The
sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) achieved well-deserved acclaim for his
grand overview of world history and culture in his four-volume work Social
and Cultural Dynamics. It is Prof
Sorokin’s argument there and in other similar works that each culture will
normally pass through three main stages in its lifetime: ideational, idealistic, and sensate. Regarding Western European culture and the
three stages, he writes,
Take, for instance,
Western medieval culture. Its major
principle or value was God, the true-reality value. All the important sectors of medieval culture
articulated this fundamental principle-value as formulated in the Christian
Credo. . . . Its dominant mores, ways of life and
mentality stressed the union with God as the only supreme end, and a negative
or indifferent attitude toward this sensory world, with all its wealth,
pleasures and values. The sensory world
was considered a mere temporary ‘city of man’ in which a Christian was but a
pilgrim aspiring to reach the eternal City of God and seeking to render himself
worthy to enter it.
In brief, the integrated
part of medieval culture was not a conglomeration of various cultural objects,
phenomena and values, but a unified system – a whole whose parts articulated
the same supreme principle of true reality and value: an infinite, supersensory and super-rational
God, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, absolutely just, good and beautiful,
creator of the world and of man. Such a
unified system of culture, based upon the principle of a supersensory and
super-rational God as the only true reality and value, may be called ideational
[this stage corresponds to the West’s life within the Orthodox
Church--W.G.]. . . . The decline of medieval culture consisted
precisely in the disintegration of this ideational system of culture. It began at the end of the twelfth century
[i.e., shortly after the Great Schism of the West from the Orthodox Church in
1054--W.G.], when there emerged the germ of a new – and profoundly different –
major principle, namely, that the true reality and value is sensory. Only what we see, hear, smell, touch and
otherwise perceive through our sense organs is real and has value. Beyond such a sensory reality, either there
is nothing, or, if there is something, we cannot sense it; therefore it is
equivalent to the non-real and the non-existent. As such it may be neglected. Such was this new principle – one entirely
different from the major principle of the ideational system of culture.
This slowly rising new principle
met with the declining principle of ideational culture, and their blending into
one organic whole produced an essentially new form of culture in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. Its major
premise was that the true reality is partly supersensory and partly sensory –
that it embraces the supersensory and super-rational aspect, plus the rational
aspect and, finally, the sensory aspect, all blended into one unity, that of
the infinite manifold, God [i.e., Roman Catholic pantheism--W.G.]. The cultural system embodying this premise
may be called idealistic. The culture of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe, like the Greek culture of
the fifth and fourth centuries BC, was predominantly idealistic, based upon
this synthesizing major premise.
The process, however, did
not stop at this point. The ideational
culture of the Middle Ages continued to decline, whereas the culture based upon
the premise that true reality and value are sensory continued to gather
momentum during the subsequent centuries.
Beginning roughly with the sixteenth century [the Protestant
Reformation--W.G.], the new principle became dominant, and with it the new form
of culture that was based upon it. In
this way the modern form of our culture emerged – the sensory, empirical,
secular, and ‘this-worldly’ culture. It
may be called sensate. It is based upon,
and is integrated around, this new principle-value: the true reality and value is sensory. . . .
the major principle of our modern sensate culture is predominantly
‘this-worldly’, secular, and utilitarian.
--Sorokin, The Crisis
of Our Age, Chatham, New York, Oneworld, 1992 [1941], pgs. 17-9.
As
those three stages touch upon political ideas like law and liberty, Prof
Sorokin writes,
In spite of the infinite variety
of the patterns of social relationships of man to man, or of group to group,
they all fall into three main classes:
familistic relationships, permeated by mutual love, devotion and
sacrifice; free contractual agreements of the parties for their mutual
advantage, devoid either of love or of hatred, but profitable to both; and
compulsory relationships imposed by one party upon the others, contrary to
their wishes and interests.
. . .
The relative proportion of
these fibres change in course of time, even in the fabric of the same
society. For instance, the texture of
European medieval society from the eighth to the twelfth century was mainly
familistic (the all-embracing medieval fidelitas in the relations of men
and groups); in lesser degree compulsory (in the relations of the free and
unfree classes); and only slightly contractual.
The total network of social relationships in this society changed
notably between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century in the direction of
contractual relationships. Between the
sixteenth and the eighteenth century the relative proportion of compulsory
relations greatly increased. The
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century constituted the golden
age of contractual society. If we were
to characterize modern Western society in a single word, one such word would
unquestionably be contractualism. It
denotes the most essential characteristic of the Euro-American society of these
centuries. During this period Western
society attempted to build a comfortable sensate society based upon covenant,
contract or agreement for the mutual advantage of the members of society, of
the citizens and their government, of employers and their employees, and of the
members of other special groups of free men.
--Crisis, pgs 138
& 140.
. . . A
person can therefore become free in two different ways: either by decreasing his wishes to make them
equal to or smaller than the means of their satisfaction, or by expanding his
wishes and increasing proportionally the means of their satisfaction. The first is the way of ideational liberty,
consisting in a reduction of one’s wishes, especially sensory ones. The second is the way of sensate liberty, consisting
in an ever-increasing expansion of one’s wishes for sensory values, accompanied
by an equal or greater expansion of the means of satisfying them. The extreme case of ideational liberty is
ascetic liberty. Its formulae are well
known. ‘Freedom is not gained by
satisfying, but by restraining, our desires’.
. . . And so on.
Ideational liberty is
inner liberty, rooted in the restraint and control of our desires, wishes and
lusts. It is the liberty of Job with his
imperturbable, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the
name of the Lord.’ Such a liberty does
not multiply sensory wishes; it does not lead to an incessant struggle for an
ever-increasing expansion of the means of their satisfaction – wealth, power,
fame and what not. It is little
interested in political and civil rights, in the external guarantees of such
rights, such as constitutions and political declarations. Its ‘kingdom is not of this world’. On the other hand, it is inalienable –
unconquerable by anybody or anything external.
Sensate liberty is the
opposite of ideational liberty. It
strives to expand endlessly both wishes and the means of their
satisfaction. The more one has the more
one wants. There is no limit to the
expansion of sensory desires, and, according to the modified Weber-Fechner law,
the discrepancy between what one has and what one wants increases progressively
in a vicious circle. Such a liberty
leads to an incessant struggle of men and groups for as large a share of sensate
values – wealth, love, pleasure, comfort, sensory safety, security – one can
get. Since one can get them mainly at
the cost of somebody else, their quest accentuates and intensifies the struggle
of individuals and groups. Sensate
liberty is thus mainly external. It is
vitally interested in the external reconstruction of social, economic, and
political conditions in guarantees of freedom of speech, of the press and of
thought, and of other ‘inalienable rights of man’. For this reason it leads to political and
economic struggle: each group or person
wants to gain as many rights as possible, either by snatching them from others
or by sensibly entering into a contractual compromise guaranteeing a minimum
number to all the contracting parties.
With the rise of
ideational culture, ideational liberty becomes the principal form of liberty,
as, for instance, in the early and medieval Christian culture. With the advent of Christian ideational
culture, ideational liberty replaced the sensate liberty of the last centuries
of Graeco-Roman culture. Upon the
re-emergence of sensate culture at the end of the twelfth century, sensate
liberty also re-emerged in the form of the Magna Carta of 1215, and in the
struggle of the cities for their freedom in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. As it continued to grow,
ideational liberty continued to decline.
Reinforced by the Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the
eighteenth century, and by subsequent laws expanding the scope of personal
liberties, sensate liberty finally became supreme in the nineteenth
century. . . . All these liberties – inalienable rights,
equality, individualism, free association – were the fruits and manifestations
of the sensate culture of Western society in the nineteenth century, with
contractual relations as the dominant social relationships.
--Crisis, pgs.
143-5.
Now,
to the mind of the typical ‘patriotic American’, the historical narrative of
freedom is just the reverse of what Prof Sorokin has presented. To him, what came before Magna Carta and its
offspring is ill-formed or incomplete; what comes after, particularly in the
Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, all
drawn up in Philadelphia, is the summit of mankind’s political development upon
which there can be no improvements made.
For an illustration of this, the reader may look through this essay by
Mr William Federer, an Evangelical Protestant historian in the States:
As
Prof Sorokin has very ably explained the fallacies of such a view and shown
that Magna Carta ushers in the lowest, sensate, un-Christian era of Western
politics, we will turn instead to a question that will inevitably be asked by
modern Western man in response: If
constitutional republics/representative democracies are not the best forms of
government, as we have been told all our lives, what is?
The
best form is what the Orthodox Emperor, St Justinian the Great (+565), laid out
in the Preface to his Sixth Novella: the
symphony between bishop and king, between Church and State, the two
God-ordained authorities co-operating for the salvation of the people of their
country, striving to pull all of them to Heaven:
. . .
The
rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/magna-carta-nadir-politics .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
