Bruce Charlton attempts to give a brief history lesson on leftism.

First Charlton employs a shopworn argument used mainly by Eastern Orthodox apologists. As far as I can gather this argument goes something like:” The Western Church’s conception of politics allowed the secular princes an autonomous secular sphere which they in turn were later able to use to usurp the Church.” Those who forward this argument usually suggest that the West should have employed some form of a Byzantine style caesaro-papist model and thus forestall the emergence of the Enlightenment. A cursory reading of history shows this argument to be unconvincing in light of the criteria many of the proponents of this argument set for themselves,

Did the Byzantines really have any greater success in combating heresy? In stopping Islam? In the modern era while it is true that liberalism did not originate in the East, the East seemed completely incapable of resisting its advances. Indeed one could argue for example that it was just those ceasro-papist features of the Russian czars under “enlightened despots” like Peter the Great that made the imposition of Enlightenment liberalism in Russia relatively easy and whereas in the Catholic West liberalism usually could only come about through usurpation, conquest or in the context of Protestant cultures.

I am sure we are all in agreement that Liberalism as an ideology has very complex origins. If one wanted a starting point I and many other would point to the so-called Renaissance in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Bruce seems to ignore all of this in the favor of simplistic formulations. He next moves on to the early Enlightenment, where he mentions Deism and the dominance of secular authority. Charlton laments the separation of Church and state- with the state superior to the Church. Still doesn’t this describe the history of his own Anglican church? But then I imagine this is probably why Charlton likes the Anglican Church since Anglicanism supposedly is quixotic attempt to return to the proper “Eastern” order between monarch and church albeit a failed attempt. It is also curious that he fails to make any mention of the long ignominious history of Whiggery spawned and spread forth from his own country- volumes could be written yet there is very little.

His next “era” gets even more muddled. Labeling this section “anti-tradition” he notes:

This was the Old Left/ Socialism – concerned with overturning the old social order. Anti- whatever traditional divisions variously of slavery, caste, class, sex, marital status, religious affiliation, race, nationality, employment, age and so on.

Notice there is absolutely no accounting of the rise of capitalism or Whiggery. In Charlton’s account, those two social forces have nothing to do with the rise of modernism. Has Charlton ever actually grappled with some of those “Old Leftist” intellectuals? Never mind Marx, Engels, Sorel or Proudhon. What of old-leftists like G.D.H. Cole or Christopher Lasch? Does Charlton even realize that many of the Old Leftist/Socialists opposed many of those vices that traditionalist purport to oppose today?

Then comes his last point the supposed “New Left” and the rejection of “natural law common sense.” Here again he seems to have at the very least jumbled the timeline. The great rejection of natural law thinking came much earlier than the 1960s with the rejection having a genesis in the Renaissance and Reformation. If the concept of Natural Law was not out right rejected(Hobbes) it was rendered incoherent(Locke). Placing all the blame on the “New Left” in the 1960s leads to a kind of nostalgia for the time immediately prior to that. This results in an all too familiar spectacle- Christians coming to embrace an incoherent ideology i.e. modern conservatism.Taken as a whole Charlton’s whole post is in some ways amusing, here we have a modern liberal who thinks he’s a conservative attacking men who often times were just as traditionally minded if not more so and who formulated brilliant and frankly much stronger critiques of liberalism.

Soon in another post perhaps I will have to show how Charlton’s thought actually betrays some ultra-modern mentalities and how these mentalities ultimately undermine any kind of coherent “traditionalism.”