On a blue-sky day near the sea shore, in my parents' home, I sat with a family friend, a professor of education at one of those now-Ivy League, quasi-Catholic (well, I could say "formerly Catholic but now oxymoronic") institutions; she was writing an article about white privilege in k-12 schools, and had asked me, a former Trivium professor, to edit it. When I sat down, I didn't know what it was about, and simply wanted to be helpful. As I discussed with her sentence clarity, I came across a point that seemed illogical, or unsound, and thought naively that perhaps it was about syntax.
"No," she said in her sanguine, kind, energetic manner, "I'm really saying that white privilege is systemic, and this means that all white people are, as a class, guilty of racism." I don't know if my mind fell open, or my mouth. When she got up to see if her chocolate cake was done, my philosopher-husband must have seen a train wreck coming, so sidled up and quietly, under the racket of oven door and cake pans said, "She's a cultural Marxist."
This was three years ago. Since then, I've been trying to understand this concept, and why my immediate response was that it was unsound, illogical, and fundamentally, an open door for social terrorism. I've been trying to understand, why, when she explained her point, I saw fire; I saw individual people crushed under the weight of a nameless, faceless, uniformity; I saw individuals subsumed into class, into deterministic fate, into fossils, no greater than the sum of the irrational forces of survival. Now, as I watch 2020 unfold and reveal more apocalyptic bits hiding in every crease, I see this fire again, and I see now the fullness of what has been unpacking and unfolding over the last century, the last five hundred years. Cultural Marxism, and its parents, Economic Determinism and Communism and Atheism, have a pedigree reaching back into the thought of Darwin, and even further back to the "state of nature" philosophers like Hobbes and Locke.
What is cultural Marxism? Complicated question; one can experience it, though, in the 2020 focus on "systemic racism," "white privilege," BLM, and even, perhaps, on MAGA groups. One hears it in terms like "social solidarity," "corporate kleptocracy," and "dismantling Western nuclear family and patriarchal structures," to name just a few. You experience it in the persecution of sacramental churches, the herd-like narratives presented by corporate-owned media, virtue-signaling, draconian business and middle-class busting, and robust, corporate-run censorship on social media platforms which is just one dance step away from the censorship I experienced first-hand in Russia during the death of the USSR.
To see that all these seemingly disparate elements are species of Marxism, one needs to see the fundamental roots of Marxism, and this is a wide-ranging, historical and philosophical definition. Building partly on an older book by Dr. J. Husslein, The Christian Social Manifesto, we have to start with a parent of cultural Marxism: Economic Determinism. This is a materialist conception of history and human organization, built, I think, partly on radical idea of a "state of nature" in the seventeenth century. For the first time in human history, thinkers like Hobbes and Locke posited an "extra-societal" theory of the origins of human rights and behaviors. Locke created a "state of nature" which emphasized the individual's right to private property as necessary for survival, and traces early human cooperation to the need for survival around one's labor and property; Hobbes, on the other hand, posited a "nasty, brutish, short" state of nature from which escape was necessary for survival, period. One could say that these two "state of nature" philosophers are respectively the direct root of Capitalism (via individual private property rights and contract theory divorced from the constraints of the Church) and the direct root of Communism (via the Leviathan necessary to control a brutish nature).
However, if one looks more closely, they are perhaps two sides of the same coin. The "coin" is the assumption, first, that a "state of nature" beyond, prior to, any human society, is possible (do we just pop out of random bacteria--oh wait, that's Darwinism), and second, that political order is a bandage and not necessarily a good in itself. This fundamental "sameness" can be seen more clearly when it is contrasted with political theory in Western culture starting with the Greeks. For Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and until the Scientific Revolution and the Wars of Religion (15th-17th centuries), the political life was, on the one hand, the means by which human beings attained natural virtues and the development of their faculties in accord with the discernible order of the cosmos, and on the other, during Christendom, the reflection in society of the natural, eternal, and divine laws. As Pope Pius XI says in Quadragesimo Anno:
For according to Christian doctrine, man endowed with a social nature, is placed here on earth in order that he many spend his life in society and under an authority ordained by God, that he may develop and evolve to the full all his faculties to the praise and glory of his Creator; and that, by fulfilling faithfully the duties of his station, he may attain to temporal and eternal happiness. (39).
