Speaker 1: If you want to support the show and get the
episodes early and ad free, head on over to Freemanbeyond
the Wall dot com forward slash Support. I want to
explain something right now. If you support me through substack
or Patreon, you have access to an RSS feed that
you can plug into any podcatcher, including Apple, and you'll
be able to listen to the episodes through there. If
you support me through subscribe, star gum Road, or on
my website directly, I will send you a link where
you can download the file and you can listen to
it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support
everyone gives me. It keeps a show going. It allows
me to basically put out an episode every day now,
and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate.
I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two
even three a day, and yeah, can't do it without you,
So thank you for the support. Head on over to
Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com, Forward slash Support and
do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to the finale of my reading of Raizard Lagut
Goes the Demon in Democracy. This is part ten and
I want to remind you that Thomas and I watch
movies and review them and comment on them, and the
latest we did was the nineteen thirty five Lenny Riefenstahl
classic Trying for the Will. If you go to Freeman
Beyond the Wall dot com forward slash Movies, you can
see where there is a link that you can get it,
and you can also subscribe to our at least once
a month movie reviews for the year. All right, let
us start and get into this and finish us up.
This is chapter five. It's called religion, and we're on
part five. Hostility to Christianity and modern liberal democracies raises
a question of how religion should manifest itself in public life.
The simplest answer, close to what some Protestant movements embodied,
is that religious life and political life should be separated.
Religion is essentially a private matter, a family matter, and
sometimes a community matter, but definitely not a state matter.
There are quite a lot of people today who are
public figures, professionals, politicians, and it is rarely that we
know what religion, if any, they profess, and even if
we knew, this would be irrelevant in the assessment of
their public performance. Such a strict separation of the religious
and the public realms is very much in tune with
today's ideology of modernity, and it is all the more
convincing that confirms the assumption considered obvious but in fact doubtful,
that the freedom of religion is guaranteed in Western democracies,
and that Christians, being denied a public presence, should have
no reason to complain. This strategy, let us call it conciliatory,
should be distinguished from another one, let's call it capitulatory.
The difference between the first and the second is at
the beginning of one degree, but ultimately one of essence.
The aim of the conciliatory Christian has been to avoid
conflicts with the liberal Democrats and to adapt themselves to
the existing system which they thought. Let me start that again.
The aim of the conciliatory Christians has been to avoid
conflicts with the liberal Democrats and to adapt themselves to
the existing system, which they thought sufficiently spacious and friendly
to include Christianity together with other religions. The aim of
the Christians who have capitulated is to be admitted to
the liberal democratic club, and in order to do it,
they are willing to accept any terms and concessions. Convinced
that remaining outside the club or being refused entrance would
bring infamy on them, One can, of course defend both
strategies conciliation and capitulation, and the standard argument of defense
is the following. An enormous part of the activities of
churches and an enormous area of religion have nothing to
do with politics, socialism, liberal democracy, or anything related. Religion
and churches are about God, souls and salvation. Therefore, because
we live in a civil society governed by the rule
of law, waging big political battles against it is not
only meaningless from the perspective of religion, but polls to
churches away from the primary mission, which is that of evangelization.
They always care so much about the purity of the
church once the church starts, once a public face is
put on, isn't that interesting? It's like, well, no, no,
you can't. The church can't stay pure. If it touches
the state, it will become dirty, something will. It'll go wrong,
no doubt. The basic objectives of Christianity remain outside politics,
and it is these objectives that the churches and the
faithful should pursue. But This otherwise obvious statement fails to
address one crucial fact, the growing infiltration of liberal democracy
into religion. Liberal democracy, like socialism, has an overwhelming tendency
to politicize and ideologe ideologize social life in all its aspects,
including those that were once considered private. Hence, it is
difficult for religion to find a place in a society
where it would be free from the pressure from liberal
democratic orthodoxy and where it would not risk a conflict
with its commissars. Even the issues generally thought to be
remote from politics become censured by the punctilious scrutiny of
those who watch over ideological purity. To give an example,
the Vatican declaration dominess aous sparked anger in many groups,
many among secular and even atheists than Protestant, more among
secular and even atheists than Protestant Orthodox, and the direct
cause was the following sentence quote. Therefore, there exists a
single Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church,
governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops
and communion with him. Chapter four Claus seventeen. Those who
protested claim to defend the non Catholics, who presumably could not,
in light of the declaration, achieved salvation and thereby had
their eschatological steps that is unfairly diminished in relations to
the Catholics. So instead of just saying, well, you mean
you can't say that, that's you're just you're saying you're
the only way, It's like, no, no, Look what you're
doing to the Protestants and the Orthodox by saying that.
