Reps for Jesus

 The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung upon a gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs of something that was more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it. 

(G.K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas)

While on Twitter the other day, this particular tweet thread caught my eye;

Now, I've got to admit that excesses of any kind are a sign of mental imbalance but the overall tone of that comment, and later ones, suggested that author was disparaging the idea of a "muscular Christianity".  Now the point of this post is not to rag on the author of those comments but to point towards what I think is a persistent tendency in Christian thought and one that has caused a lot of untold harm especially with regard to the Christian understanding of man.

Machialvelli, when it came to institutions, was fond of making a distinction between the "formal" and the "real".  The formal being that which was publicly expressed and the real was what actually happened.  Now Christian, especially Catholic theology, tends to be a formal acknowledgement of the goodness of the created world but in practice there tends to be strong suspicion of it.  The Christian "tradition" itself, tends to have a strong Platonic bent to it, emphasising a the flesh/spirit duality, with this duality having an implicit hierarchical aspect to it: the spirit being "higher" than the flesh.  Giving weight to this view are certain oft quoted texts in the Bible. So when JG states that a disparaging of the body is one of its strengths he is certainly justified by "tradition" for his view.

Certainly the Bible cautions about following the ways of the flesh, but I really can't find an endorsement of neglecting it entirely or pretending that it doesn't matter. Much like the rider of horse, the role of the spirit is to guide the flesh and not let the horse lead the way. Platonism certainly doesn't dispute this, however the way it approaches the subject it's as if the well being of the horse doesn't matter at all. In fact, especially among the religious ascetics, there seems to be a certain notion that treating the horse badly or neglecting is a virtue. Chesterton recognised this as well;

This Platonic influence could be seen particularly in the fact that "the earlier school of Augustine and even of Anselm had [treated] the soul as the only necessary treasure, wrapped for a time in a negligible napkin." Chesterton even detects in the Greek theological tradition "a sort of dried-up Platonism" that translated into "the last indeed noble abstractions," but too far removed from the concrete world, the consequence being that the Logos of the Byzantine Greeks "was the Word, but not the Word made Flesh." As a result, "the earlier Christian ages had been excessively anti-corporeal and too near the danger line of Manichaean mysticism."

and;

The truth is that the historical Catholic Church began by being Platonist; by being rather too Platonist. Platonism was in that golden Greek air that was breathed by the first great Greek theologians. The Christian Fathers were much more like the Neo-Platonists than were the scholars of the Renaissance; who were only Neo-Neo-Platonists. For Chrysostom or Basil it was as ordinary and normal to think in terms of the Logos, or the Wisdom which is the aim of philosophers, as it is to any men of any religion today to talk about social problems or progress or the economic crisis throughout the world. St. Augustine followed a natural mental evolution when he was a Platonist before he was a Manichean, and a Manichean before he was a Christian. And it was exactly in that last association that the first faint hint, of the danger of being too Platonist, may be seen.

This Platonic tradition had caused serious problems in the Church that there was a serious danger of incursion of Islamic philosphy into Christiandom (I don't want to go into to this now for the sake of brevity). Theologically, the real blow to this NeoPlatonistic view of the person was dealt by the work of St Thomas Aquinas who was able to reconcile Aritistolean hylomorphism with Christianity. i.e  the Man was both spirit and flesh. Again, quoting Chesterton,

In a word, St. Thomas was making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian. This is not a paradox but a plain truism, which can only be missed by those who may know what is meant by an Aristotelian, but have simply forgotten what is meant by a Christian. As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.

I really want to emphasise this point, Christianity emphasises that sanctity and matter are conjoined.  The view espoused by JB is explicitly rejected by Aquinas. This is why actions of the flesh impact upon the spirit, it's because you dealing with one thing possessing two different qualities rather than two separate discrete things. What we do with our bodies affects our souls. Matter has some dignity.

Now while Christianity, Catholicism in particular, may affirm the teaching of St Thomas, the manichean Neoplatonist tendency is still strong in the Church. Historically, the Church has been quietly supportive of mortification of the flesh in the pursuit of sanctity but has remained rather silent or very hostile on the subject of the perfection of the flesh in pursuit of sanctity. Fasting for Jesus is good but doing reps for Jesus is suspect. But why is fatness less an evil than fornication? Why is the prudent pursuit of physical perfection a morally suspect thing?

Even in the understanding of evil, the tradition of the Church still operates on Neoplatonist lines. The sin of gluttony is "abstracted" into the broader sin of excessive sensuality. Maybe I've not read a lot but I've never seen gluttony pointed out as an offence against the body, a mutilating sin. For a Neoplatonist it doesn't matter since the body is not important. And that's the problem with Neoplatonism it neglects realities for theories. The idea is more important than the substance.

And yet the logical consequence of a Thomistic theology is that prudent perfection of the body should be spiritually beneficial.  If the object of Caritas is to perfect the form of the thing considered then its operation on the flesh is to perfect it. Now, for the spergs out there, I'm not advocating bodily perfection at the expense of the all the other facets of life a man must attend to, rather there needs to be a prudent balance, with the recognition that the neglect of the body is a sin. Doing a few reps for Jesus is a corrective.

Rules of the Club

He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth.

(Matthew 12:30)

As I've said before, any restoration of the West is going to have to involve a recongition of the importance of Christianity in the formation of Western identity. Our "slouch to Gomorrah" has primarily come about from Western society's rejection and, in some instance, perversion of its Christian faith. It follows therefore that any restorative movement is going to have to acknowledge the role of Christianity in any reinvigoration of the West.

So where does it leave the others, who neither have faith or a Christian heritage.

It may surprise many of you that I have a very strong sympathy with regard to honest Atheism. My own predilections are strongly empirical and I can understand how a man looking at the universe around him sees no God.  The apparently inert response of a supposedly loving and active God in a world of so much injustice and evil is a very strong argument against his existence. Looking at the world around me, the empirical data, superficially, is powerful evidence against His existence and it's sometimes only the gift of Faith that lets you see God when the rest of your senses are telling you He is not there.

Christian theology affirms that faith is a supernatural gift doled out to those whom it pleases Him. And why God chooses to dole it out to some rather that others is a mystery. I certainly didn't warrant it and I know plenty of other better people than myself who don't believe.

Now this poses a problem. As a Christian, how can I expect the non believers to believe in the things that God has chosen to withhold from them? How can I, in good faith, expect them to believe in stuff that I wouldn't believe if I hadn't been given faith? The answer is, I can't.

Expecting an atheist to believe in God is like expecting me to deny him, a violation of conscience. Furthermore, it's contra Caritas, which protects conscience.

So given the hugely influential presence of Christianity on European identity can an Atheist or Jew be part of the European Right?

As I've said before, the fundamental criteria of Rightism is commitment to the Truth.  But as God seems to dole out the supernatural gift of Faith to whomever he pleases and he withholds from some, I don't see any obligation for non believers to uphold the articles of Christian faith which from their perspective, they don't believe to be true.  However, I do expect them to be honest in all other things.

In fact, some of the writers that have been most acknowledging of the Christian tradition, have been atheists such as Theodore Dalrymple and John Gray.  Gray, particularly, recently savaged Steven Pinkier's book and exposed it for the  propaganda polemic it was. One doesn't have to believe in the Christian religion to acknowledge its role and social utility in the formation of the West. But what characterises these atheists, as opposed to the New Atheists, is their honesty.

As I see it criteria for non Christian inclusion in the European right are;

a) Honesty with regard to the facts of European history and empirical observation.
b) A goodwill towards Christianity, which at its bare minimum is a tolerance of it.

Exorcism

What unites the Left, the "Alt- Right" and Neoconservatism is a contempt of Christianity.  For the Left,  Christianity, with it's regressive morality, is seen as an instrument of exclusion, creating minorities that are unable to achieve full acceptance and equality within the Christian schema. For the Right, Christianity "is cucked" especially with regard to the racial question and is seen as a source of civilisational weakness. For the Neocons, Christianity is problematic, since its civilisational triumph poses a direct challenge to the concept of man as espoused by Atheism, Islam, and Judaism.  The Left and Right directly challenge Christianity, Neoconservatism tries to explain it away.

However, at a deeper level, what unites all three is a fundamental dishonesty with regard to historical fact which aims to either misrepresent Christianity or downplay its role in Western civilisation. It's not that these movements haven't any valid critique of Christianity, rather, their fundamental understanding of Christianity can be rebutted by a cursory perusal of the facts. These movements are ultimately built on lies.

By accepting the de facto framing of our current civilisational battle as being one of Right vs Left, without actually defining what these terms mean, has resulted in the Right being composed of Christian and anti-Christian elements, fundamentally crippling any resistance to the Left.  For the Christian, the problem is that he has to fight not only the anti-Christian on the left but also the anti-Christian on the  right. The net result is that the Left wins most of the time while anti-Christianity wins all of the time. Meanwhile the West slouches towards Gomorrah.

As I've attempted to show on this blog before, Fascism and all the other incarnations of Right modernism have more in common with the Left than the Christian Right. They are the enemy within.

Recent events have demonstrated just how destructive the modernist Right can be.  The Alternate Right initially started off as viable alternative to mainstream conservatism, slowly gaining cultural traction until the movement was co-opted by the Spencer types. The resulting farce crippled the movement and politically alienated it. We're back to square one.

The reason why Spencer and his ilk were able to co-opt and infiltrate is because the nascent alt-Right did not have "purity tests" i.e. ideological standards by which to expel them. Being anti-Left and anti-GOP were not enough since it left  the door open for degenerates anti-Christian Modernists. Is it any surprise then that Milo ended up being the mouthpiece of the Alt-Right.

Once again the Left won and the Christians lost. It's almost as if it were planned.

Any fair assessment of Western identity cannot ignore the pivotal influence of Christianity on it.  Attempts to deny or explain away the Christian component of Western Civilisation are quite simply lies, and incompatible with the Western conception of man or the facts of history. Sure, there were other influences which were non-Christian and there were places where Christianity stumbled but to deny its formative influence on Western Civilisation is proof of malice.

As I see it, any future Dissident Right needs to police its membership to prevent subversion by Right Modernists. The "purity tests" to be used are;

a) A commitment to the Truth.
b) A recognition of the formative role of Christianity in Western Identity.
c) A commitment to Christian social morals-if not necessarily belief.

As I see it, these three tests are our garlic, holy water and crucifix that we use to exorcise the modernists from any re-emergent Dissident Right movement.

Thoughts

In case anyone is interested there is an interesting lecture given by George Hawley: Is the Alt-Right Collapsing.  Hawley's academic specialisation is in the non-mainstream Right. I've read his book, The Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism and, like his lecture, thought it a fair and balanced work.

I don't think Hawley gets everything right, but his main contention, that the Alt-Right is dying, is in my opinion correct.  Hawley lays the blame for the failure of the movement on several factors, the principle ones being its explicit white nationalism and it National Socialist "Optics" which worked to drive the normies away.

Hawley's done a fair amount of work on the Alt-Right, and though it really wasn't mentioned much at all in this talk--though he's spoken about it in other places considerably--is the explicit anti-Christian bias inherent to it. For Christian people like myself, Anti-Christian Modernism v2.0 is just as repellent as Anti-Christian Modernism v1.0.  For the Christian, there's not really much difference between being Gulaged by a Commie or Auschwitzed by a Nazi. The Alt-Right was really the same turd in a different package.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the whole Spenceresque co-option of the non-mainstream-Right was how many non-Natsocs were sympathetic to them. I honestly felt I was a voice in the wilderness at times and it's one of the reasons I've really lost much of my urge to blog. What's the point when so many are so easily led astray.  A healthy Right would have purged Spencer and his ilk immediately on the grounds that their ideology was incompatible with that of the Right.

It has always been this blog's contention that the foundational stone of European civilisation was Christianity and any restorative movement which ignores this pillar, or one that advocates doctrines which are contrary to it, is merely another version of error. For the Rightist, the key issue is not one of Right or Left but one of right or wrong. Sure, there are contingencies such as race, geography and history which impacted upon European civilisational development but these factors on their own do not explain the European phenomenon.

That's why any movement which denies it ain't worth shit and is simply modernism or paganism in another package. The defining event which initiated European civilisational decline has been de-Christianisation.  Our secular culture is at the peak of its technical prowess and probably has the most educated population in history yet were are in a civilisational death spiral which increases in velocity in proportion to the decline of religious observance. You don't have to believe it but the correlation is very, very good.

But to be charitable to the Alt-Right--I'm Christian, remember--some of their criticisms of Christianity may have some validity. The depopulation of the Christian Churches may not just simply be due to the disobedience of an ungrateful people, rather, it could be due to the repulsion at being fed an adulterated product. The Kumbaya Christianity being fed to flock today seems a adulterated and watered down version of the faith of the past. That does not mean that return to the past is an antidote to the ills of today. After all, it was the problems of the past that gave birth to the monster of modernity. Change is not the problem, change in the wrong direction is.

