The present task of conservatives

When Ron Paul attempts to educate the public on basic conservative principles (and educating the public is part of the job of a statesman) his opponents only grin at him condescendingly and then go back to making their usual concessions to prevailing opinion and popular programs. The Republican party today is not a party of principles, and the so-called neoconservatives are little more than a group who support world economic interests, and entanglements in the affairs of other nations. The task of conservatives today is to do as Ron Paul is doing, to educate the public about basic conservative principles, which they have forgotten. Attaining high office will necessarily have to come later. Here is a Ron Paul site that articulates the issues.

Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all

By Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 - 1926)

English version by Stephen Mitchell

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

-- from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Ken Wilber and the Great Spiritual Blockade

As I have said, basically, Ken Wilber defines involution as evolution. His slogan of “transcend yet include” sounds, on the surface, like evolution but he means by it inward spiritual evolution. Like most religious thinkers, Wilber can lead us to the Soul-Within but he speaks little of the God-Without Whom we must bio-spiritually evolve to.

Wilber's path is a consciousness involution not a consciousness evolution. Biological evolution has been making us more conscious, and that consciousness has been preceded by biologically-evolved brain power or Soul-power. “Spirit-in-action” is primarily biologically evolution, with the Soul-Within as our spiritual guide, all the way to Godhood.

Becoming more fully conscious of the Spirit-Within, we see that the Spirit is taking us on a bio-spiritual journey to Godhood. We cannot stop for long and swim in the bliss of Soul-Consciousness, this can become a Great Spiritual Blockade to further evolution to God. We are the image of the Trinity, which is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, which activates spiritual evolution within natural evolution, is taking us to the highest evolution possible: the Trinity, and Godhood. We are the image of God, but God is the image of us fully evolved.

States Rights? Power to the Neighborhoods!

Here is an excellent review by Bill Kaufman of a book about Jefferson's last years by Alan Crawford. (Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, Alan Pell Crawford, Random House, 312 pages )

“...Crawford’s Jefferson speaks to the current crisis in his late-life responses to the steady growth of the central state and the resultant erosion of the political role of the local citizen. Crawford emphasizes, as so few writers on Jefferson have done, the “ward republics,” Jefferson’s radical yet practical plan for decentralizing government. His “single most profound contribution to American political thought,” in Crawford’s phrase, was explicated in a series of letters in 1814-16. He proposed that almost all governmental powers devolve to “ward republics,” five or six miles square, which the country could rely upon for “the eternal preservation of its Republican principles.” Crawford abhors the enlistment of historical figures in present-day crusades, but Jefferson’s ward-republic idea, though firmly set in a place and time, offers us a way out of Empire—a path of refreshment, a revitalizing end to our torpid condition...”

The “gradation of authorities,” in Jefferson’s phrase, parallels the Catholic concept of subsidiarity.

See the review here at The American Conservative.

On The Philosophia Perennis

Followers of Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, and the Philosophia Perennis, are courageous and deep thinkers who nevertheless do not affirm evolution, (both men converted to Islam) and their problems with science seems to derive from an entirely involutionary view of Godhood.

While the Evolutionary Christian Church can affirm many of the insights of the Philosophia Perennis, we view it as seeing only half the picture. God, glimpsed after great effort, in perennial philosophy, must be bio-spiritually evolved to, with even greater effort.

Religion

The modern pattern
doesn't fit no matter
how we situate
the pieces, a holistic
mood hangs over the room
of art and Mathematica.

Altruism and Spirituality In The Evolutionary Christian Church

In his book, “Integral Psychology” Ken Wilber says, “Authentic spirituality is not about translating the world differently, but about transforming your consciousness.” Mystics and New Agers may wish to deny it but generally their idea of spirituality is “feeling good,” then, because they feel good they hope to do good. To put it bluntly, everything can be considered beautiful when you are high. Altruism has, and needs, a deeper base than this. Transforming your consciousness into God-consciousness requires far more than Wilber's “integral spirituality,” which merely goes inward within the human being to attain God-consciousness.

Peace in this world, if it is possible, will not come by denying or repressing biology, and it won't come by making everyone feel good through drugs or self-centered versions of religion. Altruism is grounded in biology, in kin-centering and group orientation. You sacrifice to advance the genes you hold in common with your kin and group. Evolution takes place at the group level and the group is affected by the evolution of the individuals and the culture within the group: this is the ground for spirituality in evolution, here is the true vehicle for evolution to God.

