Liberal enlightenment as a spirituality

[Magical Realist]

I have often pondered how my liberal values of equality and compassion for the downtrodden and for the protection of minorities is not just a political creed I adopted from the democratic party. That it is really much deeper than this and has roots in my early Christian faith and love for Jesus' as well as Buddha's teachings. Even though I am agnostic now, I feel like if we don't learn to love and have compassion for all beings, never judging or morally condemning others, then we have not progressed beyond the superficial materialism and egocentrism of our culture. Here's a poignant statement I found of Facebook on the origin of the liberal worldview in a deeply spiritual devotion to and love for all humanity:

"To the church of my youth,
What the hell did you expect me to do?
You told me to love my neighbors, to model the life of Jesus. To be kind and considerate, and to stand up for the bullied.
You told me to love people, consider others as more important than myself.
You taught me to sing "red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight."
We sang it together, pressing the volume pedal and leaning our hearts into the chorus. You said that “He loved all the children of the world”.
You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never "hate" anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.
You told me it's better to give than receive, to be last instead of first. To help the poor, the widow, the stranger at the gate.
You told me that Jesus looks at what I do for the least-of-these as the true depth of my faith. You told me to focus on my own sin and not to judge. You told me to be accepting and forgiving.
So I payed attention.
I took in every lesson.
And I did what you told me.
But now, you call me a libtard. A queer-lover. You call me "woke." A backslider.
You call me a heretic. You make fun of my heart. You mock the people I’m trying to help.
You say I’m a child of the devil.?
You call me soft. A snowflake. A socialist. You shun the very people you told me to help.
What the hell did you expect me to do?
I thought you were serious, but apparently not.
You hate nearly all the people I love. You stand against nearly all the things I stand for. I'm trying to see a way forward, but it's hard when I survey all the hurt, harm, and darkness that comes in the wake of your beliefs and presence.
What the hell did you expect me to do?
I believed it all the way.
I'm still believing it all the way.
Which leaves me wondering, what happened to you?"

(original post by Chris Kratzer. Go
To his profile to see his original writing. Some words modified by author unknown).

[C C]

Stirner felt that the liberalism of the Enlightenment, and the collectivist and socialist movements that fell out of the French Revolution, were just secular continuations of religion. Or plugging new spiritual ideas (rights and different universals) into the same slots of the old "ghosts" (former hallowed concepts).

There might even be something to his regarding "sacred" as an "alien or other" distinction that we thereby respect because it is "not my own", along with such a "higher essence" -- when it is the Plato-like general idea of "human" that we imagine immaterially dwelling in each of us ("haunts you") -- contributing to that moral reverence: "If I didn’t see the human being in you, what reason would I have to respect you?" [not take your property, etc]

Max Stirner: "Political liberalism, like everything religious, counts on respect, humanity, the loving virtues. ... That is why they are continuations and consequences of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something universal, something alien. ... Since they are enemies of egoism, they are therefore Christians, or more generally, religious people -- believers in ghosts, dependents, servants of whatever universal (God, society, etc.).

[...] the “higher essence” is for you—an alien thing. Every higher essence, like truth, humanity, etc., is an essence over us. [above us in hierarchy]

Alienation is a hallmark of the “sacred.” In everything sacred, there is something “eerie,” i.e., alien, in which we are not quite familiar and at home. What is sacred to me is not my own, and if the property of others, for example, were not sacred to me, I would look upon it as mine and would take it for myself when a good opportunity arose...

[...] You are not to me, and I am not to you, a higher essence. Nonetheless, a higher essence may be stuck in each of us, and call forth a mutual reverence. To immediately take the most general, the human being lives in you and me. If I didn’t see the human being in you, what reason would I have to respect you?

To be sure, you aren’t the human being in his true and suitable figure, but only a mortal husk of his, from which he can withdraw without coming to an end; but still for now this general and higher essence dwells in you, and, since an imperishable spirit has assumed a perishable body in you, so that your figure is actually only an “assumed one,” you bring to my mind a spirit that appears, appears in you, without being bound to your body and to this particular mode of appearance, thus a phantasm. This is why I don’t look at you as a higher essence, but rather only respect that higher being that “haunts” you; I “respect the human being in you.”

[...] But it is not only the human being, but everything, that “haunts.” The higher essence, the spirit, that haunts everything, is at the same time bound to nothing, and only—“appears” in it. A ghost in every corner!

[...] When the worldly egoist had shaken off one higher power, such as the Old Testament, the Roman Pope, etc., then immediately there was one seven times higher over him again, such as faith in place of the law, the transformation of all laypeople into priests in place of the limited body of clergy, etc. He was like the possessed man whom seven devils entered when he thought he had freed himself of one.

[...] Communism, which assumes that human beings “have equal rights by nature,” refutes its own propositions to the point that human beings have no rights at all by nature. Because it doesn’t want to recognize, for example, that parents have rights “by nature” against their children or the children against their parents; it abolishes the family. Nature gives parents, siblings, etc., no rights at all.

Anyway, this whole revolutionary or Babouvist principle rests on a religious, i.e., false viewpoint. Who can ask for “rights” if he is not himself coming from a religious standpoint? Isn’t “the right” a religious concept, i.e., something sacred? “Equality of rights,” as the revolution put it forward, is only another form of “Christian equality,” the “equality of brethren, of God’s children, of Christians, etc.”; in short, fraternité.

[...] When the revolution stamped equality as a “right,” it fled into the religious sphere, the region of the sacred, of the ideal. Thus, since then, the fight for “sacred, inalienable human rights.” Against “eternal human rights” the “well-earned rights of the existing order” are asserted quite naturally and with equal right: right against right, where of course one is denounced by the other as “wrong.” This has been the contest of rights since the revolution.... --The Unique and Its Property

[Magical Realist]

Well, the whole premise of natural God-given rights pretty much comes from Jefferson's own words, as "certain inalienable rights". But I hardly think that this value of the free and worthy individual dates back to Christian teachings. After all, the world for christians has always been one divided between the sheep and the goats, the faithful and the heathen. The possible inclusion of these outsiders in God's favored family was conditional on their becoming christians, and was never viewed as natural and universal. It was only with the French and American revolution that individuals came to be valued as free and right-endowed in themselves, regardless of beliefs or culture. IOW Rousseau's naturalistic ideal of man as "the noble savage" instead of as Adam's cursed children born into sin.

Speaking from personal experience though, when I think of and relate to other people I don't normally think of them in terms of having rights or being equal. That's a very cold and legalistic way of defining persons. Rather I just have a natural empathy for them as being the same as I am, just another struggling human being worthy of compassion and respect in themselves. It all falls out of our collective identity as human beings all in the same boat in this often chaotic and random world. As Sam Harris puts it:

“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime."