CONTRASTING FREEDOMS OF BARBARISM AND CULTURE

1. I have stated that there is a sense in which the devolutionary regression from the Cosmos to Nature is equivalent to philistinism devolving to barbarism, the Devil to Woman, and that the evolutionary progression which emerges in opposition to this, as from Man to the Cyborg, is equivalent to civilization evolving to culture, and thus to that which, in genuine Godliness, would be antithetical to the Cosmos. Therefore I have identified, in general terms, the Cosmos with philistinism, Nature with barbarism, Man with civilization, and the Cyborg with culture.

2. There is nothing, so far as I am aware, wrong with this theory. But it is only one, and not necessarily the best or most credible in all instances! For it occurs to me that it would also be possible to distinguish culture from philistinism on the basis of grace and sin, psyche and soma, self and not-self, the Father and the Son, and this whether in relation to physics or metaphysics, Man or God, and no less possible, on the other side of the gender fence, to distinguish barbarism from civilization, or barbarity from civility, on the basis of crime and punishment, soma and psyche, not-self and self, the Mother and the Daughter, equally whether in relation to chemistry or metachemistry, Woman or the Devil.

3. If so, then we have a gender-based distinction between the crime and punishment, barbarity and civility, of a female disposition or reality on the one hand, and the grace and sin, culture and philistinism, of a male disposition or reality on the other hand, with the former vacuously characterized by free soma and bound psyche, but the latter, issuing from a plenum, characterized by free psyche and bound soma, so that while civility, or civilization, and culture are both psychic, or of the psyche, they are unequally so, the one being secondary to the prevailing barbarity, or barbarism, of free soma, and the other being primary in relation to the philistinism, or undue naturalism, of bound soma, its secondary complement.

4. Therefore, regarded in this light, civilization and culture would be the female and male approaches, respectively, to psyche, the one bound, or determined by somatic freedom, and the other free, while barbarism and philistinism would be their somatic counterparts, the one free and the other bound, or determined by psychic freedom.

5. Hence whereas civilization, or civility or civic duty, would be secondary to barbarism or barbarity or barbarous freedom, like bound psyche to free soma, philistinism, by contrast, would be secondary to culture, like bound soma to free psyche, and we would have a right to distinguish that society which was somatically free, and therefore barbarous, from any society that was psychically free, and therefore cultural, with an emphasis on grace and sin rather than, in female vein, on crime and punishment.

6. No society would, of course, be entirely the one thing or the other, but there is still a sense in which a bias towards one or the other options, according with the prevailing gender of a given people, can be discerned, and we can note a distinction, once again, between free state and bound church on the one hand, that of a female-oriented society, or matriarchy, and free church and bound state on the other hand, that of a male-oriented society, or patriarchy.

7. Short of an androgynous, or very neutral, compromise between female and male alternatives, it is difficult to imagine a society in which the State was free one moment and bound the next, or, conversely, that the Church was bound one moment and free the next, since one would not be referring to one type of state or church but either to a state and a church which changed its integrity, like a chameleon its colours, as and when expedient, or, no less paradoxically, to the co-existence, in mutual rivalry, of two types of state and two types of church, neither of which had any desire to compromise with the other.

8. Clearly, states and societies tend to be one thing or the other, either free or bound, whether in relation to the State or to the Church, and states are established and maintained, more usually, on the basis of the prevalence of one type of state and corresponding type of church, irrespective of whether this means that a minority who might happen to belong to a different type of church or even to relate to a different type of state in relation to that are denied sovereignty and the official endorsement of their sense of freedom.

9. In philosophical terms, one might say that societies advocating and upholding the reality of a free state, with a correspondingly bound church, are more prone, in Protestant fashion, to empiricism, while those upholding the reality of a free church, with a correspondingly bound state, are more likely, in Catholic fashion, to favour rationalism, as demonstrated by the historical division between British and Continental philosophy, since empiricism thrives in a somatically free environment, where science and politics are barbarously free, and sensuality tends to take precedence, in avowedly female vein, over sensibility, whereas rationalism only really thrives in a psychically free environment, where economics and religion are culturally free, and sensibility tends to take precedence, in typical male vein, over sensuality. For the distinction here is not between freedom and binding, but between contrasting types of freedom and their correlative orders of determinism, whether psychic or somatic.

10. Societies in which the State is free and the Church bound, being of the not-self and therefore notself-consciously female, will maintain a situation in which civility is secondary to barbarity, punishment to crime, since, in the very nature of things, punishment, and therefore civility, can only be secondary to crime, and therefore the barbarous pursuit of somatic freedom at the expense, on the other side of the gender fence, of psychic freedom.

11. Societies, on the contrary, in which the church is free and the state bound, being of the self and therefore self-consciously male, will uphold a situation in which philistinism is secondary to culture, sin to grace, since, in the very nature of these things, sin, and therefore philistinism, can only be secondary to grace, and therefore the cultural pursuit of psychic freedom at the expense, on the opposite side of the gender fence, of somatic freedom.

12. I will not say that empiricism is wrong or that rationalism is alone right; for such a reductionist claim would hardly do justice to the legitimacy of sensuality from a hegemonic female standpoint in the free state or to the legitimacy of sensibility from a hegemonic male standpoint in the free church, but, rather, that, as the evidence suggests, empiricism will not take precedence over rationalism from a properly male standpoint in psychic freedom, while rationalism can hardly be expected to take precedence over empiricism from a properly female standpoint in somatic freedom.

13. Either a society opts for observation in female vein or it opts for reason in male vein, for, at the end of the day, you cannot have a state that is free one moment and bound the next, or a church that is bound one moment and free the next, but either a stable polity or a stable religiosity, the former based in somatic barbarism but allowing for civilized constraints, the latter based in psychic culture but allowing for philistine alternatives, since one cannot have punishment without crime nor, conversely, sin without grace. Just as crime is the somatic precondition of punishment, its psychic corollary, so grace, by gender contrast, is the psychic precondition of sin, its somatic corollary. The Mother precedes the Daughter no less surely than the Father precedes the Son.

14. Obviously, societies in which either a female bias or a male bias obtain are incompatible and incommensurate. You can't blend that which won't mix but reacts against any such compromise. You can either carry on, in the well-worn tracks of secular or ecclesiastic tradition, or you can forge a new society in which such a dichotomy, and in some limited sense dialectic, no longer obtains, because one has found a way to transcend it via some kind of synthetic transmutation of the antagonists such that does away with the ethnic and political rivalry and establishes a fresh basis for society to develop from, a basis, I mean, which is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Parliamentary nor Republican, Loyalist nor Nationalist, but doggedly Social Transcendentalist in its design to forge a supra-national union of the peoples concerned in what I have described, in previous texts, as 'Kingdom Come', as instanced by the concept of a Gaelic federation of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as the means whereby lasting peace can be brought to the British Isles, and the hideous division of Ireland between Protestant North and Catholic South be consigned, democratically and peaceably, to the rubbish heap of schismatic history.

15. For until the Gaelic peoples, in particular of Ireland, Scotland, and hopefully even Wales, opt for some kind of federal unity within the supra-national context of such a 'Kingdom' as that to which I have dedicated a considerable period of my vocational time, it is hard to envisage any substantial progress being made in the way of a united Ireland and an end to centuries of sectarian and political rivalry. Such a rivalry can only be ended, I contend, by Social Transcendentalism, and thus by the synthetic transcendence of Catholic/Protestant sectarianism and an end, in consequence, to the Christian religion, that great failure of Western civilization.