Prevalent within the ideological viscera of what has been denominated modernity (secularization with the further compartmentalization of life) is the liberal-leftist myth of people being alienated from their society and culture, meaning that certain numbers of liberals and leftists have been or can end up feeling alienated or suffer from alienation.  

Or, perhaps, one’s society or culture is found, by them, to be alienating in some manner or other.  It was once, as an evocative term, quite in vogue in the 1970s, especially in sociology, until it got analyzed to death; and, it was finally found to be semantically meaningless garbage that could be facetiously molded into whatever protean shape its sophistic user, at any time, desired; this is still true today and will be so into the future as long as humanity remains human, i.e., imperfect or, much more properly theologically phrased, just plain sinful.

This matter of alienation is partly covered, recently, in such works, e. g., by Peter Augustine Lawyer in his Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls and, also, his Stuck With Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future.    

Coverage of this difficult because protean subject, in a selective way, is interestingly seen in E.B.F. Midgley’s provocative volume titled The Ideology of Max Weber: A Thomist Critique concerning the Nietzschean “Death of God” thesis beloved by intellectuals.  This leads to a cognate suggested reading:  The Gods of Atheism by Fr. Vincent P. Miceli, S.J. because nominalist spirituality, as opposed to orthodox religious beliefs, has sadly come to dominate contemporary world civilization and its many discontents revolving usually around the modernists.

An example can be given here.  With the destruction of Western Christendom, meaning the rise of Protestantism and its many results favoring individualism in religion and much else, meaning, in short, a spreading desire for secularization, those supporting modernity, a form of rebellion, have either drifted or run away from the Roman Catholic Church; and, consequently, no longer appropriately see the Pope as the truly Sovereign Pontiff, the undisputed and undoubted Vicar of Christ on earth; good reading would include: How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church by H.W. Crocker III . 

There was no longer the prior classical or premodern understanding that, for instance, one’s religion was absolutely synonymous with all aspects of a person’s entire life and totality of being in this earthly world and, by logical extension, the life of the world to come, meaning, ultimately, Heaven or Hell.

The modernists have been in rebellion in intellectual, ethical, and moral terms; Western civilization itself has growingly, therefore, been in true and much larger revolution against the Church; they, the progressivists, are simply not in rebellion against rebellion certainly.  Thus, one manifestly sees that alienation qua alienation is, in its fundamental essence, a complete fraud and a total conceit, a basic (self-)deception and a rather cheap canard; it is, therefore, a modernist myth in the worst meaning of such a term imaginable.  A blatant falsity has been perpetrated upon modern society.

Thus, true modernists are not at all alienated from modernity, their own ideological creation; they are, on the contrary, fully integrated, fully in tune, with it so that assumed alienation is then a completely inappropriate concept; this holds with certainty for those who are, thus, totally committed to fostering modernization and its various and sundry manifold implications within society and culture, ethics and politics. 

And, this substantial reality of social and cultural deracination has, rather increasingly, been the actual case, the exact truth, for more than several past centuries by now and, crescively more so, into the post-Christian/postmodern era; one can perceive that what may be called the “aristocratic” internationalism of the Church has, moreover, been completely rejected by many millions of people, which may partly be explained through the theological principle of (an) invincible ignorance.

Prior to the often celebrated  arrival of modernity, which ought not to be confused with simply being what is known as the modern age circa 16^th century and after, people supposedly were in tune with their own societies and cultures.  Then, with the praised  arrival of modernity, normally seen as being the Age of Enlightenment (read: repaganization era – minus the original pagan innocence) and after, the asserted ideologically assumed possibility of “alienation” suddenly, more or less, and supposedly, more or less, had appeared. 

It had spread so rapidly among the Western intelligentsia that, by and throughout the 20^th century, it became and then remained ever after an iconic theme, as with, e.g., post-World War I’s “Lost Generation” of many American and other expatriates that seemed to generally congregate in and around Paris.  

A survey of such people would easily demonstrate that religion, the best antidote to any such alleged alienation, was among the furthest things from their minds.  The same could, basically, be said of the hippies of the 1960s, as yet another example of the asserted veracity of the contentions being made with substantive and substantial argumentation in this article.

And, the further from God someone goes, the further toward a sense of a vacuum in one’s life, which cannot fully nor really be actually filled with mere intellectual pursuits or, perhaps, a rather vacuous “spirituality” even today claimed by so many atheists, humanists, secularists, neopagans, and others who simply, if truth be told, ought to really know better – but don’t.

The supposed paradox is that as more and more modernization had occurred in Western society and culture, this had increasingly “alienated” some people as their nominalist (read: secularist/materialist) values became, ironically, more and more so predominant.   When an increase happened over time of giving them more of the results of their desires, supposed alienation had resulted, like having too much of a “good” thing.   

When modern men, through increasing degrees of secularization, finally do come to worshipping themselves, however, only blasphemy or its equivalent gets uttered in their poor prayers, as Malcolm Muggeridge, a Roman Catholic convert, would have surely agreed. 

Social commentators, usually synonymous with being intellectuals, began, especially in the 20^th century, to say that alienation, meaning a psychological, emotional, and intellectual dislocation/disassociation from one’s society and culture, was truly a special condition to which only liberals and leftists were, in fact, subject to; this is, assumedly, because of their particular and greater sensitivities, predilections,  inclinations, and, overall, much more refined and better appreciation (in their own twisted minds) of truth, justice, beauty, and moral rectitude.   Really?

Such a tawdry rendition of tendentious hogwash is, however, not rare among intellectuals who, even when they may sometimes disrespect their own kind, still grant them the so unctuous grace of being hallowed subjects of alienation due to superior, one assumes, elite vibrations of tenderness toward the oh-so-touchy ability to feel modernist angst and psycho-oppression.   Oh, truly, what vile squalid rot to, thus, behold; it stinks eternally.  

Among, e.g., socialists, George Orwell, for instance, would have fully agreed with this statement of valid criticism since he had been, in fact, among the most extreme critics of the intellectual poses and fancies of socialists and the other so-called progressives.

Interestingly, however, conservatives do agree with liberals and leftists that the latter two groups, especially the leftists, are to be considered logical candidates for being alienated.  This illustrates that the position of what may be called, in opposition, the traditionalist right is opposite to Conservatism, meaning that the greatest “enemy” of the traditionalist right is not Liberalism or Leftism but, rather, Conservatism, which keeps moving to the ideological Left decade by decade.   

A typical 1950 American conservative would call a typical 2007 conservative a leftist and that,  emphatically and manifestly, proves the critical point about Conservatism being made here; Conservatism keeps on moving to the ideological Left, not the traditionalist right.

It is Conservatism that, therefore, ignorantly falls for the quite ugly posturing of the intellectualism of the Left in believing in such absurd myths as (liberal-leftist) alienation, which really just means the continuing minimumization of religious faith for the base and contemptuous sake of celebrating godlessness, which is actually a form of modernist superstition that creates a false, terrene god.

What is actually being witnessed is not the property of being “alienated” as such, on the contrary, those claiming to be disaffected souls are, in reality, true believers in the now here noted “radical, bourgeois-democratic mystique” of modernity, a secularized version of the ancient Pelagian heresy, rooted in philosophical nominalism, that can be profitably called the neo-Pelagian heresy.

 The reversed anthropomorphic projection of Man as God who has been “alienated” somehow or other (there are Freudian and a literal plethora of other explanations) from his assumed godhead or, perhaps, presumed apotheoses.  As an ideology is actually an ersatz, modernist-style religion, some people are truly capable of worshipping themselves as a god substitute (and wanting others, if possible, to do likewise regarding them); therefore, for proportionately dedicated intellectuals, the important and fundamental question is only, of course, why not?

Belief in the radical, bourgeois-democratic mystique justifies all, explains all, and satisfies all longings for integration with the impulses of a degenerate, decadent, and nihilistic modernity; and, the transition to what is now known as postmodernity is, nonetheless, inconsequential in such functional context.  The subject of alienation will, therefore, be logically kept within the broad schema of modernity for easier clarification and formal presentation of the basic points to still be made.  