Why the atheists were so indignant about the fact that
they would not achieve salvation in which they do not
believe in God, through God whose existence they denied, can
be explained only as a case of total subjugation of
the mind by politics and ideology. They did not see
salvation as a theological problem, but as the Catholic Church's
political instrument, cleverly camouflaged by theological rhetoric to justify her
domination over other groups and other religious and non religious groups.
In addition, the sentence in question offended their egalitarian sensibility. Salvation,
like anything people desire that is not required as a
human and right and distributed equally, must have appeared to
them to be ideologically suspect. The Church is bound to
get into permanent conflicts with liberal democracy and matters of
morality which this system has appropriated and subjected to the
power of legislative bodies in the courts. Today it is
the legislators and the judges who decide what is and
is not permitted, what is right and what is wrong,
what is good and what is evil in matters of
life and death. Until recently, the family ethics was to
a large degree shaped and with good results, by the Christians,
who continued and developed the teachings of the classical thinkers.
But during the last decades this ethics was taken away
from them and incorporated into the liberal democratic mechanism. Dozens
of legal decisions were taken directly affecting family and even
sexual life, and those decisions blatantly diverging from Christian teachings.
For example, about abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia became law. Christians were
forced to accept the humiliating subordination to a law they
thought immoral, but whose disobedience is penalized. Quite often, the
grounds for these decisions have strong anti Christian overtones. Christian
arguments are dismissed as merely religious, with the implication that
as such they are irrational. Parochial, anachronistic, and unrepresentative. In
many countries the conscience clauses protecting Christians were either scrapped
or made invalid by the courts. There is virtually no
area in which the influence of Christianity has not been challenged.
Everything that Christianity imbued with its spirit, legacy and wisdom, education, morality, sensibility,
human conduct, even diet, the liberal democratic order puts a
question and in many cases eliminated. Sunday has become a
day off from work, not a holy day. Organized actions
have been taking place so far successfully to lift the
band still existing in a few regions in Europe on
public disco events on Good Friday. Ash Wednesday is no
longer honored, and the Christmas season has become a commercial paradise,
while Christmas Eve with friends over a beer is more
and more encouraged as something chic. The laws and mindsets
have been reconstructed in such a way that no custom
or rule having its root in Christianity can withstand the
onslaught of liberal democracy. If the old Communists live long
enough to see the world of today, they would be
devastated by the contrast between how little they themselves have
managed to achieve in their anti religious war, and how
successful the liberal Democrats have been. All the objectives the
Communists set for themselves, in which they pursued with savage brutality,
were achieved by the liberal Democrats, who, almost without any
effort and simply by allowing people to drift along with
the flow of modernity, succeeded in converting churches into museums,
restaurants in public buildings, secularizing entire society, making secularism the
militant ideology, pushing religion to the sidelines, pressing the clergy
into docility, and inspiring powerful mass culture with a strong
anti religious bias, in which a priest must be either
a liberal challenging of the church or a disgusting villain
is not. One may wonder this non religious and anti
religious reality of today's Western world very close to the
vision of the future without religion that Communists were so
excited about, and which, despite the millions of human lives
sacrifice on the altra, progress failed to materialize. The triumph
of anti Christianity seems to favor the conciliatory strategy. A
lot of Christian communities, overpowered by the March at time
gave up any idea of head on confrontation with liberal
democracy or even any energetic defense policy. Those who capitulated
unconditionally had to perform theological acrobatics to justify their position,
and in so doing agreed to suppress any formative ambitions
of their own and remain silent when before their eyes
the Christian practices and ideas were being destroyed. After making
some timid gestures of resistance at the beginning, they soon
agreed to recognize so called homosexual marriage, to condone abortion,
or even to tolerate euthanasia. The ubiquity of liberal democratic
rights and ethical permissiveness may have generated in a lot
of Christians such a feeling of resignation that any vigorous
resistance must have seemed to them futile. The only option
left for Christians to maintain some respectability in a new
world was to join the great progressive camp, so that
occasionally they would have an opportunity to smuggle in something
that could pass for a religious message. You can see
this on Twitter. You can see this all the time.
