_________
Source: The Unz Review
Watered-Down Blood
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT | JUNE 4, 2023 | 16 COMMENTS
In "The Failed Empire", I have argued that the medieval papacy is responsible for the failure of Europe to reach political unity under German leadership in the medieval period. I did not deny that the "the enduring absence of hegemonic empire" and the "competitive fragmentation of power" had positive effects, as Walter Scheidel claimed in Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2019). Scheidel's 600-page demonstration failed to convince me, but even if true, his thesis does not contradict mine in any way. It is just a different vantage point. From the vantage point of today’s world geopolitics, there is no denying that Europe is a total failure and cannot even begin to compare or compete with the new "civilizational states", to use Christopher Coker's category.[1] That the papacy is to praise or to blame for it is hardly in question.
Here I will argue that the medieval papacy is responsible for the creation of the modern Western individual, that rootless man obsessed by his own salvation, identity, and self-realization. I will not deny that Western individualism has produced an exceptional harvest of geniuses in all fields of human culture, and unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of creativity. That, I think, is undeniable. And perhaps it was worth it. I will simply argue that the pathological—and contagious—stage that Western individualism has reached today is the end-result of a program of de-socialization written by the Roman papacy. To borrow from Joseph Henrich's remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World, to which I will return: "by undermining intensive kinship, the Church's marriage and family policies gradually released individuals from the responsibilities, obligations, and benefits of their clans and houses."[2] Over many generations, this social engineering wired our uniquely individualistic psychology.
It may sound counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the loss of kinship bonds, since practicing Christians are today the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end. All established religions are conservative, that is their main social function. But Western Christianity's conservatism is about preserving what little kinship structure it didn't destroy in its revolutionary stage: the nuclear family, the last step before complete social disintegration.[3]
The theory here presented differs from the one blaming Christianity for the cancelation of the White race, whose most radical proponent was the late Revilo Oliver (1908-1994). He wrote in Christianity and the Survival of the West:
Secondly, Christianity did not result in the same breakdown of kinship in the East and in the West. There was a qualitative leap in the West, during what Robert I. Moore has called "the First European Revolution" (c. 970-1215).[4] In a far-reaching project of remolding society, the papacy drove a persistent and multi-directional assault on the kin-based social structures of Romano-Germanic populations, which Greco-Slavic populations did not endure to the same degree.
This is not to say that the Eastern Church was particularly friendly to kinship. In theory, Christianity is inherently individualistic and depreciative of blood ties: only Jesus's blood saves, and salvation is for the individual alone. But the take-over of the Roman Church by the Cluniac monkish party, unparalleled in Orthodoxy, means that the phenomenon described by Louis Dumont, the normative effect of the outworldly individual forsaking lineage and family, was more acute in the Roman Catholic tradition.[5] Blood has been uniquely watered down by Catholic baptism. This explains why intensive kinship has resisted better in Eastern Europe, especially in South Slavic lands, where, "in the nineteenth century, zadrugas [extended families] comprising more than 80 people were observed. This was not the rule, of course, but domestic groups of 20 to 30 members were not uncommon at that time."[6]
But isn't Protestantism more individualistic than Catholicism? It certainly is. Modern individualism owes much to the Lutherans and even more to the Calvinists. But Protestant individualism could only take root in a social and psychological soil already fed by Catholic individualism for centuries. The increment in individualism from Orthodoxy through Catholicism to Protestantism would require a special study. I will here only focus on the policy of the medieval papacy against blood ties, and its long-term consequences.
The Pre-Christian Kin-Based Social Organism
Throughout Eurasia and the Middle East, our pre-Christian ancestors lived in clan-based societies. In addition to the sources I mention in "Bring out your dead!" on that topic, I recommend Guillaume Durocher's recent book The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece. To quote from his reading of Homeric anthropology:
Marriage was, naturally, the keystone of the social edifice. It was never a matter of two persons getting married, but of two lineages contracting a blood alliance by marrying their children—who may or may not have taken much part in the decision.
