The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution. VII

The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution

By Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado 

(Continued)

VII. Contemporary Constitutionalism, Individualism, and Postmodernity.

The liberal constitution concept has been pulverized by the prophets of the New Law, and we have passed now from a State Constitution which organizes the political power to one which designs, creates and modifies the social order in a totalitarian manner by means of ideologized decisions of the constitutional judge. As accurately recognized with a cyphered language by Doctor Diego López Medina in his text "The impure theory of law", the new law, with a dose of unresolved anxiety for influence, has undertaken the task of deconstructing our juridical tradition and the foundational values of our nationality, to rebuild it or rather re-found it, entering without hindrance, according to his view, in the post-modern global village by way of the purpose of socializing the constitution. "Ideological pluralism placed the task of proclaiming society's moral criteria on the agenda of justice, and that way the constitutional courts replaced the churches in the task of defining the culture's moral parameters", with its pontiffs, its dogmas, its crusades, its sins. and its heresies.

With such conception, contemporary constitutionalism, in its transit from modernity to post-modernity has created a citizen with unlimited and limitless rights who: "... demands everything for himself against the authorities who try to rule him, against the community to which he belongs, against the rest of men; in a word, against anything that makes him uncomfortable or eclipses him. All authority or right of any kind over men is excluded. It is only rights of the individual against anyone who could or would threaten them, avoid them or suspend them: rights of the child against his parents, rights of the women against men, rights of the State against the Church, and forming all of them a liberation front: rights of man against God."

Rightly does Professor Villey point out: "We do not easily get to reconcile these rights our time segregates everywhere, rights to prudishness and to sexual liberty; rights to life and to abortion; rights to marry and to divorce. Americans are ahead of us even more in the intensive and daily fabrication of new rights of man. In these post-modern times, the inventive genius keeps ceaselessly feeding new rights; today, such rights, affirms Juan Fernando Segovia in the afore quoted book, are recognized and guaranteed by the national constitutions as well as by international instruments which obligate states to modify their internal norms in the name of an active, solidary and integrated humanity, even, in some regions, rights of nonhumans, as happens with animals, have been consecrated. This overabundance serves, above all, to feed a multitude of demands that are impossible of fulfillment. When people come back to reality, they become disappointed and bitter." The supreme rule of the common good disappears to the benefit of the supreme rule of liberty; if modernity liberated civil society from the Church's beneficial influence, post-modernity will do the same from that of the State itself, even of the constitutional dominations and powers, diluting itself by means of the reign of conscientious objections, of privatizations and, in sum, of the private good; the well-known formulas of supremacy of the law, of sovereignty, and of public good could well make their entrance today into a museum of juridical archeology. Professor Thomas Molnar, in a series of recent essays, has left us a personal vision of the above in which he calls the apogee of civil society and the hegemony of free thought turned into the sole ideological expression authorized today.

Not that someone with a Thomistic formation may be ignoring the existence of human rights; on the contrary, they are as old as man himself. God completed His creation adopting man as His child and endowing him with the rights corresponding to his dignity. He is their author, not the French Revolution nor the United Nations' declaration nor the international treaties; they are the instruments of an ideology which in nothing resembles the Thomistic tradition on natural rights; let's not forget that all conception of such rights depends on the notion of the human person that is accepted, and as we Catholics see in it human and divine values, we can understand that this duality will affect those rights; quite different is the case for those who deny man's transcendence, his ultimate end; or for those that deny that persons have a nature... Never before in the history of humanity had human rights been so much ignored but also never before the absence of God in society had been so general; that is why the only way of guaranteeing the human rights is by defending the rights of God in society.

We are facing the radicalization of libertarian possessive individualism, where reason has died to give way to sensibility, emotion, imagination, fantasy, experimentation, and fabulation. this is why in today's language, to say "I feel like"  or "...gives me a bad vibe" is now in fashion. 