As we have said before, we think Christian social values (eg. as seen with subsidiarity, or the Catholic version of federalism ) can harmonize with the ethical values which define several degrees, or hierarchies, of ethics toward group members, group government, other group governments, members of other groups, individuals in the Church, and the Evolutionary Goal of Godhood. A man's ethical loyalty to his own group naturally exceeds that to members of “mankind,” unless the survival of all groups or the total existence of man is threatened---this was developed in Cattell's Beyondism.

Authentic spirituality is about transforming the world through evolution, as well as about transforming the self inwardly. The Spirit within is the God we evolve to without. The Inward Path relates to the Outward Path.

Let us involve and evolve to Godhood

Religion tends to be subjective, science objective, both seem to be limited by excluding the other.

The Theoevolutionary Church says the “subjective” Soul, seen from within through involution, contains the Eye of God, the Eye of Soul, which needs to be reached outwardly by way of the activation of the Spirit-Will, or “objectively,” through material evolution.


Traditional religion says, let us involve to God, science says (or could say), let us evolve to Godhood. The Theoevolutionary Church says, let us both involve and evolve to Godhood. This is the Twofold Path.

The Soul And Spirit In Evolution

Ken Wilber's noble attempt to integrate all things stops half way. Although going inward to examine the Soul and Spirit can bring us to see the future God we must evolve to, this is not Godhood, and it may be blasphemous to say it is.

Wilber's definitions of superconsciousness leave the impression that this is as high as we can go, when superconsciousness can only be attained through supermaterialism. Involution goes inward and backward to the Soul and Spirit, evolution goes outward and forward to God, but both must work in harmony. Evolution defines the ascent of consciousness within the ascent of material evolution.

What we call the Great Spiritual Blockade is going inward to see the Essence of the Soul, and defining this as the final goal of religion and of evolution. It is a dazzling blockade, nevertheless, Godhood must be materially evolved to, activated by the Spirit-Within, guided by the Soul, which knows best the God that It must evolve to.

Selection

There could be intelligent
warlords kayaking through
the fjords, or geeky scientists
comparing sun shields. Will we
meet in the Arctic after
civilization is destroyed?
Offense tends to win over
defense. Will there be walking
over corpses? It could be that bad,
it's the curse of being stupid,
but life is congenitally
optimistic; if we don't
evolve to Godhood someone
else will.

Catastrophe looms: predictions of James Lovelock and Guillaume Faye...and solutions

James Lovelock's book, “The Revenge Of Gaia,” predicts extreme weather by 2020, and by 2040 the Sahara will "move into Europe, Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad, Atlanta will be a jungle, Phoenix will be uninhabitable, as will Beijing, which will try to move up to Siberia and thus clash with Russia, we will have severe epidemics after mass migrations.

Lovelock says we should use the term "sustainable retreat” rather than sustainable development. Remaining humans could go nuclear, desalinate the ocean, grow synthetic food, prepare for chaos, and engineer the climate. Smart cities will prepare by shoring up hospitals, securing dependable food and water. Dumb cities will be overrun and descend into chaos.

Lovelock's scenario of our grim future on earth suggests that survivors will retreat to the northern latitudes of Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and the Arctic basin. The self-regulating system of the earth is out of whack and will make a jump to a hotter state, as it has in the past. Of the present 6.6 billion people only 500 million will survive.

In examining Guillaume Faye's predictions, Michael O'Meara says that Faye (like Lovelock) believes “...social and economic upheavals are likely to be compounded by ecological devastation and radical climatic shifts that accelerate deforestation and desiccation, disrupt food supplies, spread famine and disease, deplete natural resources (oil, along with land and water), and highlight the unsustainability of the world's present overpopulation..."

Faye continues his predictions: “...the cancerization of the social fabric that comes when an aging European population is deprived of its virile, self-confident traditions; when drug use, permissiveness, and family decline become the norm; when a dysfunctional education system no longer transmits the European heritage; when the Culture Industry fosters mass cretinization; when the Third World consolidates its invasion of the European homelands; and, finally, when the enfeebling effects of these tendencies take their toll on all the other realms of European life.

- The worsening social conditions accompanying these tendencies, he predicts, will be exacerbated by an economic crisis (or crises) born of massive indebtedness, speculation, non-regulation, corruption, interdependence, and financial malpractices whose global ramifications promise a "correction" more extreme than that of the 1930s.”