One of the most prototypical of all radical, but still factually speaking, bourgeois intellectuals was no less a modernist personage than the infamous Karl Marx himself.  How so?  Among other ready examples of his typical bourgeois prejudices qua thinking was the Marxist standard division of the “deserving poor” versus the “undeserving poor” ideologically translated as the proletariat v. lumpenproletariat.   How (representatively) bourgeois can one so illustratively get!? 

During Marx’s lifetime, he had been, interestingly, invited to visit factories to see the actual working-class specimens of his passionate writing endeavors; of course, he had always refused.  Why should he risk any possible physical contamination with such lower-class people?  Don’t be absurd.

Further clarification will be given as to what is being critically and importantly said and demonstrated.  The middle class of a society is, for instance, not to be wrongly confused, though it often usually is, with the bourgeoisie, which incorporates a radical element that has sought the absolute politicization, actually the totalist ideologicalization, of all human life; this is, moreover, a very significant matter to comprehend correctly. 

A middle class is merely an economically functional unit or portion of a society; the true bourgeoisie, however, is that highly politically active and aggressive segment of society that wishes, always and everywhere, to attain absolute political power and dominance; this is done for imposing, violently if necessary, all of its (predominantly) secularist/materialist values, capitalist or communist (makes no real difference in intent), upon the rest of any society that it inhabits.   

Unlike Conservatism concerning such thinking, the traditionalist right has never seen any supposed antagonism or opposition between Capitalism and Communism; they are, in point of fact, the two complementary and reciprocal sides of the very same coin of modernity, meaning individualism and collectivism; they both do support materialism, secularism, economism, and, in general, dehumanization through to the ultimate attainment of nihilism.  

The traditionalist right, one clearly needs to note, has always opposed bourgeois power and values, which is logically inclusive of Liberalism (both the modern version and the old kind also known today as Libertarianism), Capitalism and Socialism of all kinds, bureaucratism, militarism, secularism, modernity, nationalism, nihilism, and materialism.   As an example, another difference between a conservative and a traditionalist right person would be the attitude toward the American Pledge of Allegiance; almost all conservatives would want their children to know and recite it; the traditionalist, however, abhors a pledge that was originally made up by a socialist ideologist who was also, of course, a nationalist.

In its essence, therefore, the traditionalist right logically opposes all ideologies, including Conservatism, which none other than Rush Limbaugh, in addition to many others, has emphatically stated is a very definite ideology.   No authentic “traditionalist right” manifesto could ever be written; there have never been and will never be movement leaders, ideological/dogmatic texts to cite, programmatic statements, nationalist affiliation pledges to recite, etc. 

On the contrary, every ideology seeks its Utopia; there has never been, will never be, any Utopia offered by the traditionalist right.   Such rationalistic/nominalistic thinking would, by definition, be integrally always anathema to the thinking of the true political Right; all ideologies are bourgeois abstractions, including, of course, Marxism/Leninism.

As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, author of Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler, had quite easily demonstrated, all ideologies, including Communism, Nazism, and Fascism, are definitely only on the ideological Left of the political spectrum.  And, no, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn fully agreed, it is not true that opposites ever do meet in politics. 

This is as if, analogously, fire and ice could actually come to combine without the logical extinction of one or the other, by sheer obvious definition.   Thus, the far Left cannot, in fact, end up ever reaching the (supposed) far Right or vice versa.

Of course, people with opposed points of view can denounce the same thing(s) – but not necessarily for any or all the same reasons; they need not be, moreover, in any true agreement and can come to the same conclusion(s) by even very different means of reasoning that can be completely opposite or antithetical in their formulation(s) and/or assertion(s) of truth. 

Thus, Communism, Fascism, and Nazism are actually all on the Left, never on the Right; they all seek to ideologically aggrandize State power reified through demanded centralization, oppression, persecution, terror, injustice, slavery, and tyranny; they are, in their fundamental essence, mirror images as to being modernist/nominalist ideologies participating in the Neo-Pelagian heresy of reified Man as God.   

The traditionalist right, for instance, hates nationalism, which ultimately requires the centralization of State power; thus, the nation-state is historically, in its factual origins, a true product of Liberalism.  

For instance, Hitler, as a man of the Left, completely hated patriotism and supported only nationalism, as is explicitly explained most plainly in his infamous Mein Kampf.  This is consistent with Leo Strauss’ contention that Nazism, in terms of the historical genesis of its ideas, is a form of Liberalism.  

The traditionalist right, in sharp contradistinction, only sides with patriotism and against nationalism because it sees no contradiction in also favoring an “aristocratic” internationalism versus the both evil and atomistic cosmopolitanism of the Left or the atomistic individualism of Libertarianism.

The traditionalist right supports chivalry against the extremes, the opposite errors, of either pacifism or militarism; it prefers a society of social estates contrary to bourgeois class society or the supposed classless utopianism of Communism. 

The right that seeks traditionalism prefers economic activity within the social-cultural context of social estates, if at all possible, and with the quest for a true free market/entrepreneurship contrary to Capitalism, which functionally and logically seeks to be State or Corporate Capitalism; this is with its anti-free market desire for attaining corporate welfare as seen in tariffs, quotas, protectionism in general, etc. 

An actual free market economy dedicated to entrepreneurship, as defined, e.g., by the Austrian School of Economics, however, would be and remain totally antithetical to the statist ideology of Capitalism.

In terms of the ultimates involved, therefore, Conservatism and the traditionalist right are, in fact, polar opposites, especially in their much different consequences.   But, much more to the specific point of this present article’s orientation, it is, thus, highly important to note that men of the traditionalist right can be and usually are subject to true alienation, not the phony angst/posturing of the Left. 

The former feel alienated from a modern Western society and its decadent and degenerate culture that is dedicated to celebrating and promoting sodomy, abortion, infanticide, pornography, euthanasia, etc., meaning, in short, nihilism, the worship of death, the culture of death itself.  Thus, this obvious reality of modernity allied also to the spread of democracy, founded upon nominalism, is the true fulfillment of the degenerate and decadent utopianism of the Left, and certainly not of the Right. 

Not surprisingly, because Aristotle and others had defined democracy as a form of tyranny, one must be morally and politically in opposition to democracy and, consequently, Conservatism to be truly on the side of the traditionalist right.  This is why, when clearly perceived, Conservatism, as noted by the ideological adherents of the thinking of Edmund Burke, an English Whig, is really, in fact, another form of Liberalism, as was correctly noted by C.N.R. McCoy and others, since it supports democracy in some form or other.  

The true political issue for any actual polity, as was so correctly defined by Aristotle, is not really having rule done by the one, the few, or the many as if, for instance, a majoritarian (democratic) tyranny is supposed to be better than one or several tyrants; the basic factual matter of rulership’s central and fundamental concern is the political need to be an enemy of tyranny, whether exercised by the one, the few, or the many.   

This is, for instance, why the important causes of the promotion of freedom and liberty are best handled by the men of the traditionalist right, not conservatives, because all ideologists, inclusive of conservative ideologists, are enamored, to greater or lesser degrees, by various kinds of utopian urges.

With all of the foregoing argumentation kept in mind, it is, by now, quite obvious that the adherents, any supporters, of the radical, bourgeois-democratic mystique cannot, by definition moreover, ever be alienated, ever be those who supposedly suffer from what is called alienation.  Logically, therefore, only those people who righteously abhor modernity, meaning what it nihilistically represents and symbolizes, can truly be said to suffer from genuine alienation, from a true sense of fundamental abhorrence, of basic rejection. 

So, the way that alienation has always been popularly presented and culturally represented is seen to be totally false and without rational foundation; it is simply mythic at best, like a psychosomatic disorder, and, at worst, just a bad and rather pretentious and tendentious, tiresome and ugly, Leftist joke.

The men of the traditionalist right are, by definition, properly alienated from what vilely poses as being contemporary Western “civilization” and “culture” in the most debased forms currently imaginable with the legitimization and ever expectant legalization, sooner or later, of all moral vice now said to be virtue. 