This is what like Woe and Corey from a Stone
Choir fight against all the time, These quote unquote Christians
most of the especially the Evangelicals, and a lot of
a lot of Catholics and even some Orthodox are nothing
more than liberals, nothing more. And you know, as somebody
who remembers when like the Presbyterian Church of America PA
was like heavily right wing, I mean not more Southern
Baptist convention gone and it's you may find a dependent
Baptist church out there that's doing something, and there are that.
You know, there is a rising of traditionalism in the
Catholic Church, with people looking for Catholic masses and wanting
their parishes to do the looking for Latin masses and
wanting their parishes to do the Latin Mass again. But
for the most part, it seems like most people have
given up and they've actually taken the stance that if
you are against this modernity, the way they're doing things now,
then you're a heretic, and you are you're a Nazi.
I mean, they've just literally become leftists. But this conciliatory
attitude on the part of Christians is certainly wrong if
it is motivated by the conviction that the current hostility
to religion as a result of a misunderstanding social contingencies
unfortunate errors committed by the Christians, or some minor ailments
of modern society. The truth is that all these phenomena,
as well as other anti Christian developments, are the genuine
consequences of the spirit of modernity on which the liberal
democracy was founded. Modernity and anti Christianity cannot be separated
because they stem from the same route, and since the
beginning have been intertwined. There is nothing, and has never been,
anything in this branch of the European tradition that would
make it favorably predisposed to predisposed to Christianity. The waves
of hostility appeared and disappeared, ranging from outward aggression to
indifference mixed with contempt, but never did the tide turn
into an open and sincere simple There have been several
Christian authors of liberal persuasion who tried to find common
elements between Christianity and liberalism, which occasionally produced interesting theoretical insights,
but generally, the inexorable tendency to liberalize and democratize the
world that we have witnessed over the last centuries always
supported the forces of anti Christianity. Therefore, whoever advocates a
conciliatory strategy today fails or refuses to see the conditions
in which Christians have been living. It is utterly mistaken
to take the position that many do, namely that the
church should take over some liberal democratic ingredients, open up
to modern ideas and preferences, and then, after having modernized herself,
managed to overcome hostility and reach people with Christian teachings.
One can see why this plan has gained considerable popularity,
but whatever its merits, it cannot succeed. During the Second
Vatican Council in the years that followed it, some Christians
chose a similar path to be in tune and at
least externally with the liberal democratic sensibilities, so that the
enmity would become less acute and the anti Christian trend
be reversed. The idea of agjornamento was far from self evident,
and a lot of contra contradictory theories and strategies were
put into it, but the long term effects, whether intended
or not, were quite clear. The church architecture became community
centered rather than monarchical. Liturgy was simplified so as not
to be too absorbing to a modern man who is
less and less has less and less time for religion. Latin,
incomprehensible and unpleasantly elitist, was replaced with the vernacular languages
that everybody could understand. The priests seemed to behave during
the mass like leaders and commanders, and turned versus populum
to make an impression of being an equal among equals.
I will just say to you, Stormy and I have
talked about this. Well, you think that Latin. There is
power in Latin. There's a metaphysical power in Latin. And
by getting rid of Latin, it takes power away. Notice
where they still keep Latin. Where Latin is still alive
in the law, in legal world, say have power over you.
If you want to look and see who has power
in the world, now look and see who's using Latin,
still using Latin. Think about that. All these changes, however,
did not blunt the anti Christian prejudices that the liberal
democratic spirit had been feeding on, nor did they entice
more people to enter the church to strengthen the already
decimated army of the faithful. The good things that were
expected to happen did not happen. They did not, let
me say it again, because they could not, and a
versions of Christianity run so deep in the culture of
modernity that no blandishment or fawning on the part of
the Church can change it. Going to far along this
road actually threatens the very essence of Christianity. Since the
Second Vatican Council, the tendency to obsequiousness has been increasing
rather than diminishing. Also in Poland, despite the fact that
liberal Democrats never made any conciliatory gestures and their demands
paradoxically became more peremptory. The Catholic Church, it must be
clearly emphasized, as more aware of the danger than other
Christian communities. However, the priests and the bishops who have
been subjected to tremendous pressure, especially in Western Europe and America,
to ingratiate with the liberal democratic orthodoxy, and this pressure
has sometimes been quite effective. The Vatican, ruled by John
Paul the Second and Benedicta sixteenth, was outspoken in its
fidelity to the fundamental teachings of the Church, but it
is difficult to predict in which direction their successors will go. Well.
