There is a lot of discussions today about the nature and meaning of “identity” in contemporary politics. This short article is about to shed some light on the development of the concept from biblical times until Post-modernity. Some brief discussion of contemporary “woke” Critical Race and Gender Theory from this perspective is also provided.
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The Book of Genesis supplies us with a clear vision of mankind: almighty God “bestowed life on men and women, creating them in his image and likeness.” Both the human body and soul reflect this similarity composing a singular unity. The body cannot exist without the soul and vice-versa. In the moment of death human soul is detached from its body but they will be reunited at The Final Judgment. Only fully recreated humans, composed of both necessary parts will find absolute consolation with God.
Christianity built upon this heritage. We read in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians:
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
The explicit transcendent presence of each and every human life in the eternal existence of God himself is the primordial condition of mankind and the true source of dignity and importance of the individual.
Since the early days of Christianity rationality was considered to be an essential attribute of the human soul. St. Augustine called the soul “rationis particeps” – a “rational partner” while Boethius authored the very first definition of “a person” – what could be called a scholastic substrate of individual identity:
Persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia – A person is a singular substance and its nature is rational (Liber De Persona et Duabus Naturis Contra Eutychen et Nestorium).
This understanding of a human being was preserved unaltered through the entire Middle Age period – roughly 1000 years – and was fundamental for the development of the West-European civilization.
In the “Discourse on the Method“ published in 1637 French mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes delivered his concept of Self implying the pre-existence of the conscious identity before any idea of the external world emerges in a person's mind. The Self – both rational and completed constitutes personality. Cartesian Self is determined by its capacity to perform logical reasoning driven by self-explanatory, formal “laws of thought” which act on all mental representations of reality. Cartesian momentum of reflective introspection – his famous “cogito ergo sum” – broke medieval body-soul unity. All mental qualities of a human were now reduced to his conscious Self while the body was left only as its “dumb” vehicle.
That opened the door for empirical inquiry of the body and consequently – modern medicine – but it was beyond Descartes to explain the origin of the pre-existent Self. René Descartes was a devoted Christian believer. His ideas were framed in old traits of Christian Neoplatonism and its concept of Logos – The Reason of God – providing eternal and absolute principles of the Cosmic mechanics. Human Self was subordinate to these principles of rational reasoning grounded in the “substance” of a human person designed in course of God’s act of creation.
Hugo Grotius has elevated the concept of natural law to new heights. He developed principles of justice independent of organized religion or the Bible. His analysis of real politics on the verge of geographical discoveries delivered recognition of the right of self-defense and the right to be compensated for injuries inflicted by an adversary (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625). He wrote, “Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself. For although the power of God is infinite, yet there are some things, to which it does not extend.” We may immediately see here the outcome of Protestantism and its denial of the primordial Catholic concept of God being unbound by his own rules.
Then, the Enlightenment came with its nature vs. nurture narrative and we may observe how the old paradigm where reason is central to identity is gradually being deconstructed.
John Lock was the first renowned modern era philosopher who speculated a person is born as a tabula rasa – a psychological blank slate passing through gradual socialization. Though he preferred the phrase “empty cabinet” over “tabula rasa”, the meaning behind is the same while the latter term can be traced back until Aristotele and his 350 B.C. treatise “De Anima” (“On the Soul”) which was studied by middle-ages scholastic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus. Consequently – “tabula rasa” fits well into history of ideas while Locke’s “empty cabinet” remains his own “licentia poetica” unused anywhere else.
In his 1694 “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” John Locke explained identity “depends on consciousness, not on substance” and consciousness itself is a product of nurture practiced on the psychological blank slate of nature. Nevertheless, Locke made a precise note following Cartesian understanding of a human person:
“[a person] is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places…. consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self… in this alone consists personal Identity…” (idem).
Cartesian “cogito ergo sum” is here repeated in a somewhat more elaborated manner and the only distinction from the ancient tradition was revealed in Locke’s “Treatises” where he provided an explicit clue: he tells us that the law of nature is revealed to us by reason. Simply speaking – he put in plain words what Descartes used to take for granted:
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…. (Treatises II.2.6)”
While John Locke was a trinitarian Calvinist, he positioned himself towards Socinian Christology. We must remember Fausto Sozzini recognized Reason directly as the second source of true faith after Revelation!