This is because, among other important reasons, what had been classically defined as objectivity and subjectivity are, in modernity, wildly reversed and, consequently, perverted through nominalist-oriented cognition.  How so?   Alisdair MacIntrye, among others, has very interestingly written on how, prior to modernity in thinking, if no law had permitted something, then it was automatically assumed, by all reasonable people, to be, therefore, illegal. 

After modernity, most people, thinking themselves “reasonable” by the warped nominalist standards, assumed that something could be done if no law explicitly prohibited it.  It is an extremely critical and pivotal distinction to here properly note; it was, moreover, a truly revolutionary change of the accepted legal epistemology. 

This shockingly represented, to say the least, a very tremendously significant shift in human powers of (deformed) reasoning due primarily to what has gotten to be historically called the Protestant Reformation, a philosophical antecedent of the later Enlightenment, which had a quite terrible and devastating aftermath. 

A supreme product of triumphant modernity, Protestantism logically leads, by its inherent reductionism and individualism, to increasing degrees of secularism that finally, through spiritual exhaustion, usually results in nihilism, the final fulfillment of modernity, which philosophically precedes postmodernity itself; this is obviously seen with its highly affinitive deconstructionism in its greatly warped and twisted ratiocination from the late 20^th century and, of course, continuing now into the 21^st century.

 For example, Martin Luther himself, one of the very top figures of this revolutionary movement in religion and much else, wrote glowingly about what he had then called the peculiar freedom of the (Protestant) Christian man when liberated from the Roman Catholic doctrine of free will; Lutheran determinism fit in perfectly well with nominalism and spread from theology into political and social thought, as seen with Thomas Hobbes, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Karl Marx, to prominently name just a few. 

In fairness, of course, some other evil tendencies toward this notably horrible attitude, contrary always to classical Natural Law teachings, can also be unfortunately found easily within the (later historically proclaimed) Renaissance; this is, especially, it can be mentioned, within its more secular inclinations as it had developed.   Matters worsened, therefore, with and after the highly strange period of the so-called Enlightenment and then, of course, the post-Enlightenment era into the 20^th century. 

Therefore, logically speaking, how can the modernists and progressivists in society be ever alienated from a situation that they have approved of increasingly, as the centuries have gone by, with nihilism being celebrated (by them) as the hallmark, the epitome, of any advanced civilization and humane culture?  It simply does not make any sense. 

It contradicts absolutely all basic logic and reasoning among human beings for people to be supposedly opposed to what they support at one and the same time and in the same respect.  Even Marx, in his later years, had denounced alienation as just being, in his own words, a lot of “philosophical nonsense” signifying nothing.

When subjectivity and objectivity in the premodern understanding become, through modernity, reversed totally, then, literally speaking, all hell breaks loose: World War I, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, World War II, Cold War, genocides, holocausts, War on Terror, etc.   But, is more evidence needed of the truth?

Obviously, what has genuinely happened is that the so-called alienation that has supposedly occurred is the direct result of increasing modernization qua secularization, of deliberately retreating from needed acceptance of and dutiful adoration for the ultimate metaphysical order of reality, i.e., the Lord God Almighty Himself. 

As Christopher Dawson, a Roman Catholic convert, would have surely always agreed, one must have a society and culture founded solidly upon and kept within the known proper boundaries of theological assurance, meaning solid adherence to a religion, to prevent any possible existential, phenomenological, or gestalt (read: idiotic) speculations upon the terribly fallacious and absurd subject of (supposed) alienation within a society or its culture. 

Find God, and one can and will, eventually, find one’s self; to lose the Supreme Deity, however, is to lose one’s self.  This is not, however, really alienation; it is plain stupidity for many, a lack of knowledge for many others; it is the human failure, due to an act of free will or ignorance, to know, love, serve, and adore God, which, for those who believe truly in the truth of the Resurrection, especially through the Roman Catholic faith, means always Christ the Lord, the Messiah, of this or any world.

Athanasius contra mundum!

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