In pre-Christian Europe, marriage inside the clan was common, as a way to maintain the corporate property of the clan land, where clan ancestors were buried. Marrying in-laws after the death of one's spouse was also common, even expected.
Although in both Roman and Germanic societies, monogamy was the rule, there was no ban against divorce or second spouses, especially in case of infertility or in order to get a male heir.
An alternative heirship strategy was adoption, generally within the clan. This was facilitated by the widespread practice of fosterage, that is, the sending of children to be cared for by maternal or paternal uncles until they reached adulthood (it was especially common in Briton and Irish societies).
This complex interconnection of the living was organized around the vertical axis of the veneration of the dead, which united communities religiously from the family level through the clan level to the city or national level.[8] It was so essential that clans who had not known common ancestor, had to invent one in other to seal alliances.
The Roman curia banned these practices, and in doing so destroyed the traditional clan-based structure of European society. Social anthropologist Jack Goody has documented this systematic assault on kinship in The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge UP, 1983), and more recently in The European Family: an historico-anthropological essay (Blackwell, 2000). Harvard professor Joseph Henrich has followed his lead in The WEIRDest People in the World. Since Henrich is neither a historian nor a social anthropologist but a professor of human evolutionary biology, I will rely directly on Goody and other sources for the next section, before coming back to the more original parts of Heinrich’s book.
Please go to The Unz Review to continue reading.
Source: The Unz Review
Watered-Down Blood
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT | JUNE 4, 2023 | 16 COMMENTS
The Medieval Origin of Western Individualism
In "The Failed Empire", I have argued that the medieval papacy is responsible for the failure of Europe to reach political unity under German leadership in the medieval period. I did not deny that the "the enduring absence of hegemonic empire" and the "competitive fragmentation of power" had positive effects, as Walter Scheidel claimed in Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2019). Scheidel's 600-page demonstration failed to convince me, but even if true, his thesis does not contradict mine in any way. It is just a different vantage point. From the vantage point of today’s world geopolitics, there is no denying that Europe is a total failure and cannot even begin to compare or compete with the new "civilizational states", to use Christopher Coker's category.[1] That the papacy is to praise or to blame for it is hardly in question.
Here I will argue that the medieval papacy is responsible for the creation of the modern Western individual, that rootless man obsessed by his own salvation, identity, and self-realization. I will not deny that Western individualism has produced an exceptional harvest of geniuses in all fields of human culture, and unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of creativity. That, I think, is undeniable. And perhaps it was worth it. I will simply argue that the pathological—and contagious—stage that Western individualism has reached today is the end-result of a program of de-socialization written by the Roman papacy. To borrow from Joseph Henrich's remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World, to which I will return: "by undermining intensive kinship, the Church's marriage and family policies gradually released individuals from the responsibilities, obligations, and benefits of their clans and houses."[2] Over many generations, this social engineering wired our uniquely individualistic psychology.
It may sound counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the loss of kinship bonds, since practicing Christians are today the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end. All established religions are conservative, that is their main social function. But Western Christianity's conservatism is about preserving what little kinship structure it didn't destroy in its revolutionary stage: the nuclear family, the last step before complete social disintegration.[3]
The theory here presented differs from the one blaming Christianity for the cancelation of the White race, whose most radical proponent was the late Revilo Oliver (1908-1994). He wrote in Christianity and the Survival of the West:
Throughout the world, Aryans are showing unmistakable symptoms of either imbecility or a latent death-wish. … The most likely primary cause, in my opinion, is Christianity, a religion that is the negation of life, and is a kind of racial "AIDS," which, over two millennia, progressively sapped and finally destroyed our race’s immune system, i.e., its consciousness of its racial identity.I have two disagreements with that theory. First, I think the focus on "racial identity"—or the lack of it—is misdirected. The organic cohesion of a society starts at the level of the extended family or clan, and only if social bonds are undermined at that level over a long period of time does racial identity—or what Ludwig Gumplowicz more elegantly called the "syngenic feeling," that instinctual familiarity with those that resemble us—ultimately collapses. Immune-deficiency hits the social organism on the family level, not the racial level. Defending the dignity and the rights of White people is a worthy political cause, but racial identity is a very poor social glue by itself. What we need in order to build back our immune system, I think, is to reclaim what Western Christianity specifically destroyed: "intensive kinship" (Henrich's term).
