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Merker: Getting from Enlightenment Reason to Secular Salvation
The educated youth of the mid-19th century were traumatized by the aftereffects of the twin revolutions that convulsed Europe around 1800: the French Revolution with its 30 years of war and upheaval; and the Industrial Revolution in the economy.
Everything was changing, and Merker proposes “Romanticism in art and intellectual fashions” as, at least in part, a reaction against the merciless change issuing from the French and Industrial Revolutions. And this Romanticism included Nationalism, an effort to create meaning in national myths for the various peoples of Europe.
The point is that we live in a time of momentous change.
[We have] the French and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, Romanticism, Nationalism, science, and beyond[.]
And everyone is trying to understand the present, to divine the future, and also make their divination happen.
What’s it all about, Alfie? One thing is clear. In the two and a half centuries since the convulsions centering around the year 1800, we still have not agreed upon what to do. We have been unable to stabilize our Enlightenment heritage as divided between the competing French and English interpretations.
So Merker proposes to investigate the “superordinate ideals and values” that are directing traffic. And he suggests that Romanticism, especially as it helped birth Marxism, is the key to understanding what ails us. A key to the birth of Marxism in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, except that they were not really philosophers but literary figures creating modern myths.
These three failed to be bound by Kant’s dictum that we cannot know things in themselves, and pretended that they could know everything by conducting speculative exercises in “German Philosophical Romanticism.”
But there was a problem. Hegel’s philosophy proposed an “end of history” culminating in the “glorification of the Prussian state” and did not provide a secular version of Christianity that looked towards the future and provided an engine of “hope, purpose, and activism directed at a ‘promised’ future state of felicity.”
No problem. David Friedrich Strauss wrote The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach wrote The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach proposed that the notion of God is a projection of positive human attributes “such as understanding, strength and love” into a divine being that is really just a projection of ideal human nature.
According to Feuerbach, in our conception of God we have divested ourselves of our own nature in an act of self-alienation that leaves us estranged from ourselves and divided from our fellow humans.
Suppose there were other, non-religious alienations “whose abolition would complete the liberative restoration of an imagined human state of perfection”. Moses Hess came out with On the Essence of Money that experienced humans as subjects “under the ‘worship of money’” as a secular equivalent to Feuerbach’s religious alienation.
Obviously, this secular alienation could be “ended by a restoration, under a future system of socialism or communism, of the cooperation which Hess held to be characteristic of human productivity in the unalienated state”.
Marx and Engels converted this restoration into their “materialist conception of history” where human history is driven by “changes in the material means of production.” Thus the Industrial Revolution changed the means of production and the bourgeois revolutions would be followed by proletarian revolution, and “the cataclysm would issue in a world of conflictless cooperation”, for, following Feuerbach, it would release the
cooperative, unselfish, communal species-being [that] constitutes the real nature of the individual awaiting liberation from its occlusion by “alienated labor”[.]
The genius of Marxism is to copy the Christian arc of history into secular form.
By its assumption of an inevitable passage from capitalism to revolution Marxism recaptured, in purely secular terms, … the psychology of hope and purpose that is inherent in Christian sacred history[.]
And it equips the followers with patience, for if the revolution doesn’t succeed today it just means that “material conditions are not sufficiently ‘ripe’ for the passage to the final apocalyptic transformation.” Meanwhile the faithful can keep busy with “the proselytizing, organizing, and agitation that will inevitably… be rewarded with success in the end by ‘the iron laws of history’”, never mind the “defeats along the way to the shimmering goal.”
More to come.
| Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:31:51 GMT |
Merker: The Three Western Moralities
Having sorted out Rousseau and Co., Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise reminds us that modern secular morality is basically a reboot of Christian morality that goes all the way back to the life of Jesus.
And that is important because all good people with a conscience adopt the reigning moral framework, and however aware people are of the standard moral framework within which they live, whether the awareness is innocent or informed or insincere, “moral principles exert causal power in the culture that promotes them.” Christianity, since the beginning, “extols self-abnegation as the epitome of virtue.”
Jesus’ teaching was responding to an existential crisis for the Jewish people, what with the death of Herod and imposition of Roman rule. The air was full of messianic expectations, and that is what Jesus provided in a classic cult. He prophesied that in the new world
the last will be the first, the first will be the last, and righteousness will reign after the unworthy have been cast down and the good exalted.
What should a follower of Christ do?
