Saturday roundup

 Paul Kingsnorth has become one of my favorite Christian writers to check out on a regular basis. I think I've mentioned his journey here at LITD before: from atheism through Buddhism to Eastern Orthodox faith. One of his recurrent themes is how, in the process of achieving material advancement, we have mechanized out souls. 

I'm here linking to a piece that he wrote for his Substack The Abbey of Misrule, in May of 2022, but its point remains at least as timely as it was when he published it.

It's titled "What Progress Wants," and, in the course of arriving at his crescendo, he cites the observations of some figures who share his concern about this mechanization. It's an eclectic bunch, and by no means exclusively Christian. He includes René Guénon (1886-1951), a Frenchman who searched for a unifying principle in Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism and Christianity, Catholic priest and theologian Ivan Illich, and Beat poet Allen Ginsburg.

But it's the final figure whose disturbance about humanity's course provides the framework that Kingsnorth requires to make his own point:

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution - a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as ‘someone who thinks that “today it is no longer possible…”’ We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before. Instead, we believe we live after what Del Noce called a ‘violent break with history’: a move from the ‘kingdom of necessity’ to the ‘kingdom of freedom.’ In the story of Progress which informs our view of history and society, the revolutions of the modern age - industrial, political and intellectual - are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced ‘a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history.’ 

What Progress wants is the end of history.

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters. What is it, asks Del Noce that ‘is no longer possible’?

The answer … is simple: what is excluded is the “supernatural,” religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process towards radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.

Del Noce’s ideas are complex, but this claim gets to the heart of the matter. The modern epoch, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything ‘unseen’ or ‘beyond’. From the eighteenth century onwards, philosophy sweeps away religion: the world is now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything becomes immanent: literally down-to-Earth. There are no principalities or powers, and so everything is potentially transformable and explicable through human might. This is another way of framing Guénon’s ‘Western deviation’: a ‘progressive materialisation’ that leads us into a ‘reign of quantity,’ in which we take on the role of the Creator for ourselves. 

What Progress wants is the end of transcendence.

All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a ‘sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods.’ Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. No longer, said Del Noce: the only ‘transcendence’ that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves :

Modernity marks a major break by fully developing the anthropological theme, so that transcendence pictured as ‘beyond’ is replaced by transcendence within the world. 

‘Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained twentieth century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results. 

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? ‘The spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science’, writes Del Noce. A ‘totalitarian conception of science’ sees

… science regarded as the only true form of knowledge. According to this view, every other type of knowledge - metaphysical or religious - expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead - as noted by Illich - religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was ‘resolved into philosophy’, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. ‘The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity’, said Del Noce, ‘accelerated the process of disintegration’ that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. 

Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution. The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. ‘The revolutionary attitude of creative violence’, writes Del Noce, ‘has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world.’ If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had. 

What Progress wants is permanent revolution.

The two world wars of the twentieth century - which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 - spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, the most immanent nation in history, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging ‘the Enlightenment’s war against their own past.’ America, said Del Noce, was now ‘the wellspring of the principle of disintegration’, which, along with its European allies and mentors, it was spreading around the world through the globalisation of its institutions and worldview. 

Del Noce agreed with the prophetic Simone Weil that ‘the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world’ - and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others: 

Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now - oh, wonder! - in order to feign regret they are applying the same method to themselves.

What Progress wants is colonisation.

Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and ‘the death of the sacred.’ The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting ‘permissive society’, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family - but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact: 

It is now clear how the process of criticism of authority, which originally was directed against conservatism, against false consciousness, against mystification, etc, ends up reaching the greatest degree of conservatism and linguistic falsification ever known in history. It would be easy to illustrate from this perspective the new features displayed by the contemporary crisis: the collapse of faith in all ideals, to a degree never seen before; the resulting loss of hope; the falsification of love, almost always bestowed on something ‘far’ in order to justify indifference or hostility towards what is near.

What Progress wants is the uprooting of everything

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth:

The age of the revolution gave up on searching for unity, and accepted a sharp opposition. The ideal endpoint is identified with liberation from authority, from the reign of force and necessity. However, what has happened so far suggests, rather, that the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power.’

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters. 

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would ‘absolutely deny traditional morality and religion’, basing its worldview instead on ‘scientistic dogmatism.’ It would negate all ‘spiritual forces’, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: ‘the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism.’ It would be a ‘totalitarianism of disintegration’, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, ‘the complete negation of all tradition’, including that of ‘fatherlands’ - nations - would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations. 

Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that ‘current political formulas are completely inadequate’. Neither left nor right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the left blaming ‘fascists’ and the right blaming ‘communists’ for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine. 

What Progress wants is liberation from everything.

Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution, and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced, pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism. 

Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one - and getting it right this time:

Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organisation that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.

What Progress wants is to move beyond nature

Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple ‘reaction’, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines. 

What Moloch wants - Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks - is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards - where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people - they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us. 

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.

