Is America worth saving ?

First, we must ask what is America. America started from protestant religion, which unfortunately tends toward individualism, eventually becoming essentially gnostic and a form of idealism. If I told you I had a relation with a girl and it consisted of me acknowledging she existed and thinking about her you would rightly tell me that is not a relationship proper, but stalking. Protestants do not have a relationship to God, they stalk Him. Whereas in Catholic or Orthodox religion you have various rituals and liturgies that shape one’s heart and being to a proper relationship with God. In Catholicism you DO God,  you perform religion, act it out in practice, liturgies allow you to participate in God, in His mode of being, one goes from individual being to an ecclesial being in communion with all the Saints of the past and the future.

Obviously plenty of Protestants do have a relationship with God, and presently there is a push for a more liturgical existence which is a good thing, but the seeds for atomic individual atheism are there.

America, it has been said, is a nation of laws, but there is such thing as a pre-political existence in the form of custom. John Adams in 1798 warned his fellow countrymen stating,

 "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

As intermediary structures that form the cultural morality necessary for self-government have been dissolved - the family, Church etc - we need more and more laws to hold together a nation.

I claim America has previously been held together by the social capital of Christianity, and now that this is disappearing we no longer have a common good which all people strive toward, instead we have a nation of individuals all striving for their own personal good in need of more and more laws to secure their individual rights.

Loosed from any real connection to the past or future, which is becoming more and more uncertain, modern man experiences what Zygmunt Baugman called ‘Liquid Modernity,’ we have no historical consciousness, we have no roots in the soil, the ideas we sacrifice for today might be overturned by tomorrows generation.

                                           

So, what is American culture ? Lawrence Auster HERE argues  it consists in the following :

Western tradition, there is the more particular Anglo-American tradition, some features of which are :

• The remarkable degree of freedom from external controls made possible by the Protestant ideal of moral autonomy and self-restraint. 

• The habits of self-reliance and local government, which are largely absent from other cultures including continental Europe 

• The shared faith in natural rights, deriving from Locke and the Declaration of Independence. 

• The common law tradition and due process of law. 

• The principle against self-incrimination. 

• The tradition of the loyal opposition and the right to dissent, which stands in contrast to the power group warfare that obtains in many other cultures. 

• Freedom of speech and the appeal to reason in public discourse. 

• The traditions of honesty and fair dealing. The sense of fair play. 

• The high degree of trust and social cooperation made possible by the above. 

And finally—as the result of high moral standards, cooperativeness, trust and freedom—America’s extraordinarily rich tradition of voluntary associations and institutions—ranging from pioneer communities to churches to business enterprises to philanthropies to political and scientific societies—operating within the law but otherwise free of the state.

Well, is that enough to bind a people together ? Was it ever ?  P.T. CARLO HERE gives startling answer, I quote large portions of his essay :

"There is no past (which is not a Liberal past) that the American can romanticize, no holy redoubt to retreat into. America is the only nation without a past; only the future lays before the American. Its ethos is the eschatology of the road, of the continual unfolding and violent conquering of a fertile frontier. When the American seeks the solace of a sacred grove he finds only the shade of the strip mall. The American Reactionary may set his spade to work in hopes of finding fertile soil somewhere beneath this endless superficiality, but his quest will only yield him asphalt. In America there is no soil to find beneath the asphalt, there is only more asphalt.

The United States itself was founded as an ideological laboratory experiment. The North American Continent, after its original inhabitants had been exterminated, served as the ideal blank canvas upon which to impress the violent fantasies of the European intelligentsia. Its endless natural resources and geographic impregnability served as a kind of blank check to the utopia builders of the Enlightenment, a Zion for the Godless.

Latent in the founders’ vision is the concept of Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s “primitive man”: a creature born free, but everywhere enchained. For Rousseau, Society itself is ultimately evil and an imposition on and degradation of the individual’s inherent freedom.

The decaf coffee of social relations, a “thing” deprived of the very essential traits which constitute its own definition. It is the primary Utopian delusion, the desire for the “Object” (Society) minus the very characteristics (familial bonds of affection, pre-rational loyalties to place, or clan or God) which define the “Object,” in short: magical thinking.

The individual, the atom, the irreducible remainder, is the prime symbol of American consciousness. 

This “American Dream” of ever increasing and unconstrained individual freedom, for which no price is too high to pay, is the heart and soul of American “civilization.” In this sense the American dream equates to a full embodiment of what Oswald Spengler called “the Faustian prime symbol” of “limitless space.”  The utter erasure and eradication of limits of any kind upon the sacred “liberty” of the individual. Is this not the driving force behind so many of our modern American pathologies? Manifested perhaps most clearly today in the Gnostic violence of “Transgenderism.” A movement which finds even the limits of biology itself as being unacceptable, limits it loathes and seeks to annihilate.

Any Reactionary or Post-Liberal future will by necessity, even if it is still geographically located in North America, cease to be truly “American.” To be Post-Liberal is to be de facto Post-American, whether one wishes to be or not. No other way forward is possible. There is no soil beneath the asphalt.”

I agree. I also agree with the blogger Micheal S., that Christendom is over, it ended during the World War :

"...there is so simply a division between the ordinary arrangements of Western society as it was before 1914 and those that have prevailed since 1918 

Four great empires, ruled by Charlemagne's descendants, that controlled most of the world's surface, fell as a consequence of that war. A fifth was fatally weakened by it, though it took a while for it to collapse. The entire remainder of the twentieth century was devoted to sorting out the consequences. The fall of the Romanovs was followed by a brief and ineffectual democracy under Kerensky, and then Boshevism. The fall of the Hohenzollerns in Germany led to the brief and ineffectual Weimar republic, and then Nazism. The fall of the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary led to the splintering of its former territories, which soon became prey to the Nazis, and then to the Soviets after World War II. That war led to the Cold War and also to the collapse of the British empire. 

We are not done with this process of sorting-out, since the current conflicts in the middle east are consequences of the post-WWI dismemberment of the Ottoman empire.”

    Now we are witnessing the end of Liberalism, of liberal democracy. Naturally people will, and are, turning back to Communism and Fascism, but the fact is Religion IS culture, only religion has the symbols and rituals to bind us together, to root us in a land, to take possession of our hearts and minds. No God - no society.