If politics is downstream from culture then problem is to fix culture before you can fix politics. The American founding fathers knew that no constitution would restrain a corrupt people, virtue was needed. And you ain't going to build virtue without religion. The common man as a utilitarian philosopher is pie-in-the-sky bullshit.  Men need rules to live by.

That's why any restorative project for the West has to be based on the Christian religion.

Otherwise it's a waste of time.

Merry Christmas

Firstly, I'd like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

It's been a year of mixed blessings and I must admit that some of them have put me in a bit of a funk. Over here in Australia, the country overwhelmingly voted in favor of the legal recognition of Same Sex Marriage. The Euthanasia Laws were passed in my home state and the lack of any coherent response by the "Right" reinforced its impotence. Right "victories" were non existent.

Globally, the war in Syria seems to have taken a turn for the better with the intervention of Putin, but on the other hand there wasn't much else. Trump hasn't really been doing much "winning", the U.K. still hasn't left the EU. Poland is being hassled by Germany the EU, Europe's demographic disaster continues. North Korea continues to develop its nukes with China's covert blessing and a showdown there is eventually going to happen. As for the the economy of the West...tick, tick, tick.

Culturally, the Dissident Right seems to have lost some of its steam with neoreaction going particularly quiet. From my perspective the Dissident Right seems to be aimless and drifting at the moment. On the bright side,  the cabal sympathetic to Richard Spencer seems to have lost a lot of its clout and presence on the dissident forums. This is a good thing.

I'm all for slogging things out when the going is hard but the lack of meaningful victories is demoralising and I suspect that this may have contributed to my chronic writer's block. Though I haven't written, I've tried to be productive in my reading. I've particularly gained an appreciation of the Protestant author Grant Havers and his concept of Political Charity, more on this in later posts. I'm also really enjoying Eugene Weber's histories late 19th C.  France, especially the process of its "Modernisation". They've changed my thinking with regard to the nature of the Managerial State...it's not going away. And I've just started Corelli Barnett's, The Collapse of British Power and its seems very, very good.

Correlli Barnett's, Audit of War was hugely influential in my thinking and its surprising to myself that I've not read more of his work. Barnett is not Aspergy and is not looking for the "one thing" that explains it all, recognising that other factors are important. Still, something things are more important than others and its surprising that a military historian such as Barnett lays most of the blame of Britain's collapse ultimately at Evangelical Protestantism, and its atheist offspring, Enlightened Humanism:

It follows that a study of the decay of British power between 1918 and 1940 and of its collapse between 1940 and 1945 cannot be adequately conducted within the confines of military history, nor, for that matter, of political or economic history. This book therefore ranges from religion to technology; from education to foreign policy; from literature to grand strategy. Yet throughout the narrative the standpoint remains the single one of strategy — not, however, strategy in the limited sense, but total strategy: strategy, that is, conceived as encompassing all the factors relevant to preserving or extending the power of a human group in the face of rivalry from other human groups. From this standpoint, a topic like religion, for example, appears in a perhaps surprising light as a strategic factor of no less significance than first-line air strength.

The Collapse of British Power.

Barnett is onto something much bigger than just the collapse of British Power and provides a diagnosis that can be applied to much of the West.

I think that many people on the Dissident Right have been reluctant to acknowledge this angle explaining the Western decline primarily because of their own hostility to religion but I'm sensing a vibe in some of the more intelligent blogs that a restoration of religion is going to have to be entertained as a purely political or technocratic solution is not enough. How this is going to happen or how to implement it on a nation wide scale I don't know. However, I hope to do my own bit, and after I finish this post, I'm going to head off to Midnight Mass and bend my knee to the infant babe. I suggest you do the same.

Once again, Merry Christmas to you all and I hope that 2018 brings a few victories to the table.

Postmodernism

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." 

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

A while ago I got a chance to read Stephen Hicks's, Explaining Postmodernism, after Jordan Peterson tweeted out its praise. I thought it was good and for those seeking a brief introduction to the subject it's definitely worth a read.  For those who are interested, here is a review that I think is quite good.
I'm not really interested in providing a critique of the book but am more interested it's subject matter and in the implications it has on the wider culture.

