Thursday 18 January 2018

What is the Big Issue, the Litmus Test? Mass Immigration versus the Sexual Revolution - Secular-Alt-Right versus Christian Revivalists

It strikes me that there is a distinct division between the secular and religious anti-Leftists (groups who often get bracketed-together due to their sharing an enemy).

The secular 'Right'* (including most of the Alt-Right) regard mass immigration to The West as the most important current issue; that issue which needs to be addressed first and with the greatest urgency.

In contrast, Christian anti-Leftists (such as myself) regard the sexual revolution as the most important current issue.

(Although I also argue that this is an issue that cannot be effectively addressed until after there has-been a Christian revival - thus a religious awakening is the issue that needs to be addressed first and with the greatest urgency.)

So the seculars and Christians are applying a different Litmus Test.

The secular Right often judge Christians to be soft on immigration, hence covertly Leftist; while the Christians regard the secular Right as wobbly on the sexual revolution - often advocating extra-marital promiscuity - and therefore as in-essence Leftist.

Since there can only be a single priority; Immigration versus the Sexual revolution makes a useful Litmus Test to evaluate the true status of an anti-Leftist.

*I use scare quotes around the word Right, because I regard the secular Right as being in fact a variant of The Left - since their ultimate judgment is in terms of hedonic satisfactions. Both are materialists/ positivists; and the only significant difference between the Secular 'Right' and the mainstream Left is a disagreement concerning the best or most effective ways to maximise happiness or minimise suffering during mortal human life. Whereas the Religious have a different ultimate evaluative reference that goes beyond the gratifications of mortal human life: i.e. for Christians the salvation of the soul and its progress towards greater divinity.

10 comments:

IMPERIAL ENERGY said...

The issues that is the "issue" is fixing the structure of government by rejecting Imperium in Imperio and establishing a secure structure of power in which ownership and control is aligned and power and responsibility is made consistent.

Fix that problem, then everything else is simple.

Bruce Charlton said...

@IE - That priority is, of course, a secular one - and a minority focus of the Alt-'Right'. I would assume that nearly-all proponents of Moldbuggian structural rebooting would, if offered a choice between issue priorities of Mass Immigration or Sexual Revolution, come-down on the side of Immigration.

The Social Pathologist said...

I think you're wrong in how you have framed the issue. The big issue is the relationship between any ideological position and the Truth. Religious advocates should not be throwing stones at the secular adversaries if their own position is wrong. Religious conservatives, in particular, spend very little time examining their own positions, especially in how they map onto reality.

My opposition to much of the current Christian approach to mass migration is that is based upon an idealised assumption of human nature that's at odd with reality. The human propensity for homophiliy, identity and cognitive miserliness are ignored with as much blindness as secularists who ignore the problems of unrestrained sexuality.

A man's obedience to the Truth is what makes him a Rightist. Everything else is a variation of the Left.

Anonymous said...

Excellent Post; the Secular Alt-Right essentially want modernity unchanged but with different groups in charge, while the Religious Right wants a complete and fundamental revaluation of life.

Another "litmus test" is the writing style between the two. In some parts of the Secular Alt-Right, there is a huge amount of contemptuous sneering and status posturing (though I suspect some of it is done purely for effect and not meant seriously).

But if taken at face value, one has the paradox of people who claim to want to defend civilization, yet view the majority of even the native-born populations with utter contempt.

Evidently, (as you wrote in your post 2010 post Should Western Civilization be saved), they do not want to save the *people* of Western Civilization, rather, they want to preserve the system of modernity (which contains the seeds of its own destruction), with them and people who think like them in high status positions.

On the other hand, the writings of the true Religious Right (such as Albion Awakening and this blog) use an earnest, not contemptuous tone and it is clear that the religious right values the people who are stuck in modernity, not the system whereby they became stuck.

Bruce Charlton said...

@SP - What counts as truth (e.g. what counts as evidence, and how it is properly dealt-with) is a consequence of metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality (including how it is possible for humans to know the truth) - and these base assumptions are different between religious and secular people, in the way I describe.

My point is that the secular Right shares the base metaphysical assumptios concerning what if Life and how to evaluate Life, with the mainstream Leftists.

From a religious perspective, this is a profound error, a foundational falsehood.

The Social Pathologist said...

@BC

What counts as truth (e.g. what counts as evidence, and how it is properly dealt-with) is a consequence of metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality

Agreed.

But there has to be more....and that is a commitment to the Truth. The metaphysics on their own are not enough.

I imagine that God prefers honest Atheists to dishonest Christians.

Bruce Charlton said...

@SP. It was a concern with truth, and that truth be not-just 'a matter of opinion' nor of expediency (i.e. hedonic advantage - as with 'science makes people more powerful, richer and happier'), which (via stages) made me consider theism.

It was the corruption of science into first permitted, then encouraged, and now bureaucratically-implemented dishonesty (as I personally experienced it through the 1980s into the 2000s) that made me realise the importance of metaphysics to truth.

http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/

Indeed, I eventually realised that real science had been done by people who were religiously-raised to believe that truth was real - an objective part of reality; and that this belief rapidly dwindled-away with each generation that lacked such an insight.

The truthful real scientists didn't actually need to self-identify as Christians or Jews - but they needed at least a residual 'deism' (usually from childhood upbringing as a Christian or Jew) of assuming that there was a reality to which they 'ought' to conform.