Mary Harrington fleshes out, in a piece for UnHerd that also dates from last spring, what the concrete fruits of this "progress" are. She asserts that the Judeo-Chrisitanity which shaped the West for centuries, which has as its premise the fairly self-evident fact that we did not create ourselves, has been supplanted by the exact opposite of that premise:

State power across the Anglosphere is ever more explicitly ordered to religious beliefs; it’s just that these beliefs aren’t Roman Catholic. Instead, what’s now granted state backing is a belief in the absolute moral sanctity of bodily self-creation. 

In Canada, legislation has just been proposed that would ban protests within 100 metres of a Drag Queen Story Hour. This proposal echoes an existing provision in the UK that bans even silent prayer in the vicinity of abortion clinics. And over in the USA, a Christian mother is suing the state of Oregon, which has barred her from adoption for saying she wouldn’t accept a putative adoptee’s self-declared pronouns or permit them to take puberty blockers. 

What, then, is the sacred value being enforced here? In the words of one supporter of both abortion and gender ideology, the common thread is “bodily autonomy and attempts to define the futures of others”. From this perspective, power should be ordered to the sacred value of self-creation, even over normal aspects of our organism such as puberty, pregnancy, or sex dimorphism. There is no sense in which our bodies should be accepted as a given, and anything we don’t like about them is a problem we’re entitled to solve as we see fit. 

She foresees "increasingly bitter political and religious schisms over what (if anything) is sacred about the human organism."

In a December piece at The Catholic World Report, Christopher R. Altieri notes the difference in the way the recent Fiducia supplicans (the Vatican document on administering blessings to "couples" with unorthodox bonds) has been received in the global north and global south:

Fiducia supplicans is crowded with caveats and brimming with qualifications, many very carefully drawn, over 5,000 words. It is evident that the declaration’s author and his commissioning principal both knew it would make waves. But it is unlikely either Fernandez or Pope Francis expected the tsunami of reaction that came in short order.

Some dioceses—mainly though not exclusively in western Europe—made a show of enthusiastically embracing the business, even though a facial reading of Fiducia would require many of them to halt plans for para-ritual blessings of gay unions or even roll back policies already articulated, for the implementation of which blessing formulae have already received at least preliminary local approval.

From other jurisdictions—many of them geographically located in the global south—the reception ranged from frigid to actively hostile, with several national bishops’ conferences flatly refusing to implement the declaration at all.

The cardinal-president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conference of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), Fridolin Ambongo, issued a call mid-week for talks among African bishops with a view to preparing a unified “continental” response.

That is a politically fascinating development, since it came from a fellow who is a member of Pope Francis’s C9 “small council” of cardinal advisors. It raises the question whether Ambongo has deployed a temporizing measure in hope of allowing Francis to walk things back. Alternatively, he may have thrown in with his continental confreres in the episcopate, many of whom have already balked at Fiducia supplicans.

Document author Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez is going to have some difficulty putting some teeth behind his insistence that all of Catholicism get on board:

Fernández, for his part, has staked a long and rocky row to hoe, insisting in the interview that bishops may not prohibit what the pope has permitted with Fiducia supplicans, especially since at least one national conference—Malawi—has already issued an explicit prohibition, in addition to the dioceses and conferences that have said they won’t be implementing it.

At Very Serious, Josh Barro looks at the atmosphere on university campuses that made possible the recent Claudine Gay debacle:

Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately-notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation — not only failing to show that Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented, but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.

The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of Historian Finds Yet Another Thing That Is Racist, garnered a lot of credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal who published it came out with a What Is Truth, Anyway-type word salad in defense of the article, including this:

We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category – dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

These ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approaches also extend into the soft social sciences — see, for example, the theme of the 2024 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, which declares an intention to “reimagine” anthropology in a way that breaks down the barrier between theory and practice to make more room for more social activism, so that anthropology better serves as a tool to respond to “systemic oppression.”

People (including me) look at papers and statements like this and conclude that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research — it’s social activism dressed up as research . . . 

At Honest to Goodness, Kaely Triller Harms asks, just what is it that those outraged by Beth Moore claim to be her violation of basic doctrine?

. . . in the Protestant church, one of the women who has cared the very most [about the Church turning a blind eye to various forms of corruption] and done the lion’s share of the heavy lifting is Beth Moore, who has stood bravely in the gap and said, “Church! We must learn to bind these wounds and pursue justice for the hurting.”

But the church keeps kicking her in the teeth for saying it. I’ve honestly never seen another Christian endure so much mudslinging, vitriol, and contempt from her own camp in my entire life. They call her a Jezebel, a false teacher, a harlot, a cancer. The relentlessly vicious blowhard William Wolfe just used his massive platform this past week to invite other Christians to call her demonic. Other influencers like Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry joined the pile-on. They make cartoon caricatures of her. They put her name in headlines like “The Moore of Babylon.” They claim she’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, though half the people making these claims can’t even tell you exactly what she’s done that’s this horrific. Some dude on Twitter today told me the Bible commands us to drive women like her out of the church. I asked why.

“Women shouldn’t preach” came the triumphant reply. I didn’t even have the bandwidth to explain to him that Beth does not inhabit a pulpit, nor did she ever set out to preach to men. Her target audience has always been women, and enough men found value in her words that some of them stuck around to hear what she was saying. Should she have kicked them out? Returned their man cards to them and diminutively encouraged them to only listen to male wisdom? 

