I do not understand the invoking of past opinion versus other opinion to prove the authors point

Its rather a blameless way of writing, which proves nothing [devoid of fact]and leaves the author blameless and, really, mindless

I think one of the key questions here is whether or not ‘secular humanism’ and modern left egalitarianism in general is a product of Judeo-Christianity and its values. If we concur with Carl Schmitt when he wrote that all modern, salient political values are, in fact, secularized religious ideas, then we need to see how much of the left really derives from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The European Right can handle these questions and can embrace Nietzsche. The American Right, with very few exceptions (Mencken was one of them), finds this a very difficult step to take.

Strauss tried to replace God with, I believe, his dedication to the Zionist project. His address at Hillel House reveals this overriding concern as the central focus of all his work, esoterically concealed or not. I do not believe this kind of ethnic, chauvinist preoccupation can substitute for a transcendent understanding, or originating point of hierarchical reference and ordering, and this emptiness lies at the heart of the Straussian failure as well as at the center of the failure of the neocon project in general. Richard Sherlock’s brilliant essay on Strauss ("The Secret of Straussianism") brings this crisis in Strauss and his followers to light.

I don’t think the gentlemen at GRECE would like to see americans devote themself to the
pagan project. According to them (and someone like de Maistre) America was from the
beginning on an Enlightment project aimed at destroying anything connected
to the old world. To these thinkers it’s no surprise America has become the
McDonald’s-eating-celebrity-worshipping-Botox-nation it is today. Europe is much to
sophisticated for such developments, although, the American hegemony is steering is in
the same direction. So, Grecistes emphasize the importance to make a distinction between
Europe and the US on an existential level. There is no such thing as ‘the West’ in which
Europe and the US are united with common purposes. The West (led on by the US)
is a global system of financial and political institutions aimed at de-rooting
traditional peoples for the sake of money and power, even though silly leftists may
think and argue otherwise. So, traditional/Enlightend Christianity may work for America,
and that’s okay, but Europe has a much richer tradition.

I agree with Carl O. that the Hillel House address in crucial to an understanding of Strauss.  In this fascinating lecture “Why We Remain Jews” Strauss eschews cultural and religious forms of Jewish identity and articulates or rather adumbrates one based on arms and Zionism. The basic idea is that a new identity can be created through the appropriation of land through violence.  Like Carl Schmitt’s Nomos concept in taking and holding land.  It’s a rather murky meandering lecture with inchoate utopian aspirations and the Q&A;session afterward is amusing since his tactful and well-intentioned interlocutors have no idea of what he has just explained to them.

“I think one of the key questions here is whether or not ‘secular humanism’ and modern left egalitarianism in general is a product of Judeo-Christianity and its values.”

The big question in my mind is whether the concept of Christianity itself leads to our modern condition and if so, is this an inevitable outcome?  The complaints about Christianity weakening traditional cultures started long before the enlightenment, if I remember correctly.

Let’s define some words:

PAGANISM: The pagan cultus is do ut des: I give a sacrifice to a god, so that he may give good things ("sacraments") to me.  I manipulate the god.  The pagans kept the ordo of their liturgy secret, lest enemies could manipulate a god against them.

The Judeo-Christian god cannot be manipulated.  The Jewish cultus (Exodus 25ff and Leviticus) and the Christian cultus ( Holy Mass) is eucharist = “thanksgiving”.

EQUALITY.  Equality does not mean “sameness”, as it does for Cultural Marxists.  It means, following that Personalist philosophy that develops out of Realist Phenomenology, that each person has the ontological status—personhood—as each other person.  See John Crosby, The Selfhood of Human Persons.

RIGHTS.  I follow Hohfield: rights are (1) three-term, not two as in Locke and Hobbes: a) the right to something, b)he who holds this right, and c) he who has the duty to provide the something.  (2) Thus the right of one is combined always with the duty of another. Hohfield says there are four kinds of such rights: claim rights, liberties, liabilities, and immunities.