"The new rights are the sign of a new social tragedy since they sanction anti-social conduct, oblivious to any social or political coaction, freed to an extremely privatized morality. Exaggeration of the differences leads to picking the condition of the excluded as a paradigm of rights. They are, in a sense, rights to exclusion, rights to ¨do as we please,¨ rights to consumption and to alienation, to give or not give sense to one`s life, to build or destroy oneself, to direct one's personal life or not to direct it. These are the tragic rights of a destructured society.

We are now living through the ideological canonization of human rights. This is manifested by their boundless diffusion and their galloping influence, which has created a civil religion taught at school and propagated by communications media and by a multitude of bureaucratic and private channels. In it, we find the Marxist influence which considers man an alienated whose nature is not a given but a free construction of his own authenticity, as if each one could configure his being in an independent manner and, being responsible only to himself. Human nature deconstructed, it will not be possible to know other than by ideology, what is idoneous to man; the state apparatus ends up being converted into an instrument of mutation of human nature, regulating the cultural revolution to which we have been making reference.

To rescue the human rights from this highjacking to which I have been referring, good intentions are not enough, it is necessary to go back to Catholic natural law, which founds the juridical norms on the concrete relationships of individuals; it is the only solution remaining to those who have the mission of acting prudently in a just order. It would be necessary to retrace the secularization route traveled by Western culture and defeat the world that encloses the rights of man in the ideological circle of democracy and liberalism and the emancipating project they embody.

It is necessary, then, to seek the solution in a different plane, recovering the metaphysical foundation of law, as noted by González Pérez: "Man will only regain security and confidence when he recovers the conscience that his dignity is not tangible, not because it has been decided so by an international assembly, a dictator or a parliament, but because it is so prescribed by the eternal Law.

Without this return to metaphysics, in constitutional law nothing more will remain than the disappointed assertion of Saint Exupery: "What do we care for the political doctrines which pretend to attain the plenitude of men, if in the first place we do not know the kind of man they want to form."

Of course, I know well the criticisms to the above assertion that will be made from the spokesmen of a secular society habituated to the destruction of all its foundations: ¨ Natural law is suspect, religious in its origin and metaphysical, inadequate to a pragmatic and pluralistic society."

Antonin Scalia, United States Supreme Court Justice, cited by Thomas Molnar in ¨ Natural Law and Positive Law in the Anglo Saxon World¨ has claimed that the natural law positions represent fanatism and intolerance; but in turn, those who put themselves on guard before natural law have no qualms in claiming that the ultimate juridical authority is simply the individual's free will. Undoubtedly, this philosophy is not very far away from anarchy.

The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution. VI

The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution

By Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado 

(Continued)

VI. Human Dignity and the Cultural Revolution

Today, it is not necessary to send armies to

take over the entire world. It suffices with

subjecting the world spiritually and culturally.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Never before in history had it been insisted so much upon human dignity as the foundation for a legal system, and on the primacy of the inalienable rights of the individual, but it is also true that never in the history of legality had the common good as a limit to such primacy been forgotten as now. An individualist doctrine has been tried to construct, in which the dignity of man has been caricatured, reducing it exclusively to liberty, and liberty to the absence of coercion; desire and appetite without any limitation would become a foundation of law, in consequence, within such sui/generis personalism the autonomy of the individual would become the sole foundational value for legality, giving no consideration to the others as an essential element of law, or the fulfillment of duty, and much less the common good.

The right to make valid any act willed by the state or by the individual as a right, even when sometimes limited for utilitarian reasons, would be absolute relativism: Everyone can claim the most strange, contradictory and even absurd things as rights; without doubt, we would have to conclude that anarchy is a right. We are heading toward an inexorable degradation with the pretext of the validity of a new dogma or rather a Utopia, called by some the free development of our animality, a perfect caricature of the true development of personality which proposes man to rid himself even of his own nature. This has entailed a rapid process of moral dissolution or of collective degradation which, if not stopped, will end up having the classical concept of social liberty as ordered liberty disappear. In the end, the war of all against all will ensue.

