The ceaseless rush of everything leftwards, meaning towards an egalitarian levelling down (with, naturally, a presiding elite) cannot be resisted though it should not be accepted on that account. Nonetheless, though reactions will spring up, these will sooner or later be swept aside because they do not have sufficient sustaining power in a world that has turned its back on spirit. It's all about first principles, and the assumption of practically everyone today is that all human beings are basically equal in all circumstances. This, which is a materialistic view, has never been thought by any previous society. For Christians, everyone was equal or potentially equal in Christ but not as far as this world was concerned. That way lies the inevitable descent to the lowest common denominator. Then there is the idea that everyone is equally subject to the law, but that again was not regarded as extending to every aspect of society, seeing no difference between king and commoner as king and commoner. It was just that the law stood over everybody, and that was because the law was rooted in God.
But today notions of higher and lower have been largely abandoned, and this destructuring of structure and dismantling of order has left a world in which competing groups all struggle for power, paying lip service to the idea of a common humanity but really seeking advantage for their own little tribe. The end result will certainly be conflict unless that is offset by some form of political totalitarianism in which hard won freedoms are lost, bartered away in exchange for supposed security and stability.
I was unwillingly drawn into an argument with an enthusiastic feminist the other day. (Unwillingly because there was nothing to be gained). She took her feminism as a self-evident truth. She believed everyone had been oppressed by white males until recently who had lorded it over the rest of creation, subduing it to their dominating will. She asked me why I thought men and women should not be treated as completely equal, and when I responded that framing the question in that way put the matter as how the two sexes should stand to each other on a false footing, was unable to comprehend what I meant. I said that the real point was that feminism degraded the feminine by turning women into ersatz men, thereby destroying a harmony that relied on complementary opposites working together to their mutual benefit, and she countered that men had always exploited and controlled women. She insisted on casting the whole question in terms of power as leftists invariably do, and accused me of wanting to return to a past in which men held all the power, and women just had to go along with that. I said that those who were against modern feminism did not regard the past as a perfect example of how things should be, but that the cure lay in reform rather than revolution which is what has actually taken place. Rather than thinking in terms of power, we should be thinking in terms of love, support and respect, all things feminism erodes because of its unremitting focus on power.
I mention this conversation because what it demonstrates is that if the right meets the left on its own ground, allowing it to frame the parameters of the debate according to its own terms as it has done for so long, it will lose all the arguments. What it must do is set up new territories, and these must be rooted in the spiritual order as traditionally understood, though adapted to the modern sensibility with its increase of personal agency. For instance, if asked, as in the example above, whether men and women are equal, one could reply that this is a meaningless question. In one sense, of course they are equal. In another, they are different and meant to be. The differences may have been exaggerated in the past but that is no reason to deny or minimise them now. Working with the differences properly creates harmony but feminism, in the same way as does its alter ego, male chauvinism, simply brings about discord.
Because leftists are ideologues, often dogmatic ideologues, they try to force reality into their theories of how it should be. This never works. Instead, we must see what human beings actually are and build from that. But what human beings actually are must include the spiritual dimension because that is part of what they are. In fact, it is the essential part of what they are even in this world, and if it is denied no political system will ever work. Ideologies arise when people lose touch with their instincts and fail to develop intuition. They are the mark of the ignorant intelligent which is why they are so prevalent in our day. They always lead to separation from reality because they arise from the separated mind, that is to say, from self-enclosed thought divorced from God.
We see in the contemporary world all the inbuilt flaws of liberal democracy coming home to roost. It is said that any system is only as good as the people participating in it which is true enough but some are still better than others, and democracy clearly had many benefits. Now, though, it appears to have reached some kind of end game as its flaws become more pronounced and take over the whole system. Democracies generally start off as limited in their extent but, by their very nature, soon move into universal suffrage as equality is taken to mean what it says. But universal suffrage, attractive as it may sound to the superficial thinker, inevitably leads to the triumph of quantity over quality. The less able are given the same rights as the more able, and from then on collapse is only a matter of time. Whether that be into tyranny, as Plato thought as people turn to a perceived strong man to maintain order, or some form of societal breakdown remains to be seen. The fact is that what we call leftism, a materialistic liberal egalitarianism, will always end in the destruction of the good, the beautiful and the true. It is part of anti-creation, the reversion of matter to its raw form, a sin against the Logos.
Nicolai Berdyaev sums it up in a quote I have mentioned before on this blog, "The demand for a forced levelling, which comes out of the lower levels of chaotic darkness, is an attempt to destroy the hierarchic cosmic order which was formed by the creative birth of light in darkness, an attempt to destroy human personality itself." Believe it or not, this is the real motivation behind what manifests in this world as the Left, and which is doing so particularly forcefully now.
