World History Instead of Western Civ?

Further to my last post, I note with sadness but not surprise that my former university, Crandall University in Moncton, NB, has replaced its first-year Western Civilization course with a World History course. Here are my musings on that event.

What is world history anyway? I teach a Christianity and Culture course in which I teach the rise and fall of Western civilization. It is a fourth year course that builds on our first-year Western civilization courses. Teaching Western civilization in a Christian liberal arts college is a natural thing to do because the West arose as a result of the powerful flowing together of Greek philosophy, Roman law and Biblical revelation. Because these currents allowed people to discover truth, modern science was made possible in this civilization (and nowhere else on earth). Many other great and glorious things were also inspired by Christendom: classical music, natural law, English parliamentary democracy, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, free enterprise, individual liberty and the list goes on.

Modernity is both an era and a project. Central to Modernity has been the failed Enlightenment Project in which a noble, but doomed, attempt was made to preserve both science and morality without revelation. The culture of death into which late modern, Western culture has fallen and the crisis of truth which characterizes the post-Enlightenment West is stark testimony to the fact that Christianity is the soul of the West and Western civilization minus Christianity is a declining and decaying civilization rather than a dynamic and growing one. Christianity is the central narrative that makes sense out of Western civilization.

But what narrative makes sense of world history? Augustine wrote a world history in City of God, but he fashioned most of it out of salvation history. If you reject salvation history - which goes without saying in the late modern West for getting rid of Western civilization courses is one of the final steps in turning your back on the Christian West - then how do you make sense of the history of the world?

It seems to me that there are two options: (1) the modern one and (2) the postmodern one.

The modern option is to pretend that the Enlightenment is not a failure and to use a "cave man to space man" narrative to show that progress occurs by the shuffling off of religion and superstition and the embrace of science. This approach would best be described as "Scientism" the belief that science explains all and is totally sufficient for the good human life. In this narrative Richard Dawkins stands at the summit and peak of all human evolution. (Shudder!)

The modern option, however, is less intellectually compelling with every passing year. The Enlightenment has failed and morality has been reduced to emotivism - as writers as varied as C. S. Lewis, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Bentley Hart, Benedict XVI, Christian Smith, Walker Percy and Aldous Huxley agree. Nietzsche has not been answered and his disciples dominate the humanities and social sciences in the late modern university. Relativism, existentialism and the will to power are now the prevailing winds. Hitler lost the war, but the philosophy that drove him survived and flourished. Eventually, it will likely triumph.

Late modern man has lost his confidence in philosophical realism and thinks that morality cannot be derived from reality itself. It is only a matter of time before a similar loss of faith in mathematics occurs. Already Aristotelian logic is out the door. In the social sciences the idea of mathematically describable laws of nature are in question. Can science itself survive much longer?

World history in the second, postmodern option is basically nothing more than, in the words widely attributed to Henry Ford just "one damn thing after another." That is, there is no meaningful narrative that connects the dots and gives meaning to the myriad of interesting but essentially unrelated details. Nominalism applied to history is not a pretty sight, as Richard Weaver shows in his classic: Ideas Have Consequences.

World history is not the study of one particular culture with all its strengths and shortcomings. It is the study of everything. And everything, strictly speaking, cannot be studied without reference to Biblical revelation. There is no way to give world history meaning without understanding it in an Augustinian manner as the history of God's fallen creation in the process of being redeemed.

But when a culture decides to abandon its own history the chances of it embracing Biblical revelation as the key to understanding world history are slim. An Augustinian course in World History would be welcome, but I'm not holding my breath.

Progressives versus Conservatives: What is at Stake?