Is perhaps the above not the ideological support for the personal drug dose, suicide, abortion, homosexual unions, euthanasy, eugenics, incest, anonymous maternity, zoophilia, and whatnot, recognized by diverse international treaties and by a great majority of national legal systems and justified in the name of the new secular dogmas. The tolerance, pluralism, non-discrimination, to which the entire society is being led, whether by means of State programs implemented by the ministries of health and education or by means of decisions proferred by the Constitutional Court in sentences which make reference to the free development of our personality.  Having the State lost its moral dimension, it turns into a clear abetter of social disorder. This is an authentic cultural revolution in which the school our children attend, our families, the business where we work, the mentality, politics, religion, morality, in sum our entire life has to conform itself with those 'politically correct' postulates.

With great acuteness, the prologue of the text "La Revolución Cultural; un smog que envenena a la familia chilena" (The Cultural Revolution; a smog that poisons the Chilean family), reads ¨Yes, a revolution that penetrates as smog in all environments, gradually contaminating laws and customs, corroding principles, eliminating the notions of good and evil and implementing a new, atheist and relativist morality and that additionally prepares the juridical and publicity climate to persecute those who oppose any degree of resistance¨,  it is a program of deconstruction of what remains of a Christian inspired society, to impose a model relativist in its ideology and immoral in its conduct; its doctrinaire foundation lies on a peculiar interpretation of human rights, dispensing fully of the Church teachings and of the Christian nature of our people. Of course, all of the preceding carried out by the dictatorship of the tolerant,  who are practicing a far-reaching social chirurgy, cutting off the Christian roots of our society and imposing a Freudian pansexuality, demolishing of the family and of all our traditions.

Unabashedly, Rodolfo Llopis, leader of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party), recognizes the agenda that socialism has devised on the topic:

"To me, no revolution takes place simply by the carrying out of a change in the political regime. Not even when together with the change in the political regime a social change takes place, is there a revolution. To me, the revolutionary cycle does not end until the revolution takes place in the conscience of the people... it is necessary to take over the souls of the children." After that would come – and we are experiencing it in our politics – what the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci proposed: Marxianize the interior man without violence or bloodshed, it matters not to conquer the streets and towns, what must be conquered is the mind of civil society, especially in Hispanic America and the South of Europe; all the habitats, the customs, the social institutions where Roman Catholicism has more deeply guided the thinking and actions of the generality of populations, where it has been fulfilled to the letter by actions of the aforementioned state and judicial organisms. It is necessary, in compliance with the commitments of the Cultural Revolution, to alter such mind, turn it into its opposite in every detail, so that it turns not only into a non-Christian mind but into an anti-Christian mind. Such goals have been attained by means of a quiet and anonymous revolution in the name of human dignity and human rights, and in the name of liberty and autonomy with respect to external restrictions.

The ideology of human rights which rules at the present time ends up fostering the absolute liberation of man from all kinds of powers and dominations, even the constitutional ones. Such ideology, in its liberal origin, makes man independent not only of kings and privileges but basically of God, of its law and of religion, then of material inequalities and at the present time seeks to free us from anything which limits man's autonomy, starting with our own body; it is the primacy of the individual body to which reason is now subjected, to such a degree has it been dogmatized that authority of any order which does not subject itself to such ideology will be deemed to be illegitimate by NGOs and multilateral organisms. Today the favorite targets of the cultural revolution are not the military headquarters or the public offices as it once used to be; today, as said before, it is the souls of children, it is an unnoticed ideological transfer produced in a subtle manner in our entire culture. The taking of the Winter Palace, Gramsci sometime said referring to the political power, is the last thing to try; the taking over of the culture should come first.

Our ineffable Nicolás Gómez Dávila summarizes this in one of his erudite extraordinary sentences or scholia as they are popularly known: "The revolution only invades palaces previously deserted."