- The scarcity and disorders these man-made disasters bring will not only provoke violent conflicts, but cause the already discredited state to experience increased paralysis, enhancing thus the prospect of global chaos, especially as it takes the form of strife between a cosmopolitan North and an Islamic South.

These catastrophes, Faye argues, are rooted in practices native to liberal modernity. For the globalization of Western civilizational forms, particularly American-style consumerism, has created a latently chaotic situation, given that its hyper-technological, interconnected world system, dependent on international trade, driven by speculators, and indifferent to virtually every non-economic consideration, is vulnerable to a diverse range of malfunctions. Its pathological effects have indeed already begun to reach their physical limit. For once the billion-plus populations of India and China, already well embarked on the industrializing process, start mass-producing cars, the system will simply become unfit for human habitation. The resource depletion and environmental degradation that will follow are, though, only one of the system's tipping points.

No less seriously, the globalizing process creates a situation in which minor, local disputes assume planetary significance, as conflicts in remote parts of the world are imposed on the more advanced parts, and vice versa. ("The 9/11 killers were over here," Pat Buchanan writes, "because we were over there.") In effect, America's "Empire of Disorder" is no longer restricted to the periphery, but now threatens the metropolis. Indeed, each new advance in globalization tends to diminish the frontier between external and internal wars, just as American sponsored globalization provokes the terrorism it ostensively resists.

The cascading implication of these developments have, in fact, become strikingly evident. For instance, if one of the hijacked Boeings of 9/11 had not been shot down over Pennsylvania and instead reached Three-Mile Island, the entire Washington-New York area would have been turned into a mega-Chernobyl -- destroying the U.S. economy, as well as the global order dependent on it. A miniature nuke smuggled into an East Coast port by any of the ethnic gangs specializing in illegal shipments would have a similar effect. Revealingly, speculation on such doom-day scenarios is now seen as fully plausible.

But even barring a dramatic act of violence, catastrophe looms in all the system's domain's, for it is as much threatened by its own entropy (in the form of social-racial disorder, economic crisis, and ecological degradation), as it is by more frontal assaults. This is especially the case with the global economy, whose short-term casino mentality refuses the slightest accountability. Accordingly, its movers and shakers think nothing of casting their fate to fickle stock markets, running up bankrupting debts, issuing fiat credit, fostering a materialistic culture of unbridled consumption, undermining industrial values, encouraging outsourcing, de-industrialization, and wage cutting, just as they remain impervious to the ethnocidal effects of international labor markets and the growing criminality of corporate practices....”

“...Nothing, Faye argues, can halt the system's advance toward the abyss. The point of no return has, indeed, already been passed. Fifteen years of above average temperatures, growing greenhouse gases, melting ice caps, conspicuous biological deterioration, and the imminent peaking of oil reserves, combined with an uncontrolled Third World demographic boom, massive First World indebtedness, social policies undermining the state's monopoly on our loyalties, and a dangerous geopolitical realignment -- each of these potentially catastrophic developments is preparing the basis of the impending collapse.

Those who think a last minute international agreement will somehow save the day simply whistle pass the graveyard. Washington's attitude (even more pig-headed than Beijing's) to the modest Kyoto Accords -- which would have slowed down, not halted greenhouse emissions -- is just one of the many signs that the infernal machine cannot be halted. The existing states and international organizations are, in any case, powerless to do anything, especially the sclerotic "democracies" of Europe and United States, for their corrupt, short-sighted leaders have not the slightest understanding of what is happening under their very noses, let alone the will to take decisive action against it. Besides, they would rather subsidize bilingual education and Gay Pride parades (or, on the conservative side, ban Darwin) than carry out structural reforms that might address some of their more glaring failures. For such a system, the sole solution, Faye insists, is catastrophe...”

Cheers. So, what does Faye suggest we do?

O'Meara continues: "While rejecting its technological, bureaucratic, cosmopolitan, and anti-white practices, Faye fully accepts modern science. He simply states the obvious: that the great technological and economic accomplishments of Europe cannot be extended to the world's six billion people -- let alone tomorrow's ten billion -- without fatal consequence. For this reason, he predicts that science and industry in a post-catastrophe world will have no choice but to change, becoming the province of a small elite, not the liberal farce that attempts to transform all the world's peoples into American-style consumers. Similarly, Faye does not propose a restoration of lost forms, but rather the revitalization of those ancient spirits which might enable our children to engage the future with the confidence and daring of their ancestors.