Last evening, I was reading Peter Hitchens' The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost Its Way, and I found his assessment of the current political landscape to be well-stated. He stresses that the concept of "Right" and "Left" in contemporary politics is, in a way, obsolete. He is not so much calling for an abandonment of these categories, however, as for their re-definition. He overstates his point for effect, but I think it is a valid point:

"Conventional Wisdom's biggest single mistake is its thought-free, obsolete idea of Left and Right. This still relies on categories and symbols which were dead long ago, and only kept from decomposing by the refrigeration of the Cold War: capital versus labour, state control versus free enterprise, NATO versus the Warsaw Pact, 'democracy versus Communism', the stuffy censoring establishment versus the vibrant, unconventional fringe. These deserted battlefields have little to do with the real divisions which now exist between idealist, optimistic 'progressives' and anti-utopian, pessimistic conservative. Capital and organised labour combine against small business to favour regulation and globalism. Trades Unions long ago abandoned shop-floor struggles, and now mainly act as lobbies for more spending on the public sector where most of their members now work. they also range themselves with multinational corporations in campaigns for globalist and regulatory policies. The NATO alliance symbolizes this survival of outward forms, despite the shrivelling away of the conflict that originally created them." [my bolding]

Hitchens is quite correct to point out that the key ideological divisions that dominate contemporary politics are not easy to define using the labels of the past. Western politics has undergone a fundamental lurch to the left, which has turned the center into the right-wing and all but destroyed the old center.

The old center was political liberalism undergirded by the influence of Christianity on the majority of the population. Political freedoms could be extended because people had some capacity for self-discipline because of their religious training. Thus, Christianity made modern, liberal democracy possible. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of parliamentary democracy, common law and limited government (which started with the limitation of the power of the monarch), the human race reached the highest pinnacle of human freedom in the whole of human history.

Think about that for a moment. We are talking here about past accomplishment, not future aspiration, about concrete reality not Utopian dreams. Western civilization is unique. No other civilization in history ever had such prosperous and free citizens of all social classes. This is not open to debate; it is historical fact.

The role of Christianity in this cultural accomplishment was crucial. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously said of the American constitution: this constitution was made for a religious people and is suitable for no other. Religion makes democracy safe. Democracy without the moral restraints of religion, the civilizing influence of the family and the self-discipline that arises from the fear of God, is dangerous, Utopian, oppressive to minorities and destructive of order.

You can have secularism or you can have democracy; you can seek both but you will lose one or the other eventually.

It is ironic that the most radical, forward-thinking, optimistic people in the world - political liberals - are now considered to be conservatives. And it is ironic that people like Peter Hitchens can casually label us who are conservatives as "pessimistic." It is ironic because we are actually extremely pessimistic about human perfectibility while simultaneously extremely hopeful about human possibilities because we take seriously both man's glory as a creature made in the image of God and also his fatal flaw as a creature fallen into sin. If this realism seems like pessimism it is only so in comparison to the naive, unrealistic, one-sided optimism of Utopian progressivism.

Progressivism is more than Marxism, although Marx and Rousseau are the main sources of progressive ideas. Progressivism is an umbrella movement that includes many streams and variations on a theme. From Fabian socialism to Communism to Dewey's pragmatism and the Social Gospel, all forms of progressivism have one thing in common: they reject the Christian doctrine of original sin. So the argument over whether Obama is a socialist or not is quite irrelevant. We know he is a Progressive and that is all that matters.

Sometimes they see man as an angel; other times they see him as an animal. One moment they revel in the thought of social engineering to create Utopia and the next moment they engage in eugenic methods by which they label some humans as sub-humans. They are perpetually extremists as they swing wildly back and forth in their estimation of the value of human beings.

The Christian doctrine of original sin, which presupposes the creation of humans as good and as in the image of God, allows for a balanced view of human beings that sees them as good, but fallen, creatures and as capable of great good, yet in need of redemption. This kind of balanced view of human potential was the basis of Western civilization and the denial of the Christian doctrine of original sin by Rousseau, Marx, Dewey, Nietzsche, and so on, will bring about the destruction of the West.

Progressivism is not about progress, but about regress. It regresses back before Christianity to a worldview that has no place for sin, redemption, grace and God. It could be said to be "half of Christianity," in that it is a doctrine of heaven without a doctrine of hell or judgment. It is a doctrine of redemption without a Redeemer. It is a doctrine of man which fails to take into account the fact that man is a sinner.

What is at stake in the battle between Progressivism and Conservatism? Merely the preservation or destruction of our civilization. In the name of Utopian dreams, Progressives are busy undermining the foundations of civilization including Christianity, the family and traditional sexual morality. In the name of "Progress" they would undo the basis of freedom and justice.

