Social Contract Theory as Feathered Serpent

How Enlightenment thinkers created a mythology for the modern world . . .

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Comments (7)

In the good ol’ pre-Social Contract days, let’s say the 16th century (pre-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), there were Roman Catholics and Protestants executing and slaughtering each other in many parts of Europe. I’m not sure which were the TRUE Christians in these bloodbaths. But I do know that if one or both of them were…well, then, Christians do not NOW exist in America. (No surprise to those of us who actually understood Nietzsche’s tweet “Gott ist tot.”) Roman Catholics and Lutherans in Germany in the early 1930s had a choice Bolsheviks or Nazis. Likewise, in 2023 America, “Christians” have a choice: extreme Left or extreme Right, Stalin or Hitler. “Christianity” is not an option.

May 3, 2023 Nick Reply

(But of course I exaggerate: there is still no alternative to Stalin or Mao in this country. In other words, the extreme Right is still only hypothetical–at Rumble, Jared Taylor only has a few thousand followers.)

May 3, 2023 Nick Reply

That was because of the printing press, now we have the Internet. Then we just had two fractions, Protestants and Catholics. Now everybody hate each other. That we don’t kill each other, is just because of a stronger State, which uses other methods.

May 4, 2023 Øyvind Holmstad Reply

I don’t believe in social contract theory either. I do see something similar in the story of Moses where the people pledge to abide by the law along with the generations that follow. Something similar to that exists with the US Constitution. It was ratified by the states and applied to all following generations.

The fundamental problem is that the current and future generations have had no say in the matter and therefore could not have entered into any contract. A contract exists between 2 parties and ends with the death of one of the two parties.

I think Wilson infers the impossibility of allowing each new person into the world the chance of accepting or rejecting the legal systems we live under but offers that their is an actual contract given to us by our Creator. That could work logically because as His creation we are in one sense His property. As the ultimate property owner he has the property rights over us.

Showing his love and generosity He has proven to be very open handed with how we should live our lives. This is where particularity and natural law give us wide swathes of freedom while giving us a clear standard where we should not tread.

https://thecrosssectionrmb.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-ethics-of-liberty-human-rights-as.html

May 4, 2023 RMB Reply

You do know that the Thirty Years War and English Civil Wars were political and aimed at disestablishing the secular powers of established churches and opposing absolute monarchies, don’t you.

May 4, 2023 EK Reply

EK, I’m aware of that paradigm, and line of propaganda. Cromwell, or at least some of his soldiers, thought they were NOT fighting because Charles I was too “absolutist” (Ship Money and Forced Loan) or because that “divine-right” monarch was not “constitutional” enough; but rather because he was too Papist or at least too Arminian. Of course you are welcome to question their sincerity. Charles did.

May 4, 2023 Nick Reply

The attempt to dismiss the feathered serpent as outlandish gets right to the essence of the problem with Modernity. Any learned Christian in Medieval Christendom would probably understand the symbolic language of Heraldry. The modern world would probably benefit from reading Evelyn Underhill’s book on Mysticism, of that same title. F.C. Happold also wrote a book of that same title. Cirlot’s “Dictionary of Symbols” would also be helpful in reaching an understanding of communication between our mundane reality and Transcendent Realms. Kathleen Raine’s books of essays on poetry (Defending Ancient Springs, Blake and Antiquity, The Inner Journey of the Poet) would also be helpful. Modernity has lost sight of the reality that an Inner Journey actually exists, and it is what human beings were created for, hence the profound feeling that we don’t belong HERE, and “HERE” is terminated in 70, 80, 90 years or so. We are prompted, at a profoundly fundamental level, to look into that Inner Journey, just like the explorers during the Age of Exploration were driven to take their Outer Journeys, into the unknown regions of the World.

May 5, 2023 Larry Bowen Reply

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