But what if there are no prescribed rules of reasoning offered by the almighty God? – This question was a matter of inquiry during the Enlightenment. It was particularly important for Swiss philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Hundred years after Locke, he also started from the Calvinist background but quickly stopped bothering with religious spirituality. His ideas departed from Christian Imaginarium towards secular “civil religion”. In his philosophy, the concept of God was moved away from centrality, the idea of Natural Law was rejected, and the organization of society became a mere outcome of human interactions where appropriate rules have to be constructed perpetually from scratch.
Rousseau’s “Second Discourse” as well as his “Essay on the Origin of Languages” give an account of cultural evolution which, for most of its part, clearly undermines the relevance of natural law. In the simplest terms, Rousseau pointed out that “primordial natural law” theory implied a natural, language-less thought, with a conventional vocabulary and syntax extrinsically added on top of the antecedent and independent thought processes. For Rousseau, man is not – by nature – a language using animal. Consequently, man is not – by nature – rational species in any significant sense. Moreover, in the first version of the “Social Contract,” there is a chapter (The Political Writings of J.J. Rousseau, 2 vols., ed. C.E. Vaughan, Oxford 1962, I. 449) where Rousseau explains that neither the idea of God nor of natural law is innate since both have to be taught to men. It may be a law of reason, but the reason sufficient to apprehend it develops only after the rise of “those passions” which render its dictate impotent. What are these “passions”? It looks like Rousseau outrun his time formulating early dialectic argument in Hegelian terms: the human mind develops itself in its search to satisfy some passions, and this, in turn, thanks to its new prowess, provides new objects of passion. It is only at a very late stage that reason and language attain perfection which in principle allows for the possibility of the independent and highly abstract pursuit of truth. For Rousseau, Reason is too precarious a faculty to serve as a mode of Natural Law promulgation. If there is a medium Natural Law is promulgated – it must be buried deep under the rational mind.
Two hundred years after Rousseau his ideas evolved into a somewhat hermetic theory developed by the linguistic school of psychoanalysis epitomized by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. According to his interpretation, humans develop identity through a process of “mirroring” a child experiences between 6th and 18th months of her life. Briefly – this process is a combination of the two:
Gradual separation of the Self from the environment, particularly from other people, driven by tactile and visual reception of the independence of the physical exteriority.
Projection of “external” onto “internal” driven by this differentiation. The very medium through with this differentiation proceeds is the language – acquired medium of symbolization. Thus – identity is a dialectic state between enigmatic unconscious underlying “Self” and “the Other” emerging both on the physical and symbolic plane.
Thus, a newborn baby does not distinguish external from internal. When it starts to realize such a difference – is unable to accept it – The Self crystallizes around the existential trauma of this separation – a process in which baby’s mother belonging initially to the “internals” of the newborn perception becomes an external figure captured by the powers of adults manifesting as rivals – for instance, a child is forced “to share” mother with father. The child is also forced to accept verbally given rules and commands explaining the world around her. According to Lacan – individualization is nothing else but the acquisition of some pre-existent, socially-defined symbolic system of the world delivered through language. Thus – in the Lacanian perspective – the process of language acquisition appears as an inevitable but somewhat brutal act of burring pre-existent, “true” Self (a.k.a. “unconsciousness”) of a child under symbolic system delivered through the language of his or her parents. Since then – language becomes an impermeable barrier spread between unconscious and conscious. Direct access to the internal wiring of our psychics is closed forever. Only dreams and other unconscious/subconscious behaviors can shed some light onto the depth of human psychics. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Jaques Lacan only made this quote stronger.
The Lacanian Self is by no means driven by reason. People do not follow their callable needs. What they actually do follow is an unattainable object of their desire – something they want to chase and never stop chasing:
a mysterious object petit a! This object is pure negativity, is endless… “something else”, a subject can never give it a proper name of meaning.
The reason for that fundamental instability of the Lacanian Self is the emergence of the Real – a shadowy trace of the lost sense of being “organic” - a reminiscence of being in direct connection to the world without the mediation of the Symbolic (an overwhelming system of thinking-by-words-and-meanings).