Only conservatives think that limited government the rule of law, individual liberty, free enterprise, traditional morality, the family and free speech are worth conserving. Let us be honest: any form of "Progressivism" that sets its face against these beautiful and good things will not lead to progress but to the abyss.

Robert Barron on the Mission of the Church

This absolutely excellent seven-minute video shows Fr. Robert Barron talking about the mission of the church and its relationship to culture. He begins by reflecting on the empty churches of Europe symbolizing the decline of Christianity on that continent and goes on to think about the question of what we do in such a situation.

Toward the end he says something very profound. He says that when the Church has the opportunity to shape the culture it should do so and when it is persecuted it needs to stand firm. But in both situations the basic task of the Church is to be a witness to Jesus Christ and the good news is that it is possible for the Church to be a witness when it is is standing over against the culture and also when it is shaping and building the culture. The Church's mission is constant although the degree of receptivity in the culture continually fluctuates.

I have never heard a better short summary of the relationship between the Church and Culture. Listen to it; it will be a rich reward for a seven minute investment of your time.



HT - David Fitch

How I Spent My Weekend

Well, I'm back. April was a good month for blogging, but I've gone quiet for the past three days and perhaps you would like to know why. On Friday my wife and I enjoyed a nice drive up to Barry's Bay, Ontario, which is on the edge of the Ottawa Valley just south of Algonquin Park - a small town in north-eastern Ontario. Algonquin Park is one of the best places in the world for canoeing and we love to spend a few weeks there every summer.

Anyway, the purpose of this jaunt was not canoeing, but a visit to Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy, an orthodox, counter-cultural, Catholic, liberal arts college, which has what must be the coolest address for a Catholic college in the entire world: "18 Karol Wojtyla Square, Barry's Bay, Ontario." I had been invited to give a lecture there on Friday evening, which I did. About 60 or so people crowded into the largest classroom at the Academy to hear a Baptist (!) speak on "An Evangelical Appreciation of John Paul II's Theology of the Body." It was a lovely evening and Bonnie and I were made to feel extremely welcome by the professors, students, board members and friends of this vibrant community of faith.

On the last page of Alasdair MacIntryre's After Virtue, he writes:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this time is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict.

What MacIntyre foresaw in this passage, I saw with my own eyes in Barry's Bay. Men and women of faith: priests, singles, married people, families living in close proximity and forming a community in which the moral and intellectual tradition of the virtues could be not only preserved and handed on to the next generation, but also inculcated into the students who come from all over North America and scatter out from the Academy all over the world.

The curriculum is heavy with Latin, Greek, theology, philosophy, history, literature and a smattering of psychology, science and mathematics. This curriculum is rooted in that of the Medieval universities and it is designed to preserve the best of the classical world as purified and corrected by revelation by the Church Fathers. The curriculum is taught, however, not by "mere experts" in the sense of scholars who know the subject objectively like atheist sociologists with a research interest in faith healing, but by committed Christians who believe what they teach and therefore imbue it with enthusiasm and vitality.

Everyone lives within walking distance of everything on campus and everybody attends the parish church for mass (most on a daily basis). It struck me that it must have been very much like what the first universities in Medieval Europe must have been like. The landscape of Barry's Bay is rugged and only moderately fertile. The area is not rich and there is a certain isolation. It is 4 hours to Toronto and 2.5 hours to Ottawa. Yet it struck me as infinitely more civilized than either of those two places. If Western Civilization has a future, it is being forged in places like Barry's Bay, not Ottawa or Toronto.

The New Religion of Homosexuality: Can It Sustain a Culture?

What I mean by the "new religion of homosexuality" is the hyper modern religion of individualism, hedonism and state enforced equality that is rooted in atheistic materialism. This new religion is appropriately symbolized by homosexuality, which is the final sundering of procreation and sex and the consequent reduction of sexuality to mere sensual indulgence. Homosexual activism is the excuse used by adherents of this new religion to overturn 4000 years of moral tradition and to marginalized adherents of traditional morality and religion (whether Jewish or Christian) in the pursuit of the "brave new world" of equality, stasis and material happiness.

