Motus Mentis

I’ve written for years (as have many others on the dissident Right, most notably and influentially Mencius Moldbug) that modern-day Progressivism is in fact a secularized religion. This diagnosis is plainly evident not only in its form and content, but is also confirmed by its genealogy, which reveals a lineage extending back (at least) to the Calvinist settlers of Massachusetts.

Last year I wrote:

In order correctly to understand the modern Left, it’s important to recognize it as a secularized religion. Tracing the development of this religion, from its origins in Protestantism, then Puritanism, then through its many transmutations in America ”” from sixteenth-century Massachusetts, through its northern and western Protestant expansion, through the “Awakenings’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, through the secularizing influence of Universalism and Unitarianism, through the sequential attachments of its “mission into the wilderness’ to various sacred causes such as abolition, Prohibition, women’s suffrage, global government, desegregation, feminism, environmentalism, Blank-Slate biological universalism, open borders, LBGT-etc. activism, and global warming, to name some salient examples ”” has been a major project of the dissident and reactionary Right over the past couple of decades. I’ve written about it often.

(See also the follow-on to the quoted post, here, and this post about Progressive religiosity in the runup to World War I.)

Here’s Moldbug, with a pithy explanation of why our national religion became our national cryptoreligion:

How did we fall for this? How did we enable an old, well-known strain of Christianity to mutate and take over our minds, just by discarding a few bits of theological doctrine and describing itself as “secular’? (As La Wik puts it: “Despite occasional confusion, secularity is not synonymous with atheism.’ Indeed.)

In other words, we have to look at the adaptive landscape of ultracalvinism. What are the adaptive advantages of crypto-Christianity? Why did those Unitarians, or even “scientific socialists,’ who downplayed their Christian roots, outcompete their peers?

Well, I think it’s pretty obvious, really. The combination of electoral democracy and “separation of church and state’ is an almost perfect recipe for crypto-Christianity.

As I’ve said before, separation of church and state is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic. What you really need is separation of information and security. If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, a constant danger in any democracy for obvious reasons, the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it’s a church. Dropping theology is a no-brainer. Game over, you lose, and it serves you right for vaccinating against a nonfunctional surface protein.

That the modern Left is indeed a religious movement, with all the evangelistic fervor, self-righteous moral certainty, and millenarian zeal of its Protestant ancestors, is an idea that’s gaining broad acceptance. In recent months I’ve mentioned the ongoing conversation between radio host John Batchelor and the historian Michael Vlahos about civil wars bygone and impending; of particular relevance to the topic of this post is a brief discussion, aired this past October, in which Professor Vlahos talks about the religious roots of Abolitionism, and the ominous similarities between that movement and today’s “social justice” evangelism, and the ways in which our current political climate echoes the disintegrating United States in the 1850s.

Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here. Have a listen.