Secular Materialism and the Feminine

How can we cleanse our minds, purging them of every aspect of secular materialism? This is the task that lies before us at the present time because this materialism is like a worm in the apple of the mind that will contaminate the whole thing unless it is removed completely. Unfortunately, all of us are corrupted by it to some degree as it is the water in which we have swum all our lives. It's the basic assumption to everything, how we are educated, our culture, high and low, and it drives our dreams and ambitions. It's all pervasive. Even most people who believe they believe in God are materialists with their religious beliefs sitting in an overall context of present day secular materialistic assumptions such as democracy, humanism, feminism, climate change concern and so on.

I mention feminism. Our current world is sometimes described as increasingly feminised but this doesn't just refer to the rise and spread of feminism over the last hundred years. It also describes the attitudes that prevail in contemporary society as a whole, over and above the roles of men and women. What does it mean?

A feminised society is one that no longer seeks truth or excellence. In line with general female motivation, it prioritises what is seen as safe, secure and equally nice to all. It wants what is most agreeable to most people without excessive challenge or discomfort. Consequently, it will never rise above mediocrity. Women seek to observe the status quo. It is men who take risks and break boundaries so a feminised society will seek security and conformity above all. Consequently, it will start to regress to a kind of childhood. These characteristics, excellent and necessary in a mother, are an ideal balancing corrective to the more masculine drive that seeks out truth and creates a civilisation. However, if they dominate as they are beginning to do now they infantilise and weaken and lead to a reversal of cultural achievement. 

The childlike condition that results might be regarded as spiritual in that it bears a slight resemblance to pre-agricultural societies that supposedly lived in harmony with the natural world in a state of peace and communal equality.  I have to stress supposedly since more recent, less ideologically driven, research has shown that to be mostly a fantasy. But even assuming it were true, societies of this kind remained just as they were for thousands of years. They never advanced until disturbed, and their spirituality was largely just an awareness of the supernatural. They had not begun to grow into a real knowledge of God, and the purpose of life in this world is to transform human souls from a state of passive participation in life into beings of creative love and power. In short, to make gods. This requires constantly aspiring upwards, reaching beyond the safe and what is acceptable and attainable by everybody in the society. It demands that we leave spiritual childhood behind and become spiritual adults which means abandoning the lowlands and climbing mountains. Like it or not, and many religious people won't, a truly spiritual attitude needs the pioneering spirit. A feminised society is one that stays in the nest and will never fly. 

It can easily be observed that both materialism and feminism arise at the end of a civilisation's lifetime. They seem to be signs of cultural fatigue and decay and arise from a loss of spiritual purpose, coming about when the creative impulse that forms a civilisation has worn out and it is living off its past achievements.

Duality is the basis of the manifested universe. It is the interplay between two opposing forces that brings about creation and drives evolution. After all, it could be said that Man only begins to know himself because of Woman (and vice versa). Therefore, to point to feminism as a sign of cultural collapse is not to criticise woman anymore than to condemn materialism is to condemn matter. Just as the devil doesn't lie outright so much as deform the truth, the problem here is that womanhood and the material have been taken out of place and made to usurp the role of that which they are intended to complement in the context of duality. They have been made to become, or try to become, what they are not resulting in disorder and spiritual chaos. The devil is not very imaginative. He always makes the same offer. Give me your soul and I will give you money and power. He's played his usual game with feminism and materialism and many people have made the exchange.

How do we grow out of this? By starting to take the teachings of Christ seriously. These are not adjuncts to the modern beliefs of the world, to the secular ideologies of materialism, as they often seem to be perceived nowadays. They completely replace these ideologies, showing those to be shallow impostures deriving from a false idea of the soul. Feminism is an offshoot of secular materialism but when the feminine is rededicated to the spiritual it is transformed and becomes a sacred vessel for the divine as with Mary. Similarly with matter. Just as with the soul itself, these things only find their true fulfilment when they give themselves over to God through Christ. Then they become holy things. At the moment they have been deformed by trying to be something they are not.