Many fear that the next generation of cardinals may be
more willing to compromise, especially as the fringe groups of
the clergy loudly declare their readiness to flow with the
liberal democrat democratic current. This may lure them into falling
into falling again, only deeper, this time into the same
erroneous belief that an affable demeanor will silence the enemies
of Christianity and propel the new hosts of the faithful
to a liberalized and democratized church. Best news I heard
is that in survey has done in the past five years,
new priests that are getting ordained are much more what
we do would say conservative, more let's say traditional. But
hostility will not subside and the new hosts of the
faithful will not show up because the mechanism of de
Christianization has its own dynamics that the concessions of the
christian strengthen rather than weaken. If the Vatican Council, if
the Vatican Council progresses were to be presented with what
the liberal democrats of today demand the Church should do,
they would be shattered and unceasing relentless. Us offensive to
appropriate the entirety of our existence has made us complacently
amenable to things that are otherwise outrageous. In order for
the Church to be praised, or even to be spared
the heaviest blows. It is no longer enough to make
the sacral architecture less hierarchical and more democratic, or have
the priests faced the faithful during the mass, or to
consider the abolition of celibacy. Nowadays one must go further,
prohibit the condemnation of anything other than what the liberal
democratic orthodoxy mandates to condemn, and decree to praise everything
that the orthodoxy mandates to praise. Today, the Christian's devotion,
or rather surrender, to liberal democracy is measured by their
enthusiastic support of the claims of homosexual activists and by
the acceptance of what the feminists call women's reproductive rights.
One shudders at the thought that will be expected of
the Christians in a few years time. Well we're here,
Buddy Lanes. By the representatives of so called open Catholicism
do a disservice to the cause of Christian religion. Their
relationship with liberal democracy is reminiscent of the dialogue their
older colleagues conducted with Marxism. Open Catholics effusively eulogize the
political system and its ideology, categorically distanced themselves from closed
and nonliberal Catholics, apparently in the hope that while cooperating
creatively with the system, they will have an opportunity to
put a few droplets of Catholicism into the liberal democratic vessels.
Their interlocutors welcome the commitment to liberal democracy with satisfaction
and emphatically approve of the great divide between the good
Catholics and the bad Catholics, but are never tired of
repeating that the divide should be deeper and should result
in a sort of core centenaire around the bad breed.
They make it clear, however, that although the initiative of
the few progressive dissonance is not negligible, Christianity itself is
of little worth, and whatever is of value in it,
it is better expressed and more forcefully implemented by liberal democracy.
Not surprisingly, the open Catholics who decide to play this
game have not gained much, but instead have been subjected
to an endless series of humiliations to which they have
grown so accustomed that they treat them as the natural
order of things. With each new move against Christianity, be
it in vitro fertilization, so called reproductive rights or a
rehabilitation of a new sexual disorder. They are the first
to defend it cheerfully, arguing that in fact, nothing harmful
has happened, that it is the Catholic fundamentalists who are
the guilty parties, and that are after the Liberal Democrats
give the world a new push forward, things are in
much better shape than before. Cardinal Wazinski, being under enormous pressure,
was yielding to Communists, but finally said non possumous. Looking
at the open Catholics, it is hard to imagine that
they would be better to utter such words, let alone
think about them. No matter how far Liberal democracy pushes
its anti Christian campaign, one should rather think of the
open Catholics as a group of cheerleaders with funny pom poms,
similar to those that one can see at games in America,
encouraging their favorites to fight for progress. The sad spectacle
of what is most misleadingly called dialogue shows, as it
did in the case of Christians conversing with the Marxists
several decades ago, a dramatic asymmetry both in power and
an ideology between the two sides. In terms of power,
the liberal Democrats have practically a monopoly. They control the legislation,
directly or indirectly, influenced court rulings, and of a powerful
hold on public opinion. The Catholics are on the far margin.
The most they can do is to beg favors from
the rulers of today's world, provided those rulers happen to
be in a good mood, but do not participate in
its formation. They can only supplicate, and their supplications must
not be expressed in their own language, but in the
language of those who hold power. They ask for acceptance
of Catholicism, not as Catholics, but as a group whose
creed does not threaten liberal democracy, and can, even once
they present their case with a sufficient skill and credibility,
be considered as supportive of it. While submitting these supplications,
they are occasionally graded well by the powers that be,
But no matter how these good grades increase their self esteem,
they usually lose sight of the essence of the general conflict.
