Positivism and Globalism

The Nazi Empire fell. The Soviet Empire fell. And now a new globalist empire is in the ascendant. It will also have its day, its pride preceding its own fall, but who knows how much damage will be done before it comes crashing down?

In my recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative, “Bad Ideas Have Bad Consequences”, I focused on the destructive ramifications of various philosophical perspectives which emerged during the so-called “Enlightenment”. That essay ended with a discussion of the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which had led to the founding and subsequent ubiquitous influence of the pseudo-science of sociology.

My trusted guide in these musings on Enlightenment philosophy has been Henri de Lubac, whose book, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, continues to be the focus of the FORMED Book Club, which I co-host with Father Fessio and Vivian Dudro of Ignatius Press.

One aspect of Comte’s positivist vision was the establishment of a globalist world order, which would be governed by an elite class of financiers and bankers. This class of very wealthy and therefore very powerful men would form the ruling  “patriciate” who would govern the “proletariat”.

“Bankers are the natural generals of modern industry,” Comte wrote. “Because of this, positivism reserves to them the temporal supremacy of the West.” He envisaged a global patriciate of two thousand bankers governing the global proletariat. It was from this financial elite that “the new knighthood must emanate….”

As for the rest of us, we should accept our destiny as proletarians. “The vast majority of workers” will always be dependent on “a periodic wage”, without the prospect of ever attaining productive property of their own, which might enable some form of independence from the government of the patriciate. In modern terms, the global elites will run the global corporations and the rest of us should be content to be disposable cogs in the corporate machinery.

The globally disenfranchised were to be sold the idea of globalism through the art of propaganda. Referring to the need to inspire “the bulk of mankind with enthusiasm” for the positivist patriciate’s rule over them, it would be necessary to “paint them a vivid picture of the improvements that the new system would bring into the human lot”. In brief and in sum, humans must be subject to humanity. We cannot expect to have individual freedoms that contradict the needs of a global deified humanity.

This necessary serfdom in the service of humanity was encapsulated by Henri de Lubac:

[I]f temporal society is an adequate manifestation of the only true deity, from whom the individual receives all that he is, how can he have any rights as against society? That notion of right is essentially “theological-metaphysical”. This means that it is completely out of date.

For Comte, any notion of individual rights rooted in natural law is “as false as it is immoral”. Such notions “must disappear from the political domain as the notion of cause has disappeared from the philosophical domain”. Positivist political philosophy replaces the relative rights of the individual with the absolute right of humanity as incarnated in society. It substitutes “laws for causes and duties for rights”. It replaces “the futile and heated discussion of rights” with a “fruitful and salutary realization of duties”. The individual exists for society and must be subject to the demands of society. Comte is absolutely blunt and candid about this:

Positivism never admits anything but duties, with all, for all, for its point of view, which is always social, cannot contain any notion of right, constantly founded on individuality…. On what human foundation could the idea of right thus rest? … Since divine rights no longer exist, this notion [of individual rights] must be completely effaced.

In such a society, which sacrifices men on the altar erected to Man, the individual will be judged according to his usefulness to society. Again, Comte is absolutely candid: “Any worthy citizen then becomes a social functionary.”

In his conclusion to the section of his book on Comte’s positivism, de Lubac passes judgment on this “religion of humanity”: “The positivist formula spells total tyranny. In practice it leads to the dictatorship of a party or, rather, of a sect. It refuses man any freedom, any rights, because it refuses him any reality.”

The problem with Comte and his followers is that they are “steeped in sheer utopianism”. They are convinced that the acceptance of serfdom on the part of the proletariat is a necessary prerequisite for the “harmony” that service to Humanity will bring. The future of Humanity will be so happy that there is no way that those in the present or the past can even comprehend it. This faith in the future was expressed by Comte in the following glowing terms: “Henceforth the knowledge and improvement of our nature are to procure for us means of happiness whose past cannot provide any idea of it.”

Humanity’s future, guarded and guided by positivist principles, would see an endless age of peace and love. “The final state is fully conceived,” Comte declared, “in view of the expansion related to sociological foresight and universal love, replacing theologism and war.” Clearly Comte was imagining a world similar to that imagined by his disciple John Lennon, in which belief in nothing but Humanity, will leave nothing to kill or die for and no religion too.

“Love as the principle” is the positivist motto. “Alas!” de Lubac responds. “One can but add: ‘and tyranny as the outcome’.”

It is ironic that one who erects Humanity as a god should know so little about humanity itself. Comte’s naiveté is made manifest in his belief that “altruism … can never become oppressive”. The idealist can never become a fanatic or a tyrant!

“Comte’s spiritual itinerary is that of man himself,” writes de Lubac. “Lost faith cannot long remain unreplaced.”

Henri de Lubac understands that man does not live on bread alone. He needs a god to worship. If he will not worship the God of religion, he will erect a new god in His place. When men stop believing in God, Chesterton reminds us, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

Comte’s god was Humanity, the most inhumane of deities. It is a god which is widely worshipped in our own day and which is being championed by the “new knighthood” of the global elite, which Comte saw as the leaders of the cult of humanity. We think perhaps of George Soros and Bill Gates, those unelected shapers of our globalist destiny. We think of Comte’s two thousand bankers who were the “natural generals” of the positivist world order. We think of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

“Can it at least be said that the positivist menace is not very formidable?” Thus asked Henri de Lubac in the dark days of 1944, at a time when the menace of Marxism and Nazism eclipsed any thought of the dangers of Comte’s “Humanity”. De Lubac then answered his own question: “To my mind it is, on the contrary, one of the most dangerous that besets us. At any moment the failure of other nostrums, with greater outward attractions, may suddenly send its stock up.” The Nazi Empire fell. The Soviet Empire fell. And now a new globalist empire is in the ascendant. It will also have its day, its pride preceding its own fall, but who knows how much damage will be done before it comes crashing down?

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.