Worth Dying For
In deciding one’s political philosophy, one should look first at what makes a man willing to lay down his life for another, because that is the fundamental political bond.
In ancient times, it was tribalism, that is, the bonds of bloodkinship, shared religion, shared lore and myth and legend and worldview.
In the city-states of Greece tribal bonds were less important, and the agora of shared laws, shared gods, and shared history more.
The Roman Imperium shared the Roman Law, literature, culture and the shared sense of being civilized, of being part of the ‘Ecumen’ the civilized inhabited world.
Then came Christianity, and that was a bond that survived when the laws and imperial military failed.
After the fall of the Western Empire, the shared things were princedoms, religion, history. After the Reformation, the nation-state was the shared bond.
In the United States the attempt was made to have the shared bond be the dedication to a proposition that all men are created equal, but the informal bonds of religion, language, culture continued to bind the federal nation.
With the French and Russian revolutions, and the rise of Fascism, the bonds of propositional nations were attempted with different and evil propositions. They failed in a spectacular fashion, as shown in the high cost of blood spilled needed to maintain their regimes.
Since 1960, the Left has been willfully, carefully, and relentlessly obliterating all the shared values of the Americans, erasing our history texts, forbidding public religion, bringing our laws into contempt and disrepute.
For myself, I am willing to die for the Constitution, but not for the opinions of four liberal justices of the Supreme Court who claim the Constitution allows the government to make the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for contraception and Abortion, trample the cross, spit on images of Mary, etc. The Laws of this nation form no bond between me and other patriots, not these laws, not any more.
But neither is whiteness for the sake of whiteness something for which I would die. The bond is too attenuated: why should I pick a white guy like Joe Biden over my daughter, who is Chinese?
On the other hand, I would gladly side with Christians of any sort against Mohammedans of all sorts, and fight and die shoulder to shoulder with them, because that is the core of my worldview, the thing that makes life meaningful.
The Leftists feel the same way about Political Correctness. They will die before they speak or think a true thing: their devotion to falsehood is absolute, beyond reason, and beyond comprehension. It is their God.
The free market, free trade, and the various other Enlightenment concepts seem to have failed in the modern day — but why?
My suggestion is that the Enlightenment was a cease fire in a Protestant-Catholic civil war ripping Christendom in two, and the only way to step back toward the limited government the Feudal system imposed on kings (who neither made laws nor governed religious matters).
My suggestion is that Constitutionally limited government will work with a morally upright people, which is to say, a Christian people, and is utterly unsuited to heathens.
Limiting the power of Caesar means having faith that the problems Caesar would otherwise solve with that power can be solved some other way, such as through the Church, or by prayer, or by the voluntary efforts of the countless smaller associations and institutions men in Christendom form. Unlimited governments, on the other hand, cannot tolerate a Church which is not subordinate to the national leader, a law that is not allowed to solve current problems, or smaller institutions and private gatherings which attract the loyalty of men, and form the core of resistance against Caesar’s ambitions.
Having free trade between two peaceful Christian powers is mutually beneficial in economic terms. A free movement of peoples from crime-riddled tyrannies and deathcult infected tribal areas into Christian civilization is not mutually beneficial: it is a slow motion invasion.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
