I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God.

— Charles H. Spurgeon

Nervous system, circulatory system, solar system, systematic theology, systematic oppression, by gum, systematic systematizing — “system” may in fact be modern man’s favorite word, not in the sense that he uses it more than all others, but in that its meaning hides behind nearly every other word he uses. Modern man does not meet new people, he “connects” with them, “networks” in their midst. Even nature is something to be “connected” with. His primary image of himself and the cosmos is network, a sprawling node graph of people and things hierarchically and latitudinally enmeshed like clockwork. Even the constellations, the very embellishments of the heavens, are not abstract figural images, but mere geometric conglomerates of points interrelated linearly.

The staggering accomplishments of chemical science and computer engineering powerfully commend the utility of such a pragmatic lens, but utility is often all that is to be commended in it. Pragmatism in its extreme is always hindered by self-defeat. As what is aptly called the Meaning Crisis demonstrates, often that which is most necessary to utility is not itself terribly concerned with being useful. All the material utility in the world cannot stave off the existential maladies of despair and depression that only Divine beauty, hope and purpose are shown to alleviate, proving that often the most fundamentally materially useful things are immaterial and oriented toward spiritual absorption rather than mechanical use.

It finally dawned on me recently that my continual fascination with the American Civil War has something to do with the United States’ lack of a medieval or ancient past. Certainly, civilizations far older than the Constitution have inhabited the continent for millennia, but “civilization of the people, by the people, and for the people” codified in the American system of government is and always has been distinctly modern, from its deistic language to its essential predication of national identity upon system. The Civil War galvanized this reality, not only in that the more medieval civilization of the feudal antebellum South could not coexist with the constitutional reality being constructed in the North, but also in that Americans demonstrated an inability to share erstwhile assumed values without their confirmation and conformity within legal strictures.  

This systematization of value is epitomized in the emergence of ideology, without which the aforementioned history has become largely indigestible to the typical modern. Ideologies seem to fundamentally depend upon a modernist, metanarrative epistemology, encoded with an assumption of universality premised on rationality. That is, ideologies as entities, so to speak, do not present themselves as culturally developed, propagated, or specific. There is no sense in ideology of local or temporal appropriateness, only a claim to pure, simple, rational and moral correctness, indiscriminately applicable. Communism has no care for language or geography, liberalism is especially not for one race or tribe in particular, and even Nazism’s particular ethnic targets were to some extent hypothetically rooted in a lofty, Darwinian, utopian, universally natural form of an idealized humanity. 

Examples are plentiful of the defeat of such assumed universality in practice, such as the terrific failure of the Soviet and French revolutionary calendars. Cultural specificity is simply too strong. The seven-day week was never promulgated on such modern merits, and so it cannot be defeated on those terms. The metric system likewise was touted as more rational, more “self-evident,” in the modernist parlance, but a keener awareness that these values in themselves are inextricably cultural explains why the metric system was actively rejected in the United States. A self-important sense of Enlightenment is not sufficient to overcome cultural inertia unless Enlightenment in itself holds enough cultural cachet. Even “pure reason” must play by culture’s rules.

Ideology is a violent and ugly player in the cultural landscape of today and responsible for not a little of the bitter bifurcation of American society. Far from an actual ally to reason, it strangles the better angels of individuals by flattening out their judgements into conformity with what must be asserted rather than what should. “I subscribe to this or that ideology, am a member of such and such mental tribe, therefore I must affirm this or that position.” Certain morally, rationally, historically more tenable opinions are rendered moot by default, murdered on the altar to self-consistency. As Spurgeon noted in the case of biblical truth, it is far more important to be consistent with external reality than with oneself, and as Emerson more cynically mused, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Ideologies do not found their tenets on particulars of place and situation but on detached ideals alone, and being unaffected by reality struggle to affect it. As Governor Lew Wallace comically observed of my home state, “All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.” Real life is simply incalculable. Human beings and the world we inhabit are flatly too multivariate to ever be totally reducible to variables. Context is a vital ingredient to winnowing that infinite field to a behaviorally informative size.

Context is a fairly good name for what makes wisdom. It is an important factor in why generative LLM’s cannot replicate human relationship — in fact, why any system cannot mimic what relationship begets. As a friend recently (wisely) put it, wisdom is not formulaic. Even the wisdom of Solomon borne out in the Proverbs is quite obviously not constitutive of universally relevant precepts. Furthermore, the principles spelled out therein are explicitly portrayed as the result of a personal relationship with God, and therefore cannot be divorced by the reader from the strange personal relationship of a reader to the tradition. Wisdom is more or less by definition the species of knowledge that is inherently contextual and relationship-dependent.

