A Perpetual Elite

Riots of Selfishness and Baal Worship


One of the phenomena emerging as an unexpected outcome of Western secular humanism is the rise of an elite ruling class. This is surely true of the United States which has seen two quasi-royal dynasties emerge: the Clintons and the Bushes together with all their respective retainers and advisors. Many of these people have known very little or nothing throughout their working lives except as political moths gathering around the flames of power.

This nouveau-elite is far removed from the lives of ordinary people. Many come from “blue blood” families. Most have attended Ivy League schools. Ironically, when “outsiders”, such as Barack Obama, are elected to office they have achieved only because they have slavishly worked to become part of the elite, gaining thereby an inside track to power.

This elite is utterly secular. In core outlook and philosophy there is now very little to distinguish between the two dominant political parties. Whilst some may profess to believe the Christian faith it rarely goes beyond “private sphere Christianity”, personal morality, and sometimes private religious devotions. The great idol is Baal, the state, America the Beautiful. Political arguments devolve into debates over how best to advance the interests of America's power, with which the interests of the elite are seen as perfectly aligned.

In this matter, whilst we acknowledge in a general sense multitudes of conspiracies, we are not conspiracy theorists, or conspiracists.
A conspiracy, after all, exists when as few as two people think and plan any strategy or action together. The elite ruling classes doubtless are involved in endless conspiracies in the small “c” sense, but this is of little moment. What is more critical and important is that virtually all the political and governmental strategists have a deep devotion to the religion of secular humanism. Man (as manifested in the American secular elite) is god. There is no higher power. Collective man is the Baal.

Thus far the United States. What about Great Britain? We are not specialists in post-WWII British history, but we read with interest the following analysis by Peter Hitchens:

The Left are right to put part of the blame for the current riot of selfishness on the shoulders of Lady Thatcher. They are wrong to distort her remark that there “is no such thing as society” to mean something that it plainly did not. But they are right to perceive a moral emptiness in her government, which showed no interest in moral or cultural issues, in family breakdown, the decay of marriage, the collapse of discipline and learning in schools, in all its eighteen years in office.

The Left also has a better record on the great European issue than the Right. The best and most powerful speech in opposition to British entry to the (then) Common Market was made by Hugh Gaitskell on 2 October 1962, when he said, “We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history.” The then Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, responded to this accurate warning a few days later with nothing more than a feeble joke, and continued his spurned attempts to join, which would in the end succeed under his successor, Edward Heath, with the keen support of his successor, Margaret Thatcher. [Emphasis, ours.] She would not recognise the problem until the last months of her premiership, and was destroyed by her own party largely because she had begun to adopt Hugh Gaitskells' position. . . .

Labour's almost complete swoon into the arms of the European Union ( a few short years after campaigning for an exit from the EU) is one of the most extraordinary, and least inspected, political turnarounds of modern history. It is also one of the consequences of the new, denatured politics of the “Centre Left”, in which the range of permitted views in any major party has become so narrow that almost no dissent of any kind is permitted. . . .

This atrophy of religion and patriotism in the Labour Party, like the atrophy of the same things in the Tory Party is the deep problem beneath all others. It is the absence of anyone who will articulate these feelings which has encouraged the consensus the expediency which is politely called the “Centre Left”. Freed from higher obligations of either kind, the politician has nothing to keep him from becoming the servant of his own political class, and a pursuer of the line of least resistance. [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 122-124.]

So, in Britain too, a common political class has emerged which replicates the old establishment Tories and establishment Whigs. What is different this time around, however, is that post the Glorious Revolution and the emergence of the Whig and the Tory “parties”, the Christian faith still cut to the heart of many social, economic, and political issues. No longer. What is common now between the “Centre Left” and the “Centre Right” is an abiding devotion to foreign gods, to Baal, and to the ultimacy of the secular state. That is why the European Union has captured the hearts and imaginations and devotion of both parties. It reflects their commonly held religion of secular humanism and their devotion to Baal, the state. Europe is great because it offers the promise of a bigger—therefore better—state.

The long term future of this new elite is not bright. Let all beware of hitching their wagons to them:

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Lord Byron