Under communal justice, some rights are indeed held by everyone, and to deny this is to deny the Common Good itself; under distributive justice some are held only by certain people on the basis of merit (desert), need, ability, position with respect to the common good, and degree of risk taken.

Again following the Personalist tradition of Crosby, by his ontological status as person, a person has rights, and these rights are thus “universal” to the extent that person is found everywhere.

If the wise Dr. Fleming and others wish to attack the rights tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, I’m with them.  But there is another rights tradition.

I agree with Burke that obviously when rights are also a particular culture’s tradition and patrimony, they are obviously more secure.  That doesn’t make them any less “universal”.  See Burke on the rights of the people of India.

There is nothing of the Enlightment in the theory of Universal Human Rights. It
is proper Catholic doctrine as elaborated by Francisco de Vitoria of the University of
Salamanca. It was those Thomists who said in black and white that men, white, black,
yellow, or red, had rights because they were men.

If the Enlightment later tried to rewrite history, that that not make it true.

“There is nothing of the Enlightment in the theory of Universal Human Rights.”

This is the difference between Roman Catholicism and the true Catholic faith, which you call Protestant. Natural law exists, but it plays out in different precepts and ideals depending on the society. “Universal Human Rights” smashes all that in the name of political rationalism.

“I agree with Burke that obviously when rights are also a particular culture’s tradition and patrimony, they are obviously more secure.  That doesn’t make them any less universal.”

No, no. You mistake patrimony for rights. What we think of as rights are concessions extracted from the Crown from the Magna Carta to Independence. Being the right winger that I am, I question severely how applicable how American-style “rights” translate cross-culturally. The Singaporeans seem not to want them, so are you going to condemn them?

Sid, on equality, you state (after your standard name-dropping) “that each person has the ontological status—personhood—as each other person.” Okay, so what? People are people. It does not follow that a New York welfare dependent with a 77 IQ deserves the same liberties as a Virginia freeman. If liberty means degeneracy, people are better off without it.

Strauss and de Benoist are stuck in the same nihilistic tree. Strauss knows he is stuck, so he tries to hide it. De Benoist thinks his bondage is freedom.

“The European Right can handle these questions and can embrace Nietzsche.”

This idea of attaching Nietzsche to conservative politics is a grave disaster, as any passing glance at the history of Germany can tell you. If God is dead and death is annihilation, who cares about future generations? In the end, we are all dead anyway.

You can talk until your air runs out about rising above conventional morality and transcending the convention, but the drama of your life will still be interrupted by unsettling annihilation.

The reactionary modernist peddles a mythology about Christianity as universalism. So in order to establish a virtuous society, one must demolish the church. He may feel that fighting to save the West has some virtue, but if he is headed toward oblivion anyway, why he bother? An uncreated, random universe could care less if France survives.

“The big question in my mind is whether the concept of Christianity itself leads to our modern condition and if so, is this an inevitable outcome?”

No. The people who answer otherwise are up to no good. When Christianity was strongest, there was no “modern condition” to worry about.

That said, Roman Catholicism’s fatal mistake pushed us into this mess. Rather than do necessary reforms, the Pope pit Christendom against itself, leading to bloody war and the rise of the Modern state.

Worse, Rome made one concession after another to modernity and these things are now called “Holy Tradition.” There would have been no French Revoluion if the ancien regime wasn’t crap in the first place.

“It was those Thomists who said in black and white that men, white, black, yellow, or red, had rights because they were men.”

If your life looks like the tragic parts of a Jack London novel, what good does it do? Rights matter in societies with enough potential longevity, leisure and prosperity to make them worthwhile. Otherwise they are abstractions.

Iraqis today have all sorts of rights, but the lights are out and people are shooting at them. Many say they were better off ruled by a sadistic tyrant. The Universal Human Rights crowd cannot fathom this.

Given the recent child abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, and the emptiness of the Protestant church’s “sports metaphor” stuff, Christianity appears to be succumbing to its own nihilism. It doesn’t need Nietzsche or Benoist to collapse.

What would Mencken have to say about the church these days?