At it's most basic, Postmodernism rejects the notion of an objective truth and insists on the notion that truth is socially "constructed". Right from the outset we can see that Postmodernism is opposed to Rightism, whose metaphysical fundamental premise is the existence of an objective truth. Furthermore, the way that Postmodernism sees the "truth" is as relative view point, used to assert and maintain power by the Right. Postmodernists may deny the reality of the truth but implicitly they affirm the reality of power, and their aim is to assert it on their terms.

I don't think that many Rightists fully grasp the malignancy of this concept, especially when debating the Left within the current cultural context. Whenever the Left presents some outlandish idea, there is no doubt some Rightist who sets about trying to prove them wrong, but what the Rightist fails to understand is the game he is playing and the game they are playing are totally different. Proof is irrelevant when there is no truth. Arguing against the Left using empirical facts and reason is pointless when your opponent denies the legitimacy of these things.  Which brings us to the subject of free speech.

Our current notions of free speech, based as they are on the classical liberal tradition, are premised primarily on the notion that there IS an objective truth.  They are also premised on the notions that people, especially those in power, may have erroneous ideas, and that reality calibration is only possible through the free exchange of ideas sifted through the mechanism of honest rationality, considered from a variety of viewpoints. The other implicit assumption going on here is the power is expected to yield to the truth when shown to be wrong. In other words, the classical liberal advocacy of freedom of speech was premised on several prior assumptions with regard to ontology, reason, and the rights of power and truth. The other premise is that your opponent was meant to argue in good faith. How do you argue with a person who denies these fundamental premises? More importantly, what's the point when Postmodernism asserts that is no such thing a "right opinion" or argument in the first place.

Academic freedom is likewise premised on the notion that academics should be free to pursue their studies in whatever direction they wish in the search for truth. However this concept gets turned around on its head when it comes to Postmodernism with its assertion that there is no truth.  Postmodernism effectively undermines the whole Western academic apparatus. As Chesterton said it is the thought that destroys all thinking.

Our reflexive and unthinking advocacy of freedom of speech and academic freedom has given a milieu for Postmodernism to thrive. It has advocated the very undermining of the institutions whose protection it seeks whenever it is challenged. Ultimately postmodernism about power, particularly its own, and it spreads it in an environment that that it has sworn to to destroy. I'm normally loathe to put any restrictions on the freedom of speech or academic inquiry but when I comes to Postmodernism I quite happy to provide an enthusiastic exception. The old Church fathers would have recognised it for what it was, a poisonous heresy and would have stamped it out.

I'm all for doing the same.

Leo Strauss: Inside Every Gook

Strauss's attempt to muscle out Christianity as a formative principle of Western Civilisation led him to posit an alternative.  For Strauss, that alternative was Athenian Philosophy.

Philosophy, as Strauss asserted, was categorically different to revealed faith and two could be considered as operating in separate domains: influential, but not binding on each other. While the faith could inspire or challenge, it was the role of philosophy to determine what was the correct way to live. Furthermore, Strauss asserted that there was difference between the philosophy of the "ancients" as opposed to the "moderns". The poisons of modern philosophy, according to Strauss,  found their origin in the radical reaction to the Christian synthesis of faith and reason, resulting in reason being taken  to the extremes.  Strauss saw modern philosophy--with all of its ills--as a sort of Hegelian "reactionary anti-Christianity" rather than an separate thing in itself. Ancient Greek philosophy, on the other hand,  was uncontaminated by the Christian faith and represented a purer and more universal philosophy that could stand alone outside the Hegelian Christian/Anti-Christian dialectic.

As I understand it, Strauss saw the classical world as being more moderate and prudent when it came to rationalisation and reason. The ancient world never made the mistake of the Christian West, of trying to harmonise faith and reason, nor did it make the mistake of the radical Enlightenment, in trying to eliminate the faith.  The "reasonableness' of the ancients was a sort of "check and balance" on rationality and helped stop philosophy/reason  from becoming too extreme. Strauss felt that by adopting this approach a moderate secularism could be achieved, and hence his call for a "return to the ancients."

However, if you think about this for a bit, the terms "excess", "prudence" and "radicalisation" are all relative terms which are subjectively contingent, and what Strauss was advocating in his depictions of Classical philosophy was a "moderate" or dispositionaly conservative, secularism,  i.e. "go slow secularism". Strauss may not have admired Burke but he was effectively advocating a secularism along Burkean lines; a prudent, cautious secularism which didn't push things too far. And I think that  his advocacy of a "moderate" secularism is what gave Strauss his appeal among the "feelz" based "Right" who found the radical secularism of the Left intuitively repugnant.

