At the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of the Gods. It was the logical result of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In the post-religious age, man, not the human soul, appeared at the center, which must be saved and prepared for eternal life. Nietzsche wanted to feel nature, to live by its laws in “this very world” and to escape from the clutches of Christian morality. According to Nietzsche, the superman is freed from the influence of Christian morality invented for the “weak”, who strives to rule and live fully in harmony with the laws of nature, and not to suppress instincts for the sake of some “extraterrestrial world” that Jesus promises us after death.
Nietzsche was first and foremost against Christian morality, and the basis of any religion is morality, and the “roof” of teaching is the offer of “reward” to curb instinctual passions. The same is true of other religious teachings. For example, according to Christianity, you restrain your instincts by keeping the commandments in order to be saved in the “next life”, for which Jesus sacrificed himself, in Islam for eternal pleasures with 70 virgins, in Buddhism to be freed from the nightmare of new lives, etc.
Today’s liberalism, neo-Marxism, feminism, other common “isms” are first of all against traditions – patriarchy, traditional family – religious institutions based on these ideas, because they are the ones suppressing “natural instincts”, that is, the bearers of moral-normative ideologies fighting against real freedom. Like Nietzsche, they offer to live in the “now”, in this material world, in contrast to the traditional value system, they base their “happiness” on “new” models.
It was not by chance that Nietzsche suggested pushing the fallen.
It was said to “push” and break the moral norms among us. However, the foundations of Nietzsche and modern liberal and leftist theories are different, they essentially believe in different ideas about neo-paganism. As why exactly paganism, we will talk about it later.
In the United States today, if we take a deep look at the ongoing processes, there is a struggle between Christianity and paganism that has split the country. The world is also split.
However, we are interested in the civilizational processes, which is the basis of the legitimacy of the authorities. For example, the most dangerous thing for the United States is not the political, but the civilizational rift on which the political currents are built. If before the political struggle did not turn into a civilized struggle, today there is such a danger. This is the worst that can happen in the life of big countries.
Similar processes take place in Armenia as well, but unlike the West, in our country it takes place in the subconscious layer — “New Armenia”, “Old Armenia” do not have their own civilizational and philosophical formulations, that is why we do not have real parties and real political institutions. The issue of legitimacy is also pending, because the basis of legitimacy can be ideas, not the number of ballots.
As early as the 12th century, the French theologian Pierre Abelard came to the conclusion that “Man, by his very nature, is a terrifying animal. We know man only in a state restrained by civilization, that is why we are frightened by the former manifestations of his real nature.”
Research by historians, culturologists, and anthropologists has led to the conclusion that the emergence of religions has contributed to the emergence of the largest human societies, states and civilizations. Religions, if we put aside their sacral component, are a means of introducing moral norms: what is good, what is bad, what is not allowed, how to organize daily life, norms of relations between men and women, sanitary rules, public and state rituals and etc.
Religions not only set norms, but also restrained the predatory nature of the man mentioned by Abelard. The 10 Christian Commandments and the interpretations built on them are the basis of Christian civilization, the 700 or so Judaism commandments impose stricter restrictions, the Shari’a of Islamic law imposes even stricter requirements and punishments. The same is true in Buddhism and Hinduism. Each of them is a separate civilization according to the established value system and ideas about the world; German Spengler, English Toynbee, Russian Danilsky, American Huntington interpret these civilizations differently, as well as the mechanisms of influencing or not influencing each other.
In short, before the Enlightenment, religions were the main tools for creating civilizations, and any civilization had its main center, which developed, spread or enforced those norms, dominated that territory. These were empires.
Catholic civilization seceded from the Orthodox world and later destroyed its main enemy, Byzantium. In fact, it was not the Ottomans who destroyed Byzantium, but Catholic Europe, the Turks simply put an end to that process. It is worth mentioning about it in a separate article, which can be important to understand the real political history of Armenia.
Later, the Holy Roman Empire was destroyed by Protestant movements, and we entered a secular age in which religion was pushed out of politics.
If religions have been pushed out of real politics and societies have become secular, then how are the value systems of societies and states being established now and how do modern “empires” – superpowers – function, what value systems do they use in their struggles to dominate others, to ideologically defeat rivals? This is what is needed to understand the meaning of liberalism, Marxism, conservatism and other similar “isms” in order to understand the real meaning of the struggle of ideas in international life, without which it is impossible to understand today’s reality.
