Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus, part VI: Politics and Religion

This is an article in a series. Here are the others:

Church History: What Went Wrong? part 1
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part II
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part III: Allegory
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part IV: Allegory
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus: part V: Male and Female
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus, part VI: Politics and Religion

Politics and Religion, Male and Female, in Light of the Garden of Eden

To continue, male and female are rightism and leftism, conservatism and liberalism because this paradigm transfers without modification from the carnal to the spiritual to describe what they are and how they function theologically. They are the composition, the behavior, but also and most importantly they are the limits of what is possible for them.

In carnal application to the idea of limits to male and female and their products, or the extent to which improvement is possible, or a new paradigm emerging from them that makes them more or better than they are, it is obvious this expectation of improvement and innovation is through reproduction, as I have covered. The male, the stronger, taller, the more robust and dominant, equipped with a means of entering and leaving behind his essence within the more reactive, receptive, smaller and less forceful female, and initiates conception. Male and female are ontological equals in this but differ in right/left morphology and right/left behavior. From this merged duality, new life comes.

Every couple expects or hopes that their offspring will be better off or better people than themselves as a new creature. Every couple wonders and hopes that their offspring will be an influential leader that will make positive changes to the world, perhaps the President, perhaps a scientist that will discover how to defeat some new disease. Male and Female in spirituality are the same.

Spirituality, Male and Female pertain to opinion, theory, learning, knowledge, wisdom, philosophy, theology with respect to progress. The “right” lobe, in distinction from the “left,” is about holding back to what is known instead of blind innovation, to axioms of philosophy and logic instead of the needs of sensibility, interpretation from established hermeneutical rule instead of personal subjective priorities in meaning. Maleness in this spiritual, religious and philosophical relationship wants to preserve and tends to be satisfied by what belief is working with and has proven to work or be true, bringing it to its full potential in Man without radical modification. Spiritual femaleness wants something else entirely and is naturally uncomfortable with what is presently conventional, established and believed. In respect to their product, the male/female paradigm is about the belief essentially in the success of the prophecy that through the interaction of these two, or, when one leads the other in unity, that revelation (life), will come better than now exists in its progenitors.

However, as I said, left and right define both what they are and how they behave as much as their limits, and their prophecy, so to speak, is always an unsure one in the fallen world. One, an unsureness of an outcome that is not perfectly known. This is the good version because at least the eye is on the revelational product. The other, the bad one, is an unsureness of the revelational product itself.

For Christianity, since understanding this fact is so crucial and because there is such a Christian tendency to follow either side only by their ability to push a bare narrative that invites a naive or emotional acceptance, let me go directly to the comparison of theology to politics in the male/female paradigm. This will show that choosing one side or another is not a choice for liberalism or conservatism, but the choice of leftism and rightism together, equals and at peace, in a revelational paradigm instead. When this paradigm is chosen there is then only one choice to be made as to what Revelation is, and around what vital center our theology is to orbit.

Mostly, overwhelmingly, the interaction of the tendencies of natural conservative and liberal thought is not “good” as God intended, not a means to the equalization of extremes that results in peace and unity before and after transcendent disclosure. They are just a means, outside of Eden, to justify the eschewing of revelation, misidentifying it, relegating it, abusing it, reviling it and rejecting it. It’s also an ordained means of forestalling the time an inevitable and catastrophic failure comes. But, in the meantime. we have a choice of escape, where the failure of the world is not also applied to us.

Politics

Conservative and liberal politics are a good thing for the carnal world, but deadly for the Christian faith. For thousands of years, the male conservative principle dominated the world, doing so at the expense and relegation of the female left. Patriarchal monarchies and dictatorships were the default up to the 18th century all over the world. It is also true that these times were often associated with social abuse, corruption, and cruelty. This is, of course, is not to be not a judgment on a dominant male paradigm, but considered only in context with the involuntary primitive state in which it is operated. When life is hard, everything is hard.

When life is under threat, when disease runs rampant without cure, when learning is meager, when its “poor, nasty, brutish and short”¹, we are mostly interested in staying alive. There is no time for gender norming, encounter groups, racial sensitivity, inclusion, and sensitivity training. Innovation is slow because the daily time that must be spent mostly around gathering or growing food, fighting men and animals raiding your supplies, getting through the day with intense pain and handicaps from disease and injury. Roads are dirt filled with animal dung, rats carry fleas that transmit plague that wipe out hundreds of thousands, travel is by foot or on horseback. Under these conditions, strength, force and Law reigns, or you die. Maleness is taking what is given to you and slogging through it. But then, through great fortitude, bravery, and endurance, bringing it up to its full potential to stabilize life.

