Category: Culture

Patriotism, Flag Waving & Allegiance

“We salute one flag and that is the American flag. And we’re going to make sure the American flag gets the respect it deserves, alright? … Patriotism will be celebrated in our cities and taught very, very strongly to our children.”

Donald Trump
Thank You, Tour
Hershey, Pennsylvania

“The territorialization of the patriotic sentiment has its modern roots in the political state that emerged in the Renaissance, but it was not brought to high intensity until the French Revolution. Then it was that the idea of France, ‘one and indivisible,’ became the mainspring, working through Jacobin decree and military successes in the field, of what think of as modern nationalism and patriotism.

Patriotism, as we have known it for nearly two centuries has been inseparable from war and revolution. Each of these forces, destroying or diminishing as they have the more ancient ties of race, locality, religion and kinship as effective allegiances….”

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 58

Many have been those who have opined that Trump ran upon a “civic nationalism.” But the question has to be asked, at least, what kind of Nationalism does Trump envision. Though I consider myself a Nationalist, I recognize that not all Nationalisms are created equal. The kind of Nationalism I envision is a grass roots nationalism that grows up out of allegiances that are more fundamental to an allegiance to the nation that is just the consequence of those former and prior allegiances.

There is a Nationalism that exists that is posited on the destruction of the allegiances I consider primary. Allegiance to religion, race, people group, locality, clan and kin are the bedrock allegiances that when existent create natural loyalty and allegiance to the nation. However, there is a patriotism that we might call “un-natural.” Un-natural because it reverses the process and is built top down. The demand is for the patriotism to the Fatherland without a prior patriotism to the former allegiances mentioned. This kind of nationalism absolutizes the nation-state and so seeks to destroy all other allegiances and patriotisms in favor of allegiance to the Father-land. This is the kind of nationalism that finds children being encouraged to report on their parents. This is the kind of nationalism that expects ministers to read their Bibles through the flag.

I don’t know which kind of patriotism Trump is touting but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this kind of “patriotism” talk concerns me. Trump talks about local, local, local. I like that. But is he really going to give us a patriotism that devolves power from DC so that the local can be genuinely local again and so worthy of plights of fealty?

If he does so, I’ll be the first to congratulate Trump.

Nisbet and McAtee on “Professional men of Knowledge”

“Who, we are obliged to ask, looks with respect any longer to the professional man of knowledge: whether scientist or scholar?

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 110

Nisbet goes on to explain why this is so. This is so because the putative “wise men” for so many generations have disappointed and let us down. People have gotten wise to the con that the “Professional men of knowledge” pulled for so long. For a couple generations now these men have been all hat and no cattle.

In my environs, I see this most commonly among the clergy. The clergy was once accepted as the “professional men of knowledge” par excellent. This is rightfully no longer the case for those who are not simpletons or groupies.

The clergy has shown themselves too often to be vacuous hacks whose expertise is more akin to the kind of expertise one finds in those who have made a career of building McDonald franchises or in the skill one finds in Shamans among animistic peoples.

Clergy as “Professional men of knowledge?” That is almost as incongruent and ridiculous as the idea of Psychologists as being “Healthcare providers for the mind,” or “Friends of the Court” as being “Friends of the family.”

And so, we must each, on our own, go to the well of knowledge, and labor to be our own “Professional men of knowledge,” because it is unlikely (though not impossible) that we are going to find Professional men of knowledge in this culture.

__________

* = This is a post where I am speaking of general truths as opposed to universal truths. I acknowledge that there remain solid clergy out there. I just am convinced they are a minority.

Symbol Change

Judges 6:5 That night the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s bull, and the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it 26 and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order.

Studying the book of Judges right now and in Judges we see how unfaithful Israel had built altars to Baal as opposed to previous generations who had erected altars to “I AM” thus communicating who the people and the land were being given over to. I was struck with the importance of those altars as symbols and declarations of ownership.

When we tear down old symbols and replace them with new symbols we are, like the Israelites of old, giving ourselves, our children and our land over to different gods. The tearing down of a flag or a monument and the raising of a new flag or new monument is a significant happening. What you are witnessing is the gods being changed out.

In the last 100 years, we have seen quite a bit of this. When you do any reading on the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of Communism you note that the Communist went whole hog on this very point. They not only tore down Churches. The Communists changed those Churches usage from houses of worship to places where pigs were housed. The Communists changed the Churches from places where the soul could find relief to latrines where a different kind of relief was found. The Communists after the revolution went on a rampage tearing down old symbols and erecting new ones. Out with the old God. In with the new gods.

When the Soviet Union fell the process was reversed. I clearly remember many scenes of statues of Stalin and Lenin being pulled down by cranes. When “Desert Storm” was finished one of the clearest images of victory was the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein.  Out with the old god. In with the new gods.

Now in our country, we have been experiencing the very same thing. First, it was the Confederate flag desecrated and hidden away. Recently, I read a longish piece on how it is the Gadsen flag that has been determined as “racist” and no longer can be tolerated in the public square. Statuary of our ancestors is being removed in favor of the ancestors of an alien and strange people. Out with Christianity. In with the new gods.

Whenever you find this happening you are witnessing a religious attack on the people. Where this religious attack is successful you are witnessing a people being conquered. In the book of Judges, the people had been conquered by Baal as witnessed by all those new altars built to Baal. In Czarist Russia the Christian Russians had been conquered by the Jewish Bolsheviks as witnessed by removal of their Christian Churches. Today White Western Christians are being conquered by the enemies of Christ and the evidence of that is the removal of our symbols in favor of the symbols of our enemies.

