Understanding the consequences of post-modern theories on society from a Catholic perspective

Art by Jean-Leon Gerome

“Thou hast no right but to do thy will... For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”

― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

The purpose of this article is to show how subjectivism and post-modern theories have trickled down into the culture as a sort of contagion that is not fully understood by those who spread it. I will simply propose that what we see today within the culture in regards to identity politics and ideas about truth are consequences of conscious ideas with subversive tactics that aim at undermining traditional values of Good and Evil. I will attribute the spirit behind this phenomenon with the eternal opposer – Lucifer.

Most people have heard the accusation of various established narratives being “social constructs” and have recognised the preoccupation with language and “the discourse”. These ideas are simplified and overlapping interpretations of an array of work by philosophers such as Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, George Bataille and others. Their collective works are vast and include intense discussions about the human experience, but my intention is to plainly shed light on how these philosophies have entered mainstream dialogue, and although many of the theories differ they’re all a means to the same end: by their fruits we shall know them. Let’s start with the idea that everything is a social construct, whether it’s gender, monogamy, knowledge or religion. This is essentially an argument for subjectivism but I think it rarely gets discussed further than being used as a silencing tactic. The critical constructivists assert that dead generations weigh down subsequent generations with a “pre-loaded consciousness”, our minds are then developed within the narrow confines of a world already built on the foundations of pre-modern objective truth and meta-narratives. If Foucault was “opposed to that which is inherently legitimate” and others say that there is no objective perspective because our minds filter our experience through these prescribed values about behaviour, relationships, power and so on then they should be treated with scepticism – this leads to the idea of actively deconstructing the ‘legitimate’ values where we find them and creating our own realities as we see fit. What Nietzsche meant by the ‘death of God’ was essentially that humanity was moving into an age where there would no longer be a foundation for moral truth; we can see in society today that people are losing grip of a fundamental understanding of what is right or wrong and this was precisely the goal of these philosophers and their contemporaries. The Nietzschean quip: ‘trans-valuation of values’ refers to a continual practice of removing any trace of God and his morality from the culture and to create our own values, as Sartre says “...everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist.”

Now let’s look at the fixation with language and discourse; for example the drive towards sharing ‘pronouns’ when introducing oneself as well as various identities surrounding gender identity, sexual preference and possibly other characteristics. Additionally, the propensity to group people in terms of their identity is to categorically attribute every axis of human experience to the narrative of power struggle, i.e. oppressed and oppressor; this will create conflict on all borders. When the goal is to fundamentally dismantle perceived established power structures, language is one of those structures that is immaterial and therefore a good place to start within a movement, as it doesn’t require active incursion. So, the idea is then to be critical of the way language controls any given narrative, this often results in proponents of these multi-tentacled ideologies extorting perceived ‘violence’ from words and essentially fomenting anxiety around detecting hidden, unconscious or otherwise internalised prejudice that is built into your psyche due to the dominant world-view you were raised in. The only answer to this problem, is self re-education. Where would be the best place to start in this endeavour? Among the youth. Young people are easy to manipulate because they fundamentally lack power and they’re finding their sense of autonomy. To keep God and his morality out of the culture, you start by telling the youth that there are a plurality of truths. The house built on sand can be epitomised in this quotation by David Halperin: “Queer is … whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.” Therefore sexuality is merely a tool for those whose aim is only to subvert and cause chaos, as a Marxist group once put it: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

So who better to sow the seeds of chaos than teenagers and naive celebrities? We live in a unique time where we are seeing the fruits of subjective morality in the hands of the masses. The permanent revolution can be illustrated by the serpent eating his own tail; contradictions, confusion and conflict are the manifesting characteristics of this evolved Marxist zeitgeist. The head of the serpent is the presupposition that all relationships are predicated on power, and the meaning of life is whatever gives you gratification. The critical constructivists -as a sort of buttress, since they’ve pulled the carpet of objective values out from under them - align themselves with the ‘oppressed’ at every opportunity. Having gained a footing through subversion, from the conceited philosophers who birthed absolute subjective morality to their heirs that have taken the inverted values and made them absolutes via authoritarian behaviours, have thus become that which they set out to destroy, thereby eating the tail.