A person's “jouissance” or enjoyment − basic instincts and desires are driven by the Imaginary (a set of sub-conscious ideas and images of “the idealized self and its needs”) - is being suppressed in the course of socialization. As soon as jouissance is being suppressed and momentary wishes are set under the control of the conscious will - the primordial “sense-less” attachment to the external world is broken and the reticular construction of symbols and meanings is imposed by the Other between a sense-less self and the world. The primordial paradise is lost definitely, but a reminiscence of this particular experience of “being beyond self and sense” is within the frame of Lacanian psychoanalysis being called “the Real”.
The critical point of the Lacanian psychoanalysis is that there is nothing like a subject’s “true identity” – one's identity is always acquired and there is no meaningful self beyond the symbolic-driven identity but only a meaning-less (sense-less, pre-symbolic) self – an empty set. Migration of the personality from sense-less into sense-full is done through language acquisition as language is a natural symbolic toolset of a human being. Consequently – there is a shadowy abyss of the sense-less Real behind each and every symbolic construction a subject can notice.
Meditation is a set of mental techniques used to temporarily suppress the Symbolic and thus invoke the experience of the primordial (pre-language) sense-less and meaning-less world, feeling of the “cosmic attachment” of the self. Lacan believed that the experience of the Real beyond the carefully trained-by-practice mental state of meditation (when a practitioner intentionally "stops-making-sense" completely and goes through the destruction of the symbolic mainframe around reality) − is immensely traumatic “death of the self” experience when a subject’s identity is somehow destroyed and the “naked self” saves itself from unbearable trauma “in an emergency” by the acquisition of some alternative identity.
The Real emerges from behind the curtain of the Symbolic because of the unconscious pressure generated in the form of a Symptom (or “Sinthome”) − a highly ritualized manner of enjoying unconscious needs. The very occurrence of a Symptom is an immediate upsetting proof that there is something left within the Other that has avoided symbolization, a hole or fracture in the related acquired identity that by no means can be filled with anything meaningful. A lack, a puncture in the symbolic continuum. Symptoms cannot be “explained” because there is no meaningful explanation of their compulsive nature. Interpretation works only by focusing on the articulation of the signifiers connected to the symptom; signifiers in themselves are meaningless − their unconscious references are beyond any signification, so are not signified.
Symptoms are then manifestations of the Self being frustrated by the need for something unattainable what could be handy to reestablish this lost attachment to the pre-symbolic Real. The purpose of a performative ritual is to reduce this frustration and enjoy “in lieu” of the actual (unattainable, uncallable) object of desire. That is the origin of the irreducible human drive to fulfill the promise of our fantasies. Only traversing the fantasy, the act of a complete sacrifice on the altar of the utopian idea can reattach us to the Real in such a way that jouissance manifests its libidinal potential of essential satisfaction. A painful wound in the structure of the realm of daily existence heals for a few moments. A person can feel the “taste and sense of life” for a while.
As you can see - the intellectual construct of the “identity” is completely different in the scope of the Cartesian and the Lacanian understanding of the human nature. If we apply these ideas to the world of politics - we can see for instance how John Rawls' “common reason” fits into the Cartesian mindset while Zygmunt Baumann's “liquid modernity” fits into the Lacanian mindset. One can hardly understand contemporary politics unless the Lacanian perspective is brought into consideration. Why do the people seem to continue being confused and unhappy and cling to some eccentric traits despite constant improvements of the material conditions and overall wealth? Why do we observe the popular celebration of "otherness" (diversity)? How can we explain the unexpected revival of religions and spirituality? All these questions are hardly explainable within a Cartesian intellectual mainframe and it is difficult to address them within the scope of classical liberalism. All they look like a sudden rage of the darkest obscurantism and for the taste of a classical liberal should be excluded from the social debate. But within the Lacanian scope – some other strategy is recommended: the involvement of eccentric and counter-establishment traits into the mainstream debate. That is because symptom suppression is normally a poor solution. Suppressed symptoms used to come back as revolutionary ferocity, terrorism, or sectarian zeal. Thus, raw brutality of symptom suppression is moderated and a switch from antagonism-driven governance into agonism-driven governance is constantly observed within post-modernist societies.
Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Veit Bader constructed post-secular theories of moderately agonistic democracy where “because the consensus requirements are moderated and exclusivist secularism is dropped − democracy is characterized by the absence of liberal reason-restraints and of consensus requirements, by deliberations cum negotiations, by unrestricted freedoms of communication, and by an inclusive multi- or poly-logue” (Secularism or Democracy? − Associational Governance of Religious Diversity; V. Bader, Amsterdam University Press 2007). Ideally, the jouissance of various minorities and eccentric groups can be recognized, institutionalized, and addressed before it manifests itself in a form of some serious symptom disrupting society.
The consequence is even greater fragmentation of the post-modernist society where multiple identities, lifestyles, and ideas co-exist as a fluid reticulum, while the entire culture is driven by the increased exposition of the society to the negation of logical reasoning, growing appreciation of noetic inquiry, and – in a wider sense − of the pre-symbolic experience of the world. This is a powerful movement that is both culture-forming (focused on perfecting of arts and rituals) and power-negative (against enforced control over nature, people, and things). It comes as an emancipatory eco-feminism of social justice warriors, queer-borderline movements, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, or fascination in indigenous, pre-modern ways of life. Identities affirmative to these traits will constantly gain their electoral share counter-balancing the globalized system of the technocratic capitalist economy.
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The Lacanian psychoanalysis offers some theoretical system that may be useful in explaining some range of political patterns within society. Probably this should not be the only theory being used for that purpose, probably it should be supplementary along with some other theories of economic and sociological nature, but it seems it is more robust and more explanatory than the Cartesian outlook of the self and subjectivity. That should motivate classical liberals to rethink the fundamentals of their ideology and address the inevitable political conflict generated by the tension between the rational and noetic approach to reality in a cleverer way than they normally used to practice today.
Specifically – Lacanian perspective may be helpful to understand otherwise hardly explicable paradox: more and more our world is driven by the meritocracy, by technocratic experts, by scientific analysis, and by empirical data – a bigger and bigger fraction of society disengage from this trait and engage into irrational, emotional, conspiracy-driven attitude. Moreover – this trend seems to be particularly strong within an affluent and influential segment of the public. It looks as if the tyranny of “objective reasoning” was repulsive enough to push millions of people into denial of the well-established body of knowledge. While science-driven medicine is delivering daily amazing new therapies – the popularity of “natural” medicines is expanding and the anti-vaccine movement is prominent.
While the overall longevity of the human population is increasing for decades – so many people feel less and less secure and their entire life is marked by everyday anxiety or fear. At the very same moment, some of the riskiest extreme sports reached enormous esteem in between those who carefully select their food to avoid even the slightest “chemical” contamination.
We can observe through our own eyes the transition of logical reasoning into the domain of cheap, inhuman, mechanical, and alien while “subjective living experience” and the entire affective domain is elevated into the principal position of the things that matter. The emergence of radical romanticism raging against dominant scientific positivism is truly astonishing. The fury of the BLM movement focused on the deconstruction and destruction of the entire heritage of the Latin civilization under the blank term of “fighting racism” is probably the best example of this counter-rational mayhem.
So-called “classical” liberals were ousted from ongoing discourse even more than traditional conservatives. While the latter may to some extend maintain their reference frame of common sense and religion, the first ones were left abandoned by the progressive mainstream as both epistemological and ethical dimensions of strict reasoning were dropped en masse as uninteresting, encapsulated under the common denominator of “white privilege”, and shoved into the category of “racist” oppression. Poor “classical” liberals were detached completely and most of them are unable to cope with the new situation. When words have changed their usage and meaning, when logical reasoning was defeated by hyper-empathy and hyper-morality driven by resentment and guilt, “classical” liberals have become “living deads” of the past era having neither a political representation nor cultural influence. They were enclosed in a narrow circle of “intellectual dark web” and ridiculed by the progressive mob.
So, what has actually happened?