They mistake the favors bestowed on them every now and
then with the actual position of Christianity in the world.
They do not understand that the relationship between the two
is inversely proportional that the more favors are granted to
the open Catholics, the weaker the position of Catholicism, or
of Christianity in general becomes. I believe Poland is something
like ninety percent Catholic. Don't quote me on that, but
I think it was the last time I look so.
And considering they were they were under communism too, this
is a great study to see just exactly how And
I think any anyone who's a Protestant, anyone who can
see it orthodox can see it in churches, and a
lot of the churches. That's why a lot of people
have to be we got to find a good church.
How many times I get contacted by people and say,
can you point me to a church where they're not
going to talk about Israel? Part six. One can look
at Christianity in the modern world, and in Europe in particular,
from the vantage point of an insider or an outsider.
The first is the Christians, to whom the presence of
religion in the modern world is vitally important. He interprets,
and with good reason, the war against Christianity is a
process through which the West has been moving away from
religion in the proper sense of the word towards some
form of civil, real life religion, the type that Rousseau
wrote about, supplemented with a few new ingredients. He fears
that this new creed will turn into an idolatry of
the existing system and its ideology, the creed according to
which the ultimate criterion of being good Christian will be
the enthusiasm with which one welcomes the progress of liberal
democracy in politics and ideology, and the readiness with which
one gives Christian legitimacy to the new acts of capitulation.
Any Christian in America knows what this is. I don't
care what your what church you go to. These fears
alass are not unfounded. For instance, it has become a
common practice at papal teachings as well as other fundamental
documents of Christianity are being assessed in light of the
liberal democratic ideology, as if this was the highest tribunal
whose verdicts the Catholics must humbly respect. The case in
point is the reception of the Sentissimus Enis John paul
the Second's important and cyclical which has been praised or
criticized from exactly the same perspective which is its attitudes
attitude to democracy. Some praise to Pope for having spoken
up in favor of democracy and of the free market,
while others rebuke them for having been sufficiently committed to
democracy and the market not sufficiently committed to democracy and
the market economy. The former praised them as a good democrat,
while the latter undermined his democratic and free market credibility.
That's such an evaluation of the Pope's words is seriously flawed,
is beyond the comprehension of modern men. Fewer and fewer
people take seriously the notion that there may be some
other criteria of assessment, not necessarily liberal democratic, and more
important than these, and that perhaps it is in the
light of as well as in the humble respect of
the criteria, that the liberal Democrats should look critically at
their own praise suppositions and at the political system they
have been thoughtlessly defending. All Christians who believe that the
liberal democratic ideology is like an ordinary coat, no different
from any other, that they can put on to be
able to move around more easily and comfortably, but inside
which they will still remain the same Christians make a mistake,
and a double one to boot. The first mistake is
a wrong choice of strategy. The liberal democracy ideology uses
no matter that it does, it does so fraudulently. The
rhetoric of multiculturalism, which is supposed to give justice to
the existence of different cultures, which precisely because they are different,
are said to contribute to the richness and diversity of society.
But if this were true, then Christians should compete with
others for a visible presence and for influence. After all,
that is what the coexistence of different groups in a
liberal democracy should amount to, and in order to be
a successful competitor, they should act as an energetic and
full blooded group, strongly committed to their cause, openly determined
to imprint their marek the world. The opposite strategy, obliterating
the boundaries, diluting their message in liberal jargon, cajoling the
ideas idols of modernity, paying homage to today's superstitions, self
effacing their identity, condemns Christians to a sad defeat with
no dignity and no progeny. The second mistake is to
ignore the fact that liberal democratic ideology has long since
ceased to be open if it ever was, and has
entered a stage of rigid dogmatization. The more conquests it makes,
the less the victors are willing to show clemency to
anyone outside the winning forces. The Christians who put on
humble faces and declare their readiness to seek a common
ground of action for a better world stand no chance
to survive, regardless of how far in their self repudiation
they go. Sooner or later they will have to sign
an unconditional surrender and to join the system with no
opt out and no conscious clauses, or in the events
of sudden death declaration of non possumus, they will be
instantly degraded to the position of a condemptible, contemptible enemy
of liberal democracy. So far, nothing indicates that the regime
will lose its ideological momentum. But the fate of Christianity
and a liberal democracy can only be viewed from an external,
non Christian perspective. Those who are not Christians, and as
sometimes happens, do not like Christianity, can feel shoden freud
looking at the problems this religion encounters in the modern world,
particularly a disturbing rapidity of secularization. However, such a reaction
is short sighted. Christianity is not just a religion, but
a vital spiritual element of Western identity, something that allowed
Europe to maintain a strong sense of community, linking the
ancient with the modern and absorbing into it itself a
variety of intellectual inspirations. By rejecting Christianity, after having marginalized
a classical heritage, Europe and indeed the entire West, not
only slides into cultural aridity, a process noticeable for some time,
but also falls under the smothering monopoly of one ideology,
whose uniformity is being cleverly concealed by the deafening rhetoric
of diversity that has been pouring into people's minds at
all occasions and in all contexts. Christianity is the last
great force that offers a viable alternative to the tediousness
of liberal democratic anthropology in this respect, that is closer
to the classical rather than the modern view of human nature.
