The Empire Was Good, But Not *That* Empire.

In Rogue One there are two factions of the Rebellion. Broadly speaking, they are moderates and extremists. The moderates are still seeking to affect political change via diplomacy, while the extremists are convinced that the corruption of the Empire is such that only radical, violent resistance--revolution--will do.

Neocon boosters of American Empire like Sonny Bunch, who enjoy LARPing as the Galactic Empire, do so in vain. The Rebellion--democratic, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, and very much universalist in its aspirations and pretensions--is American Empire in seed form. Comparisons of Dick Cheney to Darth Vader notwithstanding, American Empire functions by spreading, or attempting to spread, American values of democracy, liberty, and equality to the globe. Not exactly high on Vader's list of priorities, but right in the wheelhouse of the Rebellion. The two sides are not Empire and anti-Empire, but competing Empires. Not all Imperia are created equal.

Observing the factionalism of the Rebellion in the film naturally brings to mind Islam (jihadis and non-jihadis), but it is better correlated with the Puritan North (abolitionist and non-, later interventionist and non-). The Rebellion is too democratic, diverse, and egalitarian for it to be an appropriate analog to Islam. Puritan Yankees fit the bill much better. The same Yankees that were the victors who came to define America, and spread its secularized Puritanism to much of the globe.

Others have made similar critiques of Bunch, rightly recognizing that America is much better correlated with the Rebellion than the Empire. But both sides of this argument miss the mark for a simple reason: both assume American Empire is a force for good in the world. It's an intra-neocon squabble that is easily resolved: Bunch likes to root for the bad guys in film and troll (who doesn't?) Not much more to it than that.

But it turns out Bunch is correct by accident. The rebels are a force for evil in the galaxy, as is America to the globe; the Empire are the protags, but they are not America (or even the neocon segment of it.) The Empire are the defenders of power and order, hierarchy and authority, tradition and obedience, harnessing spiritual power to quell dissension among the people, securing a new Pax Romana against the forces of global (or galactic) liberalism. The Empire is Holy Mother Russia.*

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*It's to be expected that the screenwriters would attempt to tar the Empire and its values with allusions to Nazism and planetary ethnic cleansing. To maintain the analogy we just note that the hysterical anti-trad equivalent of 'planetary ethnic cleansing' in the Current Year would be something benign like anti-homosexual-propaganda laws.

Against Imminent Flourishing

Encountering the assumptions and norms of secular, liberal Universalism, we need to train ourselves to distinguish the particular assumptions of this worldframe from obvious truths, for which they are often confused. Because this frame is our inheritance—for better or for worse—this requires some training and discipline.

To understand the depth of the problem, and the insidious nature of the enemy, let's look at something that, on its face, may appear straightforward and uncontroversial: The Human Development Index (HDI.) The HDI, per Wikipedia, "is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development."

Bracketing the question of what exact data, metrics, standards, and procedures are used for establishing the rankings, what could be controversial here? Longer life expectancy, better education, and greater amounts of income are uncontroversially better than their opposites, and the HDI ranks accordingly. How could anyone, secular Universalist or not, dissent?

Here we recall that Christians worship Jesus Christ, the Theanthropos, who likely had moderate levels of formal education, lived a life of voluntary poverty, and was brutally executed at a fairly young age. The supreme human life, according to the Christian, fails on all three measures of "Human Development": education, income, and life expectancy.

Not only that, but Christ exhorted his followers to "take up your cross and follow me", into that very same life of simplicity and sacrifice. If his followers were to be successful according to Christ, their lot would entail a martyric form of life, if not martyrdom itself (and all of the apostles were in fact martyred, save for St. John); if they were to be successful according to the world, it would not.

This is not, of course, to suggest that education is bad, money anathema, or that we should aim for the shortest lives possible. It is to say that what is deemed to be "flourishing" in the purely imminent frame of the secular materialist, will always necessarily be a secondary, at best, concern for the traditional Christian. And that in many instances, what would increase stature in the imminent frame, would diminish it in the eternal. The two can't be reconciled.

All other considerations being equal, a devout, faithful, uneducated woman who dies giving birth to her fifth child at a young age is of incomparably higher stature in the Kingdom than a selfishly childless, successful, careerist secularist who lives to a ripe old-age, having aborted many children along the way. On the HDI, the former hurts your nation's rankings and the latter helps them.

And how easily we (opponents of the secular-Universalist project), slip into adopting their framing as our own. When presented with HDI rankings, rather than striking immediately to the question of the underlying presuppositions, we instead seek to explain the data in favorable ways. "The highest ranked nations are secular European ones, who all have Christian histories and retain Christian principles, even if in deracinated form." However true that may be, that tack accepts that the metrics of 'human development' are fundamentally correct, when they are actually quite irrelevant to the actual sine qua non of human flourishing: salvation.

And many other non-ultimate, but still highly crucial, metrics of actual human development are routinely left out of the frame of the secular Universalist: moral sense and constitution; aesthetically pleasing cities; high TFR, etc.

When we argue that pornography is bad, not because it degrades the soul by divorcing the sexual act from the intimacy, blessedness, and fecundity of the marital bond, and objectifies humans in the service of self-gratification, but because it harmfully re-wires neural pathways, we repeat the mistake. The latter fact may be empirical evidence of the former truth (which can be accessed independently via revelation), but to make it the central plank of the case is to embrace the secularist, materialist frame.

