Liberals lie. And I include libertarians among liberals. Perhaps they lie first to themselves, but they lie. All liberals, from Hobbes to Locke to Jefferson to von Mises to Nozick and on to the collectivist enablers or advocates of a `liberal’ and totalitarian order. The biggest part of their lie is the one which claims man to be a secular creature who worships God (or—historically—what anthropologists and archaeologists call the “moral gods”) only as a matter of choice—worship isn’t seen by liberals as an inherent part of human being as is engagement in marketplace activities and some level of political activities. All but true extremists, anarchists, agree that some minimal system of justice is necessary along with defense against foreign peoples.
As the past few centuries have passed, it would seem that nearly all liberals—including not a few Catholic bishops and leaders of other Christian communities, not a few Christian thinkers—have accepted this radical separation of religion from the “more important” parts of human being. As far as free-market (classical) liberalism goes, the major scholars themselves admit that that form of capitalism is more revolutionary and sometimes more destructive of human institutions than is Marxism and other isms of the modern world. For example, feminism and homosexualism and other forms of anti-human thought developed in the context of Western societies as they mutated first into classical liberal forms and then into collectivist liberal forms.
Liberalism is founded upon myths of political communities (Hobbes and probably Locke and the Founding Fathers of the US) or economic communities (von Mises and Hayek); both forms of communities are actually fully voluntary (contractual) gatherings of individuals in the ideal. Those myths weren’t meant to be taken literalistically but, in the Augustinian sense, are to be taken literally. That is, there was never a specific event or even series of events in history which corresponded to some sort of contract, political or economic, between individuals but the general idea is that individuals are real and communities are but nominalistic entities formed by the wills of individuals and breakable by those same wills—or, more likely, the wills of descendants of those original individuals. See A Very Simplified View of the Woes of Christianity—Now and at Two Earlier Times and Civilizational Decay as a Loss of Shape for my rough, non-scholarly take on the ways in which this misunderstanding of human being, indeed—all of created or contingent being, developed in the West during centuries when Christian thought seemed dominant.
In fact, the histories of human communities in the Mesopotamian or Mediterranean communities from which the West largely came indicate a primary importance to the temple (priests and worship) over the palace (kings and political activities) and the marketplace (merchants and economic activities). This isn’t to deny that human beings gathering for “collective worship of moral gods” needed police and soldiers of some sort as well as merchants to trade, say, surplus grain or goats for agricultural tools and weapons. This is to say that there is a lead horse (or 2) in the largest of teams, though as the team forms, all the horses need to work together. And we should be clear that much came to the West from those ancient communities, ancestral to the Hebrews and other Semites and also to the Indo-European peoples—including Greeks and Romans, though in a somewhat different and less restrictive way.
Even so far as the Indo-Europeans on the Russian and Ukrainian steppes are concerned, their dominant male-line DNA (R1b) evolved on the slopes of the Ararat range of hills and mountains as—so to speak—Abel the pastoralist who looked upon, and raided, the various members of the tribe of Cain—such as Semites, farming the river valleys of that northern region of Mesopotamia. The Bible, and empirical evidence gathered by archaeologists and other empirical scientists or historians, indicates that it was the tribe of Cain which initiated outright war against the tribe of Abel—perhaps for good reason. The later-emerging Indo-European peoples, the Slavs, have a high percentage of R1a male-line DNA; that line evolved on the plains of modern-day Iran, east of Cain and Abel—so to speak. For what it’s worth, R1a is also a much more common Y-chromosome that R1b among the Iranian peoples, some tribes of Afghanistan, and the higher castes of India.
These peoples, genetic lines, have heritages and are not some sort of accidental groupings of generic humanoid. Other peoples, other genetic lines, have different heritages and are also not some sort of accidental groupings of generic humanoid. (I’m not slighting the other peoples who contributed genes to the Indo-European family-lines, including most especially the ones coming in through the mothers of those peoples, but I’m trying to keep the story simple and true though it be impossible to tell the entire truth without a multitude of volumes each hundreds of pages long.)
In this very interesting and probably very important article, The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load, we learn that individuals inclined to “collective worship of moral gods” are genetically healthier than those not so inclined—the immune system is of particular importance. Those not so inclined to that worship have the same sorts of loads of genetic mutations as schizophrenics, autistic peoples, and homosexuals. This isn’t a proof that the God of Moses or the God of Jesus Christ, or those “moral gods,” exist; it just means that human nature, think especially of personality/social characteristics, evolved to live in complex communities centered around that collective worship. As a speculation, I would suggest that our form of abstract reason is also that appropriate for a world created by, or at least controlled by, “moral gods” or even the God of Jesus Christ.
