Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Destiny of America

Nov. 14, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

10:10

The Destiny of America

The United States is an an inflection point which will decide the course of its future for centuries. Subscribe to https://www.lotuseaters.com/ to support me.

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	The West is at a historical inflection point, the decision of which will determine the moral and spiritual direction of our civilization for centuries to come.
	The political turmoil in the US for the past eight years has been a struggle for control over this direction, and it seems that now Trump and the forces of Americanism have won a resounding electoral victory.
	When Trump re-enters the White House on Inauguration Day, the Republicans will have the Presidency, House, Senate, Supreme Court, and popular vote.
	They will have not only the power, but the endorsement of the American people to implement the MAGA agenda.
	This is an interesting development because they will, in effect, be attempting to turn back the clock to an earlier point in liberal democracy.
	MAGA represents the freewheeling, classically liberal America of the second half of the 20th century, the America that won the Cold War and put a man on the moon.
	These are the energetic forces of technological progress, abundance and expansion.
	They espouse a moral doctrine of freedom, ability and liberty.
	In opposition to this are the rival forces that go under the name of social justice, what we now colloquially call woke.
	This movement developed its ideology within American academia through the same time span as the dominant liberal culture, resentfully gathering up the people who felt that they did not benefit from the existing order and carefully devising a new moral code which was deliberately designed to overthrow the old.
	This movement has been a subversive but minor part of the popular culture for decades now, but since around 2010 it has been in the ascendancy, using the old liberal culture's own arguments against it to establish a new moral order in which the marginalized minorities would be given the reins of civilization over the majority.
	This new morality has been slowly but surely indoctrinating new generations through a wide-reaching network which controls the education system to promote its own doctrine of progress.
	In contrast to the MAGA doctrine, the woke doctrine is a sluggish system of social progress, redistribution and contraction.
	It seeks to close a circle around civilization and reorder the hierarchy of society so that it appears to them more even, more just, and raises up those people who are the losers in a competitive society.
	As there is nothing new under the sun, you may not be surprised to learn that all of this has happened before.
	It has been on my mind since Trump's election victory that there is a fair historical comparison to be made between him and a lesser known Roman emperor called Julian the Apostate.
	In the first few centuries after the death of Christ, Christianity was a relatively small and persecuted religion that existed alongside other strange and esoteric Eastern sects.
	It agreed with the basic premises of the dominant pagan religion, that there was a spiritual world that intersected with the material world, and a divine force was ultimately responsible for earthly events.
	It diverged with the pagans on the nature of the divine other world.
	To the pagans, the jealous god of Abraham was but one deity amongst a pantheon containing thousands of deities.
	And to the Christians, the pagan gods were either primitive superstitions applied to material phenomena such as the sun, moon and stars, or they were perhaps demons misleading mankind.
	How Christianity differed from paganism was not just in its metaphysics, however.
	It also diverged in its moral approach to human life.
	Where paganism embraced a vitalist, solar approach to life, in which virtue was celebrated and achievement was the source of glory, Christianity advocated for compassion as the proper focus of our moral lives and celebrated charity towards the meek, the downtrodden and the suffering.
	It appears to me that both of these moral currents are a perennial feature of human life, and neither one can be permanently extinguished.
	They both contain aspects of the good which imbues them with moral legitimacy.
	After passing through centuries of persecution and martyrdom, Christianity spread through the empire because of the appeal of its doctrine of solace and its acts of charity.
	Christians proliferated and soon found their champions amongst the elite, the most notable of which was Constantine the Great, who ascribed his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge to the Christian God.
	A year later in AD 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity as a religion of the Empire.
	However, Constantine went further than this, looting and closing pagan temples and advancing Christian elites within the imperial administration.
	He had chosen sides in a culture war in the Roman Empire, and angry mobs of Christians across the empire began exacting revenge on their pagan persecutors now that the power of the state was behind them.
	They attacked pagan priests, they desecrated pagan temples and destroyed pagan idols and disfigured relics of Rome's pre-Christian past.
	This moral and cultural revolution was brought to a halt by the accession to the purple of Constantine's nephew, Julian.
	Julian was a brilliant youth who received a Hellenic education in the Greek East.
	Though raised as a Christian, his precocious intellect and martial disposition put him at odds with the compassionate doctrine of Christianity, and he became a devotee of Homer and a public champion of the pagan cause, which earned him the epithet of the apostate by Christian historians.
	Julian understood that the Christian population of the Empire was large, and that he could not sully his reputation and legacy through persecution.
	He realized that it would have to be through force of argument and education in which Christianity would be defeated, and so set about a program of restoring the pagan religion to preeminence.
	He bestowed upon the traditional religion the grace of the state and reopened and refunded the pagan temples.
	He purged Christianity from the army and imperial bureaucracy and most importantly banned Christians from being teachers.
	As Edward Gibbon put it in the second volume of his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, In all the cities of the Roman world the education of the youth was entrusted to masters of grammar and rhetoric, who were elected by the magistrates, maintained at public expense, and distinguished by many lucrative and honourable privileges.
	The Edict of Julian appears to have included the physicians and professors of all the liberal arts, and the emperor, who reserved to himself the approbation of candidates, was authorized by the laws to corrupt or punish the religious constancy of the most learned of the Christians.
	Where the Christians had discouraged or prevented pagans from gaining a good education, Julian intended to reverse this dynamic and ensure that it would be pagan teachers who would educate succeeding generations, so that Christians who followed their own scruples would become ill-educated.
	As Gibbon concludes, Julian had reason to suspect that, in the space of a few years, the church would relapse into its primeval simplicity, and that the theologians, who possessed an adequate share of the learning and eloquence of the age, would be succeeded by a generation of blind and ignorant fanatics, incapable of defending the truth of their own principles or exposing the various follies of polytheism.
	Julian died young, in his early thirties, slain in battle against the Persians in the East, and his successors undid his work and restored Christianity to the moral prestige it had had before his reign.
	The effects of his reforms did not have time to take root, and twenty years after his death, the Edict of Thessalonica was passed by Theodosius, which made Nicene Christianity the official church of the Roman Empire, and paganism withered away within a century.
	I am sure that by now you understand the reason I am telling you all of this.
	Where Julian was trying to return the religious development of Rome to an earlier point, Trump is trying to do the same with the liberal development of America.
	If Trump does not completely remove woke doctrine from universities, colleges and schools, and replace it with a patriotic education, then when his time has passed,
	the woke elites will restore themselves and cement their new moral authority as America's normative and universal worldview, and in centuries to come, future historians will come to look upon MAGA in the same way we now look at Julian's pagan revival.
	History is not necessary, it is contingent.
	The eventual victory of woke is not inevitable, but time is of the essence, and Trump's next administration must hit the ground running and begin these reforms without hesitation.
	The future is ours to win, and we must be mindful of how it is won.
	Winning elections is necessary, but not sufficient.
	More must be done to secure the moral outlook of future generations, lest we become a footnote in the history books.
	If you appreciate this analysis, please do follow the link in the description to lotuses.com to sign up and support my work.

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