It is obvious that in the postmodern period a new civilization emerged, the “theologians” of which are already philosophers, economists, culturologists, political scientists, who give a new meaning to the world, and these approaches are used by political centers to establish world hegemony.
Tsarist Russia has never been a world superpower because its ideology, Orthodoxy, had no universal significance, but the Soviet Union was based on Marxism, which already had universal significance. The world was divided into two parts: the proponents of “freedom” and “equality”. Both ideologies had a universal impact, and the world was divided between them. What was strange about all this was that the idea of “equality” was perceptible in other civilizations as well, in the worlds of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. It was a new phenomenon.
In Europe, in the United States and everywhere there were supporters of “equality”, and in the “socialist camp” there were also supporters of “freedom”. The idea was of universal significance, which is why the Soviet Union became one of the pillars of the bipolar world.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there remained only one pole, the pole of “freedom”, which began to degenerate and decay without the presence of the enemy, but in order to maintain the role of the world supercenter, it was necessary to maintain the function of the torchbearer of “freedom” by making changes in the already existing value system.
Ours is the problem of those changes in the value system or the distortions of modern “commandments”, which we will consider in the logic of the developments of international politics.
There is a lot of talk in Armenia today about the danger of losing national traditions. And what are the traditions, what is their significance? As I mentioned in the previous section, civilizations are based on value systems that become traditions over time, and later, as life progresses, values change and new traditions emerge. Naturally, every civilization built on certain traditions has its key country, which we will conventionally call an empire. Empires defend and disseminate those values, impose their standards on them. In order to gain control over people, one must first control their thoughts.
Before the Enlightenment (17-18 centuries) value systems were introduced through religions based on the authority of God and, of course, no one could question the word of God (and whoever tried was declared a heretic and punished), and consequently, the change of value systems was slow, and the dispute over values was over the interpretations of the word of God. After the Enlightenment, religion began to lose its magical influence, and in the 19th century, Nietzsche announced the “Death of the Gods”. Changes in value systems began to appear rapidly.
You can get acquainted with the rapid change of value systems in our time and its consequences on today’s civilization in Manvel Sargsyan’s lecture.
According to the Swiss culturologist Richard Theodore Tarnas, “The European ‘New Age’ has been replaced by the postmodern era, one of the most characteristic of which is the belief in progress and the omnipotence of reason. In the New Age (Modern) the Value system was transformed during the First World War. As a result, the European-centered image of the world gave way to global pluralism, and the modernist belief in reason gave way to interpretive thinking. ”
Through Christianity, the family became one of the major public institutions sanctified by the church. Husbands and wives marry in the church “in the presence” of God. The family, before Christianity, was not so strictly defined or sanctified in any other religion. The controversy over the institution of the family, that it can be concluded not only between a man and a woman, but that many options are possible, is a civilizational and political dispute, it is not accidental that it has acquired geopolitical significance. It can even be said that the modern left and liberals, due to their approaches to the family, want to create a new value system, which is becoming a symbol of today’s globalism and divides conservatives and globalists. The problem is not so much the different ideas about the family itself, but the establishment of a new civilization through value systems, and then a new domination. It is no coincidence that the main issue is not the protection of the freedoms of people of non-traditional sexual orientation, their right to live freely, happily and with dignity, but the issue of marriage itself (the issue of the marriage act recognized by the state), which sets a new civilization standard. It is clear that the problem is political.
Paganism is not a religion, but a discrete set of different cults; it has no definition as a religion or the basis of a unified civilization. The Roman Empire was able to create a powerful state, military force, a legal system, which is still the basis of our legal system, but failed to sanctify these standards with the authority of God, that is, to make them inviolable and uncritical, as a result of which the empire collapsed when it lost its military power, and had to convert to a more rigid, centralized, and monotheistic Christianity.
The theorists of the new left and liberals propose to free man from the clutches of patriarchy and religion, which stifle natural instincts, restrict his freedoms and make him a prisoner of tradition. We can agree with them on many issues, but we must also admit that sometimes these instincts become uncontrollable and have the potential for self-destruction. The events in the United States are interesting to look at what the outcome of the struggle between conservatives and globalists can be and what the consequences will be.
