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Friday, October 15, 2021

Offsite Post: ‘Individualism Is Death’

 

Mr Tim Kirby has written an excellent essay that is rather like a skeleton key for unlocking the mystery behind the moral collapse of the West.  He says, in part,

‘Complaining about the “degradation” of society gets louder with each year as the average Western man becomes more depressed, sexless, drug addicted, emasculated, jobless, debt ridden and utterly hopeless. The response to this steady decay over the decades following WWII has mostly been a lot of finger wagging. Those that want to save the West are very good at pointing out all the bad things that are happening, but their attempts to beg or guilt trip the next generation into holding on to traditions with no system of apologetics to explain them is completely futile.

‘The ultimate reason why Conservatives, Traditionalists (Western TradCons), Republicans, the Alt-Right, the Red Pill, Team Trump and so on continue to lose is that they firmly believe in the idea that the individual is sacred and that no government, and to a greater extent no one, should tell this blessed individual what to do. Yet this same group is eternally surprised that raising people in a system that can never tell them “no” turns society into spoiled narcissistic hedonistic adult children.

‘ . . .

‘The broad spectrum of pro-Western political viewpoints mentioned above is stuck in a death cycle of clinging to its Liberalism constantly yet howling about the negative consequences of it. They cry about falling birthrates and the death of the family and yet generally advocate for living for yourself and building a career or not taking the risk on marriage after all “she could take half your stuff”. They want people to make sacrifices for their nation in spite of all of us being indoctrinated into a cult of Hedonism and “looking out for #1”. They want women to be feminine and men to be masculine, which are ideals to strive for that serve little purpose when you spend your adult life alone in your one-bedroom apartment, and when there is no means of enforcing any standard onto people in the first place. This group complains about the rampant narcissism in society but makes it clear that no one can tell anyone what to do. The “solution” to everything of adding more Liberalism is really the cause of our suffering.

‘No attempts to save culture, the family, traditional gender roles or anything else sane will work when we live by an insane premise, that society is made great via Individualism. Culture, patriotism, family, traditional gender roles, etc. are all concepts founded in the idea of contributing in or belonging to a group. Rampant “me culture” was the poison to society that all of our traditional religions fought to keep in check for the future of humanity, but since religion is now a personal choice they have essentially lost that war forever.

‘ . . .

‘To the extent that the medieval peasant needed a shot of Individualism to rise from his meaningless cycle of existence, the Postmodern man needs a shot of the traditional values that kept the peasant working in the fields – productive, masculine, loyal, married with children and filled with ideas of something greater than himself perhaps worth sacrificing for. If the Right in the West does not answer the call to some level of Illiberalism, it will fade away into the night wrapped in a warm blanket of smug self-assuredness that the Individual is the Alpha and the Omega.’

Mr Rod Dreher adds a further dimension to this critique of Western individualism in an essay on the book The WEIRDest People in the World by Joe Henrich:

‘It’s a big book, so I’ll try to boil it down. Its basic argument is that the medieval Church in the West, separated de facto from the Eastern Church by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, orchestrated a cultural revolution in western Europe by changing marriage laws and customs. It broke up the tight kinship forms of family that were traditional in barbarian cultures that had just converted to Christianity — forms that persisted in most of the rest of the world (even in Byzantine lands; the Orthodox Church, says Henrich, was slower and less forceful about changing these patterns). The Latin church’s breaking up of strong kinship networks shifted psychological patterns in ways that led to the development of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.

‘A simplified version of the argument goes like this: the Latin church broke up kinship networks, which had practical social effects resulting over time in a more individualistic way of thinking. Around the year 1000, an alien looking at earth from orbit would have imagined that Chinese or Islamic civilization would dominate the world for the next thousand years. But a big change was taking place in western Europe that would catapult Europeans over everyone else. The kinds of institutions and ways of thinking that an individualist-minded West was generating would spark a culture that eventually produced Protestantism and mass literacy, which went on to make Westerners even more innovative and materially successful, and further apart psychologically from the greater part of humanity.