The Pope is saying that people are placed by God into society, not that they decided to create society out of a kind of nothingness; he is saying that society has a final cause, an end ordained by God that is for man's good and for the fulfillment of his nature as a rational creature made in the image of God, who is Himself a society. This is so very different, contrary, really, to the idea of a state of nature and therefore contrary to the political and economic societies produced by "state of nature" philosophers. The pernicious element entering through Locke and Hobbes is determinism: we are determined, in some way, by the need for survival. Survival is the end, either one's very life (Hobbes) or one's economic life (Locke). These forces of survival become the determiners for political, economic, and social life. At the root of human life is antagonism; no longer is the focus on love, or on the rational and its development, but is rather on a balance of forces to create order: for hegemony and survival. In essence, human nature is reduced and redefined.
This lens of primal, survival forces creates logical conclusions: in societies, whether Hobbesian or Lockean, the state of nature will become a herd or group-like balance of forces, and these groups, like the individuals in the states of nature, will still be fighting for survival. Not only this, nature is defined not only as fundamentally competitive, it is also a nature requiring either Leviathan or contract theory to order it properly: this means, in effect (especially for Hobbes) that man in nature was not able to see or discern eternal or divine law, was not able to relate to a Creator, or to be primarily under His authority, that family is not ordained by God and the primary authority after God.
As things developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, the progeny of Lockean thought was the American Regime built on contract theory and an absent, Deist god, the ravages of the mercantilist model, and the capitalist movement from Adam Smith's laissez-faire private capital and the mysterious forces of the market, much like the survival, individual right forces of the state of nature. The progeny of Hobbes, I would argue, was the absolutism of the 18th century monarchies and ultimately, Marx.
Marx posited that the real forces, the real ends of human community, were found in economic struggle. Dr. Husslein says, "The final cause of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in mens' [rational apprehension of logos or God's order], but in changes in the modes of production and exchange"(58). To me, this sounds like the economic version of "state of nature." Like the scientific revolutionaries starting in the 16th century, Marx was looking for impersonal forces, or certain empirical laws that one could use as the ultimate principle for action. Like the American founders, Marx saw that if one built a system on how people really behave, rather than how they ought to behave, one was more likely to predict what will happen next and be able to manage it: economic determinism was born. Also, like the scientists and political thinkers fueling the Enlightenment, Marx wanted to create and articulate laws independent from the claims of Christianity.
Why? He saw religion as just another, rival, means of control, an opiate: he saw that Christianity held that God is both the principle of order and that He makes demands on us for our own good and fundamentally relates to individual souls. Marx desired scientific, empirical certainty so that human beings as a collective could control their own ends. Furthermore, to Marx everything was actually, empirically, determined in a materialistic framework and so it was worshipping clouds to accept the claims of the Church and 2000 years of Christian thought. This is akin to the scientific, political, economic, and even religious revolutions of the centuries after the breakdown of Christendom. Dr. Husslein states, "The method of producing . . . material livelihood determines also the social, political, and intellectual processes of life in general (59) . . . underlying all this doctrine is the starkest materialistic evolution, claiming the descent of man, body and mind, from the truth: the evolution of the family from a purely animal herd, and denying, on the other hand, the existence of anything except matter and force, thus doing away with God, the soul, and free will"(60). In other words, materialism means determinism, which means that responsibility is meaningless, and therefore, so is free will and all overarching, cosmic, true, objective morality checking any human institution. The system, the State, becomes the morality because it is the ordering principle, the First Cause.
Here we see the deeper connections between Economic Determinism, the principle under all Marxism, Darwinism, and Capitalism. The picture of our modern world begins to come together: empirical, materialistic evidence is the only source of truth, and a grim, narrow 'realism' comes to maturity. Human beings are a step away from brutes to be managed, determined by their needs, passions, and selfishness. Fundamentally, these modern systems are built on the abolition of man based on the Christian conception, a conception that holds a special place, because it is simply true. The only form of a god allowed in any of these systems is the Enlightenment Deist, "clock-maker," but this was a short step to atheism, and Marx was honest about it.