Briefly, classical liberals have lost grip on public discourse for a long time already. They fell into the Hegelian trap best exemplified by Francis Fukuyama and his world-famous book “The End of History and the Last Man”. Contrary to Fukuyama’s naïve assumptions, history did not end but accelerated significantly. The socio-political system of the West was released from geopolitical stagnation defined by the Manichean conflict with the Communist Block and moved forward unrestricted by cold-war era geopolitical constraints. Under the new neoliberal order, the protective function of nation-states over local communities was marginalized while profits of multi-national corporations' shareholders boomed. A dense network of supranational political entities cemented binding local governments with practically immutable rules and regulations detached from any democratic influence. A period of rapid globalization has begun initiating steadily increasing economic inequalities driven by disfranchising of the working class as well as systemic precarization of the middle-class in the West.
This way excellent growth conditions for a deep-polarizing Marxist narrative were created, where “liberal” political doctrine was identified as an integral part of the “oppressive hegemony” of the “white cis-heterosexual patriarchal” culture – the culture that has to be rejected engross if a change in the desirable direction of “social justice” is ever going to occur. This was enhanced by the exhaustion of the dominant economical model caused by global warming and other environmental problems. Suddenly, the entire Latin civilization has been recognized as unsustainable and “erratic” while alternative narratives of marginalized subaltern or minority groups gained enormous momentum amplified by the already mentioned mechanism described here in terms of the Lacanian psychoanalysis.
It is worth noting the influential Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse explored similar patterns in his renowned book “Eros and Civilization” published in 1995, though he employed Freudian rather than Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis. That has skewed his perspective as he tried to explain societal development through Eros vs. Thanatos antagonism while Lacanian linguistic approach puts attention to Eros vs. Logos dynamics, which seems much more applicable.
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Romantic irrationality of the “woke” momentum, its focus on moral absolutism and its articulation in terms of grievance against endless oppression from privileged groups, its revolutionary drive towards rejection of the bulk of the Latin tradition seem difficult to be aligned with modern corporatism. But the Lacanian perspective brings to the front the foundational role of irrationality and unconscious for the modern West-European civilization. In his remarkable book The Unconscious Civilization (Free Press 1997) John Ralston Saul proposed some explanation to this paradox: our situation is that knowledge has not made us conscious. Instead, we have sought refuge in a world of illusion where language is cut off from reality.
But globalized, multinational corporations detached from ethnocentric nation-states dwell within their own comprehensive bubble and forge their own integrity, identity and cognitive rules. They create their own autonomous “political reality”.
Because the internal mechanics of the economy is driven by ever-more-complex formulations of mathematical science (and it’s going to be AI-driven in a short future) it is completely unreadable for laymen. We can observe the reaction of the “societal unconscious” as the Hegelian “Ruse of Reason” - sort of romantic gear-work rising “heroic” movement obsessed by the moral absolutism balancing scrutiny of “inhuman” technocracy. We can observe the rise of the “counter-merit” element aimed against science and engineering, and we already see growing domination of impatient “woke” morality over the social practice of the corporate world. The remaining rational part of the “World Enterprise” is reacting with authoritarian approach of overwhelming digital supervision and control. Liberal democracy is more and more becoming an empty phrase. Constantly limiting free expression solely to “positive thinking” in terms of prescribed moral dictionary The Corporation is becoming both the King and the Pope of the new millennium bending nation-states and their citizens to conformity.
The “Woke” ideology shares many traits of the early Christian understanding of the “social justice” which we may roughly call “proto-communist”, this ideological proximity renders every “left” ideology familiar to the Christian idiom. While these proto-communist traits were always present within the Christendom, they were balanced by what we know as “Christian tradition” epitomized by the teaching of the Catholic Church. This tradition was “The Logos” side of the Catholic ideological equation of the Middle Ages. But due to secularization of the Western world, this element of the Church’s authority is gone and the attempt to replace it with science was only partially successful. Absent “The Father” figure, society is moving towards its erotic center unaware of the overwhelming discord such an unrestricted movement generates. The vacuum left after the missing Logos must be somehow refilled. Contemporary Corporation is probably best suited to this task if merged with a political movement. The “woke” socialists have come in handy blending well into homogenizing corporate logic of globalized capitalism.
