The Marxist Menace (is it us?)

We inherit so much from the dominant culture – it’s in the way we talk, think, behave, are afraid to behave… I work with someone who has serious problems with common swear words – heck and darn are all right, but not the words for which these are euphemisms. She’s likely unaware of the origin of so many of the ordinary idioms in use in casual conversation. If you’ve tended to add the word “action” to some of your nouns, in slangy speech, welcome to the porn industry. Far more significant, in my view, is the inheritance from anti-human sentiments like Socialism. I think it was Ludvig von Mises that pointed out how many of our ordinary concepts in casual conersation are predicated on socialist ideas.

One key legacy of socialism is how we perceive conflict as almost inherent to any set of distinctions. Distinction = opposition – that’s the insane formula. It’s not new, of course. Dr. Joseph Farrell, in his monumental God, History, and Dialectic, quite effectively traces this assumption throughout human history (from gnosticism to the Great Schism and into modern philosophy). Socialism gives it to us (as part of the same revolutionary tradition that gave us the French Revolution and the Terror, and the Revolutions of 1848 – see James Billington: Fire in the Minds of Men) as class conflict – conflict wherever anyone is distinct from anyone else. This is where we get deconstruction in literary criticism , for instance. Indeed, the implicit, oft concealed ideal in this framework is a non-specific human amalgum, a monist proletariat of one-ness but, since this is impossible (logically as well as historically) – however much you claim we’re moving toward it as a new spiritual age or utopia – it yields a perpetual source of agitation (and revolutionary fervor) in the meantime.

And what has this to do with Orthodoxy? Well, quite frankly, Orthodox people are just as good at bringing in the idol of Baal and setting it on the table during coffee hour as your local masonic lodge. In other words, we can be quite religious. Religion is the importation of the world system and its assumptions, all dressed up in religious garb – it’s the attempt to make the world compatible with the Faith.

And where do we do this with socialism? Well, how, really, does the pseudo-issue of cradle vs. convert, ethnic vs. anglo-saxon, (perhaps even traditionalist vs. modernist) differ from the social conflict approach in your average university gender or racial studies program? How does it differ from the rantings in The Socialist Worker? Different content, but same methodology. Same assumptions.

And, frankly, we have NO BUSINESS indulging in it or indulging it. We have no business legitimating the social order and presuming to reify its methodologies in the guise of Orthodox “issues”, mimicking the lost with our own version of class consciousness. We are the people who have no Jew nor Greek. We are those who venerate Saints baptized as infants and Saints baptized as adults. And the moment we start ranting in the blogosphere, or the parish hall, or (God forbid) from the pulpit, about this group or that group, reified in terms of divisive conflicts, we’ve become a social club. A religious expression of the world order. Might as well pin on some lapel badges, wear berets, and go marching over to the “other” Orthodox Church to stage a protest. Might as well create pamphlets about it. What piffle. And yes, the fathers warn us about piffle.

We are not of this world. We do not follow after the philosophers of this world, or the intellectual systems it raises up against the Church, which will prevail against it, though the final battle take place at the gates of Hell itself. Marxism. Socialism. Deconstructive conflict-theory. It doesn’t belong in the temple and among the pieties of the faithful.

So when you hear “the converts are messing it up” or “the ethnics just don’t get it” or someone rolls their eyes over the “cradles”, besides sounding like a bunch of ridiculous kids factionalizing into “geeks”, “jocks”, and “stoners”, we’re repudiating the Faith, denying the Incarnation, and embracing the world – and not just the world, the failed, detritus of their philosophical cast-offs. The trash of the world. The children of God shouldn’t play with the trash.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top