Saturday, September 19, 2015

Brown noses and Brownshirts.

I've noted that that the racist right has been cheering Victor Orban and his actions in stopping the Muslim invasion of Europe. It's true, Viktor Orban is  the Right's man of the moment and his closing of the borders is to be lauded.  His assertion and defence of both an ethnic Hungarian identity and European one is at odds with that of the Euro-weenies of Brussels who have given Orban the predictable sobriquet of racist.  It's no surprise then that the cognitive misers of the Right, looking for  a legitimate champion of "white identity" would choose to see him as their a fellow traveler in spirit.  However,  it must of been a bit of a surprise to these intellectual giants that when they chose to have a conference on his turf he banned them on the grounds that they were racists. You see, Orban is a proud Hungarian Nationalist but he is not one of them. The racialists had committed an intellectual error. They assumed that just because Orban was implementing the same policies they were advocating, Orban was doing it for the same reasons they were doing so.  They were wrong.

Where Orban and the racialists is differ is with respect to their metaphysics. Orban is a Christian and his worldview is made from this perspective.  Unlike the materialistic HBD crowd, there is only one class of human beings and membership of it is not contingent on genetic rank.  Membership of the human race is recognised as being of the fact that man is the image of God. This being an article of faith. From this flows the notion that all men should be treated with dignity and humanity.

Christianity does not deny the existence of races, or of their differences, rather it insists that human dignity--and the duties thereby owed--is not contingent upon genetic structure or phenotype. This differs from the racialists who infer the quality of man is based upon his genetic structure. Whiteness is not just a marker of identity for these men but is also a marker of "distinguishing quality". Furthermore, many of the racialists embrace a materialistic metaphysic which reduces man to a simple material substance.

One of the real world problems with the strictly biological understandings of the human person is that the dangers of racial supremacism and Darwinian competition are always lurking to rear their ugly head. The manifestly obvious fact, of the association between "Whiteness" and technological and cultural achievement,  puts forth a justifiably assertive claim for the superiority of the White people over all the other races. The argument for the superiority of Whites is so easily made and so easily grasped that it's only a small, and cognitively easy step, to start thinking in terms of Unter and Ubermensch and of "practical" solutions to intractable social problems.

This is why racialists have always been hostile to Christianity, since it puts a brake on this these final steps.  Asserting, contrary to apparent fact, that no matter how savage, offensive or ignorant a man is, of whatever race,  he is still to be treated like a equal human being. It's this insistence of treating the other as human that stops a Christian from turning into an arsehole. Christianity asserts that there are certain minimal standards we owe everybody. Orban belongs to this view and rejects the notion that some men are better than others because of their genetics.

What surprises me is just how many Christians--especially in NRx--have given a sympathetic ear to the racialists when the their underlying metaphysic is hostile to Christianity itself. It's a sort of pact with the Devil which a bit of sober reflection shows will not end well. The last time Christians formally did this they got right and royally screwed.  But then again that's the nature of the Christian Right, it's pretty dumb.

Perhaps one of the reasons why the Christian right is so easily seduced by racialists is because Christianity itself lacks a "theology of the flesh".  I've argued before on this blog, that the "decarnalisation" of the human person has led to cultural fault lines which have been exploited by different kinds of diabolical error. Chivalric love is a love without reference to Eros, and the current embrace of multiculturalism is an attempt to build society without reference to human homphily. The Christian conception of man seems to be one without reference to his flesh.

The Christian Left, on the other hand, seems to operate with the blessing of the Church, at least with regard to mutliculturalism since it's theology is in many ways in synch with Marxist ideology which teaches that race,  (i.e. flesh) does not matter.

The thing for the intelligent Christian is that he has to walk a fine line between those who think that the flesh doesn't matter and those who think it is all that there is. He has to walk a fine line between the brown-noses and the brown shirts.