Often a major paradigm change will create a new movement, initially radical and subversive but eventually morphing fully into the new establishment. Depending on its ideological feeders, the new consensus becomes more or less totalitarian – although “more totalitarian” tends to be the default. In this mature phase the new paradigm will display all the characteristics of an orthodox religion attempting to marginalise or silence dissenting views. It becomes the new orthodoxy versus the new heresies and heretics.
The mediaeval model:
The Roman Church in mediaeval Europe provides a broad template illustrating the process and dynamics of the mature system:
From radically subversive to the new orthodoxy:
The radical Christianity of the first three centuries was persecuted, the target of genocide at the hands of the pagan Roman powers until the Edict of Milan. Then in the early fourth century it was granted equivalent legitimacy to the other religions in the empire. By the end of that century it was declared by Theodosius to be the only legitimate religion in the empire, and the path was clear for it to mature to a totalitarian system.
“Heretics” as a despised and demonised class:
While the earliest church had to deal with dissenters, these were at most confronted, refuted and at worst excluded. The great Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries provided parameters for declaring a vast number of groups and viewpoints heretical: Arians, Monophysites, Nestorians, Copts and Assyrians all being combined into this group. Where Rome held sway, they were subjected to exclusion and exile – and in some cases even to death. As the hold of Rome intensified over the Western church and morphed into the Holy Roman Empire, a broad consensus of rulers, churchmen and intellectuals emerged that formulated and policed the parameters of orthodoxy. The church could eventually call upon the secular powers, in the form of the military, to hunt down the heretics and exterminate them. Intensive “crusades” were launched against some who were ensconced in Alpine valleys. The established consensus made it clear – even the mildest dissent will not be tolerated.
Intensification of conflict with heretics, and the descent into support for the irrational
Dealing with heretics became a massive and expensive endeavour. It could be retroactive, as in the exhuming of the bones of Wycliffe to be burnt for his subversion of the claims of the church. It could be despicably treacherous, as in the waiving of the safe-passage offered Jan Hus, and his subsequent execution in Konstanz. An entire organ of the church-state alliance was called into being – the Inquisition – to “smell out” and eradicate dissenters. Friends, neighbours and families operated as spies, reporting even the slightest suspicion of dissenting sympathies. An accusation of for instance having once read the wrong text could lead to a person’s torture and death, without recourse or mitigation. Indeed, at times these close acquaintances would function as the executioners, as in the infamous Bartholomew Night massacre in post-Reformation France.
The problems for the orthodox consensus intensified when the established church and associated powers adopted philosophical and scientific positions that were no longer rationally viable. The elevation of Aristotle’s cosmology to dogma created a hiatus between the new class of scientists and adventurers and a church which had departed from any position that could be defended by reasoned argument. A full-scale ideological war was now waged, in which the church became alienated from and subverted by an entire class of thinkers and Christian practitioners. The totalitarian consensus was unravelling.
The eventual secession of the Protestant churches and nations was facilitated by the obvious irrationality and arrogance of the Roman establishment – and by new technology such as the printing-press, which provided a channel for communication and subversion to the heretics. The Inquisition continued to rage, but the paradigm had changed again and it was too late for much of Europe. South Europe and the new possessions those countries held in the New World were condemned to pre-modern feudalistic forms of rule and culture until well into the 20th century – while the Protestant North enjoyed the hard-won fruits (with many set-backs along the way) of the modernising programme.
The model repeated
This model of progression from radical subversion via established consensus to brutal totalitarian intolerance can be detected in similar and even identical form in the many new “orthodoxies” arising since then. While less brutal than the Roman repression, the established Protestant churches of Northern Europe also marginalised and excluded dissenters – many of whom emigrated to North America and created there a nation which forbade the emergence of any church-state consensus. One of the greatest works of pious literature was written by an English dissenter imprisoned for the crime of “preaching” while not holding credentials from the established English church – The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.
The French revolution demonstrated many of the traits of the mediaeval totalitarian consensus, as did the Marxist Soviet and German National-socialist states. These can even be detected in the Zulu Empire under Chaka and Dingaan.
Today the new orthodoxy consists of what was radical subversive in the 1960’s. The erstwhile anti-establishment protestors have now become the patrons and guardians of a stifling new consensus. The academic, political, journalistic and entertainment blocs have underwritten the consensus and employ many of the strategies and tools of the mediaeval church-state alliance to enforce it. They now police the parameters of orthodoxy as implacably as any previous Inquisition.
The new heretics and their marginalisation
The new heretics include every person who does not whole-heartedly embrace the new consensus which has crystallised most noticeably since the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the USA (see my earlier posting on this.) The consensus, tagged “the liberal Left”, Cultural Marxism, post-modernism, and a number of other more or less credible identifiers, has responded with hysteria and desperate activism against this new challenge to their hitherto unchallenged dominance in the market-place of ideas. Its response has become brutal, and in some Western nations has even begun to forge or harness a new Inquisition to police its privileges.
