The Dynamic of the Paleolithic and the Problems of Modernity

Thinkers on the conservative Right advocate going back to the Classical and Christian heritage which created the West to solve the problems of modernity which was initiated by the Enlightenment, but that does not go back far enough in our recovery. We need to go back and study the Paleolithic where human nature became what it still is today. The long Paleolithic period not only gives us insight into modernity and the classical and Christian heritage, it gives us insight into the human nature which helped create and develop these things.

The Right often makes the recovery of the Classical and Christian heritage seem like the solution to all are problems, period, but this heritage also has problems which the Paleolithic can help us solve. Sociobiology has studied the Paleolithic, among other things, and revitalized the idea of human nature being truly kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

This points toward political and religious forms that can harmonize with real human nature and nature itself. This calls for a sacred which is really not foreign to nature and to human nature. This does not suggest radical revolution---the classical, the Christian, and modernism can be revitalized---each of them alone is not enough. Real conservatism does not throw away the past as modernism has more or less done, but conservatism also would not throw away modernity as the traditional religions more or less do. The great error comes from separating the city of God from the city of man, but this derives from the other great error of separating the material from the spiritual. We evolve in the material world to supermaterial Godhood, which is expounded upon in the religious philosophy of this blog.

In America we were a continental Republic which made a great mistake in becoming a global empire. We need to get back to a continental Republic. Power needs to be given back to the states and regions and the central government needs to be shrunk to being mainly the protector of the states, internally and externally. Furthermore, we need to eventually acknowledge the distinctions between different ethnic groups in America and orient ourselves toward regional ethnostates, protected by a light federalism. This is what can calm present and future civil disorder, and this is what can harmonize with the Classical and Christian heritage to help solve the problems of modernity.