Petr
Administrator
Pushing the Eschaton
It is in the discourse of the Right a commonplace that liberal policies implement Ponzi schemes; that their wild prodigality can be justified only on the basis of magical thinking which supposes th…
orthosphere.wordpress.com
BY KRISTOR
Pushing the Eschaton
It is in the discourse of the Right a commonplace that liberal policies implement Ponzi schemes; that their wild prodigality can be justified only on the basis of magical thinking which supposes that economic and cultural goods pour forth inexhaustibly from some mysterious cornucopia, rather than as products of unstinting, intelligent, diligent, difficult, costly labor rightly and prudently directed. In this liberalism has always reminded me of the cargo cults that sprang up among natives all over Oceania in the 20th Century after their contact with Europeans, especially during and after WWII. But of these cargo cults I had had only the most cursory knowledge. I knew only that some cargo cultists thought that if they mocked up a semblance of an airstrip, planes full of goods would land to disgorge them (“If we build it, they will come;” we see the same sort of thinking at work in those who suppose that if they just show up in a nice suit or arrive in Sweden, life will be for them thenceforth all wine and roses (and blondes)).
I’m reading Mircea Eliade’s The Two and the One, wherein he discusses the cargo cults. Now that thanks to him I now know a bit more about them, my hunch about liberalism has borne out to a truly spooky degree. Consider the following extended passages (page 125 ff.), and feel the prickle of the hairs on your neck as you begin to comprehend the true immensity of the intellectual gulf that separates us from latter day liberals:
It’s all there, no? Like the Social Justice Warriors, the cargo cultists were trying to immanentize the eschaton. And their methods were the same. Reading, I kept thinking of Burning Man. And Rousseau and the French Revolution, the Cathars and Bogomils, the Gnostics and Mazdaks. Utopians, the lot of them. The main difference between the nudist iconoclasts of Espiritu Santo and all prior chiliastic cults on the one hand, and on the other those epitomized by Burning Man, is that for the latter, the cornucopia they do not understand has for decades already been disgorging for their enjoyment a torrent of goods. Compared to their ancestors, or anyone at any other time in history, they need to work almost not at all (almost all jobs these days (including my own) would look to our forebears like sinecures). The only thing missing is immortality – and they have faith that “the Americans” will soon deliver it through gene therapy or AI.
The liberal rejection of the traditions, customs, morality, and sexual orders developed over millennia of scarcity and insecurity makes some sense when we consider that scarcity and insecurity seem to have been more or less routed in the West since WWII. Those with eyes to see understand that this seeming is a phantasm. But we can at least understand how our fellow citizens might thus err, and honestly think themselves in the right – so that they think their own is the “reality based” party. If reality really were a cornucopia, they would be right.
But, of course, the world isn’t a cornucopia. Maintaining things in good orderly fashion, so that the cosmos continues as such, involves a lot of work, for all creatures. So the latter day cornucopians among our fellows are wrong.
A few pages later, Eliade discusses the traditional cults of Melanesia, almost all of which expect an eventual cataclysm that will destroy the universe and open ontological room for a rebirth of the world in its original paradisiacal perfection, into which the faithful of the cult will be reborn in immortal bodies.
As in so many traditional cultures, this eschatological reboot is iterated synecdochally at the turn of each New Year, so that for the traditional cults of Melanesia the maintenance of the current world order, too, depends upon an annual recurrence of the acts by which this world and its perfected successor are both originally made. This recurrence is effected on the part of the Human Beings (as traditional societies all call themselves) by the priesthood, who mime the creative acts of the Immortals. Eliade describes the rite deployed by the Indians of Northern California:
A sacred communal meal is an essential part of the rite.
Any Christian who has studied the theology of the Eucharist will see the parallels. Each Eucharistic celebration on Earth is a participation and instance of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb proceeding sempiternally in Heaven, and a salient here below of the Life of Heaven. It is by that Wedding, which completes the integration of all worlds, that worlds are made in the first place, and are maintained. So the Eucharist is in a sense a rehearsal of the procedure of Creation, as well as an anticipation and foretaste of our eschatological destiny.
I adduce the palmary rites of the Californians and of the Church because in their intentions they differ radically from those of the cargo cults and the liberals. The former reiterate and uphold tradition; the latter destroy it. The former seek to join with the divine in the maintenance of cosmic order; the latter seek by Pelagian operations magically to push the onset of the eschaton, and so to realize for themselves, now, the Resurrection to everlasting life. They seek the end of this world as a solution to their own practical problems. This they do by living now as if the tikkun olam had been accomplished already for them, so that the rules of this world no longer applied to them; and so that they may, and indeed should, destroy all the traditional forms that had perennially furnished social coherence and survival.
Is the cost of their profound moral inversion the eventual utter deliquescence of social life – which is to say, mass death? So be it, they say; bring it on: to make an omelette, you need to break some eggs. All the chiliastic cults eagerly anticipate a holocaust of the infidels, and are ready, indeed impatient, to get started with it.
Neither the traditional nor the revolutionary utopian sorts of cults doubt that there is to be an eschaton, and thereafter a heavenly rest for the elect. The crucial, immense difference between them – in virtue of which they are perfect opposites, and therefore fundamentally opposed – is that the former are content to wait upon the Lord, to serve and imitate him, while the latter would push him to act. If you think about it for half a moment, that’s just about the craziest notion imaginable; ergo, the most lethal.
Last edited:
