Demise of Conscience

by Friedrich Hansen (January 2025)

Gender quotas and discourse should be abolished immediately if we are to save the innovative mind of the West. For sexual identity rings the death knell for sublimation, enquiry and scientific innovation because it replaces the inner moral self with the agitated outer spectrum of a merely cognitive self. As a result the search for the truth in the world around us is being replaced with the inward search for subjective meaning in the narrow precincts of sexuality. This reductionist reasoning resembles the fatal route of racism by giving visualized choices it is imprisoning the free human mind along biological-deterministic group parameters. In the last century nothing good has come from this other than endless infighting of groups on university campuses. In Weimar Germany, feminists alienated heterosexual men and radicalizing many to join the Nazis. Today we see a growing segment of the fertile male population with no prospect of ever marrying. At the same time, sterile same sex couples with little chance of artificial offspring have come to occupy the imagination of party hacks and administrators.

Now “gendered” men, calling themselves transwomen, use female toilets and can compete with women in sports which is perhaps the most cruel turn of the dialectics of the enlightenment. Not even the Nazi regime could put up such a monstrosity. If pure fantasy can take over the role previously reserved for sound memory, surely the sensorial foundations of reality become volatile. Everything seems possible except technological progress and scientific innovation. Legendary Western innovation was based on economic competition over scientific accomplishments but now it is turned upside down with gender research consuming huge resources and public attention. This esoteric woke turn spells the end of the family and human history as we knew it. For with this latest circle of decadence the closing of the human mind by sexual identity politics corrupts Adam Smith’s famous “sympathy for the other” by short changing it for sexual reductionism.

Little wonder that German idealism and illustrious philosophy have been meanwhile profaned into climate hysteria and fluid gender terms. If everything is about to be liquefied for the purpose of “transitioning,” there is certainly no place left for the religious rigour of our human conscience laying the ground for Judaeo-Christian guilt culture. We are back to the old Hellenistic shame and revenge culture of late antiquity which also resulted in a rainbow of Gnostic movements avers to human responsibility. Historically this was associated with moral collapse and decline paving the way for Epicurean transgressions and unrepentant self indulgence. It comes down to the unbalanced rule of cognitive Adam I framed into the shenanigans and passions of sexual identity politics. As it is characterized by frank exhibitionism and shameless of “Gay Pride” wokism is withdrawn from moral considerations, individual guilt or ethical Adam II. Rather it has taken to justify personal transgressions by pointing toward a universal scapegoat called “climate change.” Now since the late 19th century the rise of same sex relations and rank promiscuity would be blamed on a sort of postmodern Miasma—the equivalent of medieval pests literally meaning after the Latin root “polluted or bad air.”

This new olfactory sensibility was part of the new organic primitivism, meant as a counterweight to industrialism in the late 19th century being the namesake of  “naturalism” it became the fashionable lifestyle choice of the organic rebellion, pouring out particularly odious from Germany as it experienced the most intense or rapid industrialisation among other European nations. However the answer was an anachronistic political opposition which harked back to medieval precedents. For even beyond Germany the naturalistic campaign throughout Europe would be framed in romantic terms of medieval nostalgia. Germany became the champion of romantic even reactionary naturalism because it has been until then among the rather backward European provinces. It only emerged as vitalized and energetic thanks to two major secular and biologistic concepts, namely gender and race. More than a century before Oscar Wilde, the German traveller Johann H. Winckelmann, was one of the first to imitate the gay elites of Greek antiquity as a consequence of the Renaissance enthusiasm for Greco-Roman monumental architecture.