‘ . . . Henrich is not saying that the WEIRD worldview grew up in opposition to Christianity. It’s rather that Christian culture manifested in different ways with kinship networks straitjacketed. For example,

‘“new monastic orders, guilds, towns, and universities increasingly built their law, principles, norms, and rules in ways that focused on the individual, often endowing each member with abstract rights, privileges, obligations, and duties to the organization. To thrive, these voluntary organizations had to attract mobile individuals and then cultivate an adherence to, and preferably an internalization of, their mutually agreed upon principles and rules.”

‘ . . .

‘One main point of the book: do not assume that Western norms are universal or superior. They are better for generating certain outcomes, but those outcomes may produce unwanted effects. For example, in an age of global capitalism, societies with intact families and rooted communities make it harder for corporations to make a profit. They need a mobile, flexible labor force. But over time, societies without intact families and rooted communities fail to produce the kind of people who have habits and norms that produce stable, healthy societies.’

One of the essential points in both of these essays is that the distortions of Christianity in the West – both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism – make those groups unable to lift the West out of the quagmire in which she finds herself at present.

It is easy to see how Protestantism contributes to this problem, with its belief about the priesthood of the believer – i.e., each individual Protestant is proclaimed to be the final judge for himself of what is true doctrine.  It is a bit more complicated with the Roman Catholics, for the laymen and clergy are in submission to the Bishop of Rome, the Pope; they do not get to decide upon doctrine.  The Pope himself, however, proves to be the problem in this system – a boil of individualism disfiguring the body of the West.  For the Pope has made himself the sole arbiter of the Faith, breaking free of the conciliar model of decision-making of the Holy Apostles and the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Per Mr Dreher’s essay, a return to the Orthodox Church, the original church of the West, is the primary means by which the Western imbalance between the individual and the whole community will be corrected.  Speaking in the context of Russia, Andrey Shirin writes,

‘In accordance with the longstanding tradition of sobornost, a “spiritual community of many jointly living people,” many Russians believe that they can only fully acquire a sense of meaning and purpose as a people, not as separate individuals. Nikolai Berdyaev, a prominent Russian Orthodox philosopher, puts it very well in his article titled The Truth of Orthodoxy. Individualism, says Berdyaev, is alien to orthodoxy. The true freedom of the Spirit is not found in the isolated, autonomous person who finds self-affirmation in individualism. Instead, this freedom is found in the person who sees herself as a part of one spiritual organism, which is the church. The heavy Western emphasis on individualism does not resonate with this quest. Of course, by and large, Russians appreciate the newfound individual freedoms and opportunities afforded by the influence of Western values. Nevertheless, to many in Russia these individual callings can find a sense of completion only in a larger communal context.

‘Additionally, this context cannot be limited to local communities, important as they are. Ultimately, it has to culminate in the Russian people as a whole. The separation of various realms of human endeavor and activity common to Western individualism does not fit in with the organic, interconnected worldview informed by Russian Orthodox spirituality.’

But this balance of community and individual is found also in the West before she fell away from the Orthodox Church.  Priest-monk Ambrose (formerly Fr Alexey Young) describes the world of the Orthodox Celts – Irish, Scottish, and Welsh – prior to the Great Schism:

‘First we must realize that the Celts had no concept of privacy or individuality such as we have today. Families did not live in separate rooms, but all together; no one thought about the idea of "compartmentalizing space" and only hermits and anchorites felt a calling to be alone in spiritual solitude with God, although monks had separate cells, just as monastics did in the Egyptian Thebaid. The idea that people are separate individuals from the group was not only unheard-of, but would have been considered dangerous, even heretical. Self-absorption, "moods," and being temperamental-all of these things would have been considered abnormal and sinful. It wasn't until the 13th and 14th centuries that people in the West started keeping journals or diaries, and there were no memoirs-also signs of individuality and privacy, of singling oneself out from the family, group, or community-nor were there actual real-life portraits of individuals, until the 14th century. (The art of realistic portraiture developed in response to the medieval idea of romance-for an accurate portrait was a substitute for an absent husband or wife.)

‘ . . .

The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/individualism-death.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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