I never thought I would say it, but I am poised to become a member of the right wing.
I understand your trepidation. I had to make this transition as well. But it is necessary.
Here is the Left:
That is the Left.
If you read about the Red Terror in Spain… not counting civilians, they murdered about 7,000 clergy. And 13 bishops! This was the “Spanish Revolution”… an attempt to completely reinvent Spanish culture.
But it’s all there in the source texts of the Left. Some people try to soft-pedal the rhetoric of Communists. That’s a mistake. Let’s go all the way back to Kant. His principle of moral philosophy is that since nobody knows about God and all that God stuff, man has to be “autonomous”. Read that: an
auto -
nomos… a “self-law”. Now a Christian will say “Hey, I thought God gives the laws?” Kant and the Liberal tradition say “No”. They say that Man gives the laws.
Fast forward to Hegel. What is he doing? Well, it’s complicated. But one of the things he does is transports the Kantian subject (the “self-law”) from the individual to the State. That’s because (at its simplest… though German philosophers hate simplicity) two things that militate against one another in contradiction give rise to a third term which encompasses that contradiction. So the individual person cannot be the locus of true autonomy… he’s in contradiction with other individuals. There’s something that stands over their conflict and is fueled by it.
Then morality (still in Hegel) becomes a matter of evolution (the “Philosophy of History”). There is no morality as traditionally defined… morality is history. What is good is that which triumphs. What is bad is that which falls before the triumphant. When it gets down to brass tacks, you only judge good or bad in retrospect: it’s really just another way of saying “winner” versus “loser” (Nietzsche later tries to put this anti-morality back into the individual).
For Hegel this historical process of social evolution had certain spiritual and mystical aspects (sadly revisited in de Chardin). Feuerbach came along and just stripped all the non-Materialist elements out of Hegel: all Marxists are Feuerbachians. In Marxism, the process of historical evolution becomes one of the natural selection of the highest and most mighty class: the industrial proletariat. It is not that it is morally right that workers be treated well… in Marxism there is no morality except the retrospection of victory (“History is on our side! We will bury you!”).
For any Marxist programme of social evolution to take place, a number of things have to happen. One is the complete conversion of the culture to Materialism. Everything non-Materialist is not just considered superstition: it is consider the work of the Class Enemies… social classes that seek to enslave the proletariat. Further,
and this is vital: the fundamental tenets of Marxian philosophy are nonsensical if traditional morality exists and is true. I don’t mean things like putting poor folks on the dole. I mean the underlying propositions of the philosophical edifice of Dialectical Materialism.
This holds true for any type of Marxist (there are so many types because Marx was obviously wrong in his prognostication about socialist revolution: it did not happen where he said it would or in the way he said it would… so all the other types, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Western Academics, etc. have to come up with an interpretation as to why he was wrong, and this is what specifies them). It’s not that giving poor folks some handouts or shortening the work week are somehow against Christianity. Those things, for the Marxists, aren’t even moral positions: in Marxism, there is no particular moral position at all, only strategies and tactics for revolutionary victory. The real question at stake is not what poor folks get from the government. What is at stake is an entire view of history, morality, God and man. And
that is when it gets violent.
Welcome to the right, my friend. Viva Cristo Rey!