The old West — The West of Christendom — is under siege and most Christians aren’t even aware that they and their undoubted catholic Christian faith is under attack.

The Work of Social Atomization

The common error was to believe that if the individual were liberated from the smaller organic groups he would be set free. But in actual fact, he was exposed to the influence of mass currents, to the influence of the stage, and direct integration into mass society. Finally, uprooted, the individual became much less stable.
 
Jacque Ellul
Propaganda; The Formation of Men’s Attitude
 
 
1.) Most men are chameleons. They will blend into their socio-cultural background. Strip man of the Institutional covenantal backgrounds of a decidedly Christian family, community, and church, and man will not cease to be a chameleon. Instead, man will begin to blend into the larger pagan background of the pagan state, the pagan media-cultural complex, and the pagan legal framework.
 
Paradoxically enough, the Atomization of man that Ellul chronicles here does the yeoman work of creating mass man.
 
2.) On the issue of the uprooted individual becoming much less stable, I would contend that this is creating a kind of social insanity. Social sanity requires the kind of stability of which Ellul laments the loss. This kind of stability requires long established community and familial infrastructure, customs and routines that are inter-generational, and a sense of place. All those have been largely lost.
 
The uprootedness (the social insanity) that we often see in our social order can be directly traced back to the loss of our organic groups.
 
3.) However, this uprootedness serves the interest of the heathen state
 
An unstable and uprooted people are not likely to have the foundation or moral capital upon which to rebuke and resist the tyrannical state. It is a net positive for the usurpatious state to uproot and destabilize its citizenry because in doing so there is job security for the bureaucratic class.

Inescapability of Religion In Driving Culture

 

“The culture of a people [is] an incarnation of its religion,” and “no culture has appeared or developed — except together with a religion. . . .”  
T. S. Eliot
Notes towards the Definition of Culture, pp. 32, 13

Of course, the drum that Eliot is beating here is a drum that is often beat  on Iron Ink. Religion is the animating spirit of culture and culture is the visible expression of religion. It is proper to make a distinction between them but they cannot be isolated from one another. Culture is the body of which religion is the animating soul. When I look at a culture I am seeing its religion. When I examine a people’s religion, their culture makes sense.

As an extension of this the form of civil Government of a people, being a part of their culture, is also a manifestation of their religion. All States are organized religiously. There is no such thing as a state that has separated itself from the religion of its church. Now, it may take some doing to locate what is serving as the Church to the State (Temple, Shrine, Government Schools, Mosque, etc.) but the idea of separation of Church and State is at best an illusion and always a surd.

Now, many of been my conversation partners who have denounced this idea. They have contended that it is past obvious that the Church is in decline, and if they are talking about organized Christianity or organized religion in general, they might be right. Recently, in the publishing world, it has been open season on organized religion and religious observances. It is understandable that people might observe that we are living in increasingly profane times.

Not so.

The total amount of faith of a people  (or a person) never dissipates though it may change the object of its affection that it sets itself upon. The faith tank remains full. Only the service of the god the faith fuel is being burned for changes.

To locate the new religion in service of the new god one has to identify the new sacred center of a social order. This is done by identifying a people group’s borders of what is tolerated and what is not tolerated. What kind of speech is blasphemous? Who defines unacceptable behavior and what must be done to remove the guilt of said behavior?

This means that there are no “ages of irreligion,” or “ages of skepticism.” Organized religions may recede but they recede in favor unorganized or embryonic religions. Curiously, it is the “so called” skeptics who write the books denouncing religion who are most obviously full of the inescapable religious impulse. Their objection is not religion as it is other people’s religion that they don’t approve of — a disapproval only arrived at as informed by whatever religion they harbor.

An interesting phenomenon when organized Christianity goes into decline is the rising of the Shaman. The Shaman is thought of being a person uniquely in touch with the spirit-world. Indeed, he is often the bridge between the unknown and the known. He often is the incarnation himself of the god’s will or even of the god.

Contemporary Shamans in our enlightenment culture are most often found in the field of Psychiatry. The Psychologist-Psychiatrist knows what the laymen  cannot know about himself and the laymen visits the Shrink-Shaman in order to be cured of what ails him. The Psychiatrist Witch Doctor identifies the sin, and for a price provides an incremental cure for the sin.

Contemporary Shamans in more animistic cultures will typically direct their customers to a potion or spell or a ghost dance or a spirit-animal to provide relief. But whether in antiseptic materialistic enlightenment cultures or in animistic spiritist cultures the Shaman always rises when objective Christianity goes into abeyance. In our religio-culture in the West, one can find both expressions. Whether it is some form of psychoanalysis for urban professionals or whether it is astrology or necromancy for those in the santeria cult in New Orleans or New York city the Shaman arises when organized Christianity recedes.

Note, though that religion never disappears. Never.  Man as Homo Adorans is a hopelessly religious being and all cultures are merely religion poured over ethnicity.

Oh … and as an addendum, this is why R2K is a lousy theology. There is no common square that is not an expression of some religion. R2K would have us believe that culture is religion free, operating instead on the basis of some potentially common Natural laws. Don’t you believe it! All law is religious law and the minute one surrenders Christianity as the cult behind the culture some other religion and god will own the culture.