The Church in much of Eastern Europe hasn’t been more than a mouthpiece for its respective states in a long time.

in chain •  3 years ago 

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See the image, then read.

I've run into quite a few of these lately. They're clones; they've been made for several Eastern European countries, each eager to protect their kids from the likes of me. Sometimes they're posted approvingly by Americans who ought to know better.

I'll tell you what I see in this image.

Its name is the Great Chain of Being, and it's the product of centuries of western political thought. Straight folks: It belongs to you, and you belong to it. The Great Chain of Being is a way of thinking that starts in metaphysics, detours through sex, and winds up in politics. It's older than modern representative government. A lot of people may tell you that we killed it when we split with King George III. Don't believe them. The Chain still binds even in secular, monarch-free America.

As you experienced it, the Chain probably started with your romantic life, which guided you naturally enough to a member of the opposite sex. Marriage and family soon followed, both of which are natural, though the state does strongly encourage and subsidize them both. Your interests were thus connected to people with whom you share a language, a place, a way of life, and a government. Your romantic life--with all its false starts, sordid details, and inscrutable mysteries--got redeemed: Your unruly straight libido was fit to a larger purpose, one that sublimated and purified it. (The gay libido doesn't get this treatment; it can't, and that's just what's wrong with it to this worldview.)

Perhaps the Chain is symbolized, to you, by Hungary's Crown of Saint Stephen, a golden, umbrella-shaped crown that used to be held by the Habsburgs. That family once upheld the Chain, and Hungary still uses one of its old hats as a reminder that they should keep right on doing it. But even if you're not Hungarian, your nation has leaders, and your leaders protect you; that's their obligation in the Chain. They help make sense of life for you. They keep out the bad folks. (arb waves from the barren shadows of consumerist libertinism; he grins; he fingers some merchandise.)

The leaders and their state ensure that you raise children who can and will perpetuate your society. When we in the United States debated same-sex marriage, I suspect it was just this that we really debated--the connection that runs children--self--polity--ruler--God. When the opponents of same-sex marriage claimed that letting two men legally marry would destroy civilization itself, which they absolutely did, it was the Chain that they worried about.

I infer that it must feel utterly wonderful to live inside such a mental structure: God Almighty reigns in Heaven with his angels. On earth, the Crown reminds us of His Presence--under which rules the great Viktor Orban, or whoever. Below that is you, the (f)ather, the little god of your family. You are a man--these appeals usually aim at men--and men are both the protected and the protectors. Below you are your wife and kids, and below them the animals, the plants, and the stones and the dirt: Place. Hierarchy. Belonging. Stability.

Yes, it must feel SO wonderful that even some nominally in the liberty movement can mistake the autocratic Orban for the protector of the Good (https://lawliberty.org/orban-eu-hungary/):

"[In 1989] Hungary accepted a constitution built on transnational norms of rights and rules that were supported by international organizations. Generic and procedural sources of authority were seen as a more effective way to secure the rule of law and an orderly democratic politics as opposed to constitutional legitimacy arising from the cultural-moral order of Hungary. This same ahistorical constitution was also key to Hungary’s securing membership in the European Union in the late 1990s. According to the Hungarian philosopher Ferenc Hörcher, this is precisely why the 1989 Constitution failed. The crucial acceptance and identity of the Hungarian people with their charter document was never secured. Thus, the Constitution of 2012, which features a 26-paragraph preamble affirming the religious and cultural meaning of Hungary, did not waver in defining and protecting the core political goods of the country."

Yet I can't help but think that any liberty movement worth the name would have to stand against the state and with the individual, against the despot and with the dissident. "Generic and procedural" sources of authority may sound bureaucratic and thus threatening, but in practice they almost always help the dissident. It is the ad hoc exception, specific and non-procedural, where arbitrary power finds its foothold: Never mind the written laws; look to the religious and cultural meaning of the nation!

No, don't tell me that you accept me or that I belong in your nation. I don't need and will delete your pep talk, and anyway that's not how this works. I only want to register my ongoing horror at the rise of nationalist populism and the inroads it's made into the liberty movement, which has often been kind enough to me over the years that I can think of it as an ersatz home.

The new nationalism would among other things happily persecute me as a danger to you, your children, and your way of life. To this way of thinking, it's important to make a negative example of me; it will mean fewer people ever come out of the closet. Homosexuality will not spread further. (It wouldn't in any case, but that's irrelevant.) A few more will lovelessly get married the old fashioned way, and the next time Hungary goes to war, it will have a bit more cannon fodder with which to do it. And may the best and the bloodiest nation win!

Anyway. My hope is that one day we will reject what's left of the Chain and understand that it had been an imposition all along. Be straight if you want, or be gay. Or be something else entirely, as long as it's peaceful. But no matter what, don't trust your rulers with your sex life. If anyone is a threat to your children, I know just who it is, and it's certainly not me.

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