Nihilism Or The Divine

I believe the human person is endangered, and I’ll try to explain what I mean by that.

Three centuries ago, a debate was introduced into the public arena by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This debate—which remains very much alive—centres on whether the ‘authentic individual’ exists prior to his life in society, or rather emerges out of his life in society. Downstream from this debate are two claims that remain at the heart of the progressive/conservative dichotomy.

For the progressive, one ought to enjoy the advantages of society while always emancipating himself from society, to maintain his ‘authentic self.’ Society is always a threat to his ‘authentic self,’ and hence, necessarily, in some way tyrannical—of a patriarchal kind or otherwise—and it must ever be purified through ongoing revolution. In turn, the progressive will always favor the atomized [atomization refers to "the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms." Therefore, all social values, institutions, developments and procedures evolve entirely out of the interests and actions of the individuals who inhabit any particular society. The individual is the "atom" of society and therefore the only true object of concern and analysis] and alienated individual over the accountable and communally bound individual who is formed by local and national loyalties.

For conservatives, attacks on the national way of life do not emancipate individuals from a disguised captivity. Rather, they threaten the very foundation of social relations within which emerges the human person—by which I mean the unique, irreplaceable individual who takes possession of his life and governs himself, so as to be in right relation with others. Society isn’t some looming, external force: society is us, and we are society.

Unique, irreplaceable individuals—that is to say, persons—result from their civilization. Persons don’t opt into their communities by some primordial contract. Indeed, ‘nation’ has the same etymology as the word ‘natal’—the nation is that from which we are born into the world. Human beings actualize their personhood precisely by being inducted into the communities from which they have come, with their histories, cultures, laws, and customs. Via this process, people cease to be slaves to ignorance and appetite, and they discover their personal freedom.

This is the paradoxical truth of conservatism: we hold that it is by being inducted into our received, shared civilization that our uniqueness, as individual persons, unfolds. Accordingly—and perhaps counterintuitively for the modern mind—tradition and freedom are correlated principles.

The process of liberal atomization has made very difficult the sort of civilizational induction that is necessary for personal actuation. This means that we may be seeing a process by which—as the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber suggested—persons may vanish altogether.

Already, those in the vanguard of our progressive culture are increasingly like clones of one another. They claim to have realized their supposed uniqueness and authenticity while simultaneously embracing a narrow groupthink, parroting the same narratives, and even sporting the same blue hair. Emancipated from their received civilization, pre-societal ‘authentic selves’ turn out to be interchangeable with all other such selves.

Human personhood is a phenomenon poised in the dynamism of human sociality. Persons emerge out of community, and communities are thin within the paradigm of liberal-progressive atomization and individualism.

Real communities are moral units, with shared notions of purpose and meaning by which their members may live together. For this reason, any given society is, at root, religious; for all societies, inasmuch as they are societies, are bound by some shared set of beliefs and practices pertaining to the most fundamental questions about our purpose, dignity, and destiny as a human community.

What does such a claim mean in the context of this country? In England, we have a national religion with a Church by law established enshrined in our constitution, an affirmation of which we recently saw during the King’s coronation. This established religion, however, is not the one we actually practice.

190 years have passed since the Reverend John Keble ascended Oxford’s university pulpit and declared that the nation had committed apostasy, a sermon that launched the Tractarian Movement, which in turn revitalized Toryism, inspiring the Young Englanders who gave us Benjamin Disraeli. But that revival didn’t last, and as John Henry Newman wrote, “Toryism came to pieces and went the way of all flesh.” In any case, what I think someone like Keble, or Disraeli, or Newman, could never have envisaged was the nation’s replacement of Christianity with a new religion altogether.

We haven’t diagnosed ‘woke’ properly. We should recognize it for what it is, namely an expression of a very deep and noble religious need, a need that has been neglected and mistreated in contemporary British society.

