The realization that our supposedly secular rulers have imposed a tyrannical new religion on the masses has begun to go mainstream.
The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.
The year 2020 marked a convenient end to the cultural revolution, because of the vastly different nature of the protests that took place that summer, compared with 1968. In the late Sixties, student radicals were protesting against the system. American academia itself was politically mixed; there were around three Democrat professors for every Republican — it’s now about 15 to 1 — but the higher echelons of the Ivy League were quite conservative. The Boston Brahmin elite were still pretty traditional, as was big business (although, not coincidentally, far more egalitarian than it is now). The Army was obviously very Right-wing, and one of the causes of student protests was the prospect of being drafted into a war to defend the honour of a conservative American establishment.
In 2020, almost all the major institutions in the US, aside from the actual President, were loudly vocal along with corporations, charities and NGOs in their support for the BLM protests. Parts of the media were sympathetic to the point of actively playing down some of the violence, the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” becoming an example of American journalism’s Pravda-like bias.
West’s reference to the Reformation is relevant, if not for the reasons he may think. It was that essential rupture in the West’s previously unified dominant religion that kicked out the first leg of the tripod which once upheld Western morality. With Sacred Tradition toppled, Scripture and reason inevitably followed.
The resulting vacuum let moral relativism run riot. But as West correctly points out, relativism is never an end state.
Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.
Leftist rhetoric such as, “Who are you to impose your morality on me?” was always a Trojan horse intended to make Conservatives drop their guard. Being slower Liberals, Conservatives already accepted the core of their supposed opponents’ moral frame: individual liberty as an absolute good in and of itself. Therein lay the slippery slope from “It’s none of the government’s business what two consenting adults do in their bedroom” to George W. Bush’s solicitor general overturning Prop 8 to CPAC lauding a man who wears his ten-year-old daughter’s clothes.
This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.
West is right that the phenomenon of occupiers toppling their conquered subjects’ gods and installing new idols and rituals is nothing new. His own acceptance of the Liberal frame blinds him to the onrushing dark age.
Christianity and the European peoples were necessary pillars of Western civilization. When those two elements are sundered and trampled in the West, the new arrangement that succeeds it is more likely to occupy itself with staving off famine and once-conquered diseases than conquering the stars.
Revolutionaries who establish themselves in power inevitably start thinking about firming up that power. They have a vested interest in making the times before seems worse than they really were, which is why contemporary films or plays set before the Sixties must always show it as racially prejudiced or portray traditional marriages as unhappy. Revolutionaries also need to start thinking about public rituals that imitate faith, something the Soviets, Chinese Communists and Jacobins all imitated in various ways. Rituals in particular attract children and adolescents; just as young people across Europe once dressed up to celebrate Corpus Christi, run riot on Shrove Tuesday or flirt on St John’s Eve, now Pride month and the other new feasts of the calendar are increasingly popular with children, spread through TikTok and other social media.
The religious nature of the 2020 protest has been much commented on, with strange outpourings of hysteria and feet-washing, and with Floyd becoming an icon.
What products of Late Modern relativism like West miss is that there is one true religion which offers worship acceptable to the One True God. That God remains sovereign, despite His rebellious creatures’ conceits, and He will not be mocked.
The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.
“Christian England had blasphemy laws,” blather inveterate Liberals like West, “and the Death Cultists occupying the nation that used to be England have blasphemy laws, so they’re both the same!”
Anyone in England–and the West as a whole–who’s dense enough not to have noticed the decidedly different bent of Death Cult morality will become acquainted with it sooner than they expect.
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