The tools used today to marginalise or eliminate even the slightest whiff of dissent are very similar to witch-smelling in the Zulu Empire. The King or his shaman would arbitrarily identify a person as a witch or wizard, and that person’s peers would immediately turn on them, stabbing and clubbing them to death – thereby conveniently signalling to the powerful their own orthodoxy. To ensure the elimination of any and every threat, the simplest accusation of non-orthodoxy would lead at best to exclusion, at worst to immediate death. The French Reign of Terror, the Soviets and the Nazis developed this into an art-form of co-option, using the heretic’s own peers to terminate their tainted influence. And here in the UK the ultimate harnessing of state and “orthodox” power has occurred: a simple accusation of “hate speech” against a person who has “offended” a beneficiary of the consensus (usually described as a “vulnerable victim”) will be mercilessly prosecuted by the Prosecuting Authority, with the powers of the police and the judiciary employed to exclude and silence these new “criminals.” This without any attempt to establish actual guilt or even what the parameters of guilt are. Since the scope of hate-speech is being extended daily by the hysterical consensus, the new heretics can include even many of the radical heroes of the 1960’s and 70’s, such as those venerable architects of the consensus itself: Germaine Greer and Camille Paglia.
The intellectual world is suffering an epidemic of witch-smelling. Once an academic, lecturer, commentator or activist is accused of racism or sexism or any one of a dozen new “phobias”, to avoid contamination their own peers will hastily and publicly desert them, or turn on them and rend them to signal their own virtue and harmless conformity. While the printing press offered the major tool of subversion in the mediaeval era, today it is the so-called alt-right media and the great engines of social media – Facebook, Google, Youtube and Twitter. As the owners of these engines signal their own virtuous compliance to the consensus, the algorithms are being tweaked to exclude even the slightest deviance from the ideology of the new order, labelling this blatant censorship as justified since they are acting against “hate speech.” The new dissenting media are targeted as “preachers of hate” and those who support them, even just with online advertising, are identified, boycotted and publicly “shamed.”
How will it end?
The totalitarian mediaeval church lost all credibility when it took a dogmatic stand against the rationally-validated evidence of science: Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, each clearly vindicated by empirical observation. The Soviet Union collapsed when it became clear that it was unable to generate wealth on the scale of its capitalist competitors – its ideologies devoid of any rational coherence or earthly good. Systems that required walls to prevent their own citizens from escaping the totalitarian brutality of the ruling consensus discovered that electro-magnetic waves could not be so easily excluded – while the last great Asian systems of intolerance in Iran and mainland China appear susceptible to the internet, which they are understandably desperately attempting to censor – with the craven complicity of some great Western social media giants such as Google.
Perhaps the new consensus will not be facilitated so much by the subversion of the Trump supporters and the Brexiteers but by the sheer irrationality of its own champions and tenets. This has already become clear when it ruthlessly polices the public spaces it controls to ensure that contrary arguments are cut off before being uttered. The stark contrast between the young articulate voices that offer researched and reasoned objections to the overreaching claims of the consensus – the Shapiros, Southerns, Murrays and Lahrens of the social media – and the frantic screaming sloganeers and their vicious physical attacks against all who articulate an alternative narrative, effectively enacting a hecklers’ veto shamefully supported by University and public authorities – this contrast cannot for ever escape the notice and derision of rational thinkers and those who are open to entertaining and discussing fresh insights. The young dissenters find resonance and motivation in an older and sometimes newer group of subverters – the Coulters, Paglias and Petersons whose rational beings experience every irrational utterance of the new consensus as an insult to their very considerable intelligence. Even the Court Jesters, the disruptors and provocateurs such Milo Yannapoulis play their role, subjecting the consensus to what it hates and fears most: ridicule. Who better than a gay Jew with a preference for Black lovers to demonstrate the absolute absurdity of the epithets, slogans, and tags thrown his way by the hysterical storm-troopers of the new orthodoxy: “Milo is a racist and anti-Semitic homophobe….” You couldn’t make it up.
But the prime, the ultimate subversion of the totalitarian consensus must surely lie in their replacement of the long-established objective ontology of the Western (modern) scientific world for the subjective ontology of personal identity. When the regulations of sober seats of learning such as Oxford and Cambridge, and the laws of many Western nations, are being adjusted to delegitimise and criminalise any who dissent from the right of an individual to assert their own subjective identity (sexual or otherwise) despite the hard empirical evidence of biology or simple rational cogency – then the end must surely be near. Surely the nations roar and the people imagine a vain thing! Who will be the Copernicus, Kepler or Galileo to provide the rock upon which the present absurdity must surely falter and sink?
Mathew Clark 