Hellenism in late antiquity became famously linked to the worship of beauty, vanity, pride always inevitably undermined by shame. This counterintuitive backside is always part and parcel of a visual culture. Enchanted by psychological narcissism this visual orientation made itself exceedingly attractive to the unbalanced materialism of 19th century in Germany. Promoting shame it would exceedingly challenge the traditional Judaeo-Christian guilt culture which had undergirding the European scientific revolution. Importantly the combination of monotheism with monogamy was increasingly at odds with Greek polytheism and polygamy that informed the Hellenistic shame culture. While Judaism is rooted in the auditive guilt culture, Renaissance Hellenism famously dropped the haptic or third dimension of the arts while it kept only the two-dimensional visual paradigm when it entered northern Europe.

By contrast, in classical Greek culture, three dimensional works of architecture were the norm with the exception of murals. All this left little to the imagination while the opposite is true for Judaism given the religious “image ban” and at least partly true for Christianity. This helps understanding the impressive record of Jewish intellectuals in the northern Hemisphere. The invisible hand of the Orient as Adam Smith noticed would become the secret of European economic success. The Christian trinity is also at odds with the strict Oriental image ban but it is interesting to note that the first Christians omitting the deed seem to have believed creativity was to be gained rather by miraculous this-worldly reification rather than the imitation of invisible deeds.

Rather they got away with violating the image ban given their “organic justification” of the incarnated son. After all they wanted nothing more than visualizing the likeness between God and man by drawing on the exemplary likeness between father and son. What they did not realize was that they spoiled human divinity with visibility. In the original Jewish understanding “divining” abstracts from images all together and the visual paradigm in particular. Divining was taken from the Greeks and literally busied itself with anticipating the future based on previous experiences, which is a faculty born from mental rather than visual reflection. The latter incarnates itself in simple rebuttals and inversions of arguments in the manner of scapegoating. In contrast to these plain rejections, there are more considered and detached ones derived from virtual imagination under the lead of the auditive paradigm. For instance Jews invented the ability of seeing things in different perspectives or viewpoints. This enabled them to do justice to the view point of an opponent which is the unique accomplishment of guilt culture or internalized shame.

With the demise of Victorianism at the end of the 19th century when sexual identity politics emerged for the first time, it indicated the demise of cultured and polite society under the pressure of biologism and racism. Gender is just the Western sexualized version of outward biologism following in the shadow secular nationalism. Gender pride even more than national pride militate against the foundational humility that had sustained the success of Judaeo-Christian civilization. In addition like racism, genderism is a group ideology which undermines the nobility of the essentially individualized Western conscience. It was only as a lesser evil compared with radical forms of socialism that the Western elites originally embraced sexual liberation in the decadent epoch of the fin de siecle. By way of an unintended consequence the inner conscience founded on monotheism was being visualized and underwent a metamorphosis by transitioning outward into sexual identity. As I showed in one of my first contributions to NER, the first pride marches in San Francisco during the 1890s carried Christian cross with them.

What had been the inner, parental or divine, voice of our conscience would be externalized through visualization expanding from one off sin to permanent sinner as a role model. This was driven by a ruthless sexual imagination. Another way of putting this is the rise of the haptic paradigm or mere raw feelings as the arbiter of human self understanding. According to Nietzsche excessive repetition, resembling addictive behaviour (like masturbation), can overcome the inhibitions of our parental interdictions. This might be interpreted as a mimetic feature of industrial production which is bound to produce the same coveted thing for the many and is prone to privilege reified envy over family loyalty and human jealousy. This pattern was perceived by Nietzsche as torturous animal or herd instincts and he conceptualized as endless, boring repetition of the same. From this the organic turn of decadent fin de siecle took hold in the name of embracing herd and animal instincts.

On the rise was imitation and depersonalisation through group instincts and in decline were divinely inspired human uniqueness. Little wonder that emerging mass society channelled the teeming urban crowds by releasing the religious pressures and giving way to natural indulgences as a way of taming the monsters liberated by consumerism. So sexual identity and the indulgences of same sex was to pacify the wild expectations satisfy the desires which the consumer markets could not satisfy. This gave us the improprieties of gay pride and later it gave us the obesity crisis. Bowing down to our animal instincts under the augurs of Green naturalism became the new virtue of LGBTIQ. Eastern Europe and Asia never ought into this and after the HIV epidemic the dysfunctional civil effects of sexual identity politics became undeniable.