If you imagine that the quest for truth is a natural cycle of learning, clarity and growth then the ouroboros is the crooked imitation of that, whereby there is no birthing aspect. To paraphrase Venerable Fulton Sheen: “you cannot build anything down”, the eternal dismantling and “decolonising” thwarts the growth aspect. Objective truth is the values God gave us, to create values is like trying to think of a new colour. Lucifer can only bastardise and distort truth, he can only ‘build’ down. If through relativism, all our realities are true and there is no unifying truth, then communication becomes impossible (a good description of hell – “hell is other people”), the truth is merely who has the power. The will to power, synonymous with “do what thou wilt” cannot sustain community, community is built on sacrifice; Therefore self overcoming is to be Christ-like. So, what is subjectivism aiming at? If it is freedom, then as CS Lewis said “freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches ruler and ruled alike”, rights themselves are predicated on a God-given law. Whereby pre-modern values asked what the purpose of an act was, the post modern only proposes the act; the subject, with no objective has no goal. The Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters succinctly illustrates this by saying “everything an artist spits is art”, i.e. the artist’s expression or experience supersedes the created art itself. Essentially, everything is centred on the ‘I’, my truth, my ‘values’, as Marx said “...so that he [man] will move around himself as his own true Sun.”

Without objective truth we fall into decadence, every experience is valid, intensity validates, pleasure validates. CS Lewis said that this post-modern view sees value judgements as merely sentiments or complexes produced “by the pressure of its environment”, he goes on to say that if a community can chose it’s ideology, then how can anyone reject the National Socialist’s definition of justice?

“But he – had to die; he looked with eyes that beheld everything – he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness. His pity knew no modesty; he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one had to die. He beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge – or not live myself. The God who beheld everything, and also man: that God had to die! Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Nietzsche is prophetically writing this as the ‘ugliest man’, a visceral confession of a race whose ‘freedom’ need not be witnessed, because of the shame it would induce. Let us ‘normalise’ every fetish and every selfish whim and call it empowering instead of humbling ourselves before God. CS Lewis asked if a moral law was right “because God commands them or does God command them because they are right?” When we think of law, we think of one who makes the law and one who obeys it, if God commands a law that implies a level of tyranny and if the law is right so therefore God commands it, it implies that this universal law is separate from God. Neither are true – God is law, He is truth; as Simone Weil writes: He loves, not as I love, but as an emerald is green. He is ‘I love.’ Furthermore, as God made us in his image, our conscience is the ‘aboriginal vicar of Christ’ as John Henry Newman wrote, we know that to ‘create our own values’ requires a web of elaborate lies, the gnostic knowledge of gurus offering guidance on how to ‘de-centre’ your problematic identity and ‘heal’ from inherited value structures. This secret knowledge is akin to the serpent offering Eve the apple luring her to ‘be like God’, able to see outside of God’s will, this is the hubris of Marx insisting that man created values: Quis ut Deus?

Inserting this crises into the minds of the young then stunts the ability for these pre-modern morals to blossom again and puts them in danger of being manipulated by those who desire for God to be dead so He doesn’t see their ‘dirtiest corners’. The goal on the surface may appear to be the voice of the downtrodden, but it seems self evident that resentment and petulance is at the centre of it. The serpent in the garden deceived Eve with this semblance of advocacy. Case in point: In 1977, some of the most notable names of the French intellectual world— including Sartre, Foucault, Derrida as well as Barthes, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Guattari —signed a series of petitions in major newspapers calling for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and minors. Of course, when the very notion of what is right or wrong has been elaborately philosophised away under the guise of challenging oppressive power structures, how can anyone refute Foucault’s perspective?

We combat the downward spiralling of mental health, the attacks on the very concept of knowledge and the self confessed degeneracy of the social structures that keep communities safe and healthy by being wholeheartedly steadfast in the truth, the objective truth. To paraphrase Peter Hitchens, if you don’t believe in God, act as if you do.