Sunday 17 December 2017

Original Sin - Cause of Today's Retribution?



The recent flurry of celebrity recriminations is a growth industry that began in earnest after the death of Jimmy Savile.  Along with institutionalised child abuse, it forms a small part of a wider movement antagonistic to moral standards attached to the West.  In its broadest form this includes accusations of colonialism, imperialism and slavery, the fashion for colonial iconoclasm, conspiracy theories, and political correctness.  The movement employs liberal use of anachronistic moralising in its calls for apologies and restitution, and encourages expressions of guilt.

Summing up the cause of these reduces them to ‘Westernism’, the creation of an imperialist, authoritarian, oppressive, conservative, capitalist, white male-dominated, sexually-harassing, nationalist, racist, gender-stereotyping and consequentialist entity.  This is now “the secular liberal baby boomer worldview, for historical reasons to do with empire and post-imperial guilt, unusually ingrained in the British cultural and political elite— the default position in much of higher education and significant parts of the media” to quote David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere. 
 
In an era that could be called ‘Die Weltanschauung ohne Schatten’, the West lost its opportunity to project evil onto the forces of communism, and has instead turned in on itself in a crisis of legitimacy.  In contrast to the political Right, the extreme Left likes to find fault within its own environment, and finding victims of Westernism’s failings has turned out to be easy.  Concern for ‘the victim’ is the straw man for neo-Marxism, which, having lost the support of the working class for its revolutionary zeal, had to create another.  By creating a self-inflating victim class out of the Westernism entity, neo-Marxism has its new constituency.

Building on the decline of Western nations, its loss of a meta-narrative, three generations indulging in peace and prosperity, and to quote Ibn Khaldun “the vigour of group feeling is broken… But many of the old virtues remain”, neo-Marxism has taken control of public discourse and in doing so has created its own moral high-ground based on victimhood grievances, in return for their support.  “Liberals are very sensitive to issues of harm and suffering (appealing to our capacities for sympathy and nurturing) and also fairness and injustice (related to our innate instinct for reciprocity)”, again quoting Goodhart.  Blame for Westernism is placed on the system, not on fallen and depraved human nature.  Its redemption comes through societal revolution.

So far, no need for Original Sin.

Earlier applications of Judeo-Christian justice could apply to rights to the commons, repudiation of slavery, egalitarianism, and counter-racism.  These actions weren’t retrospective in the way that anti-Westernism sums up the current spiritus mundi, indicating to me that Original Sin carries little moral weight now or in the past.  Its main emphasis seems to lie in redemption through Christ’s forgiveness and salvation.  Westernism is a recent phenomenon and while there may be a resonance with Original Sin, I would describe its relationship as nothing more than coincidental, and not in the least dependent on it.  The absence of anti-Westernism elsewhere in the world is due, I would suggest, to the absence of Westernism.  Oriental religions may not encourage retrospective retribution, but for their own reasons, rather than a want of Christianity.  Other cultures don’t have this problem because they don’t have a revolutionary neo-Marxist base seeking political and mass support in an alien environment through an academic will to power.

Victimhood is the focus of today’s incriminations, and Original Sin never applied to victims.  It applied to actions which of their time were known to be sinful, with God’s punishment meted out over generations.  With anachronistic moralising, sins are defined long after the event.  Since even pinning down a definition of Original Sin is fraught with philosophical division, its application today is irrelevant.









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