Thus, as befits a work of prophecy, Faye's survey of the impending tempests aims at preparing us for what is to come, when the high flood waters and hurricane winds clear away the system's ethnocidal illusions and create the occasion for another resurgence of European being. It aims, in a word, at helping Europeans to resume the epic course of their history...” Though rejecting liberalism's monstrous perversion of European life, Faye does so not as a New Age Luddite or a left-wing environmentalist. He argues that a technoeconomic civilization based on universalist and egalitarian principles is a loathsome abnormality -- destructive of future generations and past accomplishments.

Faye proposes what he calls “Archéofuturisme,” and EuroKnight suggests he does so “...in terms that at times recall the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, the construction of a European Empire founded on essential, archaic values and on a bold, aggressive exploitation of science and technology: hence the concept of “archeofuturism,” the re-emergence of archaic social configurations in a new context.

It is probable that only after the catastrophe which will bring down modernity, its world-wide saga and its global ideology, that an alternate vision of the world will necessarily impose itself. No one will have had the foresight and the courage to apply it before chaos erupted. It is thus our responsibility – we who live, as Giorgio Locchi put it, in the interregnum – to prepare, from this moment forward, a post-catastrophic conception of the world. It could be centered on archeofuturism. But we must give content to this concept.

It is necessary, first, to return the word “archaic” to its true meaning, which, in its Greek etymon archê, is positive and non-pejorative, signifying both “foundation” and “beginning” – that is, “founding impetus.” Archê also means “that which is creative and immutable” and refers to the central concept of “order.” To attend to the “archaic” does not imply a backward-looking nostalgia, for the past produced egalitarian modernity, which has run aground, and thus any historical regression would be absurd. It is modernity itself that now belongs to a bygone past...”

“...The issues that disturb the contemporary world and threaten egalitarian modernity with catastrophe are already archaic: the religious challenge of Islam; geopolitical contests for scarce resources, agricultural land, oil, fisheries; the North-South conflict and colonizing immigration into the Northern hemisphere; global pollution and the physical clash of empirical reality against the ideology of development. All these issues plunge us back into age-old questions, consigning to oblivion the quasi-theological political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were little more than idle talk about the sex of angels.

Moreover, as the philosopher Raymond Ruyer, detested by the left-bank intelligentsia, foretold in his two important works, Les nuisances idéologiques and Les cents prochains siècles, once the historical digression of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has finally closed, with egalitarianism’s hallucinations having descended into catastrophe, humanity will return to archaic values, that is, quite simply, to biological and human (anthropological) values: distinctive sexual roles; the transmission of ethnic and popular traditions; spirituality and sacerdotal organization; visible and supervisory social hierarchies; the worship of ancestors; initiatory rites and tests; the reconstruction of organic communities that extend from the individual family unit to the overarching national community of the people; the deindividualization of marriage to involve the community as much as the couple; the end of the confusion of eroticism and conjugality; the prestige of the warrior caste; social inequality, not implicit, which is unjust and frustrating, as in today’s egalitarian utopias, but explicit and ideologically justifiable; a proportioned balance of duties and rights; a rigorous justice whose dictates are applied strictly to acts and not to individual men, which will encourage a sense of responsibility in the latter; a definition of the people and of any constituted social body as a diachronic community of shared destiny, not as a synchronic mass of individual atoms, etc.

In short, future centuries, in the great pendulum movement of history that Nietzsche called “the eternal recurrence of the identical,” will in some way revisit these archaic values. The problem for us, for Europeans, is not, through our cowardice, to allow Islam to impose them on us, a process which is surreptitiously occurring, but to reimpose them on ourselves, while drawing upon our historical memory.

Recently, an important French press baron – whom I cannot name, but known for his left-liberal sympathies – made to me, in essence, the following disillusioned remark: “Free-market economic values are gradually losing out to Islamic values, because they are exclusively based on individual economic profit, which is inhuman and ephemeral.” Our task is to ensure that the inevitable return to reality is not imposed upon us by Islam.

Obviously, contemporary ideology, hegemonic today but not for much longer, regards these values as diabolical, much as a mad paranoiac might see the features of a demon in the psychiatrist trying to cure him. In reality, they are the values of justice. True to human nature from time immemorial, these archaic values reject the Enlightenment error of the emancipation of the individual, which has only ended in the isolation of this individual and in social barbarism. These archaic values are just, in the Ancient Greek sense of the term, because they take man for what he is, a zoon politicon ("a social and organic animal integrated into a communatarian city-state"), and not for what he is not, an isolated and asexual atom fitted out with universal but imprescriptible pseudo-rights.

