Not many people believe (as I do) in the evolutionary-development of human consciousness. If this is true, our current situation is unique and unprecedented, and we can only move forward to something fundamentally new (i.e. Final Participation).
I would like to contrast this with two other alternatives being put forward: New Culture and Benedict Option.
New Culture is a term I am coining here to describe an archetypal 'American' kind of positive thinking, can-do, we-will-win attitude; which is that we need to tackle the evils of Establishment Leftism by building a new culture, politics, economy...
This involves detaching ourselves from the mainstream (so as to cease supporting them with our money and life efforts) and instead to build a new Western Christian culture. This involves creating and expanding alternative mass media, re-booting the arts and sciences, distinctive financial institutions, new political parties and alliances, new forms of employment and community...
Rebuilding the Whole Thing on a new basis.
What is distinctive is that that this is a positive and creative programme - and that it intends to be a money-making, powerful culture: more profitable, more technologically capable, more militarily formidable etc.
What are the problems? The first is practical.
Since New Culture is a head-on attack on the Establishment, and since the Establishment is much more powerful at present - it is hard to believe that the Establishment would not be able to nip it in the bud - by expansion of what is already happening: media censorship and propaganda, lawfare and bureaucratic harassment, economic attacks from deplatforming, blocking the use of finance and software, deniable/ official physical attacks on persons and destruction of property etc. Just more of what we already have.
But these may be overcome - especially as the Mainstream is incrementally destroying its own efficiency and capability, and this suicide is not easily reversible.
The bigger problem is that the New Culture is a materialist plan of reform and reconstruction; it is positivism, reductionism, scientism - it is just another version of this-worldly utilitarianism; whose appeal is primarily a promise to enhance the health and happiness of the population, to minimise suffering and misery.
New Culture is essentially a type of Modernity - one that claims to be more sustainable because more efficient and effective. New Culture requires the vast apparatus of division of labour, specialisation and coordination of function; it requires the way of thinking that goes with such a world view: it entails a preservation of the global trade, managerialism and bureaucracy which go with the industrial society.
The Benedict Option came from the traditionalist Roman Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) and from an idea in the sci-fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller (1959) - and is based on an analogy between the current situation and that prevailing in the collapsing Western Roman Empire from the early 400s AD.
The argument is that Western Civilisation was preserved mainly in remote, cut-off monasteries and among hermits. The intention is that traditional forms of Christianity might cut themselves off from modern, Western culture - in small scale, minority societies - and survive until such a time that they can prove seedbeds for a re-birth of Western civilisation at some point in the future.
Thus, while the New Culture is positive, constructive and creative in intent; the Benedict Option is negative, preservative and defensive in intent. The idea is that there is an irreplaceable body of culture (based mainly on a fixed corpus of divine revelation) that must be kept intact and pure; and from which future societies may draw.
There are, again, practical difficulties - in that modern Leftism is demonically motivated in a way that post-Roman paganism was not; so that Leftism seeks-out and destroys its enemies. It would be presumed that no monastery, no hermit, would be allowed to exists in defiance of the Mainstream Establishment - but would be (one way or another) subverted, destroyed or inverted by the dominant power and propaganda structures.
But assuming these problems could be overcome; even as an ideal, there are problems with the Benedict Option. One is that the desirability of a reversion to traditionalist religion is not generally acknowledged.
Another is that it may prove impossible. The Benedict Option is based on a cyclical model of history; but if history is linear (as I believe) then there is no reason to believe that we can ever revert to an earlier stage.
If the modern post-industrial-revolution growth-orientated societies really are something new and unprecedented; if the problems of modernity (i.e. endemic and growing suicidal self-hatred; manifested by chosen anti-natalism and sub-fertility, and an active, subsidised program of native/ white/ Western population self-replacement) - then our main problems are likewise unprecedented, and there is no reason to suppose that what worked 1600 years ago will work again now.
So, I find myself left with the third alternative of Final Participation by means of Romantic Christianity - which is a positive and creative programme (like New Culture) - but a minority and social-transforming intention like the Benedict Option.
And unlike both: it is non-abstract and instead personal, being based on love; which I take to be a phenomenon that is real and strong mainly in families and marriages.
Romantic Christianity implies a bottom-up, family-clan basis for social organisation - such as I believe is the situation in Heaven. That is why it is called 'Final' Participation - it is the mortal, temporary, partial, corruptible attempt to live on earth the the same loving and creative participation with God that Christians hope to live in Heaven.
At any rate, FP requires that we set-aside generalised plans, programmes and blueprints for the future.
We need to start with a person-by-person Christian awakening, work on developing our own faith and consciousness; and... well... see what emerges from that on a small scale (at a personal, loving and familial level).
I think if we can develop anything Good, as 'raw material'; then we can rely upon God to ensure that this is amplified and disseminated as widely as necessary. After all, word of mouth is potentially an exponentially accelerating process of amplification (one person tells two, who tell four etc.).
Therefore we do not need the mass media and propaganda systems of the modern state; nor do we need the formal, hierarchical, sub-specialised institutions of tradition. We do not need a New Culture or the defence and preservation of Monastic preserves.
We just need each other - God Within and the Holy Ghost.