Even such a brief essay exposes the need of in-depth analysis of the “woke” phenomenon as it is much more complex and multi-layered than initially believed by its critics. Both conservatives and classical liberals are missing non-exhausted counter-narrative to counter and defeat progressing woke revolution. From the Lacanian perspective it is rather clear such a game-changing narrative cannot be constructed from existing traits. Some new ideological payload is necessary to counterweight woke-capitalism. For some time already we can see Islam taking its place on the Western stage as a valid alternative to the post-secular Christianity. On the other end there is transhumanism as an extreme techno-futurism. But there is no clear way out of the path to “benevolent authoritarian woke eco-capitalism". Particularly, neither Christian conservatives, nor classical liberals are capable of meaningful reaction being perpetually marginalized and pushed-out from the public discourse.
The chaotic narrative of conservative populism does not look very promising taking into account it’s ideological incohesion. Somewhat brutal nativism of Mr. Trump and his supporters resulted in spiritual and religious leaders, Pope Francis included, distancing from Trump casting him in conflict with ethical sources he used to declare as his own. This contradiction was instrumental in tainting Trump as a “Nazi” morally unfit for presidency.
The very same problem is hanging above Central-European populist-conservatives who are all “short-circuited” to local branches of the Catholic or the Orthodox Church. Progressing secularization of the society and modernization of the Church itself are year by year cutting ground from their feet and no resources are big enough to stop this megatrend. In Poland polls show popularity of “left-wing” policies growing in between young generations, reaching 30% approval rate in group of 18-24 years old what is statistically larger than approval for “right-wing” policies in this group, first time since 1991.
Progressive liberals and left-leaning types are now arguing that “Democratic socialism is just a better version of Christianity” − free of patriarchal dogmatic authoritarianism of the Catholic clergy. The burden of sexual child-abuse revealed recently and its sly internal treatment is not helping the Church to maintain moral authority.
New centrist political movement “Polska 2050” (Eng. “Poland 2050”) created last year by charismatic journalist and media personality Szymon Hołownia is a good example of this process. Hołownia, who called himself a traditional Catholic just a few years ago is now promoting strict State-Church separation, same-sex partnership legalization, conditional abortion approval, and green policies. Public support for his movement is growing and is at the 20% threshold at the moment – second after the ruling Law & Justice lead conservative coalition. When asked about problems of the Catholic Church he openly declared “I will not shed tears after the institution which manufactured its crisis itself”. While carefully avoiding direct confrontation, he distances himself from institutional Church in Poland moving towards more progressive narrative of Pope Francis or ultra-liberal German “Synodal Path” in particular. “Nationalism is against the message of Jesus Christ” he declared approving “refugees welcome” policy of chancellor Angela Merkel. Slow erosion of the brazen Polish conservatism is a fact. No wonder progressive opposition used to taint it with “Nazi” undertones in the same manner as American liberals tainted president Trump.
Leading Polish conservative intellectual and MEP, Mr. Ryszard Legutko complained in recent interview for the French right-leaning newspaper “Le Figaro” on the passive approval of European Christian Democrats to each and every progressive politics proposed by the liberal Left. “European conservatives have capitulated completely" - he diagnosed the situation. He lamented they push for federalization under woke ideological regime where each and every category from traditional Christian Imaginarium is twisted, distorted and skewed. He mentioned attempts to ban masculine and feminine paving their way to the EU agenda as well as omnipresent equalization of all cultures and religions rendering Christian heritage of Europe unimportant and meaningless. He complained on growing limitations to the freedom of speech ousting traditional conservatives like him to the margin... And he was unable to propose any meaningful alternative to fading traditional Catholicism what could support political stance of Polish conservatives... It seems Legutko can only pray for the religious revival of Europe as he is unable to substitute decreasing role of traditional Christianity with anything substantial. Or for the time being whatever “far-right” alternative to the Christian Imaginarium looks dangerously “too Nazi” for his conservative taste.
There is no room for Logos in the secular world but it is hard to avoid discord in the world without Logos. Liberal mindset leads Western society into the direction of the authoritarian Left. It can be “benevolent authoritarian”, but it is going to be authoritarian. Effectively, the golden age of Western liberalism seems to be gone for good.
Zbigniew P. Szczęsny
Warsaw, March 2021