In practical terms, archaism’s anti-individualist values permit self-realization, active solidarity and social peace, unlike egalitarianism’s pseudo-emancipating individualism, which ends in the law of the jungle...”

_____


Our reaction to this doom? We believe that the The Theoevolutionary Church is the right blend of past and future, with the Conservative advantage of including Traditional Christianity, rather than paganism in the future; that is, we place the inclusion (or transcendence) of the involution of traditional religion, within the spiritualization of material evolution.

Conservatives believe that there exists a legitimate presumption in favor of things long established. Centuries of accumulated wisdom make the Church like a Golden Age---at least substantial parts of a Golden Age---which still exists.

We have said before in this blog, the The Theoevolutionary Church has seen the same global catastrophe, and our solution contains a similar harmony of the past and future. We prefer the term Evolution to “Futurism,” and Order to the “Archaic.”

The The Theoevolutionary Church seeks to transmute Traditionalism---which contains essential insights of the Traditional religion---with supermaterial Evolution---which contains essential insights of the sciences. Traditional Christianity teaches us how we may see and know God, and how to live in the world. Evolution, understood bio-spiritually, teaches us how we may evolve to God. This is how we reconcile the so-called opposites of the material and spiritual, the immanent and transcendent, traditional and modern, archaic and future.

David Livingston reminded us (Chronicles) that the thousands of little localities, which the New Right prefers, were seen from around 1100 to 1500 in the Christian Commonwealth. There was no central authority, although the Christian civilization was vast. There were thousands of divided sovereignties, secular authorities were independent of one another. There was no such thing as the State in Christendom. And in the center of Europe was the light federalism of the Holy Roman Empire.  Something like this can still work.

The West is dying, yet even individual action can profoundly alter the drift of the times. As I have said before (remembering Russell Kirk), think of one brave little French girl, Joan of Arc, who changed the world.

Involution Is Not Evolution

The main problem with Ken Wilber and other religionists is that they see spirit and soul as only the interior of nature, the within of the Kosmos, they look only within, they do not look up. They abandon the outward biological path of the spirit. This abandoning we have defined as The Great Spiritual Blockade.

For Wilber and other religionists involution is evolution. Quite a reduction. Evolutionary spirituality is more than interior development, it is mainly exterior biological development. Perhaps this is done out of political correctness since talk of future human biological evolution remains taboo.

We say that involution—which is evolution to Wilber—allows us to see the Soul Within, which is not God. Traditional religion helps us to see the Soul-Within. The Evolutionary Christian Church seeks to guide biological evolution to actually reach the God who activates the Spirit within to evolve to Him.

We do not separate the material from the spiritual. We look both within and without for God, Who is evolved to from the material to the spiritual, guided by the Soul-Within, activated by the Spirit-Within, through God's grace, and by material or bio-spiritual evolution.

Desire, Reason, And Love

The Classical world said that one can live by emotions, like the barbarians, or by reason, like the civilized world. St. Augustine pointed out the impossibility of emotion-free truth, calling it a mutilation of human nature and that we must turn emotion toward the service of justice and love.

Theological materialism and the Evolutionary Christian Church say that the desires and emotions are not uniformly evil, as strict Classicism and traditional inward religion might suggest, desire must be turned toward sacred evolution to God, which means reproduction directed toward higher consciousness, higher intelligence, greater beauty, until the Absolute of all things is reached, which is real Godhood.

Defining Love Of God And Neighbor

We are told that the sum of Christianity is to love God and to love our neighbor as our self, yet God and neighbor need defining, then the character and conditions of these definitions can follow.

To love God is to desire to reach God, to attempt to become one with God. In the Evolutionary Christian Church this goal is accomplished through evolution to God, from the material to the spiritual, ultimately evolving to God, guided by the Soul-Within, and activated by the Spirit, working along with evolution.

To love our neighbor is not literally to try to love the whole world, which would be contrary to human nature, it is essentially to love one's kin, one's group. And it follows that this definition harmonizes with the definition of love of God; evolution takes place best in diverse, separate groups, thus in loving one's group and ones neighbor we can love God and evolve to God. We love the world in the sense that we affirm the right of every group to love its own neighbor, its own group, then all groups can love God by evolving to God.

Material law is in harmony with spiritual-material evolution, the Classical joins the Christian, science synchronizes with religion.