An addition to the “Permanent Things”

Regionalism and localism have existed within the Western conservative movement, but they have contended with the universalism of Christianity. This tension has been a problem. Granted, a few of the more courageous conservatives have spoken of the importance of ethnic cultures and territories---I think of Pat Buchanan---but then they often reject the whole idea of the natural evolution of the world. This has been a serious error with serious consequences.

Conservatives have therefore not emphasized nearly enough the interactions and competitions between ethnic cultures as an existing selection process of the most basic human nature. If conservatives had affirmed this they would have seen the importance of ethnopluralism in political philosophy, and the real need for permanent regional and local territories set aside for distinct ethnic cultures, with the tensions between them controlled or at least protected by federalism. The historical fact that empires fall back into ethnostates---the Soviet Union is a recent example---is grounded in the basic ethnocentric nature of human nature, which was successful in survival and reproduction in ongoing evolution.

The “Permanent Things” as defined by conservatives have not included a downgrading (but not rejection) of universalism and the uprising of ethnocentrism, and so the same mistaken universalism of modern liberalism has virtually conquered, at least with the less courageous conservatives. I believe that the universal biological origin of much of social behavior needs to be included in the Permanent Things. The U. S. constitutional separation of powers and states could even accommodate  ethnopluralism---I'm not talking about revolution.

This addition to the Permanent Things happens in the philosophy of theological materialism where the non-material nature of the universal is transformed into the material evolution to supermaterial Godhood in the Twofold Path. The symbolic inward God is then seen as the real outward Godhood reached by material evolution. Universalism can be included but transformed, and ethnopluralism can affirm the deepest universal element of the Permanent Things, namely the evolutionary rise toward Godhood.