Why WOKE Works (The End of the Empire 3)

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Genesis 2:25  ESV

Naked – In the last 200 years of the great Portuguese Empire, Portugal imported nearly 6 million African slaves to its territories in the New World.  The British and the Portuguese accounted for nearly 70% of all trans-Atlantic slavery.   During the same period, Muslim countries imported 9 million slaves (with the regular practice of castrating the males).  But you don’t see demands for reparations in Qatar or Iran.  Why?  Because WOKE works only in cultures that feel guilty. About themselves.  And the West feels guilty.  Why?  Well, you can thank St. Augustine for that.

Why do we tolerate the WOKE nonsense?  Why do we allow transgender destruction of biology? Why do we always fall over the race-baiting card?  Because: Everyone knows he is guilty, he just doesn’t know why.  Let me explain how our debt to Augustine makes it possible for WOKE to work.

Augustine planted a seed that, 18 centuries later, has made it possible for evil to flourish within our society because the society believes that it is fundamentally guilty, ontologically flawed, and without a human cure.  Those who demand restitution and reparations depend on the general population acknowledging some sort of moral, historical, and personal responsibility.  And if we are born guilty of things done in the past, even as far back as the original human beings, then the demand resonates at some deep level and we feel contemporary guilt for actions which we personally did not do.  If, on the other hand, we live in a society where guilt is attached only to those directly responsible for the act, then the claim of social and historical guilt would be considered nonsense.  If I personally had no part in the offense, then I cannot be held responsible for the offense.  Such is the view of the Hebrew prophets and most of the Semitic world today.  I am not guilty because my forefathers sinned.  My guilt belongs only to my acts.

But the West is in need to deep therapy.  It suffers from unconscious guilt, something that manifests itself when the burr of a guilty social conscious is pressed into public awareness. The Church’s historical response (now coupled with apologies) was the sacrificial exorcism of sex.

Celibacy was a moral virtue because it was the refusal to transmit sin (and its guilt) to the next generation.  Of course, if everyone chose this virtuous act, humanity would cease to exist, but at least then sin would be erased from the world by human means.  The devil’s design to transmit evil through sex was another indication of how awful sex really is.  Sex is moral disgrace disguised as orgasmic pleasure.  The Church learned rather painfully how difficult it is to eradicate this temptation.  Of course, we might ask why is marriage a sacrament if it propagates sin?  But let’s leave that rabbit hole unattended for the moment.

The Church taught us that even the vocabulary of Scripture was fraught with sexual difficulties.  For example, Galatians 3:29 used the Greek term spérma (literally, seed), artfully redefined as “descendants.”  But who could miss the implications?  Sperm carries sin.  The vocabulary itself leads to the conclusion that sex is essentially sinful, a sinful necessity if the race is going to continue.  And since everyone of us is ontologically connected to spérma, we are all guilty of the original sexual sin.  There’s something deeply wrong with us; so wrong that it can’t be fixed.  It can only be acknowledged—and paid for.

It is this view of flawed humanity that provides the current culture with its insistence that we are guilty for the mistakes (sins) of others, particularly our ancestry.  Catholic guilt is part of Western thinking.  It sets that stage for us to react positively to accusations of guilt.  We were wrong when we were born so we must make amends for being alive.  Original sin justifies cultural guilt.  WOKE works because of the Church’s doctrine of Adam’s failure—and that is why it doesn’twork in cultures where the story of Adam does not include sexual transmission of guilty personality.

We should note that the Hebrew Bible doesn’t contain an idea of original sin, or of original guilt.  The Hebrew idea of human consciousness is “choice”—the nexus of the will toward self and the will toward others.  There is no originalguilt.  We are born with conditional responsibility and ontological accountability, but not with an essentially flawed character.  Moreover, sexual transmission of sin or of a sinful propensity (nature) is an entirely Christian invention; an invention that is bearing its destructive fruit now.

The end of an empire doesn’t happen randomly.  It happens because seeds sown, and nurtured, hundreds of years earlier finally find their way into public consciousness, not in their original form but in their transmuted societal disintegration. In one sense we can thank Augustine for our current ethical malaise, and the Church for propagating a theology which will result in the end of a culture.  But, of course, insofar as we didn’t protest, we didn’t examine, and we didn’t repair this destructive idea as it developed, we are now reaping what was sown.

One of many strings from the past to our present situation.  There are more, as we shall see.

Topical Index: original sin, WOKE, guilt, Genesis 2:25