What is ‘disenchantment’?
The term largely applies to the replacement of God by the idols of the Liberal Enlightenment – namely man himself and his reason. As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, it has a definition of its own in the so-called social sciences of philosophy and sociology as “the supposed conditions of the world once science and the Enlightenment have eroded the sway of religion and superstition.”
In these fields, it is related to the sacred, and the destruction of social norms which it has produced.
What this means is that which was formerly sacred is no more. The loss of God has led to the sanctification of new concepts necessary to the belief that Christianity can be continued without Christ, and that Man can be the instrument of his own salvation.
The dismissal of God as mere superstition saw His replacement by the “rational” point of view. Yet this point of view is itself breaking down. It no longer claims a material basis, being concerned with the assertion that the nature of being itself can be asserted by the mind of the believer. From foreign policy to social ideology, the values we inhabit are so distant from reality as to be indefensible in argument, and undeniable in the chaos they have created.
My argument is that this disenchantment replaced the worship of God with a far more irrational belief system. Its idols are falling around us today. This is the great second disenchantment of the West.
The Third Religion of Man: Liberalism
The many forms of liberal democracy which have become the norm in the West have their roots in the Enlightenment idea of Man as a rational being who has no need of God.
The arguments of John Stuart Mill, as well as those of Paine and Rousseau before him, celebrate a basic belief that through reason alone mankind can and should be emancipated from the outmoded and irrational beliefs upon which our civilization is founded.
The argument that liberalism is the continuation of Christianity without Christ has been well-made elsewhere, most notably in John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism. The philosophy of atheism is a creed of progress, itself a fantasy whereby the human race is morally and intellectually uplifted as a product of the passage of time.
This idea of progress is a myth. It is a powerful one, which imbues every progressive social change with a sense of inevitability. What is new is therefore better than what is old – because it is new.
The decline of the West
In his book Why Liberalism Failed, Catholic author Patrick Deneen demonstrates the paradox of liberal thought.
Liberalism promotes individual “liberation” – the casting aside of religious, cultural and social norms in the name of emancipation. The self is schooled to seek its own satisfaction. Yet in order to offer legal protection to the resulting groups of identity-based individual extremists, the law must disfavor the majority who do not belong to them.
This is the legal paradox of liberalism, to which it has no answer. Hate speech laws, positive or equity-based discrimination, and talk of “structural racism” are the means by which the many are disadvantaged by the weaponized grievance of an organized few.
It has led to insoluble antagonisms, and to the vexed question of “what is a woman.” It also confers the means of power, reward and advantage – for reasons with no relation to merit or to competence. Such policies have been cited by BlackRock as contributing factors to the increasing instability of the West.
Instead of competence and excellence, our institutions and corporations increasingly prefer candidates for superficial reasons unrelated to aptitude. This has led to a crisis of competence.
The politics of fantasy
The broader ideology whose devastating consequences we inhabit is one of the promotion of fantasy as an alternative to reality.
The fantasies are many, and combined they are precipitating a diplomatic, institutional, financial and social collapse.
In diplomacy, the fantasies of the neoconservatives have for forty years directed the energies, wealth and armies of the West towards a program of regime change. This notion – that the world can and must be civilized through the instruments of war and the subversion of sovereignty – has impoverished the many and enriched the donor class which sponsors it.
As a result, most of our news has become tinged with propaganda. As I have argued, the ideology of the West has changed in order to perpetuate a war which could have ended with a peace dividend in 1991.
I believe the reason the West promotes the pro-LGBT rainbow flag and the green agenda is to differentiate itself from the supposed enemies of the war industry – a desperate attempt to stay relevant.
Russia is no longer communist and is arguably less godless than the West itself. It has adopted a market system, is consumerist and holds elections. Yet it is manifestly not “gay.”
Nor is China, which despite being communist is now the world’s largest industrial economy and has no truck with “Net Zero” initiatives. The green agenda is a convenient stick with which to beat this enemy, which is no longer a peer but has in several notable ways overtaken the United States itself.
The riches of the West have been squandered in the financing of a forty-year fantasy of global domination, which has left our nations morally and structurally impoverished.
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