As mentioned in the previous post, Straussian conservatism's acknowledgement of the importance of religion, without any definite obligation to it, bought the allegiance of the cognitively-lite religious crowds. Taking Strauss at his word, it does seem that Strauss thought that religion was important, but its role seemed to be "influence' and "challenge" reason without reason having obligation to respond.  Straussian paeans to the faith reassure the relgious lambs who felt that they could lay next to the secular lions under the Straussian tent.

Perceptive readers who have suffered this blog will see that there is an automatic metaphysical tension built in the Straussian hermeneutic between it and the  Christian one. Gottfried lays it out;

Christians may appropriate for themselves bits and pieces of the Straussian method but they would be wrong to imagine that the corresponding belief system is congruent with Christian truths or with any other form of revealed religion. If devout Christians find nothing objectionable about the Straussian hermeneutic, then they should be willing to reconsider their position. They should recognize the fit between the the two worldviews is more problematic than they have been willing to admit. This reassessment may be all the more necessary give the still widespread appeal among Catholic traditionalists.

In the battle between Athenian philosophy and Christian revelation, Athens always wins. Furthermore, the practical application of Straussianism in the multi-faith environment that is America--or the Anglosphere--everyone's faith gets "respected" but no one's faith gets to put the brakes on Athenian philosophy. The end result is the relentless push of secularism, albeit at a pace slower than that advocated by the radical Left.

Furthermore, as Athenian philosophy was an exercise in abstract "reason" and "sound judgement", its cognitive operations were not really contigent upon local circumstances, tradition, or identity, something Strauss dismissed as Historicism. Being abstract and purely rational, "above" time and place, the conclusions of Athenian philosophy were transnational and trans-historical, in essence universal. Just as "one plus one equals two" is universally valid, according to Strauss, anyone, thinking like a "sound" Athenian philosopher, be they Arabic, Hindu or Japanese would come to the same conclusions as to what was the "philosophically" right way to live.  Implicit in Straussian conservatism is a universalism in its applicability. i.e. it was globalist in scope.

According to Strauss, when Greek philosophy was put to the task of politics, the "best possible" political system that resulted was Anglo-American democracy. Although I may be expressing it impolitely, it's not far off the mark to say that Straussians believe that within every Gook, Chink, Sand nigger, Wop, etc., there is an American waiting to get out.

There's a couple of important points here;

Firstly, As Strauss attempts to write out Christianity from the political history of the West, he redefines Western as being equivalent to its secular liberal manifestation. By this logic, countries like South Korea, Japan and Israel are Western. The West ceases to be a particular time, person, or place. Anyone can be part of the West provided they achieve "Athenian" illumination and embrace secular democracy.

Secondly, there is an implicit tension between the utopia of secular democracy and the forces which impede it. For the Straussian conservative,  a Christianity which imposed limits on secular democracy would be just as objectionable as a Confucianism or Islam which did the same. The uncoupling of religion, as expressed though culture, if not theocracy, means that Straussian "Conservatism" relentlessly  pushes Left, the limits only being what "reasonable" Athenian rationality deems reasonable.

Take "Gay Marriage" for instance. A Catholic, sound Protestant, or Orthodox religious culture would prohibit the political realisation of the concept, no matter how well argued a case in support of it.  The prohibition would be moral and binding. A Straussian, on the other hand,  would argue that religion is a "challenge" to our conceptions of marriage but for the good of the "polis" it may be necessary to be be flexible and magnanimous to those under the spell of the "Helenic Eros." They talk the religious talk but walk the secular walk.

Thirdly, Straussianism had its gestation in the Wiemar republic and the Cold war period, where there were real threats to the existence of secular liberal democracy. Straussian conservatism sees the aggressive defense and expansion of this type of democracy as an inherent good. The consequence being that there is an implicit expansionary dynamic in the ideology. War is a feature, and not a bug, of the system.  Making the world safe for democracy means getting rid of the threats to democracy, be they political, cultural or local. Anyone who is not with the program is a potential threat.

Fourthly, many of the factors which prevent a particular country from achieving the utopia of modern secular democracy are precisely local and historical. Straussian conservatism is inherently oppositional to them. Straussian conservatism therefore acts as a homogenising social force by hostility to the local insofar as it impedes the universal, implicitly pushing towards a global monoculture and is a facilitating factor of the current globalist agenda.