Hayek, a Nobel-prize-winning Austrian economist and agnostic-verging-on-atheist (much like his American disciple George F. Will), pointed out in part five of The Fatal Conceit* that the extended order has been both fostered and protected by [Christian] religious tradition and its practitioners; that our society cannot, as the social constructivists / socialists believe, be / have been rationally constructed (i.e. traditional morals, and the economic conventions we know to work, "fail to meet rational requirements", which is not to say that they are not true), and that the result we enjoy is contingent on that arguably fragile or tenuous sweet spot reached by countless generations of individual efforts invisibly coordinated by tradition and inherited culture. It is there, on that sweet spot where we stand between instinct and reason; between the extremes of hubristic claims of rationalistic order and chaotic primitism. (Hayek also concedes that Christianity beat all others in the 'Darwinism' of religious faiths.)
Tocqueville (Democracy in America), Mandeville (see Honour and Usefulness...), Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Leftism Revisited, Timeless Christian), Chesterton (The Everlasting Man, Orthodoxy), and John Adams, among others, all agreed, albeit using different terms, that statesmen "may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."
If the majority discount the transcendental presuppositions that our civilization is based on or eliminate the religious / our culture's Christian sensibilities, then we will succumb, ultimately, to gross utilitarianism and or tribalism. E.g. if man is not seen to be made in the image of God, and is therefore not inspirited with an immortal verve demanding of respect, and does not receive rights from God, then he is replaceable, extinguishable, and more or less sentient meat whose governors do not secure his rights but confer them. (Secular / humanist arguments for natural rights and natural law, for instance, inevitably fall through without such a transcendental or supernatural appeal to an objective Truth at the first sign of scarcity, difference, or competition. That may explain why humanists like Jordan Peterson--cognizant of Nietzsche's need for super men upon realizing that normal men without God would bring Hell to Earth--act as if they believe for the sake of the system that brought us universal suffrage, stability, literacy, and Hayek's beloved extended order...)
To your point, and this point Rodney Stark elaborates on in length in The Triumph of Christianity, western culture is the product of the Christian worldview. The alt-right (i.e. Spencer-types) disagrees, positing that Christianity weakened and destroyed Europe. In the so-called Dark Ages, which were neither dark nor dim, arts and science and the light of antiquity survived in the monastery and the Church. The light of Rome was kept alive by the Roman Church, while the barbarian and feudal lord resuscitated the paganism, child sacrifice, and demon worship of flattened Carthage.
The French philosophes--whose hype men later claimed them to have effected the Enlightenment, not realizing that they were merely expounding upon Christian premises and conclusions--supposedly brought in the age of reason, though Aquinas had long beaten them to it.
The slowly apostatizing Protestant English's Black Legend sought to discount the Christian Church as a means to spite the Spanish, and they similarly castigated Rome for invented crimes (Dinesh Dsouza and countless others have demonstrated the whole-cloth fabrication of the Galileo persecution story and others).
Like altruism, which certainly predates Christianity, in Christianity and unlike in any other cult, critical concepts found elsewhere only piecemeal were together codified, and refined into an unparalleled orthodoxy over two millennia. That orthodoxy--which prizes most love for God and neighbor, the unity of the family, responsibility, and self-sacrifice for deferred pleasure, as well as honesty, humility, prudence, temperance, patience, peace, and justice, and a host of other complementary notions, customs, and concepts of being--when followed by a resolved people we are fortunate to belong to, anchors them in that sweet spot. That anchorage is not guaranteed however nor is our culture. Lose the cult, lose the culture. Lose the calibrant, lose the sweet spot. Lose the sweet spot and the culture, and you'll lose the West.
Hayek, a Nobel-prize-winning Austrian economist and agnostic-verging-on-atheist (much like his American disciple George F. Will), pointed out in part five of The Fatal Conceit* that the extended order has been both fostered and protected by [Christian] religious tradition and its practitioners; that our society cannot, as the social constructivists / socialists believe, be / have been rationally constructed (i.e. traditional morals, and the economic conventions we know to work, "fail to meet rational requirements", which is not to say that they are not true), and that the result we enjoy is contingent on that arguably fragile or tenuous sweet spot reached by countless generations of individual efforts invisibly coordinated by tradition and inherited culture. It is there, on that sweet spot where we stand between instinct and reason; between the extremes of hubristic claims of rationalistic order and chaotic primitism. (Hayek also concedes that Christianity beat all others in the 'Darwinism' of religious faiths.)
Tocqueville (Democracy in America), Mandeville (see Honour and Usefulness...), Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Leftism Revisited, Timeless Christian), Chesterton (The Everlasting Man, Orthodoxy), and John Adams, among others, all agreed, albeit using different terms, that statesmen "may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."
If the majority discount the transcendental presuppositions that our civilization is based on or eliminate the religious / our culture's Christian sensibilities, then we will succumb, ultimately, to gross utilitarianism and or tribalism. E.g. if man is not seen to be made in the image of God, and is therefore not inspirited with an immortal verve demanding of respect, and does not receive rights from God, then he is replaceable, extinguishable, and more or less sentient meat whose governors do not secure his rights but confer them. (Secular / humanist arguments for natural rights and natural law, for instance, inevitably fall through without such a transcendental or supernatural appeal to an objective Truth at the first sign of scarcity, difference, or competition. That may explain why humanists like Jordan Peterson--cognizant of Nietzsche's need for super men upon realizing that normal men without God would bring Hell to Earth--act as if they believe for the sake of the system that brought us universal suffrage, stability, literacy, and Hayek's beloved extended order...)
To your point, and this point Rodney Stark elaborates on in length in The Triumph of Christianity, western culture is the product of the Christian worldview. The alt-right (i.e. Spencer-types) disagrees, positing that Christianity weakened and destroyed Europe. In the so-called Dark Ages, which were neither dark nor dim, arts and science and the light of antiquity survived in the monastery and the Church. The light of Rome was kept alive by the Roman Church, while the barbarian and feudal lord resuscitated the paganism, child sacrifice, and demon worship of flattened Carthage.
The French philosophes--whose hype men later claimed them to have effected the Enlightenment, not realizing that they were merely expounding upon Christian premises and conclusions--supposedly brought in the age of reason, though Aquinas had long beaten them to it.
The slowly apostatizing Protestant English's Black Legend sought to discount the Christian Church as a means to spite the Spanish, and they similarly castigated Rome for invented crimes (Dinesh Dsouza and countless others have demonstrated the whole-cloth fabrication of the Galileo persecution story and others).
Like altruism, which certainly predates Christianity, in Christianity and unlike in any other cult, critical concepts found elsewhere only piecemeal were together codified, and refined into an unparalleled orthodoxy over two millennia. That orthodoxy--which prizes most love for God and neighbor, the unity of the family, responsibility, and self-sacrifice for deferred pleasure, as well as honesty, humility, prudence, temperance, patience, peace, and justice, and a host of other complementary notions, customs, and concepts of being--when followed by a resolved people we are fortunate to belong to, anchors them in that sweet spot. That anchorage is not guaranteed however nor is our culture. Lose the cult, lose the culture. Lose the calibrant, lose the sweet spot. Lose the sweet spot and the culture, and you'll lose the West.
*https://mises.at/static/literatur/Buch/hayek-the-fatal-conceit.pdf
Thank you for the post including the link, greatly appreciated.
They won't realize until everything Sharia law and all you smell is Kebab shops in downtown Toronto
Christcucks will turn the other cheek. They love to be abused by nonwhites.