With Christianity being driven out of the main tract, the
liberal democratic man, unchallenged and totally secure in his rule,
will become a soul master of today's imagination, apidictically determining
the boundaries of human nature, and at the very outset,
disavowing everything that dares to reach beyond his narrow perspective.
The only thing he will be capable of doing is occasional,
albeit capricious generosity, and tolerating some form of dissonance at
the far peripheries of his empire. Without a strong competitor,
the liberal democratic man will reign over human aspirations like
a tyrant. There will appear no one who would dare
or be ready in compliance with the existing rules to
call his reign into question. The rules that exist do
not permit such extravagant acts, and a supposition that there
might be other rules has long since been discarded as absurd.
One can, of course, imagine that the liberal democratic monopoly
will eventually begin to crack, and the new centrifugal forces
from causes yet unfathomed, will be set in motion. Common
sense and experience tell us that it is not possible
for people to be lulled by one ideology forever and
to have their emotions and thoughts organized always and in
the same way. The war against the Christian heritage, however,
may have that this unpleasant consequence. When the renewal comes,
it will start from a much lower level. Than the
one reached previously by European culture through Christianity. Liberal democratic
man in order to shake out his habits, superstitions, prejudices,
dogmas self mystification, hypocrisy, and many other faults inborn as
well as those acquired through a prolonged period of monopolistic rule,
will have before him a much harder road than did
the previous rulers of the human imagination. He is more stubborn,
more narrow minded, and clearly less willing to learn from others.
The rediscovery of the revelation after denigrating that part of
human nature that allowed its prior acceptance, will require new
stimuli and a new surge of spiritual energy, of which
we cannot, in the time of growing secularization, say anything
definite or even whether they will be at all possible.
That is the meat of the text. We are going
to move on to the conclusion. Conclusion One can look
at the affinity between communism and liberal democracy from both
a narrow and a wider perspective. The narrow point of
view may lead us to a sad conclusion that the
modern Western world never really understood the communists experience quite correctly,
and if it did, it never took seriously the lessons
that followed from it. When looked at more broadly, the
examination of these of those affinities may give grounds it
for a conclusion more daring, namely, that the two regimes
stem from the same root, or more precisely, from the
same not particularly good inclination of modern men, persistently revealing
itself under different political circumstances. This is assuredly not the
only disquieting inclination that modern man has given into bearing
in mind the bloody history of Europe and America in
the last centuries, but the story of the relationship between
communism and liberal democracy is of particular importance, as it
is about the systems that were hailed and sincerely believed
to be the greatest hopes of mankind. The story is
thus not only about politics, but also indirectly about the
aspirations and dreams of modern man. This book argued that
the modern man, who was the inspiring force of the
two political systems, was a mediocrity not by nature, but
so to speak, by design, and from the beginning was
expected to be indifferent to great moral challenges and unaware
of the danger of a moral fall. Such was more
or less the picture that the early modern thinkers created,
mostly in oppositions to the classical and Christian views of
human nature, which within a few centuries managed to overcome
virtually all of its competitors. Both regimes imagine man as
a creature of common qualities, whose commonness made him perceive
the world through his own narrow vision, and was therefore
naturally inclined to reduce art, ideas and education, contrary to
the old view which had attributed them, and elevating power
to his own dimensions. I cannot refrain from making a
personal note. The Poles could see the communist man in
his full splendor during the early stages of communism, when,
after having arrived on the Soviet tanks, he was enforcing
the construction of the new regime in a society that
had already been decimated and terrorized by the German occupation.