And let’s be honest; even if you DO think this constitutes preaching, and even if you are of the conviction that the pulpit is reserved for men, this is a tertiary issue, and there are a great many faithful, orthodox Christians who disagree about it. I don’t see any of these guys chasing NT Wright down with a pitchfork on Twitter just because he thinks women should be able to preach. 

So far Beth’s crimes seem to be that she’s a woman with a voice, she said true things about Donald Trump, and she thinks we need to improve our communications about racism. And these are damnable offenses apparently. Remember, according to Wolfe, the woman is downright demonic.

Andrew Willard Jones, director of the Catholic Studies program at Franciscan University, writing at The Hedgehog Review, demonstrates how friendship is essential to any kind of subsidiarity we can achieve:

. . . families should control the majority of productive property and massive corporations little of it. This is not some novel notion. Aristotle asserted that the most just regime would have a large, politically dominant middle class, while Thomas Jefferson famously said that the backbone of a just republic was the property-owning small farmer.

But scale is not the only consideration. Most of our work should not be paid. This is another way of saying that in a healthy society, most of our social activity would not be commercialized. Activities that used to have nothing to do with money and which now do—sports, entertainment, socializing, family time, childcare, cooking, holidays and celebrations, caring for the elderly, education, home maintenance, even agriculture—are now dominated by commercial interests. Our world increasingly appears to be a giant marketplace. Instead, when we look out at our world, we should see mostly a shared space, a socially constructed world within which private spaces have a limited but important place and commercial spaces are relatively rare. This would, no doubt, mean getting poorer according to the metrics of economists, but the common good is measured in happiness, not wealth.

As for wealth, the pursuit of money as an end should be looked down upon. When kids talk about getting rich, we should correct them, not praise them. When grownups talk about their investment returns, we should shake our heads at their faux pas, not ask about their financial adviser. We should, rather, praise a person who displays a love of family, city, region, country, and humanity—in that order. The ancients called this piety; we might call it patriotism. The point is that an honorable person knows the proper importance of levels of order for the attainment of the common good, knows where he stands in that order, and directs his powers accordingly. This is the ethical posture which produces the distribution of power that corresponds to an order of subsidiarity. In such a distribution, authorities toward the top of the social order are appropriately obeyed by, even as they are appropriately afraid of, persons toward the bottom, where the power really lies.

Finally, ideological thinking should be treated as repugnant and, well, sometimes a bit silly. When it comes to appropriate political action in pursuit of the common good, almost everything is on the table because politics is a prudential art. Aristotle asserted that you could identify a free man because he is the one who will not endure tyranny—he will not serve it and he will not betray his friends to it. We should be a society of free people, whose freedom is secured, in the end, by friendship. Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.

This next one's real recent, as in two days ago. Public Discourse interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made, Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. A taste:

. . . increasingly we see, especially over the nineteenth century, the shift from “become a more virtuous person, live industriously, and have a moral life.” There are a whole bunch of nineteenth-century texts by Charles Seymour, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that teach about the lives of self-made men in order to become like secular hagiographies. And that started to switch in the late 19th century to a much more individualistic sense of “read these books and learn to focus on what you want, what you need” in a semi-spiritual way, influenced by a quasi-religious movement known as New Thought, where you can manifest wealth, health, success, by meditating upon it.

In the late nineteenth century, in what’s known as the Gilded Age, this became a huge publishing boon, it became a huge phenomenon, and it ultimately set the stage for modern self-help, which became less about “how do I conform myself to religious or secular virtues in order to be a better person?” and much more about “how do I harness the energy of the universe to get what I want?” There is a very spiritual dimension there, even if it is not traditionally religious in nature. There is this implicit metaphysic that the “vibes,” the energy, the forces out there in the universe govern us, and that we can affect those forces by getting in touch with them in our own internal selves.

She calls this shift a "relocation of enchantment":

I’m less likely to want to speak of disenchantment than of a relocation of enchantment, which is to say that I think the “traditional,” roughly speaking, medieval pre-modern Christian worldview is enchanted in the sense that it sees the world, the universe, as a holistic whole, where our social selves, our biological selves, our natural selves, are all bound up in it. There’s a synthesis in the purpose of all creation, of all telos. That vision of the universe as not just fundamentally rational, but fundamentally with a divine purpose, really started changing in the Enlightenment. 

But in the nineteenth century, what ended up happening in slightly different ways in Europe and America was that that sense of the sacred became identified in slightly different ways with the human will and human desire. And the European model, which perhaps is more explicitly nihilistic, more explicitly influenced by Nietzche in particular, was the sense that nothing is real, nothing is meaningful, except what we decide it is. And the figure of the Dandy, who always has this slightly nihilistic streak, evolves into the figure of the Übermensch and the person who can create reality according to his will, precisely because reality itself is only ever about perception . . . whatever magic, sacredness, sanctity, whatever you want to call it, there is in the world, it comes from the self and our desires.

There's a common theme discernible in several of these pieces, is there not?

We Western humans have fully given ourselves over to the arrogance that sets us up as masters of our own destinies. 

It doesn't seem to be working out well.