What nihilism? Mencken was no conservative. He hated the South, blasphemed when possible, and mocked Middle America viciously. In the 1980s, the neocons used his legacy as a shield for their anti-Christian sneering. In the late 1990s, they figured out that he was pro-German and anti-interventionist, so they quit talking about him.

Mencken didn’t really care about preserving anything. He cared about himself and his position as a critic. Now that the neocons no longer puff his, his personality cult is dying out.

You don’t think Mencken cared about preserving the Baltimore in which he grew up, or about preserving the name of his family, Ramus?  Read Fred Hobson’s Mencken: A Life.

Peter Ramus [sic] is as ignorant about Personalism as he is about Mencken, the Catholic Faith, and St. Paul.

Let me get this straight. The Catholic Church promulgates;
a Natural Law grounded in the desire to seek to know the truth about God and to live in community with others. Moderns translate this into Kant’s arid concept of law as duty, and it’s the Church’s fault?

The Church stresses conscience as both moral awareness and a primitive recollection of God. The modern distorts this into the private judgement of the autonomous self and again, it’s the Church’s fault.

On and on it goes, modern reductionism narrows reason into a form of technical calculation, makes a mash of of Augustine, Aquinas, 2000 years of deep spiritual, doctrinal and intellectual developments and somehow the Church is to blame for the worldly bastardization of these achievements.

Perhaps, the real problem lies with an audience whose moral imagination has been so diminished, that both it’s Left and Right sides serve only one purpose; to remind us that Christ was crucified between 2 thieves. And remains so today.

Kevin, most of what I said above deals with universal human rights, Strauss, reactionary modernism and all that. Of course, only one issue really matters. That issue must be touched with kid gloves if at all.

Paleocons think of the Vatican the way neocons do about Israel. Everything is wonderful and no criticism is acceptable, especially from outsiders. As usual, all subjects on this site boil down to discussions of liturgy and the spirit of Vatican II.

Look. I discussed Roman Catholicism’s calls for mass immigration, wealth redistribution, anti-racism, social justice, universal human rights, Latin American solidarity, sexual justice, and the destruction of Western civility in the past. You know what, Leo Strauss isn’t so bad by comparison.

Peter Ramus,
“Of course, only one issue really matters. That issue must be touched with kid gloves if at all.”

A discussion regarding faith can only proceed when conducted in good faith by all parties. Your convoluted, nonsensical screeds prove you are incapable of such a feat. Enjoy reflecting on today’s Scriptural readings.

I’ve enjoyed reading this discussion.
Perhaps we might consider the comments of Dr. Voegelin in his essay “The Gospel and Culture,” where he wrote, “In the historical drama of revelation, the Unknown God ultimately becomes the God known through his presence in Christ. This drama, though it has been alive in the consciousness of the New Testament writers, is far from alive in the Christianity of the churches today, for the history of Christianity is characterized by what is commonly called the separation of school theology from mystical or experiential theology....”
As a people we have lost the experiential understanding of the Christ as the divine presence in the world and allowed our churches to decline into bastions of doctrine.
This discussion is representative of the push-pull of the tension inherent in the “cultural conflicts as the differentiation of truth progress,” and, as such, serves the purpose of potential illulmination, however, we might consider that the “work” is done in the revelation of the Christ. As Dr. Voegelin wrote:"The strength of the Gospel is its concentraton on the one point that is all important: that the truth of reality has its center not in the cosmos at large, not in nature or society or imperial rulership, but in the presence of the Unknown God in a man’s existence to his death and life.”

The term pagan is from Latin paganus, an adjective originally meaning “rural”, “rustic” or “of the country.” As a noun, paganus was used to mean “country dweller, villager.” In colloquial use, it could mean much the same as calling someone today a ‘Hillbilly’. -Wikipedia

Robert,
Good call on Voegelin as his thoughts on “the loss of the experiential understanding of the Christ as the divine presence...”, has been elaborated on by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI The latter is continually emphasizing the encounter with the person of Jesus Christ as the key to a Christian life. Forget this truth and one falls into the debilitating reductionism that has drained our life in the Spirit.

It’s also wise to recall the words of C.S.Lewis in this context;

“We will never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.”