Many people no longer understand the Christian view of man and society, and so a study of Leo XIII on Catholic Social Teaching and Pius XI, along with Aquinas and Augustine, would be eye-opening. In principle, though, the Christian conception of human life is built on Love. It seems simplistic, but it is true. If one compares in particular the different understanding of economics and property, one sees that Catholic economic and social teaching centers around the model of the family, a unit not only economic but that of love. Reflecting God's love in the Trinity "the Father and I are one" the family has natural hierarchy and love and responsibility reflecting the reality of the Trinity and the Mystical Body of Christ. Thus, in distributist economic theory (the most Catholic economic model), the good and thriving of the family is paramount; private ownership of property is as widely distributed as possible, because a certain amount of economic independence for the family allows for the unit to remain a unit, and to have responsibility and self-sufficiency, and therefore genuine morality, within the larger society. Love desires the beloved to flourish, and Catholic Social Teaching is built on this end, the same end that Christ expresses in his last discourse before His crucifixion. In a true Christian setting, responsibility for one's moral life reaches into all spheres of society, and the inherent morality of politics is acknowledged and balanced with the "check" and authority of the Church, Christ's Body. The final cause, or end, of all of this, and all of what God does and asks, is our flourishing, and human flourishing can only happen when we move toward our end, love-unity with God. This reality does not ignore sin, and failure, and the failure of Christendom was also self-inflicted, but denying its truth because of failure is like getting rid of the idea of family because parents mess up, and badly.
This must all sound incredibly foreign, and according to most moderns, unworkable. We live in deep pluralism, or we did. As Aristotle says, the instability of clamoring opinions easily gives way to the one voice of the tyrant, especially in times of fear and unrest. In our culture, an uneasy pluralism is giving way to another form of Marxism, just as Our Lady predicted at Fatima in 1917.
In these times of great fear, and growing economic unrest, people are feeling more acutely the drive to survive, and the forces of the fittest (the most adept at survival) are encroaching on all of us in the form of medical tyranny and communistic groups demanding total acquiescence around their platform of meaning. Yet, having banished God long ago from our scientific, political, and economic spheres, we are not turning to the Logos, the Truth undergirding creation and human life. We have lost our end, and all we seem to care about is survival and maintaining our standards of living at all cost--even our free will, even our God-given, dignified right to make decisions for ourselves about the most basic things. We are at the mercy of both rabid capitalists in the form of the corporate kleptocracy on the one hand, and rabid communist groups on the other hand, who say openly that they will dismantle what is left standing of Western, Christian institutions and principles, and even the idea of the nuclear family present in almost all human cultures throughout history. The Good and its concomitant, the "common good," are being forced to give way to rogue economic and political forces.
And, setting the stage, intellectuals like the one I started with are involved in this: The idea that just because I am white means that I am inherently part of a system (read: force) that fosters racism is, simply, social Darwinism and cultural Marxism. I am not much more than a molecule in the current of white supremacy, fostered in the political and primarily economic systems. Do racist systems exist? Yes. Do evil systems exist? Yes. However, reducing human life to a force, a system, is also evil, because it attempts to devolve my nature from a responsible, free, rational creature in relationship with Logos, with God, to an element in a "force." This is not any different than becoming a Marxist "worker" where everyone is the same, and equality devolves from the love of God for each of us with an eternal end to just sameness, where dreams die because everything is determined and you exist to serve the collective ("social distancing is social solidarity"). One is forced to live a lie, because one is forced to be less than human, and to see others the same way.
I see this on the "Left" and on the "Right." Groups are no longer individuals with personal responsibility, but rather forces untied from any true and justified knowledge; sophistry reigns supreme. Just look at BLM's mission statement about dismantling Western culture into some racial and moral Borg, and The Proud Boys' statement (by founder McInnis), in which the right to drink beer in peace seems to be a euphemism for radical individualism. Of course the groups are reacting to each other, and become more extreme as the others do, and so it seems that Marx was right, after all, and Hobbes and Locke before him.
How? Because we have built our modern societies on fear, not love. We have taken Hobbes at his word, and Marx at his word, and Locke, who relegated religion to the vestibule of society. We have lost love, because we have lost God, who is Love. We have taken survival of the fittest to heart, and this, of course, produces fear and means that Machiavelli makes the most sense; fear then re-enters, more virulent than before, and we in turn create more systems to control it.
We have lost our desire for eternal life, and so we fear death and crush the dreams of millions of people, their businesses, their property, their lives, in order to escape it, all the while being manipulated by both capitalists and communists.