Secondly, Christianity did not result in the same breakdown of kinship in the East and in the West. There was a qualitative leap in the West, during what Robert I. Moore has called "the First European Revolution" (c. 970-1215).[4] In a far-reaching project of remolding society, the papacy drove a persistent and multi-directional assault on the kin-based social structures of Romano-Germanic populations, which Greco-Slavic populations did not endure to the same degree.
This is not to say that the Eastern Church was particularly friendly to kinship. In theory, Christianity is inherently individualistic and depreciative of blood ties: only Jesus's blood saves, and salvation is for the individual alone. But the take-over of the Roman Church by the Cluniac monkish party, unparalleled in Orthodoxy, means that the phenomenon described by Louis Dumont, the normative effect of the outworldly individual forsaking lineage and family, was more acute in the Roman Catholic tradition.[5] Blood has been uniquely watered down by Catholic baptism. This explains why intensive kinship has resisted better in Eastern Europe, especially in South Slavic lands, where, "in the nineteenth century, zadrugas [extended families] comprising more than 80 people were observed. This was not the rule, of course, but domestic groups of 20 to 30 members were not uncommon at that time."[6]
But isn't Protestantism more individualistic than Catholicism? It certainly is. Modern individualism owes much to the Lutherans and even more to the Calvinists. But Protestant individualism could only take root in a social and psychological soil already fed by Catholic individualism for centuries. The increment in individualism from Orthodoxy through Catholicism to Protestantism would require a special study. I will here only focus on the policy of the medieval papacy against blood ties, and its long-term consequences.
The Pre-Christian Kin-Based Social Organism
Throughout Eurasia and the Middle East, our pre-Christian ancestors lived in clan-based societies. In addition to the sources I mention in "Bring out your dead!" on that topic, I recommend Guillaume Durocher's recent book The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece. To quote from his reading of Homeric anthropology:
Among the aristocratic ruling class Homer is dealing with, kinship is the basic foundation for identity and solidarity, and therefore of both personal and political action. Strangers are synonymous with uncertainty and potential violence. Kinship in contrast entails inherited resemblance and shared pride in and duties towards one's lineage. Among kin, there is the possibility of security. That security, however, only exists by the strength of the family father, his domestic authority, and his willingness to use violence against hostile aliens. … For Homer, identity and purpose is found in one's lineage. One acts for the sake of one's ancestors and one's descendants.[7]Like Greek society, Roman society was structured around the patrilineal clan, or gens. Kinship was also the grass-root organizing principle among Germans and Britons. The whole Indo-European world was based on extended structures of kinship. Every man was conscious of his own individuality of course (theories on "the discovery of the individual" are just literary theories in disguise), but the value given to the individual was subordinated to the value of the community (the opposite of what now defines modernity).
Marriage was, naturally, the keystone of the social edifice. It was never a matter of two persons getting married, but of two lineages contracting a blood alliance by marrying their children—who may or may not have taken much part in the decision.
In pre-Christian Europe, marriage inside the clan was common, as a way to maintain the corporate property of the clan land, where clan ancestors were buried. Marrying in-laws after the death of one's spouse was also common, even expected.
Although in both Roman and Germanic societies, monogamy was the rule, there was no ban against divorce or second spouses, especially in case of infertility or in order to get a male heir.
An alternative heirship strategy was adoption, generally within the clan. This was facilitated by the widespread practice of fosterage, that is, the sending of children to be cared for by maternal or paternal uncles until they reached adulthood (it was especially common in Briton and Irish societies).