Could somebody clarify if my memory is correct?  Isn’t the Carl Schmitt mentioned above the same German Jura professor who in the 1930s wrote the laws that legalized Hitler’s power grab in Germany—that’s when Germans created a “unitary executive.” Isn’t Schmitt also the same guy who wrote a glowing recommendation to Leo Strauss, which enabled Strauss to leave Germany first to France and then to US and the University of Chicago, where he trained many of the first generation neocons.  Do we have some connections here?  (I did not know Schmitt was into creating identity by grabbing land by force, but with the wisdom of hindsight that idea fits very well indeed.)

Strauss, though a personal atheist, understood that Christianity had a central role in the West and in America. He understood the need many have for Christianity or Judaism.
Compare taht to Pagans, who may personally believe, but whose beliefs are a refutation of the West and especially America.

It is a desire to rewrite Western Civilization and thus a betrayal as great as conversion to Islam. In fact, in some ways it is worse. It is like leftist theologens rewritting Christianity.
The only difference is defference to Wotan, or some thir worldist view of Celtic religions, instead of Marxism.

Unlike, the followers of Strauss, who wield great power, the European “New Right”, probably has no more than a mini-van full of followers here in the United States. The real threat is not a return to a noble, pre-Christian West, as it is the deep-rooted tendency to make an ideologial fetish out of the Church, or to conceal Christ behind layers of abstractions.

Mr. Cheeks,
Yes, “The Gospel and Culture” is a great essay and so much of Voegelin’s work reminds us, (or me in particular who might need the reminder more than most) that Christian spirituality is based on experience and the opening of the soul to the divine ground of transcendent being or reality, rather than so much else that tends to accrue to religious traditions including dogma and the polemics of “antique drums.”
These discussions are indeed very interesting and even entertaining.

Mr. Konkola,
I thought my reference to Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth was rather offhand and freely associative as I made it but yes, Schmitt was a great influence on Strauss and perhaps there is a connection here as elsewhere.  I sometimes have noticed that when Straussians and neo cons appropriate Schmitt’s thought they tend to transform it from descriptive scholarship to a prescriptive agenda.

A case in point might be the “I’m the decider” malapropism for which Bush has been mocked in the media. I suspect that this “lapsus” is actually his colloquial translation of Schmitt’s dictum: “He who decides on the exception (to the rule of law and decrees an emergency) is sovereign.  In other words some one told Bush this and he liked the idea.
Other examples might include the criminalization of opponents from the basic friend/enemy distinction Schmitt sees as in the Concept of the Political into severely discriminatory categories that we see today reflected in thought crime legislation, international peace keeping interventions, torture centers like Guantanamo, and Manichean politics.

In “Why We Remain Jews,” Strauss clears the field of traditional religious and cultural sources for Jewish identity and dismisses the idea of assimilation and conversion as well (“What about the family?”).  Perhaps he sought to ground his Zionist identity in “the elemental orders of terrestrial being” in the fundamental scene of conquest of land.  He makes no reference to the Old Testament so that the idea seems strangely disembodied and theoretical.  At least it perplexed his audience.

Schmitt resisted Hitler until he had achieved power and then fell out with the regime around 1937 supposedly because his Jewish former friends in exile denounced him to the Nazis as a guy who had a lot of Jewish friends.

I hope that answers some of your questions and let me say that I find your own postings very interesting and informative, particularly the connection between 17th century Protestant spirituality and the American liberal and libertarian tradition.  In Voegelin’s and Plato’s terms this is the real spiritual nature of our quest: how the soul reflects the political order.

Voegelin is invaluable for two other reasons related to this discussion:

1) His recognition that neo-paganism is not paganism, but a gnostic reaction to a distintegrating Christian culture; Christianity makes paganism obsolete (but not the romanticist desire for paganism)

2) His insight that both Jews and Christians must live up to moral duties (love thine enemy, love the stranger) which are unthinkable to pagan cultures. 

If only Straussians would read Voegelin! Then again, they are not seriously religious, in either a Jewish or Christian sense.