The transgressions of the male principle in this are not to be minimized, for there is wanton brutality going on, but overall it is culpable only because of the lack of actionable alternatives. These alternatives to the state of nature are introduced by appropriating, in times of relative peace and ease, the female principle, engaging in innovation and more subjectivity. Taking the chance to do something new when the male principle secures the chance to do so.

This also applies to spirituality. When there is some relief from danger and some downtime, we can sit around and reflect on higher things. Work is male, leisure is female. Conservative maleness then “mates” with the female principle and starts thinking about “God,” “good,” “evil,” “truth.” This is the male principle being more accommodating and accepting of the female principle as a part of him, the female being left rise up to functional parity in respect to things beyond the body.

The male principle must remain in control during this process or the urge to go too far, to waste too much time, to engage in play, speculation, theory and emotion instead of work, which saps the strength of the whole enterprise brings it to nothing. These concepts are at first thought to apply almost exclusively to the use, improvement, and acquisition of objective things because the world was so object-oriented due to its primitive condition. The theory is that as time goes on, when the female principle and the male principle start to come into close “love” and agreement, so speak, they produce better and better spiritual offspring in invention and ideas. In this, the male will begin to center more on the aspect of law and the female that of freedom.

Skipping, for the sake of time, through all the ages of civilization, the zenith of this relationship came during the Enlightenment (with all due respect to the East, they never had anything like this). Technology, farming, industry, urbanization, and, particularly, the social organization became much more efficient and systematized. In religion, philosophy, and science, however, the male/female parity started to show a preference for the feminine lobe after their parity was reached.

In religion, philosophy, science, politics, and technology, what happens is that once you achieve a stable organization, establish all the foundational products, the continued use of the female principle in innovation can now only be for the purpose of making it dominant and overtaking the male side since it appears that if a lot is good then more is better. The dominance of the female half, however, will now increasingly come to mean, in a role reversal from time past, the dominance and suppression of the male principle to continue the improvement of man and the world, both for his world and his spirit. And this is catastrophic.

What is not seen is that this is not progress, an upswing to utopia with femininity in control, but a reversal of the slide back into a state of nature from the opposite end. The problem that we run into is that the more you minimize reality, order and force, the male lobe, and maximize the priority of innovation freedom dominating those qualities, the more you get a respectability and justification of the idea of illusion, a need for more and more asymmetrical thought, irrationality and emotion, the primacy of subjectivity. These are by definition self-controlled states meant to be under strict control, or else the consequences of the fulfillment of the implications of the self-controlled state rules.

Progress is then not an upward swing toward illumination, revelation, or even stability because the entropic world places an upper limit on the extent of progress, as progress becomes only a reaching for an ever faster travel time to worlds we know are dead but the feminine principle still insists we are to hold reaching them the highest human of aspirations². Perfection is predicted but the only prediction is its failure because of the ceiling on improving matter. Curing a disease becomes a prophecy of immortality, which is just as far from us as faster than light travel when we we are encoded for death. Prophecies change to those of glory for mankind instead of peace by an act of God, neither of which can be fulfilled unless insular “man” is perfectible through work or the “God” concept is perfectible through insular thought.

Enlightenment Liberalism

Just before the enlightenment, there was the Protestant Reformation of Luther and the scientific revolution of Copernicus and Vesalius. This is the first powerful example of the left beginning to overcome and being preferred to the right that will lead down, not up.

Luther and Galileo are the left lobe rising in the right, as the urge to pierce what is established and immanent into outer realms to the breaking of tradition, to moving out instead of staying put. They were concerned with transcendence but applied to the outer planets and other narratives. Luther combined them both in religious innovation and discovery to mine the Bible for this alternate path. The planets, applied to Luther, become the question of “God,” or for Copernicus the question of the limits and behavior of ultimate reality beyond our earth. The Fabric of the Human Body by Vesalius is the same, for Luther not a question of the body but of the inner workings of man’s spirit.

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