It is my opinion that the current political woes of America are inevitable symptoms of her system, even symptoms of system itself, and there is therefore no systematic solution. In my own context, I have acute pastoral concerns that lend themselves to a skepticism of the new ideological hotness on the political right, vaguely named “Christian Nationalism” by detractors and adherents alike, which lands rather inertly for its lack of self-clarity regarding its status as a system. It appears stuck untenably and unpromisingly between a revolutionary desire for iconoclastic transformation and an iron-fisted nostalgic grip on the system status quo, characterized by very little except a suspension of the compound notion post-liberalism between its suffix and prefix. 

Doug Wilson, for example, as a gleaming paladin championing this shiny new political plaything, simultaneously decries the obvious failures of public secularism while being apparently unable to explain his allegedly “new system” without appealing to the baby-boomer-postwar-nuclear-family-suburbanite paradise that was itself a product of the “old system.” He wants public and official Christianity without anything nearly so drastic as a state church. Whatever Wilson’s ambiguous understanding of public Christianity might be practically distilled to brushes up against the obvious cultural barriers to anything like a state church in the context of America, and is therefore hamstrung out of the gate. When pressed, his proposed vision of America seems to rise no higher than “vote Republican,” which is mere participation in more of the very same. As PVK has continually pointed out, Wilson is, unsurprisingly, very much a liberal and an epistemological modernist. Wilson’s approach must be trimmed until it fits within the framework he’s confined himself to. His affection for the ideology which created his idyllic soda-shop atomic age childhood prevents him from suggesting systematic change for systematic problems. Far from working outside ideological systems as such, he seems unable to even muster velocity to escape the gravity of the system he’s already in. (His post-millennialism is another problem for him, perhaps for another time.) 

Again, I contend that this deep system-ism is itself an aegis immunizing the social ills of the West against any solutions from within. No system, be it “Christian Nationalism” or Democratic-Socialism or Anarcho-Primitivist Neo-Post-Humanistic-Whatchamacallism, can be the guiding hand that Western cultures need. The wisdom of God Doug Wilson and his ilk admirably want to infuse into public life is by its nature not propagated through “isms.” Wisdom ripples through relational ties, first from God to mankind, then from father to son, mother to daughter, friend to friend, etc. In an age when so many drastic and historically deadly “isms” are gaining traction among Gen-Z, it is all the more important to note that the strictures of the ideological “isms” are exactly what is stifling wisdom in the highest echelons of American public life.

Too many who put their trust in “isms,” right, left or center, are willing to sacrifice qualities far more valuable in exchange for the promise of their ideological visions. My heartfelt desire is for young and old alike to understand that Divine love is likewise not ideological, but relational and contextual. Again, utilitarian systems built without these invisible, unsystematizable realities underneath are of no utility at all. If love is given up in favor of Christian Nationalism or Socialism or any other “ism,” if holiness or godliness or graciousness in word and deed are counted as less valuable than and made subservient to political ends, then political victory will only be achieved at the cost of spiritual loss. All warfare is spiritual, and what people fight for is inextricable from how and why. For Christians, the question of Who they fight for, by and with will necessarily answer the rest.

The introspective wisdom of the Eastern Church holds great promise for Westerners in this regard. Perhaps those who listened to Jordan Peterson (and even Peterson himself) ought to listen again to the wisdom which gave him his fame in the first place and “clean their own rooms.” The constant temptation of human pride is to see the mote in another’s eye, to mortify sin everywhere without and therefore succumb to it within, to treat social issues with ferocity and fervor and personal issues with lethargy and inattention. The early Church did not conquer Rome by fighting Rome, but those saints of old became more than conquerors by fighting sin through the Spirit even unto the execution of their mortal selves. Christians need worry far less about what the world is doing to them than what the world is doing in them. If the American church faced the same brutal persecutions that our forerunners did, how many of us would become activists and revolutionaries striving to win this world, and how many of us would become martyrs attaining Christ? 

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire! But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you wait for these, be zealous to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. — 2 Peter 3:10-14 (RSV)

…But we exhort you, brethren, to do so more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we charged you; so that you may command the respect of outsiders, and be dependent on nobody. — 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12 (RSV)