Melanie Phillips, in an article entitled "Thank God for Lord Carey" clarifies what is going on in Britain today as the rise of the new religion of homosexuality and its triumph over Christianity. She writes:

The Church and the judiciary are two of the most venerable pillars of the establishment.

But in an explosive development, war has been declared between them over one of the most fundamental aspects of our society — freedom of religious conscience.

In an unprecedented move, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, and other church leaders are calling upon the Master of the Rolls and other senior judges to stand down from future Court of Appeal hearings involving cases of religious discrimination because of the judges’ perceived bias against Christianity.

The churchmen believe that because of these judges’ past rulings, there is no chance of a ‘fair’ judgment if they hear the latest such case, which has been scheduled for Thursday .

This involves Gary McFarlane, formerly a Christian relationship counsellor for Relate. He is appealing against an employment tribunal ruling that upheld his sacking for refusing to give sex therapy to homosexual couples.

According to newspaper reports, Lord Carey has prepared a witness statement in support of Mr McFarlane in which he will apparently accuse the Court of Appeal of making a series of ‘disturbing’ judgments and being responsible for some ‘dangerous’ reasoning which could lead to Christians being banned from the workplace.

In the light of recent events, such fears are scarcely exaggerated. For Christianity is under relentless attack from secular British institutions, as a result of which the freedom of Christians to practise their religion is being lost.

Phillips then gives some examples of Christians being persecuted by British courts and then gets to the heart of the issue:

To prevent discrimination against Christians being set in stone, Lord Carey wants religious discrimination cases to be heard by a special panel of judges with some knowledge of religious matters.

As an insult to some of the biggest wigs in the land, this could hardly be exaggerated. By throwing down the gauntlet to the judiciary in this way, Lord Carey is mounting a full-frontal challenge to some of those who most influence our society.

The last of several final straws for these clerics was the case of Lilian Ladele, a registrar who was sacked by Islington council after she refused to conduct civil partnership ceremonies because they were against her Christian beliefs.

Led by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger — the second most important judge in England — the Appeal Court ruled that it was unlawful for her to refuse to do so.

It might be argued that these judges were merely ruling on the basis of anti-discrimination law and that they were right to do so.

But in fact, these judges had discretion to rule in Ms Ladele’s favour because the law upholds not one principle relevant to this case, but two — and they compete with each other. For enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights is the right to exercise religious conscience.

Why, then, did the judges in this case set aside the Human Rights Convention, which they normally revere as holy Writ? Because, said Lord Neuberger, it only protected those religious beliefs which were ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society and are not incompatible with human dignity’.

So what the Master of the Rolls effectively seemed to be saying was that Christian beliefs are unworthy of respect in a democracy, and incompatible with human dignity — a truly preposterous claim, since Judeo-Christian precepts invented the concept of human dignity

Indeed, such a ruling comes very close indeed to criminalising Christianity. For if putting Christian belief into practice is outlawed, it won’t be long before Christian believers find themselves outlawed.

As Phillips says, although this sort of attack is carried out in the name of intolerance and liberalism, it is in fact illiberal and intolerant. As she graphically puts it:

The result is that Christianity is now in danger of being turned into a despised and marginalised creed practised only by consenting adults in private.

This is exactly the position homosexuality was in fifty years ago. This is why all the happy-clappy talk about "tolerance," "openness," and "diversity" is hollow and meaningless. What is happening is not that society is getting more tolerant and allowing for a wider expression of religious viewpoints; rather, society is in the process of exchanging one religion for another. A new state religion is being enshrined that is even more intolerant than Christianity ever was.

The elites of British society, not just the judiciary, are insisting that Christianity is intolerant and bigoted. Egged on by Muslims, these elites are seeking to make Christianity obscure, hated and barely tolerated - if that. It is incredible to see how the hardline Muslim and hardline leftist attitudes to Christianity converge.

One shudders to think of what will happen when these two tactical allies succeed in eliminating Christianity and then turn on each other. Will it be civil war or a quick and neat surrender to Islam? My money is on the latter. The soft leftists who are now persecuting Christians only dare to do so because Christians don't fight back. Confronted with a determined foe, they will meekly don the hijab and accept servitude. Then they will gradually learn to look back on Christendom as the golden age of tolerance.