A homo novus, uneducated, vulgar, primitive, having nothing but contemporate
tradition for the Polish, imponderables for history, culture, and anything subtle, genteel, elegant, beautiful,
or spiritual. He was carrying out the destruction of social classes,
the landed gentry, the middle class, to peasantry, the aristocracy,
and even the working class, whose interests he pretended to impersonate.
He gave the Communist Party his will and his soul,
and in return, the party provided him with the formidable
instruments of power, as well as with what seemed to
him the complete knowledge of the world. He did it
job with a ruthlessness unmitigated by any prohibitions. Polish society
underwent a profound and largely irreversible process of the destruction
of culture. Life became boorish, social norms lost their force,
and ugliness replaced beauty. One had an impression that the
country fell into the hands of the barbarians. Later on,
the communist man acquired some polishing which did not touch
his essence, but the damage could not be undone. The
spectacular manifestation of Soviet barbarism, for which the Polish language
had a lot of colorful expressions, was not a local phenomenon,
but occurred in all the countries that came under a
communist rule. When the communist order stabilized in the Soviet type,
thugs retired or were pushed aside. There came a new
generation of communists, no less vulgar than their predecessors, but
definitely not so brutal, presumably because of a fairly long
period of peace. They expressed their desires in the communist
news speak that delineated the boundaries of their imagination and
mental possibilities. Their lack of cultivation did not prevent them
from having mastered a remarkable dexterity and moving within the
intricate mechanisms of the communist bureaucracy, which was allotting privileges, benefits, property,
and power. The second time we encountered a new wave
of barbarism was immediately after the fall of communism. Naive
people thought that after the disappearance of the old regime,
a substantial part of the social fabric that had had
destroyed would be restored, and that freely elected governments in
a liberated society would make an attempt to do so,
or at least that the opening of the free space
would boost, as it did during the first Solidarity period
in nineteen eighty nineteen eighty one, human energy to pursue
the noble goals the old regime had debased. But whoever
expected this was disappointed. Instead, we witnessed an invasion by
another tribe of new men, boisterous and savage. The areas
of freedom created by the crumbling of the old oil
became almost immediately occupied by the people, coming, as it seemed,
out of nowhere, in such great numbers that their victory
was practically a blitzkrieg. Their strikingly loudish manners and course
language did not have their origin in communism, but as
many found astonishing in the patterns, or rather anti patterns,
that developed in Western liberal democracies. Of course, the new
order was different and had different mechanisms, but despite the differences,
it was directed against the social forms, type of conduct, norms,
and practices to which the old order had been Also hostile,
life underwent further vulgarization. The few practices and social norms
that survived the previous invasion were subject to attacks by
the new forces of barbarism. The ugliness of communist Poland
did not disappear, and beauty was as much a rarity
as it had been before. The new barbarians could hardly
be called Bolsheviks or Soviet thugs, but there was something
in their attitude that led them led to seek to
seeking similarities with their predecessors. Their vulgarity was so to
speak of the second order, as opposed to that which
had been seen in communist Poland, and which had been
something primorial, which had had something primorial about primordial about it.
What happened in the Liberal Democracy did not result from
the absence of culture, and there was nothing natural about it,
nor did it come from outside of the realm of civilization,
in that it differed from the vulgarity of the Communists, who,
before they captured power in Poland had lived in environments
practically unaffected by Polish culture. Having been long exposed to
the Soviet influence. They felt an intense instinctive at antipathy
toward the West as such, not knowing exactly what it was,
and in particular for all forms of civilized conduct and propriety,
which they thought both decadent and perfidious. The new barbarians
of the Liberal Democracy, on the other hand, were products
of the West, which had a certain stage of its
history turned against its own culture. The respect for its
achievements was gone, replaced by contempt the rules of civility
and propriety derided. To put it simply, the vulgarity of
the communist system was pre cultural, while that of liberal
democracy is post cultural. In both systems, man compensated for
his communists with the image of a large, well functioning
system communism in one case, in liberal democracy in the other, which,
through the pursuits of collective goals equality for all, peace, prosperity, etc.
Released them from a necessity to aspire to the ideals that,
from the perspective of the political system might look redundant.
It is therefore hardly surprising that just as communism or
socialism was a favorite word of the communist man, democracy
has been in such a word for the liberal democratic man.
