will be, is in large part down to its organic, inner coherence or knowledge of itself. If a group lacks this, while at the same time refusing to recognize its enemy, it will succumb in every battle. At some point along this line of error, all the technology in the world couldn’t change the outcome. You won’t even fight. You will fade out in silence. If your society is based upon individualism, you will be playing vidya right up until your killers thunder up the carpeted stairway. If your society is based on some artificial collectivism (David Cameron’s pathetic “British values’ come to mind as a good contemporary example), then rest assured, your ultimate security will be as brittle as fretwork in a hail of gunfire.

Read the essay here.

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