This complex interconnection of the living was organized around the vertical axis of the veneration of the dead, which united communities religiously from the family level through the clan level to the city or national level.[8] It was so essential that clans who had not known common ancestor, had to invent one in other to seal alliances.
The Roman curia banned these practices, and in doing so destroyed the traditional clan-based structure of European society. Social anthropologist Jack Goody has documented this systematic assault on kinship in The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge UP, 1983), and more recently in The European Family: an historico-anthropological essay (Blackwell, 2000). Harvard professor Joseph Henrich has followed his lead in The WEIRDest People in the World. Since Henrich is neither a historian nor a social anthropologist but a professor of human evolutionary biology, I will rely directly on Goody and other sources for the next section, before coming back to the more original parts of Heinrich’s book.
Please go to The Unz Review to continue reading.
________
Editor's note: Here is one alternative to Christianity to salvage culture and civilization. What will it take to awaken the Irish soul?
Video: Awakening the Sleeping Irish Soul
Our problem — our terminal problem — is that we have lost the capacity to walk upright in infinity. This will not be mended by pious ejaculations, any more than by neo-atheist bullshit.
By John Waters | June 5, 2023
Moving Through
Video: A public conversation about the trajectory of the soul of Ireland between Thomas Sheridan and John Waters at the Tuatha Dé Danann festival in Fermoy, Co Cork, on Saturday May 27th, 2023.
(Readers of my weekly diary may already have read most of the following in my weekly diaries of last week and the week before — reproduced here by way of introducing the context and purpose of this event. The links to the video are at the bottom of the page.)
To say that the crisis of Ireland is 'spiritual' is not the same as saying that it is 'religious', though the difference can be hard to spell out unless it makes itself clear, as sometimes it does. Ireland has been undergoing a visible 'religious' crisis for perhaps 40 years, chiefly arising from a war of attrition on its primary faith-channel, Catholicism, by a cultural insurgency of indeterminate origin but rather obvious intentionality. The elements and episodes of this have already been well canvassed: culture wars, clerical hypocrisy, charges of child sexual abuse and its cover-up, and beyond that a failure on the part of the Catholic Church 'corporate' to offer a meaningful proposal for spiritual existence to generations supposedly educated in the values of the Enlightenment and the technological/technocratic age, culminating in its woeful and disgraceful conduct during the Covid episode, when it left its entire congregation bereft of guidance, accompaniment and leadership. Cumulatively, these factors, and multiple others, have delivered Ireland into a spiritual death-spiral that has yet to be formally identified, either by the society or any of its churches. The symptoms of this crisis can be traced in the drifts of Ireland’s cultural trajectory for many years, and the events of, in particular, the past decade, when Ireland as a nation and culture appeared to be galloping towards a cliff-edge of moral and existential self-destruction. Many of the relevant episodes and developments have been described and analysed on this platform over the past three years, and before that in several books of mine published since the mid-1990s, the most recent being the 2018 memoir, Give Us Back the Bad Roads.
It is clear that Ireland has now entered some kind of final stage of this unravelling, of which the consequences are unlikely to be confined to the wish-list of those who have been driving the culture wars. In other words, what will be lost will be not merely the Church, but the metaphysical perspective in its entirety. Like other nations, though in a rather more pronounced manner, Ireland has entered what feels terrifyingly like a death-spiral, not least in the context of its collapsing demographics and inability to tell victims from vanquishers, or differentiate between its responsibilities to its own people and its role in an international people-trafficking racket. That this collapse has long been disguised by spurious economic data and other propaganda will render its manifestation and effects all the worse when it finally hits.
This conversation, though unscripted, was loosely intended as an attempt to address these conditions in the context of Ireland's long spiritual evolution, with a view to identifying some thread of continuity that might assist in reawakening the Irish soul before it comes too late to do so.
What follow are my initial thoughts written in advance of the event in Fermoy on May 27th, as published in my weekly Unchained diary.
