Motus Mentis

Our friend Bill Vallicella has posted an interesting essay on the Left’s attempt to maintain a doctrine of transcendent egalitarianism while scraping away the transcendent. He describes the problem as follows (after noting that our academic institutions have become “Leftist seminaries”):

What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left’s equality dogma is upheld? Could we explain it as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal? Long before I read Carl Schmitt, I had this thought. But then I found this provocative assertion by Schmitt:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.
(Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36.)

The idea that all humans are equal in virtue of having been created by God in the image and likeness of God is a purely theological notion consistent with deep and wide empirical differences among humans. Its secularization, I suggest, involves several steps. (These are my ideas, not Schmitt’s.)

The first step is to transform the metaphysical concept of equality of persons into an empirical concept of equality of measurable attributes.

The second step is to explain away the manifest empirical inequality of human groups and individuals in terms of sexism or racism or ageism or some other ‘ism.’ This involves a turn toward social constructivism and a reality-denying turn away from the mind-independent reality of biological differences between the sexes and the races. Sex becomes ‘gender’ and the latter a social construct. Similarly with race. The absurdities that result are foolishly embraced rather than taken as so many reductiones ad absurdum of the original mistake of making sex and race social constructs. Thus one foolishly embraces the notion that one can change one’s race. For a calm and thorough critique of this notion as represented by a contemporary academic, see my Can One Change One’s Race?

The third step is to jettison the theological underpinning of the original equality conception.

In this way a true, non-empirical claim of Christian metaphysics about persons as rights-bearers is transformed into a false empirical claim about human animals. At the same time the ground of the non-empirical claim is denied.

It is easy to see how unstable this all is. Reject God, and you no longer have a basis for belief in equality of persons. Man reverts to being an animal among animals with all the empirical inequality that that brings with it.

So the Left has a problem. It is virulently anti-theistic and anti-religious and yet it wants to uphold a notion of equality that makes sense only within a theistic framework. The Left, blind to this inconsistency, is running on the fumes of an evaporating Christian worldview. Equality of persons and rights secularizes itself right out of existence once the theological support is kicked away.

Nietzsche understood this long ago. The death of God has consequences. One is that the brotherhood of man becomes a joke. If my tribe can enslave yours, then it has all the justification it needs and can have for doing so. Why should I treat you as my brother if I have the power to make you my servant and I have freed my mind of Christian fictions?

For those of us who oppose both the Left and the Alt-Right faction that is anti-Christian and Nietzschean, the only option seems to be a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

A year ago, I posted an item of my own in response to Bill’s disagreement with my opinion that modern “progressivism” — whose most sacred tenet is its radical egalitarianism — is a mutated form of Protestant Christianity that, having slyly stripped away its commitment to the supernatural, had become a “cryptoreligion” that was now the established church of the present-day liberal West. I laid out historical, taxonomic, and empirical reasons to believe that this hegemonic faith could fairly be called a “religion”. (Bill, in this latest post, seems to be moving asymptotically closer to acknowledging this, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for him to grasp the nettle.)

Bill is quite right to point out that, deprived of any metaphysical basis for such radical egalitarianism and for the denial of the plainly obvious differences between individuals, and between long-separated human populations, this new official faith has a serious problem, one that can only get worse over time.

It’s easy to see why this must be. A simple analogy will be clarifying:

In the field of structural engineering, if you were to ignore the varying qualities and properties of different materials, and to insist instead on their universal interchangeability, your buildings and bridges would fall down. To preserve the doctrine of interchangeability, you would have two options: you would have to blame these collapses, increasingly implausibly, on pernicious environmental factors, or you would have to lower your ambitions so as to build only those structures that any of the available materials, randomly chosen, could support.

The same considerations apply to social structures as well — and this is why, as Bill correctly observes, the secular Left finds itself under increasing pressure. It is easy to see that it is already, and has been for some time, applying both of the “solutions” listed above to protect and preserve the underlying doctrine.

What Bill doesn’t say (though I imagine he’d agree) is that the problem doesn’t go away simply by putting the supernatural metaphysics back in place. As I described in this post about the evolution of religion in America, the reduction of Christianity to a worldly cryptoreligion necessarily involved the flattening and immanentization of transcendent principles and hierarchies:

What happened in the Progressive era, however, was that the social mission completely overturned and usurped the traditional concept of salvation itself. Working toward God no longer meant work on oneself for the saving of one’s individual soul, which now was scorned as sinful self-interest; the only soteriological pathway now ran through the collective, right here on Earth… Here, we see Heaven itself shot down from the sky.

In this way, equality of all before God became, at first, equality only before the law — and finally, in the present day, equality on every Earthly measure, real or imagined, simply by proclamation (save of course, for those instances where sacralized “victims” are to be lifted above their oppressors). Perhaps a nationwide resurgence of traditional religion might also entail a reconsideration of what Bill calls “a false empirical claim about human animals” — but I’m inclined to doubt it. Water doesn’t flow uphill.