The previous post ended on the question -
Who are we?
That question - we in the West have had an answer to it for the last 400 years.
Our answer has been -
"Let us refrain from answering it."
Let me explain.
Notice how we talk about our own society today. We don't talk about what a Human Being is. We talk about data, about risks, about sustainability, about behavioural design. We talk about systems, about rules, about regulation. We talk about everything that can be measured. And only rarely about what is.
This is not an accident. It is an architecture, and it was drawn deliberately, in a very specific historical situation, by people who believed they had a real answer to a real problem. And they did.
In the 1500s and 1600s, Europe exploded in religious wars. The Thirty Years' War. France's religious wars. England under Puritans and Royalists. The Protestant-Catholic split could not be healed by theological debate alone. It was fought with weapons, for decades, until the blood stood knee-deep.
When the dust of war settled, Europe was left with one fundamental question -
How do we live together when we fundamentally disagree about the deepest things?
Hobbes answered one place. Locke another. Spinoza a third. But beneath the disagreements lay a common new arrangement that has shaped everything since.
"The deepest" - the question of God, of what the Human Being is, of what it's really all about - was moved into the private sphere. The public sphere was arranged solely on what could be agreed upon, measured, administered. Religion became private. Law became neutral. And the State became administrator.
It was the tacit manoeuvre they agreed upon that from this point in history has shaped our politics, our law, our schools, our administration, our entire understanding of what a society is.
First as an agreed silence about the deepest.
Later as denial that there even is a deepest.
This is the technocratic order. It doesn't speak of God. It speaks of data. It doesn't see the Human Being. It sees a user, a citizen, a resource, a client, a target and a metric. It doesn't rest in an understanding of the human - it rests in procedures.
Where the theocratic Order derives its authority from a sacred text, the technocratic derives its authority from numbers, from statistics, from expert consensus, from rulebooks. It doesn't argue about the truth of the Human Being. It simply claims that the truth of the Human Being lies outside its area of competence.
The technocratic order doesn't see itself as an order. It experiences itself as if it "merely administers." It believes in its own neutrality. But in the very act of parking the question of what the Human Being is, it has already answered it.
It says - the Human Being is that which cannot be defined. Only measured. Only governed. Only optimized. Only regulated and behaviourally designed.
This is not the absence of an understanding of the human. It is a specific understanding of the human that simply doesn't articulate itself as such.
And it worked.
For 300 years the manoeuvre worked, more or less. It solved what it was created to solve. The West didn't break out in religious war again. Catholic and Protestant didn't kill each other over God. We had peace about precisely that which had made the blood spray in the 1500s and 1600s. On the internal religious split, it held. We had institutions that bore weight. Courts that judged. Administrations that administered. Universities that sought. The manoeuvre we had found seemed to have solved the unsolvable problem from the 1500s.
But we haven't been honest about why it worked.
It worked because everyone still walked around with an unspoken Christian-Western understanding of the Human Being at the bottom. It was there. It just wasn't mentioned anymore. It lay beneath the language, beneath the laws, beneath the habits, beneath the very way we understood each other. The technocratic surface functioned because it lay atop a living foundation. Manoeuvre and foundation held each other up, even though one pretended not to need the other.
This is what is breaking down in our time.
For two reasons, operating simultaneously.
The first - the foundation has dissolved from within. The unspoken Christian-Western understanding of the Human Being - as created, as sacred, as FREE, as responsible, as equal before God and therefore equal before the law - is no longer unspoken. It is no longer understood. It is simply... gone.
You can see it when a society can no longer agree on what a child is, what a border is, what a woman is, what a human life weighs. We no longer have a living foundation beneath the technocratic surface. We have a void. And when you place a technocratic structure - or liberal politics - atop a void, it stands for a moment. And then collapses.
The second - in the same period, another travelling Order has arrived from outside that refuses to park the question of the Human Being. It wants to speak about it, and it has a finished, clear, coherent answer. It speaks about what a Human Being is, what is right and wrong, who owes whom what, which God one bows to.
The technocratic order, which has practised for 400 years saying "the deepest belongs to the private," has no words to answer with when the deepest suddenly claims the public.
And there the technocratic movement suddenly stands exposed as what it has been all along.
Not neutral administration.
Its own Order.
An Order without depth. An Order that, in its attempt to avoid conflict about what the Human Being is, has settled the question by making it disappear. And which now lacks precisely what an Order must be able to do to be an Order - to say what it stands for, what it will not tolerate, what makes it worth defending.
This is what makes it useless as an answer now.
Because it doesn't know.
We don't know.
The technocratic order cannot take the debate with sharia, because it has abolished the very language for doing so. It can speak of "freedom of religion" and "equality" and "democratic values" - but they are all empty terms if there isn't a living understanding of what the Human Being is behind them. And that understanding is no longer there. It has eaten its own root.
It can administer.
But it cannot answer.
This is the West's useless answer.
And this is why we now stand with the question we thought we had escaped having to ask.
Who are we?
It is not a question a ministry can answer. It is not a question a consultant report can calculate its way to. It is not a question that can be parked as private. It is not a question that can be left to political decision-makers who have themselves forgotten it.
It is the question a people must be able to answer if it wants to survive as a people. And we have, at the present point in the story of ourselves, practised for 400 years not asking it.
Now it stands and waits.
And it becomes more and more pressing for every day we wait to find an answer.
And when the answer comes, it will not be found within the space we have delimited for ourselves to search in. It will not be derivable from data. It will not be agreed upon in a parliament. It will not be argued forth by experts.
Because a human being cannot define itself by looking at itself. A people cannot ground itself from itself. An order cannot rest on itself.
Every "who are we" hangs on a "what are we placed in relation to". Every "we" hangs on something that lies above "we". This is not a religious claim. It is a structural one.
We can no longer pretend we don't know this.
The metaphysical dimension - the one we for 400 years have left to the private and thereby to oblivion - is the only place from which the answer has ever been able to come. It is not a choice we make. It is a condition we have forgotten.
And we must dare to stand by it again.
If we want to preserve what is ours - and have strength enough to stand against what is trying to take it and subjugate it - regardless of whether the threat comes from within or without.
❤️🔥🪽