FRIDAY (MAY 26th)
As is customary in advance of such events, I am carrying around a bag of thoughts about this Saturday's public conversation with Thomas Sheridan at the Tuatha Dé Danann festival in Fermoy. It is, of course, a Resistance event, beautifully choreographed by Gerry O'Neill (The West's Awake, here on Substack), but for once I can banish any fears of an insurgency by left-wing actually existing fascists, since the venue is private and well secured. Democracy wins, for once — or so we hope. I shall give a full account of events here next week.
Our theme is (something like) the evolution of Ireland from paganism to Christianity, though that construction has an element of begging the question, if not actually beggaring it. It's a broad enough canvas, and Thomas and I have already approached the territory in some of our private discussions, though by no means pushing towards anything resembling a plan. I think our instincts, though we approach from divergent positions, are very similar: We seek to find a true line through the pagan and Christian histories of this island that will take us to consideration of the meaning of the present moment and perhaps some suggestion of what the next phase might be like.
Thomas is a pagan and I am a Christian. We are friends. We seek, I believe, the same thing, which is not the triumph of one or other creed, but the restoration of Ireland's transcendent imagination, without which Ireland — or any nation — cannot survive. Thomas is a great deal more knowledgable about the history of Irish spirituality than I am, and it remains to be seen whether my sense of things is accurate or sustainable, but I believe that, overall, the transition from paganism to Christianity was relatively seamless, that this augurs well for some form of ultimate reconciliation of the traditions, and that this ought to be our first point of departure. To put this another way: In terms of our spiritually imaginative collective journeying, we speak not of two histories, but one. The merging to be observed in the two strands far exceeds any sense of divergence, and this is reflected in innumerable contexts: our surviving sense of the significance of our ancient holy sites, our recently renewing consciousness of Celtic Christianity, our continuing reverence for the land and landscape of Ireland, and so forth. These factors tell us that there is a great deal more of paganism in our modern-day Catholic imagination than many Catholics might like to admit. I have no difficulty in admitting it, indeed celebrating it, although I confess I did not arrive at that point until I ran into Thomas Sheridan, about three years ago.
The core 'belief' that drives me here is that no society can endure unless it has a transcendent element to its collective imagination. That has been my obsession in writing about faith, spirituality and religion from the beginning, although for various reasons it has been all but impossible to communicate this in the cultural climate of recent decades. This, essentially, is the point of my books, Lapsed Agnostic (2007) and Beyond Consolation (2010), and also of a substantial segment of my 1997 book, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Ireland — in particular the chapter 'On How God Has Been Kidnapped and Held to Ransom'.
In the first of his trilogy, Sacred Order/Social Order (2006-2008) — two volumes of which were published posthumously — the American Freudian, sociologist and cultural critic, Philip Rieff, posited that Western civilisation was in the third and likely final stage of a rise and fall that had occurred over the course of three millennia. At the heart of his thesis is the Freudian idea that only through sublimation of the sexual instinct had Western civilisation come about. In other words, controls and restrictions on sexual activity had, as it were, squeezed out of humanity the creativity and genius which begat Western civilisation. This, it will come as a surprise, was predominately a Christian innovation.
Many nowadays misunderstand Freud's pronouncement that religion is 'illusory'. This may have been, in a different sense, his private view, but his theoretical position was that religion is a form that creates the superstructure of a transcendent cultural understanding. This means that, in a sense, human beings, when present on Earth, are simply 'moving through' this dimension to another place, and hence direct a measure of their attention to what they intuit to be beyond the horizon. This, of course, is how most religions present matters also, though generally in a subtly different sense: Often, the purpose or effect is to persuade people to discount misfortune or grief in this life, in the expectation of an afterlife reward. But, in the Freudian and Rieffian senses, we speak not of foregoing joy on Earth, but of adopting a demeanour towards Earthly reality that maximises human functioning. In this way, mankind has been able to place itself within a transcendent order of being, which has enabled it to put to good use energy that might otherwise have been dissipated in licentiousness and depravity.
Please go to John Waters Unchained to continue reading and to view the discussion.
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