Ancestral Principle

The following is an interesting thought exercise from Imperium Press.

“Paganism is seen by Christians, Jews, and others as “choose your own theology”, where you just make it up as you go along. To be fair, some of this is criticism is deserved. It’s true that there’s a lot of paganism à la carte—a pinch of Druidry, a dash of Wicca, a dollop of Buddhism, etc. Such things are obviously not serious. But this kind of paganism is quickly losing ground to serious reconstruction—authentic worship that takes one or another branch (Norse, Roman, Greek, etc.) and restores its original practices.

This is the paganism of historical pagans. To this paganism, the accusation of “making it up as you go along” could not be any less appropriate. In fact, historical pagans made exactly this accusation of Christianity, which was seen as a kind of anti-authoritarianism. “You think you can choose your own god?” This struck them as grotesque and impious, some sort of atheism. If you’re the judge of what’s worthy of worship, then your god is you. For the ancient pagan, authority was simple—it came from tradition.

Modern pagans don’t have that luxury, because our tradition just is Christianity. Or is it? Strictly speaking, it’s not quite Christianity now, is it? It’s secular humanist liberalism. If you live in the West, you live in a secular society. That is your tradition. Maybe you think you don’t get your tradition from your society though—maybe you think you get it from your parents. We’ll come back to that.

Suffice it to say that you can’t point to a social authority with any clout and come up with a justification for anything but liberalism. So, we need something else to justify Christianity. Sure, you can give a logic-chopping argument, but if you’re being honest with yourself, nobody is really moved by any of that. Very few people work through a syllogism, fall to their knees crying, and then convert.

If you look a little deeper, you find that people justify by pointing to authority. If you’re in perfect agreement with modern liberalism, this is easy—you just point to who’s in charge and say “might is right”. For anyone else, pointing to authority involves what we have called the ancestral principle. The idea is that you point to whatever it was that made everything great possible. For Steven Pinker, everything great is basically science, and what made it possible is the Enlightenment. For the Christian, everything great is basically the West, and what made it possible is Christianity.

If we were to formalize the ancestral principle, we would say that authorship is authority. What makes X authoritative over Y is that X is the father of Y. This is the deepest layer of Abrahamic morality, as we find in the book of Job. After Yahweh whoops Job just to prove a point to Satan, Job finally stands up and calls out Yahweh. Job gets an answer he didn’t expect. Instead of giving… well, any reason at all, Yahweh tells Job to shut up and stop asking questions. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Yahweh is the boss of Job because without Yahweh, there is no Job.

This might seem abhorrent to someone like a classical liberal, but when you get right down to it, they make exactly the same argument. When you point out that the Enlightenment basically made every man his own highest authority and thus authority impossible, Steven Pinker will point to modern science and say “but it made that possible”. He’s wrong, it didn’t—but the point is that the form his argument takes is the same: whatever he’s justifying was the father of everything good. Even the lefty progressive does the same thing when he asks rhetorically, “do you want to go back to the dark ages of slavery and ignorance?” Never mind that he’s wrong—it’s the same argument all over again: whatever he’s justifying was the father of everything good. It turns out that the ancestral principle is the form that all justification takes in practice. When every logical proof of Yahweh’s existence is defeated, the Christian will take refuge in the ancestral principle—“where were you when Christianity laid the foundations of the West?”

Whether for classical liberals, Christians, or Jews, authority just is authorship. That is, the father is the paradigm of authority. All the way back, what makes something authoritative is just that it made everything after it possible, including you. If you disagree with it, you’re just wrong, full stop. This is exactly what pagans believe, only more consistently. They say “if it disagreed with its own father, it was wrong, full stop.”

A consistent application of the ancestral principle—the very form of moral justification—leads one invariably to paganism, because paganism built everything. Society, law, custom, governance, technics, arts, ritual, myth, philosophy—everything. Where were you when paganism laid the foundations of the world? Every axiom you hold, every intuition you have, every feeling in your gut—all these were given to you or bred into you by hundreds of thousands of years of paganism. And anything that wasn’t given to you by paganism was justified—wrongly or rightly—on the basis of axioms, intuitions etc. that paganism begat. Everything that came after, all the way up to modern liberalism, can only critique paganism on the basis of foundations that paganism laid.

And this brings us to the ultimate point—that the source of authority cannot be other than tradition. You can’t ask why it’s good to obey (or disobey) the tradition without invoking norms, and tradition is the source of those norms. One can object that the old gods are not real, and so the tradition is invalid. But that objection can only be made on the basis of assumptions, and those assumptions have come down from the tradition itself, which has its ultimate source in paganism. It’s impossible to argue against the tradition without invoking its authority.

For us to argue anything at all is to invoke tradition, which is to invoke the ancestral principle. Society tells us that our tradition is secular humanist liberalism. Perhaps we want to say “no, I got tradition from my parents, and that’s Christianity”. But then, your father got it from his father, and all the way back until someone abandoned his tradition. If he did that for a reason, that reason must ultimately rest on assumptions, and those assumptions on tradition. There is no way to abandon tradition without abandoning authority altogether. Your father’s father’s father etc. was an anti-authoritarian, an enemy of authority who based his (and ultimately, your) whole worldview on nothing more than whim. Only paganism can claim to derive authority out of something other than whim and caprice.

As it turns out, the accusation made against paganism that it’s just making things up, could not be more wrong—paganism is the sole alternative to “choose your own god”. The fact that we’ve been off-track for a long time hardly matters. Ancient error is still error. Ancient anti-authoritarianism is still anti-authoritarianism. The ancestral principle is simply the recognition that you don’t get to choose your own authority. Only paganism holds this principle consistently, because your forefathers didn’t get to choose their own authority either. All morality and even all knowledge rests on this principle. If the principle seems new, that’s because your tradition has been anti-authoritarianism for a long time. The ancestral principle is not new, but simply the articulation something that was once so obvious that it never needed articulation.”

Imperium Press 12/13/2023

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