Ruth Gledhill is as much the opposite of Melanie Phillips as it is possible to be, just as Archbishop Williams is as much the opposite of Lord Carey as it is possible to be. Gledhill is a wooly headed "liberal" (actually leftist) who is against Roman Catholics who fail to conform to the liberal Anglican model and against Protestants who are insufficiently deferential to their left-wing betters. She trivializes the persecution of Christians in her article in the Times of London today "It Can Only Harm Christians to Bleat About Persecution."

She claims that she does not wear a cross because she does not want to be a victim. She would know about playing the victim card. You see, leftists have a well defined script about who is allowed to play the victim card and who is not. Only those minorities approved in advance by leftists may play the victim card because, you see, it is not about who actually is victimized at all; it is actually about exploiting the category of victim to justify intolerance toward traditional morality and religion.

Archbishop Williams in his Easter message threw away a good opportunity to do what archbishops are supposed to do and protect his flock. He is more interested in protecting his own position of privilege. I can't read the phrase "the Archbishop of Canterbury" any more without hearing in my mind unbidden the phrase from Brave New World "the Arch-Songster of Canterbury." The scene of the Arch-Songster of Canterbury storming out of the dinner party in a huff because he was not able to meet the Savage after all seems to me to capture the depth of character seen in the current Archbishop of Canterbury. I could see him allowing St. Paul's to be turned into a dance hall. Of course, in Brave New World there are no Muslims to prevent it.

Can the new religion of homosexuality ground and sustain a culture for 4000 years like the religion grounded in the Call of Abraham and the Ten Commandments has? Can the new religion of homosexuality be the basis for great cultural achievements like Western classical music, Gothic Cathedrals and the separation of church and state? Is the new religion of homosexuality likely to preserve a tradition over generations that sustains enough faith in the future to undergird reproduction and the continuity of the generations?

If the answer to such questions is negative, then it must be concluded that our future must include either a massive renewal of our culture beginning with a renewal of Christianity or Western culture is nearing the end of the line.

The Truth About the Crusades: A Review of "God's Battalions" by Rodney Stark

Over the past half century, the left wing influence on the academy has led to the development of a new "orthodoxy" regarding Western civilization. In the revisionist, ideologically-inspired view, Western civilization is one long litany of evil exploitation, colonialism, racism etc. One would think that Europeans had a monopoly on these universal human sins. Take slavery for example. Ritual flogging of European participation in the slave trade for a few centuries is intense, widespread and unending. But Muslim participation in the slave trade in black Africa is seldom mentioned in politically correct venues despite that fact that Europe and America abolished slavery 150 years ago while Muslim slave trading continues to this very day!

Rodney Stark's latest book, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (HarperOne, 2009), is a helpful corrective to the widespread prejudice against all things Western. It is an objective and balanced treatment of the Crusades which attempts to understand what happened and why from the perspective of the Crusaders themselves. It is not an original work of scholarship, but rather a synthesis and summary of a great deal of recent historical scholarship that provides a more balanced understanding both of the Crusades as an historical event and the importance of the Crusades for contemporary politics.

Stark's thesis is that everything you think you know about the Crusades is likely wrong. He rejects materialist theories of historical explanations for the Crusades and locates the ultimate reasons for why Europeans engaged in crusading in primarily spiritual motivations.

Stark sums up the conventional wisdom of the contemporary world as follows: "during the Crusades, an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam." (p. 8) Every word of this commonly-accepted, politically correct statement is spectacularly wrong. Stark summarizes:

"the Crusades were precipitated by Islamic provocations: by centuries of bloody attempts to colonize the West and by sudden new attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. Although the Crusades were initiated by a plea from the pope, this had nothing to do with hopes of converting Islam. Nor were the Crusades organized and led by surplus sons, but by the heads of great families who were fully aware that the costs of crusading would far exceed the very modest material rewards that could be expected; most went at immense personal cost, some of them knowingly bankrupting themselves to go. Moreover, the crusader kingdoms that they established in the Holy Land, and that stood for nearly two centuries, were not colonies sustained by local extractions; rather, they required immense subsidies from Europe." (p. 8)

Stark also shows that claims that Muslims have been harbouring hatred of the West for centuries over the Crusades for centuries are bogus and that Muslim antagonism concerning the Crusades only appeared around 1900 in response to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and European colonialism in the Middle East. Muslim anti-Crusader feeling has only become intense in response to the founding of the State of Israel.