The former liked to say, But in communism, because in
socialism and such life, and the argument of communism was
always the ultimate argument and by definition irrefutable. The latter
love saying always would do piety mixed with a touch
of audacity. But in democracy, and because of democracy, and
the argument of democracy refutes all others. The number and
frequency of the words communism or socialism and communist or
socialist in the enon regime are equal to the number
and frequency of the words democracy and democratic in the
new regime. The eagerness to use these words as Trump's
what not thought by the users to be a symptom
of intellectual and moral capitulation, but rather in quite sincerely
a manifestation of independence, courage, assertiveness, and autonomy. To a
mediocre man, an organic assimilation with the system was the
easiest way to develop a conviction of being exceptional. Try
to what many people think. The modern liberal democratic world
does not deviate much in many important aspects from the
world that the communist man dreamed about, and that, despite
the enormous collective effort he could not build within the
communist institutions. There are differences, to be sure, but they
are not so vast that they could be gratefully and
unconditionally accepted by someone who has had first and experience
with both systems and then moved from one to the other.
It would not be perhaps inaccurate to say that the
essence of the modern man's dream has come true, or,
more modestly, that this process is still in progress. He
has managed to divest himself with the moral obligations that
made his life difficult, and is apparently planning to get
rid of those that still remain. The sad state of affairs, however,
does not make him despair. He has troubled neither by
raging ideology that paralyzes his mind through stultifying stereotypes, nor
by politicization, nor by the sterility of culture and the
triumph of vulgarity. Even if he can notice that all
these regrettable developments and be sometimes annoyed by them, even
if sometimes the thought passes through his mind similar the
similar things happened in communism, he remains unperturbed and quickly
convinces himself that replacing them with something else is impossible,
and if it were possible, the results would be for
the reasons he does not bother to reflect upon disastrous.
So the liberal democrats orcrats are quite right when they
keep suggesting that the world has come to an end,
and that if it should continue to exist in a
satisfactory way, it must be developed in the same vein.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that some new rights
will be invented to make everything yet more moral, that
the feminist ideology and its spin offs will prove to
be even more absurd than before, that people who so
profoundly worship their intellectual independence will once again surprise everyone
by meekly adopting it all. We can imagine a literature
that will speak in increasingly about nothing, and the diversity
rhetoric even more raucous and more masking of the expanding uniformity.
But all this will yet will be yet another scene
in the same final chapter of a long story that
historically began in the early modern period, but that had
its long vorgeschichte. That word is wow vorgeschichte. This chapter
will include the fulfillment of what communism plan, but what
to the immeasurable regrets of its adherents failed, namely man's
integration with the regime and the regime with men. Whether
the future of human history will add some new chapters,
we cannot say, but such a scenario seems, upon the
authority of common sense likely. But the issue is not
that new impulses, fashions, mood swings, major events, and other
unpredictable factors will always emerge to affect the course of
history and people's perceptions of it. The real change will
come only when the current view of man spends itself
and is considered inadequate. Only then will other stories develop
or be revived, the former as a result of new experiences,
the latter as a result of reactivating the long dormant
areas of collective memory, allowing a different look at human
fate and the dreams through which individuals and communities express
their aspirations. This course of events surely cannot be ruled out,
although today the mere fact of considering it provokes anger
and mockery by those who lost the habit of even
contemplating such playful peregrinations of the human mind and feel
a superstitious fear of leaving the secure territories of liberal
democratic orthodoxy. But there exists yet another possibility. Perhaps the
long story reaching denouement in its last chapter that modernity
divulged to us is not just one of many stories
that can be replaced by another, but a basic truth
about modern man, who, after many adventures, downfalls, in a sense,
exultations and tribulations, after following many cameras and surrendering to
many temptations, finally arrives at the accurate recognition of who
he is. If this indeed were the case, then further
fundamental changes in human history would no longer be possible
accept changes. For the worse, Such an eventuality would be
for some a comforting testimony that man finally learned how
to live in a sustainable harmony with his nature. For others,
it will be a final confirmation that his mediocrity is inveterate.
That is it. Let me go back and look at
something real quick first yep twenty sixteen. This was published
in two thousand seen first American edition. So this book
was first published in Polish in twenty twelve under the
title Triumph. I do not know what that says, but
I will translate it when I disconnect. Thank you for
joining me for another book reading. The next one will
be something I think will gain a lot of interest,
maybe even some widespread interests. So be on the lookout
for the first episode dropping of the next book that
I read. And now I'm not going to tell you
what it is. Take care everyone. Thank you,