We know that men are:
- political animals,
- economic animals,
- family-centered animals,
- beer-brewing animals,
- rational animals, and
- so on.
How about adding two to the list, two certainly found in the Hebrew and Christian Holy Scriptures:
- worshiping animal and
- believing animal?
In fact, I’ll continue to make the claim that human beings are, first and foremost, religious animals. The authors of the above referenced article, The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load, have already made this claim plausible by showing that those human inclinations to worship and believe are, like reason or abstract intelligence, so basic to the core of human nature that defects in the complex systems of genes which regulate such characteristics are associated with health problems, often severe health problems. As a car engine with a defective alternator might sputter or might shut down completely, so it is with human beings bereft of some basic religious inclination. I simplify their results because I’m starting a journey in a manner of speaking and I just wish to know what I should pack and in which direction I should head to get to the point of understanding human nature. As an example of an interesting complication, the article indicates that the inclination to believe and the inclination to worship have separate probabilities of heritability, indicating they are linked but separable. So long as we humans retain our curiosity, the world will continue to offer us interesting problems, some suited for academic study.
It would seem possible at this point that there are no such genes, such core constituents of human being, which play a similar role for the traits of economic man or political man. It might be that economic man and political man arose in the context of religious communities and does so now; this would be consistent with the claim of some that religion supplies the individual moral characters and the communal moral relationships which make stable and complex communities possible. After all, the anti-religious stream of the Enlightenment has conquered the West for now and as religion is driven more and more out of communal (public) life, our economic and political systems are…shall we say—fraying? They would fray if they were dependent upon a set of damaged or suppressed human traits more fundamental than are they to complex human communities.
If true, this would mean that all forms of modernism, liberal and socialistic—as some have claimed before me, were based upon psychoses—dangerous fantasies, basic misunderstandings of human being which were then developed into the systems of Hobbesian justification for radical individuals living in a society controlled ruthlessly by Leviathan, for Locke’s gentler and more optimistic form of individualism, Marx’s `liberation’ into a society in which everything is owned in common by radical individuals, John Stuart Mill’s classical liberalism which became a bit of a proto-identity political system with his blessing of Harriet Taylor’s feminism, von Mises’ radical individualism so well suited to Central European intellectuals, and so on. These thinkers were an intelligent lot and insisted on using their intelligence to develop complex and sophisticated systems on the basis of assumptions of human being in its cosmopolitan, late-Enlightenment form seen as political or economic or both—as if the latest growth of a plant could be chopped off, separated from stem and root, and put forward as if the entire plant, capable of sustaining and propagating itself.
Never were those men who built the glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome seen as the ones who came together to “collectively worship moral gods.” Those men who were the prophets of God in Israel and Judah were shoved into the shadows, embarrassment that they were to those preaching political man and/or economic man as the true Man. As time went on, they had also to ignore the scientists with dirt under their fingernails, the dirt of Babylon and Jerusalem, for those investigators of reality had early on seen hints of the apparent primacy of temples over palaces and of their great importance even after the palaces and bureaucratic mazes are built.
I can’t produce the detailed, scholarly arguments but I feel it likely that this error, this placing of political and economic traits ahead of religious traits, was willful and conscious on the part of many thinkers. Yes, I am claiming many of those thinkers were conscious liars and not just the self-deluded sorts of liars, sons of Satan in old-fashioned language. These men such as Hobbes and Locke and von Mises were truly modern, exerting their wills in order to conquer reality, seeking to change human being into something more acceptable to them by promulgating the idea that, for example, the European men who’d built the Christian West were (maybe) fundamentally political or (maybe) fundamentally economic animals but Christian (a particular form of religious man) only as an accident of their history. And we’re beginning to pay the price for allowing some clever but not wise, and not moral, thinkers and doers to try to change human being into what it is not. It’s easier to damage individual or communal human being than it is to improve it.
In any case, we will continue to pay that price for a while because those thinkers have pushed their ideas into the minds and feelings and behaviors of a good number of Westerners: Christian leaders and theologians, educators and “producers of culture,” were somewhat willing victims and then began themselves to prey upon the minds and moral characters of the youth and of the mature humans as well as they tried to adjust to a world which was so rapidly changing. Those responsible for guarding the traditions of mankind tried to do so in unintelligent ways, protecting what needed changed along with what was meant to be permanent and what was still good; as those sorts of projects failed, Catholic and Protestant leaders as well as literary critics and academics and politicians went over to the enemies of tradition.
In the end, my title—What is Man? And All That?—doesn’t cut it. To understand Creation and creatures, including human creatures, we must have some small understanding of God even in His transcendence and some great understanding of God in His freely chosen role as Creator of a particular Creation in which arose this peculiar world.