The émigrés and samizdat thinkers of Soviet Union, including the ones of the ‘liberal’-left who have most deeply inspired me (Nikolai Berdyaev, Fr Sergei Bulgakov, St Maria Skobtsova, St Ilya Fondaminsky, etc.) saw their task as being the overthrow of a monolithic, impersonal, totally-mobilised system which completely constrained thought and freedom of the spirit.
But in the wake of that system’s collapse, what took its place was even worse—an anarchic free-for-all hellscape in which those who could not help themselves were brutally trampled underfoot, or left to rot through starvation, or homelessness, or drink, or drugs, or hopelessness. Among the internal critics of the Soviet Union, all but the most ideologically-blinkered neoliberals were left aghast by the human waste and wreckage that took its place.
And now, in the absence of the Soviet system, we are faced with a very different monolithic, impersonal, totally-mobilised system which completely constrains thought and freedom of the spirit... though it masquerades itself underneath the banners of ‘freedom’. This is a system of monopoly, of endlessly-volatile finance-capital, of techno-dystopian nightmares which dissolve the barriers between person and machine, of destruction (not even truly ‘creative’ anymore, if indeed it ever was) with the military-industrial complex as the vanguard of concentrated wealth.
The task which is before us, now, as before the Soviet émigrés of a prior age, is the utter demolition of the spiritual roots of this hateful, faceless, godless system.
If I am critical of Fordham, it is because not only have they abandoned this task—they have taken up a position as the handmaidens of this anti-personalist, hyper-capitalist system... in the very name of personality! Witness how they attack the outward enemies of finance-capitalism when they are, or appear, strong (Russia, China), and wholesale ignore the victims of finance-capitalism when they are weak (Palestine, wherein the only three Fordhamite articles on offer are afterthoughts over two years old and provide nothing but weak-tea platitudes based on outdated Clinton-era political thought).
And if I am critical of ‘Montanika’ / Patristic Faith / Ludwell Fellowship, etc., it is because they have misconstrued this task of our age entirely. Clinging to the tattered rags of white émigré politics and homebrew backlash-political ressentiment, they are still fighting rearguard battles of a war which has already been won (or lost, depending on your perspective). They are still looking for enemies on the outside, when in fact the enemy has already taken the castle, and is issuing their orders for them.
The haute-bourgeois academic Fordhamites may occasionally make pious noises about standing up for the victims, but Catherine Liu straight-up has their number. They are currying and hoarding ‘virtue’ (or rather, what passes for it in our age), while at the same time seeking the cosy embrace of tech-bros and Wall Street finance, particularly Teradata and CitiBank.
And the petit-bourgeois YouTube personality-cultists, profiteering pedlars of an older brand of Whiggery, street preachers and psychological charlatans which make up the ‘native opposition’ within Orthodox Christianity are... well, perhaps they are not as close to being antichrists as the Fordham types are. At least they are sincere. But they are still cultural and political sectarians. They are raskolniki and Old Believers in their spiritual ‘type’, and as such they are pitiable and deluded. And they draw people in--idealistic, lost, ‘angry young men’ in particular—with the exact same lures and promises that the German, Dutch and northern French Reformers did in the 1500s and 1600s.
I don’t know how else to describe my position here. I find Anglo liberalism, particularly in its ‘woke’/rainbow-flag/ersatz-radical form, utterly repugnant. But Anglo conservatism has no draw left for me. Neither political ‘pill’ can cure the disease that afflicts us all—including myself. All I am left to say here is: эй, приди, Господь Иисус!
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