This overreliance on data, and with it the multiplication of 'problems' for 'reformers' to solve, Helen Andrews has dubbed "bloodless moralism." Meanwhile for us, as Thomas Carlyle puts it, "tables [of data, statistics] are like cobwebs, like the sieve of the Danaides; beautifully reticulated, orderly to look upon, but which will hold no conclusion."

It's imperative that Christian reactionaries and traditionalists avoid succumbing to the conservative temptation of attempting to beat liberals at their own game, here. And it's tempting to do so, because the data is in fact on our side, when it is correlated with a proper telos. But being obsessively and myopically "data-driven" is a feature of the Left, and is a product of its implacable imminentism. Christian reactionaries are concerned with the sacred, the eternal, the immortal, and locating those within the imminent. But tacitly accepting the imminent frame as the supreme one is to allow the secular-Universalist to set the rules of engagement and, thus, to lose.

The Heresy of Solutionism

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. 

Of the many currents seething beneath the surface of our social reality, one that is not often reflected on is our deep-seated commitment to solutionism. What I'm calling solutionism has significant overlap with pragmatism, as well as scientism and positivism, but it is more properly the belief that all problems admit of in-principle solutions that are ultimately discoverable by human reason and ingenuity.

Practically, most people in our culture think and speak as if this were true, even if they wouldn't cop to believing that all problems are soluble when the question is put to them. None of the platforms of any of the political parties in the United States, major or minor, contain any planks that read "there is not much that can be done about this, to be honest." Or "all available options in this realm are inexorably fraught with peril. Weep and gnash your teeth." Because secular theology has declared the centrality and dominion of man-without-God, and determined that if man is not yet omnipotent, he must become so.

Consider that most intractable problem: death and aging. While acknowledging that there are those intrepid, brash futurists out there who believe even these problems can be solved, let's grant that most people consider them insoluble. Do we actually behave as if they are? Do we obsess over diet and exercise, in lieu of loftier pursuits? Is cosmetic surgery a multi-billion dollar industry? Do women past a certain age refuse to state their age out loud? Do we make a cult out of youth and build large segments of our economy around it? Do we exile the elderly to spend their latter decades apart from their families, and denigrate their wisdom and experience as ignorant and backwards? Have we removed care of the dead and cemeteries from our churches and churchyards to more remote professionals and locations? None of these actions will solve death and dying, of course, but deep down that's what we hope we're doing.

In The Elementary Particles, which examines the problem of death and the urge to overcome it, Michel Houellebecq writes:

In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. 

Elsewhere in the book, he depicts the lengths people go to in order to turn down the white noise, and to push death to the periphery of their awareness. For want of a solution, at least at this date, we will deny the problem for as long as it's feasible.

If our actions reveal that we believe death can be solved, any lesser problem—and every problem is lesser—must not only be soluble, but comparatively simple. The planet will soon be destroyed by anthropogenic catastrophic global-warming, you say? We should have acted decades ago and it's too late, but still, we must "do something." We've enacted every gun restriction we could dream up, save confiscation, and people still get shot? It is imperative that we "do something" more. A just political order can only arise from a virtuous people, but we are corrupt and decadent? There must be an app for that.

The desperate anxiety of our society can in part be seen as the result of belief in the solubility of all problems, which in turn can be understood as the fruit of our Enlightenment addiction to rational certainty. Returning to The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq writes:

There is no power in the world—economic, political, religious or social—that can compete with rational certainty. Western society is interested beyond all measure in philosophy and politics, and the most vicious, ridiculous conflicts have been about philosophy and politics; it has also had a passionate love affair with literature and the arts, but nothing in its history has been as important as the need for rational certainty. The West has sacrificed everything to this need: religion, happiness, hope—and, finally, its own life.

Rationalism gives way to seeing technological mastery of the world as an end in itself and humanity's raison d'etre. Technological advances further feed the illusion of the independence and potential omnipotence of man.

Sober reflection on the human condition reveals that most of our perennial problems admit of no solution within the immanent frame. Technological and social advances often introduce new problems and unintended consequences. At best we're left navigating a system of trade-offs, with most of society's problems being insoluble. But this is cause for sobriety, not despair. The stuff of life is, blessedly, not found in solving the world's problems. If it were, no man to date would have lived.

For Christians, this should be rather obvious, because if we were called to implement societal reforms and build utopia on earth, Our Lord probably would have mentioned this to us at some point. As Nicolás Gómez Dávila puts it, "that Christianity may not solve social problems is no reason to commit apostasy except for those who forget that it never promised to solve them." Instead, Christ came preaching a gospel of repentance and obedience to His commandments, the fruit of which is salvation, fully realized only in the eschaton.

The process of repentance and keeping the commandments entails things like serving, and giving to, the poor, of course, but not with the world's end of eliminating poverty in view. Poverty never appears as an enemy in the gospel; wealth does. And, as Christ's encounter with the rich young ruler reveals (Matt. 19:16-22), the problem of wealth is solved by detachment from the things of the world, and attachment to the things of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom appears in the immanent frame, especially in the worshiping, sacramental life of the Church, by "laying aside all earthly cares", as we sing at the beginning of the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Orthodox Church. Solutions to the worst problems—sin and death—exist in Christ, but they are eternal realities and gifts from God, not worldly projects and designs.

The folly of solutionism was first clearly seen at the Tower of Babel. Its modern day analogs would be the Headquarters of the United Nations and the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.; its antidote—its solution—is the cathedral.