Once this deism became culturally (within science) replaced by rejection of the reality of deity - then science was finished; because personal truthfulness had no meaning, it became just a personal quirk (and a very troublesome one).

I realised that I had been *assuming* for decades that all claims and accounts of divine revelation *must be* false - based on error, illusion, delusion, fakery or whatever. And, therefore, that this was not a matter of my having arrived at this assumption because of the evidence.

I realised that my core (metaphysical) belief in evolution by natural selection (in the generalised form of complex systems theory - see the Appendix to my 2003 book The Modernization Imperative - https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/modernization-imperative.html for my most advanced justification of my atheism) was itself based on assumptions. I list several of the assumptions in that piece. But I did not *really* believe these assumptions were true, or foundational.

And the theory explained only how I could not ever know the theory was true; that, indeed, I personally could never know the truth about anything - because all belief was just a temevolutionary porary system property (truth = expedient to system survival and expansion. In evolutionary biology 'truth' = only that which enhances reproductive success... up to now, or more exactly up until recently, so far as we know...).

In the end, at bottom, we get to intuitions - those basic things we really believe are true, and those we don't.

The first truth is that there is truth, and the second that humans can know it (in whatever qualified fashion).

For me it is in the vital matter of explaining that humans *can* know truth, that we encounter deity.

Chiu ChunLing said...

For me, the big issue is Marxism, the idea that those who fail to be productive have a moral right to demand the goods produced by the productive.

This does have expression in the sexual revolution, where those who do not do what is necessary to produce stable relationships and healthy (emotionally and mentally as well as physically) children demand that their terrible decisions be ratified and compensated by the efforts of those who have not wreaked havoc in their reproductive lives.

It also has application to the current immigration issue, where people from cultures that produce misery, violence, and poverty are supposed to have the right to take over Western nations and rule them according to the very precepts that have made their own nations unmitigated cesspits.

But for me, it is most insidiously and dangerously advanced in the global finance system, and our presumptions of building an economy on consumer confidence and increases in deficit spending. Compared to this, both sexual and immigration policies are nothing. Indeed, without the debt finance economy, it is unlikely that the sexual revolution or the immigration tidal wave could have become problems at all.

In an economy where credit is scarce and spending power tightly corralled by past earning and savings, it is difficult for men to pretend to be better prospects as providers than they really are (not impossible, but difficult). Women are instead drawn towards those aspects of male character that are good predictors of future success, since there will be almost no unmarried men flaunting (faked on credit) evidence of established financial success. Courting and marriage based on these kinds of (hard to fake) signals of future integrity as a husband and father make for better marriages and more consistently moral condemnation of men who cannot participate in the marriage market...not because they are honest, scrupulous, and prudent about debt-fueled extravagance (which are the killers of a man's romantic prospects in our society) but because they are wastrels, fools, and dishonest (the epitome of a man who has "game" in our time due to easy credit).

Such an economy also has attractions for the migrant who offers nothing of economic value. I have no problem with the hardworking immigrants who built America (well, except the ones I personally dislike for other reasons, but that's another matter entirely). There is hardly going to be a tidal wave of economically unproductive immigrants until society has reached an expectation of allowing deficit spending sufficient to allow some form of large scale wealth redistribution (whether or not mandated and run by the government, though these are generally the worst) as an established entitlement simply for showing up.

I hold the corruption of science (fueled by debt-financed Marxist government spending, mostly), as more serious than either the sexual revolution or the immigration tidal wave, but still a minor issue compared with the global debt/deficit finance scam.

I do think that it is persuasively likely that committed Christians will care more about sexual morality than national borders and security, but this does not always translate neatly into sexual politics and immigration stances. My positions on both are more nuanced than I generally find useful to discuss with anyone who makes either a litmus test.

Of course, my view on litmus tests are nuanced as well. I don't think them entirely counterproductive when they actually have a high correlation. There's nothing especially wrong with taking it as a general proposition that people who aren't willing to push back against radical sexual politics aren't serious Christians, just as long as you recognize that there are exceptions.

I mean, it's not like we're overrun with serious Christians anyway. Those that don't live so as to push back against radical sexual Marxism are even less common. I know they exist, but I've never personally met one.

Unknown said...

I know an individual case where there is overlap...both types of conservatives would be outraged even if the behavior I am about to describe has unfortunately become accepted as normal. I know a young woman who is classified as a "dreamer"...Her parents came to the U.S illegally when she was a child and this is the only country she has memory of. She has two illegitimate children with two different fathers, has casual sex with several different men, wants another child but marriage is not anything she has ever considered. She attends Catholic church and considers herself a good Christian.

As for the two sides of conservatism. My impression is the secular obsession with immigration is by far more common. Outside of some blogs it seems the whole Western world (including many Christian churches) have long accepted the sexual revolution and everything that comes with it to be normal and something not to be judged.

Nathaniel said...

The secular conservatives I know look fondly upon living in the Big Mansion. Doing exciting things like travel, drink alcohol at different places, and have casual sex.

The problem with immigration is that it (in a very practical sense) tends to interrupt these things. It makes it less safe and comfortable to go about in the city drinking lots of alcohol and having casual sex, higher crime, higher taxes, etc.

They too understand that low European birthrates are a problem, but tend to have no children themselves and little interest in marriage. Religion isn't just unappealing, it often tends to be the opposite of what they want (still usually frowning a little bit on getting too drunk and having too much casual sex, while tending to be nice towards immigrants).