Samuel T. Francis+ wrote,

“… [M]odernism denies or ignores God and concentrates on secular knowledge and action. Human knowledge then can be only empirical; moral statements can be only relative or factual, there being a dichotomy between fact and value; and human action cannot be modeled on transcendent or spiritual gods that either do not exist or cannot be known. Hence, science, the amoral and empirical description of nature, is the characteristically modern way of knowing, and technology, the application of science to practice, is the typically modern way of doing.

Although traditionalists bring philosophical and religious arguments against modernism, their major practical argument against it is its political implications.

Denying the absolute and transcendent sources of moral values, modernism has no grounds for resisting tyranny or controlling anarchy. In Tonsor’s view, we can see that the denial of the existence of order as the ground of being, and the rejection of the transcendent, are a one-way street to Dachau. If everything is permitted and the will to power is the only reality, then the Gulag is as logical as an Euler diagram.

Modern political thought from the time of Machiavelli and modern liberalism from the time of Mill have rejected the idea of an absolute moral order to which social and political institutions should conform. In the absence of a basis for firm moral judgments, these modern political views are unable to distinguish between dissent and subversion, friend and enemy, right and wrong, or to exercise power in the interests of justice and a morally based social order.

… When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident.”

— October 1987, The World & I.

+ Note: I know very little about Mr. Francis except that he was something of a paleoconservative, controversial, and wrote at times for The Washington Times, National Review, Chronicles and he was apparently a friend of Patrick J. Buchanan. But I agree in the abstract with what he wrote in the clip above from The Other Side of Modernism: James Burnham and His Legacy. SH.

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