Post nationalism leads where [quotage]
Posted on 02/18/2014 | By Chris Gale | Leave a response
Many years ago, a cultural critic, poet, and amateur theologian called Clive Staples Lewis wrote a book called “The Four Loves”. In his, one of the loves was that of what the Greeks would call the polis: the city — and what an Englishman would call the county. The place where you are born, and things are familiar: where the food is as your mother made it, the beer the right brand, the right sports are played in the right season. He suggested that the country is the county made large: we may not fight for Empire, but we will fight to defend our way of life.
His colleague in the interwar Oxford English Department (in the days when English professors discussed literature, not propaganda) summed this up at the beginning of Lord of the Rings, where Frodo is told not to go to Buckland “because people there are queer”.
This love of home, of hearth, is woven into the history of European people. We see it in the conflation of local myths, the weaving of a claim of a special love of God for our race, for our place, though this be an error. Blake built Jerusalem in fields that were disappearing in the industrial revolution: but he knew this was but a myth.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Now, this is not who God chose. God did not choose a settled people. He chose Abram, and he made him wander all the days of his life: the Pentateuch then records how Israel was rescued from slavery and became inhabitants of a land: the later historians and scribes describe the time of exile. And this is not done in a mythic fashion, but reads as history: all the Patriarchs are flawed: the founder of the Kingdom (David) is flawed, and the wisest king becomes an apostate. But in Christendom each tribe made saints their heroes, and this syncretic religion bore poisoned fruit.
If the Franks were the first European nation to discover their own national election in the manner of biblical Israel, the Spanish were not far behind. Seventh-century Spain was ruled by the Visigoths, “who considered themselves to be a chosen people with all the associated privileges and obligations. And in support of this proposition, the great Visigothic chroniclers such as St. Isidore, St. Julian, and Juan Biclarense argued that the Visigothic people was God’s instrument on earth,” literary critic Jack Weiner writes in his study of the theme of the “chosen people” in medieval Spanish poetry.[iii]… The contending French and Spanish claims to national election…were fought out at catastrophic cost much later, during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century.
It was not Voltaire or Rousseau or Nietzche who ruined Europe, but rather St. Gregory of Tours and St. Isidore of Seville who built the flaw into Europe’s foundation in the Dark Ages. I know that conservatives are supposed to hold high the banner of Western Civilization, but I have an arm cramp at the moment. Just as Hans Johst’s character in “Schlageter” could not hear the word “Kultur” (the banner under which Wilhelmine Germany fought and lost World War I) without releasing the safety catch on his Browning, today’s Europeans cannot hear the word “Chosenness” without flashbacks of all of Europe’s awful wars.
My European friends are too scarred by their own sorry history to regard any form of ethnic self-assertion with anything but revulsion. The Jewish notion of divine election, brought to America by the Pilgrim Fathers, reminds them of the horrors of their own history. It is pointless to explain to them that they got it wrong starting in the 7th century C.E. The Europeans are what their history has made of them, and there’s no replaying the tape. The Germans are ambivalent about being German. That I can understand. I have less sympathy for Jews who don’t want to be Jews.
Spengler, is, of course, a Jew, and an observant one. He likes Protestants, because he sees a large streak of the Pharisee in them (and he’s quite accurate in laying that charge) but he then conflates covenantal theology with the ideas of the enlightenment that led to a propositional republic (that lasted for about 100 years in what is now called the USA, ending either in the Presidency of Lincoln or Wilson. I will let Americans debate that point, but end it did, to be replaced with democracy).
But he misses the point. Two or three times.
Firstly, the early Christian church was explicitly transnational. You were either of the faith and in Christ, or you were not. Christianity mattered more than Jewishness — all the authors of the New Testament were Jewish but one (Luke, who was Greek: Mark and a Jewish mother and was thus of the tribe). Christianity is propositional and covenatal.
Secondly, the medieval tribes were not nations. They were much smaller than that. The unifying idea of the church acted as an international or transnational correction to the ambitions of the quite warlike northern tribes, and with more success than most give credit to them for: they turned Vikings from reavers to the Norman kings of high romance (for they did rule Burgundy, where the troubadours started) within three or four generations. They set rules of law, and corrected extreme justice. The more centralizing nations (such as France) opposed them to the point of having antipopes.
Thirdly, the reformers were overtly, and again, pilgrim people. Choosing to convert to the evangelical faith would, in many countries, place one’s life and fortune in peril: for in conversion you were accounted as dishonourable. This led to a winnowing of nonconformists and Huguenots to the northern maritime nations, and from there to the new colonies. For if Spengler sees some of the Pharisee or the Rabbi in the New World Protestant, the New World Protestant is quite aware that the reformers modeled their attitude to their nation on Abraham, Issac and Jacob, see through the filter of the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews.
So for a Christian, the answer to where a post nationalist state leads is simple. It leads to not accounting the possessions of this life but as tools, and to Christ.
Islam, in my view misses the point, because their end goal is that the nation is under submission, part of an empire: their project is not that of a pilgrim passing through, but an imperial marine. Islam has more similarity with Warhammer 2000, in this issue, than the Christians ever will have.
But to the Pagan? Now, that is a question. Spengler suggests they end up in despair, for they see the death of their tribe — either in glorious battle or by ennui (and the associated lack of children).
Me? I’m more pragmatic. By Your Fruits You Will Know Them . The modern pagan is the hipster. He neither creates, nor breeds, nor produces. Instead the pontificate, uses irony as a rule for fashion, activities and conversation, and elevates the craft of idleness as the highest good. It is a form of being living, but dead.
Do not be with them, or be like them.
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