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Modernity is all about rebellion
by Scott Gilbreath ~ January 14th, 2009
John Attarian was an atheist and free-market libertarian until he wrote his doctoral thesis on Ayn Rand’s economic thought, which posits a view of human nature unable to account for the achievements of Western civilisation. He accepted the supernatural and soon became a Christian. Then he read a volume of the Marquis de Sade’s writings and became a true conservative.
One day, while I was reading it, the realization struck me like a thunderclap that modernity is all about rebellion: against God, against restraint, against the limits of the human condition, and even against reality itself—and that Sade, the personification and most radical philosopher of that revolt, is the apotheosis of modernity. Sade’s libertines proclaimed seething hatred of God and Christianity, a hatred motivated by rejection of religion’s fetters on appetite and conduct. The rejection of God reduces existence to a material, determinist Nature, and reduces man to a material, determined being, who in effect has no moral responsibility for his conduct. Man, Sade also preached, is an extreme egoist, naturally cruel, isolated from others, bent on his own gain and enjoyment. To such beings in such a universe, good and evil are meaningless. Nihilism liberates: this is the point, and the motive, of Sade’s outpourings, and indeed of all modern nihilism and hatred of religion.
Of necessity, modernity, like Sade, denigrates Christianity.
All of the West’s impious efforts to destroy an existing civilization and create a secular utopia—the French Revolution, the Soviet tyranny, the Nazi tyranny—delegitimized and persecuted Christianity. Two aspects of human conduct, in which the conflict between piety and impiety is crucial, are crime and sexuality. Minimizing crime and imposing social controls on sexual conduct are vital to civilized life. The evidence is clear that thinkers promoting leniency for criminals and accepting sexual transgression and perversion realized, like Sade, that religion was the obstacle to their aims, and attacked it relentlessly.
Genuine conservatism, argues Mr Attarian, must be religious. Libertarianism cannot be considered conservative, for they are fundamentally opposed to each other.
As Theodore Dalrymple recently put it: “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization”.
I had never heard of John Attarian before reading his article cited here, which, although published in 2002, was only recently posted on the internet. Further research reveals that he died unexpectedly in 2004. Requiescat in pace.
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January 15th, 2009 at 08:40 PM
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