To qualify for admission his new order of things, one placed one’s trust, belief, faith, in him as the scripturally prophesied Savior, by bearing witness to him, and becoming his follower…
[Y]ou should deny yourself and take up your cross to follow him, distribute your wealth to the poor, become like a child caring not for tomorrow, humble yourself in service to others, love those who hate you do good to those that wish you ill, and turn the other cheek when smitten.
All this was predicated upon the Savior’s “bodily resurrection from death”.
Of course, when Christ failed to reappear, century after century, the extreme cultish beliefs softened. Somewhat.
The way to understand the Enlightenment is to understand that it represented “an unwitting assimilation of a specifically Christian moral stance into the foundation of secular ethics”. Secularists, to this day, believe in a secularized Christian moral universe.
Then came Thomas Aquinas and Summa Theologica and the insertion of Aristotelian “prudential ethics” into European culture. Prudential ethics is “self-regarding” rather than “other-regarding.” But it warns against “violating the self-interest of others”. Self-interest is a good thing as long as it does not violate the self-interest of others.
But Aristotelian prudential ethics remained in the second tier below the other-regarding principles of Christian ethics. It took Thomas Hobbes “to make self-interest the foundation of his moral and political system.” But Hobbes’ ideas ran into a headwind.
So successfully had Christian teaching shaped Western moral sensibilities that any stance that questioned an other-regarding conception of morality appeared to be an assault on morality itself.
For example: the Bishop of Peterborough, the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Then came Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Public Benefits.
There Mandeville argued that… envy, vanity, love of luxury, novelty and fashion… creates… livelihoods for many who might otherwise go unemployed.
And this:
[Mandeville] never tired of uncovering self-interested motives behind ostensibly disinterested pursuits and stances, and delighted in exposing its operation in moral posturing[.]
Frances Hutcheson countered Mandeville with “moral sense theory” in which
the moral worth of actions… is defined by the consequences of those actions… in terms of the extent to which they promote enhanced happiness in others[.]
And on to Bentham and “the greatest good for the greatest number”.
To Merker,
other-regarding ethics are no more fit to guide conduct and decision making for this world than was the original moral message of Jesus at the time when he thought apocalypse was imminent. The difference is that Jesus’ teaching was not intended to promote felicity and flourishing in life on this side of the cataclysm, while the secular heirs to Christian other-regard think it supplies the very key to right action in this life and this world itself.
Then came Adam Smith. His analysis of economic exchange in The Wealth of Nations led to an “ethic of reciprocity” that applied to the acts of buying and selling.
Smith recognized… the wide-ranging ramifications of the fact that… an exchange will take place only when it benefits each of the exchanging parties in accordance with their own conception of their self-interest, and that unless prevented such exchanges will take place and be extended as far as possible by the force of self-interest alone.
Merker suggests that the ethic of exchange is morally superior to the ethic of benevolence.
In the act of exchange the exchanging parties engage each other in a relation of symmetry… They both receive and they both give, they both exchange one value for another, they each bind themselves to a mutual obligation to respect the change of ownership, and by fulfilling it they each realize a bit of their self-interest…
The act of benevolence, on the other hand… is asymmetric throughout. Only one gives, the other only receives, one is the possessor of a resource, the other in need of it, one has the status of benefactor, the other that of supplicant.
And note that the recipient of benevolence takes away the feeling of indebtedness, so that in the best of all possible worlds they would like “to convert it into an exchange.”
All this might have transformed the world, except for the labor theory of value implied in Smith’s work. Smith didn’t directly deal with it; others did, and they knew that the workers were being exploited.
“Laborers, the argument goes, though entering voluntarily upon” an exchange of wages for labor get less in wages “than that labor, embodied in its product, actually is worth when that product is brought to market.”
A century later the marginal theory of value would make the labor theory of value irrelevant, because there is no use value, no labor value: only the actual price of exchange. But not before a century’s worth of intellectuals, from William Thompson and Thomas Hodgkins to Marx, had damned the act of voluntary exchange as inherently exploitative.
Merker notes that for the critics of exchange “the stance that portrays laborers as wronged in principle by wage labor” counts as “a moral act of disinterested benevolence” for “other-regarding” morality, both from the Christian tradition and the new secular tradition. Never mind that it now contradicts the science.
Smith’s pioneering insight… [of] a self-regarding alternative to the other-regarding version of morality… was simply… swamped by… social movements and intellectual fashions that… came to cement rather than to replace, other-regarding ethics in the ethos of modernity.
Except for rebels like Bjorn Merker, you and me.
More to come.
| Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:55:11 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Every society since the dawn of time, and especially ours, is drenched in religion.
Most successes are a consequence of second, third and fourth attempts.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: How The Dutch Taught Us about Government Finance