The same plays out in the trans band wagon. For the embrace of animalism has established repetition and sameness as the visual driver of a downward trend in most Western institution, namely religion, education, family formation and birth rates. Same sex relations have become the more affordable and easily accessible rival to the more unique, laborious, heterosexual encounter. Due to ongoing technological innovation in the absence of religion the deed as paradigm becomes redundant and is being swerved for same sex relations. For in the absence of religion our appreciation of and sensibility towards “the other” including different opinions are weakened or disappear all together. It is for this reason that he Asian tigers have come to replace the Western industriousness. And while the Christian gospel is spreading in Asia and Africa, it is dying in the West.

For with the embrace and mainstreaming of a culture of sameness and imitation, the uniqueness and sacredness of each and every individual, once revealed by monotheism, will fade away and with it our technological genius. The same is true for love that can only be obtained out of the fundamental difference between man and women. By contrast group identities based on sex will kill cultural complementarities which sanctify and enchant human life under the auspices of monotheism, Christian, Muslim and Jewish alike. In the context of enchanted human life we abhor all notions of serial or faceless groupism as well as changing one’s sexual identity. By contrast since binary sex changes in adolescents are conducive to transformational acts and gestures that betray a personality through internalisation, which means the sexual habit shapes the personality. In the wake of the organic deconstruction which is under way right now the uniquely precious Judaeo-Christian culture that teaches humility will be replaced by the monstrosity of pride which will transform what has remains of polite society into hell on earth. We are seeing this already in the attack of the trans crowd on the female population in the toilette wars. Without religion lifting the human thriving for causal explanations into the transcendent realm and thereby taming it the nasty human habit of finger-pointing and scapegoating will explode.

Immanent Identity Sucks

The dive into immanent or visual identity started with gender and ended with race. Not for nothing did sexual identity politics, like the scarabs, emerge in the decadent epoch. Decadence enabled the rise of feminism and homosexuality as a reductionist afterthought to Victorianism. Both are prone to psychic instability and hysteric expressionism—state of mind suggestive of a reckless soul, which was later eulogized as “coming out”. It is no coincidence, however, that precisely during the same period of symbolism, the heavy armoured scarab gained unprecedented popularity. The archaic Egyptian dung bug was sacred for his resistance to the unforgiving sun while decadence symbolised the return of atavism and primitivism. In the late 19th century the scarab would be worn as amulet around the neck by vulnerable people, so called woke avant la lettre presumably troubled identitarians. For in the lead up to the Great War European masses of soldiers seemed of little worth just like teeming aunts.

The shock of the Great War was such that in Britain the poppy is worn ever since on remembrance day, “…around the time of Poppy Day, traditionally from All Souls’ Day (2 November) until Remembrance Day (11 November) or if later until Remembrance Sunday in the United Kingdom.” It might be said that the reverence for the poppy keeping alive the memories for the mass of men slain in WWI has prevented the UK from adopting the sun flower as a national symbol, in contrast to the “pagan” continental culture that looms large in terms of nature worship among the Green “vegetable” parties across Europe. Brexit has finalized this equally symbolic and existential split in European iconography which is symbolized by the contrarian meanings of sunflowers and poppies. Yet both gave rise to the talk of “vegetables” for individuals who seem to have lost their animal spirits such as vegans and also woke identitarians.

It appears to be as if “opposites don’t touch each other anymore” with the attraction between the sexes being relativized and countered as never before. The century long fight against the traditional family, started by Oscar Wilde, is making progress—reflecting the increasing fragmentation or disintegration of Western societies. As it were: nothing can hold the warring faction of society together like the binary of love dedicated to monotheism and monogamy. Both sustain the resilience of the traditional family by keeping identity in a wholesome transcendence.

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Dr. Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.

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