The Attack on Civilization

That's not the headline in this piece from Michael Lind, but that's what's going on, both in Western societies and in the Roman Catholic Church, of all places.

And who is leading the attack?  The Managerial Class--or The Elites, if you prefer.  We referenced them just a couple of posts down in a wry-humor riposte from a politician who, while acknowledging that 'the educated' were all in favor of him, observed that he needed a majority to win.  This is precisely the problem facing the Managerial/Elite Class:  they are a distinct minority.

But that doesn't stop them from their campaign to demolish the proletariat--the untermensch.

Everywhere we see our political, cultural, and financial elites bankrolling activists to dismantle traditions. While flags and slogans celebrating racial or sexual identity are proudly displayed by Western governments and corporations, overt displays of national patriotism are regarded by establishmentarians on both sides of the Atlantic as vulgar and distasteful. Religions tend to be viewed with distrust and contempt by the trans-Atlantic elite, unless their premodern teachings have been modified into alignment with the views of the campus left. The Western canon, instead of being enlarged to include unjustly excluded authors, has been jettisoned, and liberal education has been replaced by ideological indoctrination in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI)....

According to Lind, this is not merely iconoclasm.  This goes much deeper.

 ...The cultural ferment in contemporary North America and Europe does not feel like an interregnum between one cultural regime and a stable successor. It feels like a permanent revolution.

Put another way, the Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism, not iconoclasm. Unlike iconoclasm, antinomianism is not a temporary campaign of destruction of older iconography and traditions to clear the way for the imposition of new canons and orthodoxies. Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy....

If you're familiar with Nietzsche, his phrase for it is "The transvaluation of all values," inextricably connected to the Ubermensch--the Will to Power gang.

  ...At the moment, the fashionable justifications invoked by the elite antinomian vandals attacking Western society from within are climate change, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and “anti-fascism” as a catchall category. Upper-middle-class young men and women who throw paint at artistic masterpieces or glue themselves to trains claim they are defending the earth’s environment, but they could just as well say they are fighting white supremacy or patriarchy. They are acting out the ethos of a Western elite culture that believes the act of transgression itself is virtuous; the alleged goal of the transgression is merely an excuse.

Call it “the culture of transgression” of the dominant overclass in North Atlantic democracies....

In the Church, a Pope elected several years ago began high-visibility antinomian activity by placing a false god on the altar of Sacrifice.  That particular transgression was against the First Commandment--or the Second.  Earlier, Pope Francis I had issued deliberately vague letters and decrees regarding the Church's position on marriage; he attempted to revoke the Church's teaching on the liceity of the death penalty; later, he appointed men to high Vatican positions whose views on homosexual conduct are outright heterodox.  This is antinomianism in the strict sense. 

 

But in the Church, this was preceded by iconoclasm, most obvious in the perversions of the "New Liturgy" of 1969, the point-iconoclasm being the wholesale replacement of Gregorian Chant and (properly-defined) sacred music with hootenanny, rock, and Protestant hymnody.  At the same time, the US Bishops deliberately ignored Paul VI's encyclical re-affirming the grave sin of utilizing birth control, thus ushering in antinomianism.  Rock music and sexual libertinism are directly related.  Surprised? 

 

 

...By now the antinomians in Western nations have won their war against tradition in every realm. The members of the credentialed corporate-government-nonprofit-academic-media oligarchy, along with billionaire entrepreneurs and bankers who themselves are usually born into managerial-professional families, are almost all modernist in their aesthetics, libertine in their views of sex and recreational drug use, and dismissive of nationalism and patriotism and religion, which they regard as mental diseases of the lower classes....

 

What's next, having taken down the Bougies?

 

... Instead of shocking the bourgeoisie, our post-bourgeois managerial overclass now delights in shocking the working class. Most working class people in the U.S. and Europe of all races and classes live in suburbs or exurbs—therefore our elite pundits and academics constantly denounce suburban “sprawl,” idealize life in high-style micro-apartments and expensive designer tiny houses, and call for the replacement of cars by mass transit. Many working class people like to cook with natural gas, so naturally our elite seeks to ban gas stoves. Gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers? Forget it. California will ban gasoline-powered lawn equipment in 2024. Rising incomes that accompany development allow the masses to eat meat; therefore meat is redefined by the oligarchy as unhealthy and harmful to “the planet.”...

Lind comes to the correct conclusion:  there is hope!

...My guess is that today’s wave of transgressive antinomianism will prove to be as unsustainable as those of previous eras. When the current rebellion by the managerial elite against the proletariat is exhausted, as the rebellion against the bourgeoisie was exhausted generations ago, there will be nothing left to rebel against except rebellion itself.

Most people in Western countries might welcome a revolution against revolution with relief....

And it will be the Normies-- country-music folk, farmers, and Conservatives who are national-populists and respect tradition and the moral law--who prevail.  But only with prayer.