The zeal observed among today’s progressives marks a deeply religious attempt to provide a rapidly fragmenting community with a sense of common purpose … but it is failing to do so. Here, I join the company of numerous conservative commentators who have highlighted the religious character of our progressivist culture: it has its own theology; its moral decrees; its sacrificial victims; its proselytizers; a highly effective inquisition; an exegetical methodology for interpreting history; an index of forbidden books; its iconography—especially the ‘selfie’, that frozen avatar of the disembodied ‘authentic self’; it has its saints and martyrs; its doctrine of healthcare and safety as the topmost ethical values; its idolatry of technologies as the angelic mediators that will bring about a new heaven and a new earth; and it promotes the LGBTQ+ movement as the highest religious expression, with its public processions, flags and banners, and a liturgical year complete with holy days and months of festivities. And this religion sees the State as a ‘mortal god’—to use the words of Thomas Hobbes—that will bestow the infinite capital-P ‘Progress’ for which we beg. And everyone must join in the devotions of this public religion that promises not to redeem our human nature, but rather our de-natured ‘authentic selves’ by vanquishing human nature altogether, and those who are insufficiently enthusiastic are judged heretics and must be driven from polite society.

The problem is that while this counterfeit religion purports to unify us in pursuit of an egalitarian utopia of infinite progress, it simultaneously atomizes us in pursuit of the pre-societal ‘authentic self’—the only self that can ever be truly equal to all other selves. Thus, while purporting to offer a loose conception of the good around which it can gather society, it concurrently divides us all in the paradigm of isolation and national repudiation.

And what’s the upshot? While communication has never been so accessible and belief in social activism never so widespread, statistically Britons haven’t before felt so insulated and so alienated; currently the leading cause of death among teenagers and adults up to the age of 34 is suicide. Our country is deeply, deeply unwell.

As the 18th century conservative Joseph de Maistre observed, an atomized people is a miserable and vulnerable people who will be forced to grovel before a divinised, all-encompassing administrative juggernaut. What someone like Maistre could never have imagined was the emergence of a massive information and surveillance industry, working as one mechanism across much of the globe, manipulating almost every facet of life through a sort of technological omnipresence. This Leviathan has now encroached on every aspect of private association and civil society, deeming itself the providential lord of history. And this technologically driven globalism is now threatening to eliminate the human person by defeating his nature altogether via the vastly funded sorcery of transhumanism. It seems we are witnessing, to put things back into Maistre’s idiom, the capture of our world by the forces of Satan’s principality.

The self-identification of global Leviathan as providential lord of history cast off all its concealments during the Covid episode—for which there has not been a proper reckoning. Under a Tory government, people were confined to their homes, with many plunged into crushing debt; the police morphed into roaming thugs; hysteria was deliberately fostered; experimental drugs were imposed with threats of unemployment if people didn’t acquiesce, with many now suffering from vaccine-injuries remaining largely ignored by their government; and senior Tory ministers co-opted the public into a surveillance system by asking them to spy on their neighbours. This sort of autocracy was duplicated across the world.

And such a regime is what you should expect, as persons as we know them vanish from our world and are replaced with human cogs in a colossal global machine. This is why, with every fibre of his being, Edmund Burke condemned what he called “atheism by establishment”, which would lend itself to the politics of “a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy with a purely geometrical and arithmetical” conception of society.

The challenge that Burke faced at the dawn of our secular age hasn’t changed: he was opposing an atheistic, imperial technocracy in embryonic form; we are facing it in maturity. The choices remain: nihilism or God—or put differently, idolatry and captivity masquerading as pleasure and safety, or the genuine freedom, meaning, and purpose that comes from acknowledging the spiritual dimension of who we are. Whether human personhood vanishes altogether will depend on how we choose.

To summarize: either persons precede society as so-called ‘authentic selves,’ merely opting into society for its advantages; or persons emerge out of society, that is, a meaning-driven community of people who belong together, animated by a sense of transcendent purpose. In short, between nihilism and the divine there is no medium. Either way, however, as Disraeli famously observed, man will worship something. The question is, then: what cultus, and by extension what culture, do we want to have? One that unites us in a common moral project by which we emerge together as persons, or something else?

In these isles, it’s time to retrieve a genuine, theocentric conservatism, which can offer a spiritual and moral vision of the human person. Otherwise, if British conservatives continue to be nothing other than diluted versions of their more progressive competitors, conservatism won’t only lose its place in the public arena altogether, but it will entirely deserve to do so.

At present, there is widespread hunger for a serious spiritual and moral account of who we are and our common purpose as a national community. This hunger will be ignored by conservatives at their peril.

Sebastian Morello