The point is not that Westerners have been sinless and Stark openly admits the moral failures and shortcomings of the Crusaders where they show up. The point is, rather, to cut through the ideologically-motivated hatred of all things Western to evaluate the Crusades for what they were - an attempt to protect Christian holy places and pilgrims from attack and a response to Muslim aggression. This may not be popular to say today, but Rodney Stark deserves credit for saying it anyway.

Anti-Capitalism: An Incoherent and Inadequate Position

Further to the last post, some of my interlocutors on this blog might be insulted to have me call them "socialist." They probably think of themselves as "Anti-Capitalists" (and in some cases as "Anarchists.") Anti-Capitalism attributes all the evil in the world to capitalism and uses capitalism as a catch-all for everything that is dark, evil and harmful to flowers and bunnies. But what can anti-capitalism mean in 2009 except some form of socialism (or conservatism, but my interlocutors clearly reject that)?

I actually think that a lot of people who are attracted to theology (and literature, history, art, and other liberal disciplines) do not really think the issue through very carefully. All the academic and cool people are anti-capitalists and only up-tight, middle-class conservatives and rich businessmen are capitalists. So they end up attending anti-globalization protests and voting for Obama by default. They are what used to be called "fellow-travellers" by the conservatives and "useful idiots" by the hard left.

Somewhere Yoder wrote that, as bad as Constantinianism is, anti-Constantinianism can be just as bad. Whenever a black and white ideology (or anti-ideology) begins to take hold, there is the temptation to reform the world at one fell swoop and this over-reach always leads to disaster. Yoder always argued for piecemeal reform focusing on one injustice at a time and looking for modest, but postive results. He was highly suspicious of such ideas as solving the problems of the world by eliminating capitalism. Anti-capitalism is as disreputable an idea as anti-Constantinianism, in my opinion.

When you talk about capitalism, it is necessary to distinguish between aspects of capitalism that arose in the Enlightenment (see Adam Smith for example) from aspects of pre-Enlightenment Western culture that are part of the modern, captialist culture.

Think, for example, of the concept of limited government. Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and the various Aztec empires had no such concept. It is a contribution of the Christian West (with honorable mention to the early Roman republicans). Rooted in Augustine's philosophy of history, the doctrine of the Two arose as a primitive but highly suggestive division of powers. The idea that the Emperor is not all-powerful and that subjects have a powerful defender in the Church is embedded in the fabric of Western civilization - and is one of its glories. If you want to talk about the origins of the idea of limited government, you have to go back to the Magna Carta, the English revolution, and the evolution of Parliamentry democracy.

Or take the notion of private property. Last time I checked, the Ten Commandments were acknowledged by even the most radical German higher critics to pre-date the Enlightenment. The notion of private property changed radically in the post-Enlightenment period as the notion of ownership changed from that of possession to that of consumption. (See Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, pp. 118f) Land was not always just a commodity; there was a time when the idea of enjoying the land for its own sake and the notion of a hereditary responsibility for preserving it for the sake of the community as a whole was not unknown in England.

My point is that Anti-Capitalism is just not sophisticated or nuanced enough to understand what has been lost in the Enlightenment and it has no tradition of though to look to in order to prevent it from swerving from one extreme (individualism) to the other (collectivism). Conservatism is not an ideology, but is in essence a reverence for tradition. Of course, reverence for a tradition is stupid unless there exists a tradition that is humane and good. Modern political correctness notwithstanding, I believe that there is much that is worthy of respect and honour in the Western tradition and to adopt an ahistorical anti-capitalism and anti-Constantinianism is to place oneself at the tender mercies of a modern collectivism that has ravaged the 20th century and shown itself to be even worse than the ancient collectivism that Westen Christendom transcended.