A fairly new book criticizes efforts to find harmony and order in the natural world, calling such efforts a racist expression of totalitarian-nationalist fascism.
Entitled Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and Right-Wing Thought, by the German academics Gottfried Schnödl and Florian Sprenger, the book’s purported focus is on the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s associations with Nazism. The latter were brief and paralleled the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s. Both were important figures in environmental philosophy and the significance to their work of their political alignment in the early years of Nazi power remains debated.
But not coincidentally, the “harmony” and “order” the book criticizes are also translations for the Greek term logos, so important to Christian thought. Indeed, the book’s arguments fit a broader implicitly Christianphobic attack globally by Western identitarianism, with its own totalitarian cultural approach, against a “straw man” version of traditional Christianity. The latter wrongly and in stereotyped form gets targeted by anti-fascism–wrongly on purpose it often seems! Ironically but typically, the book criticizes the works of von Uexküll (whose romantic scientism is not Orthodox Christian) for an allegedly fascist drive for harmony and order, but in its anti-fascism implicitly seems to lend support to a progressive “social justice” quest for harmony and order, with accompanying and overlapping racialist and sexual identitarianism, as found in the neocolonial and totalitarian techno-paganism of today’s Global West.
The harmony and order that are ok in this scheme are those that establish fixed abstract racial and sexual categories with global application, like “old” Communist ideas of class. The “bad” harmony and order seek to fix people into particular places by nation and nationality related to race, like “old” Nazism in its view. Neither approach is traditionally Christian. But the attack on harmony and order in nature is a typically anti-Christian move of a cultural Marxism that does not recognize its own contradictions, and which ironically becomes a water-bearer for consumerist neoliberal models of desire shaping the self.
The broad ideological effect of such a progressive critique of harmony and order (confusing norms of scientism with supposedly Christian norms in its critique) is exemplified by a recent news story about how nearly 1 in 10 U.S. adults now fall into the category of LGBTQ+ identitarianism. That proportion is rising across new generations, driven by the polysexualism of our techno-pagan and neocolonial global culture. At the same time, tolerance and support for traditional Christian anthropology of sex and family in the public sphere has nose-dived. Today only about 30% of American adults regularly attend worship, and a rising number of U.S. children are born outside of marriage. Here we see the ossifying of an identitarianism of sex in a global way, based on a consumerist definition of desire as based on lack rather than on relationality. The result is people essentially, from an Orthodox Christian standpoint, identifying themselves by their self-asserting passions rather than in Christ.
Ecosemiotics as a secular field examines meaningfulness in nature, and is founded mainly on the work of Charles Peirce of Milford, Pennsylvania, but informed by the Estonian von Uexküll’s writing on nature, among others, notably today Timo Maran of Tartu University in Estonia. But I have argued elsewhere in a number of places on this blog, and in published scholarship, that there is a traditional Christian sense of ecosemiotics that is based on a sense of identity as relational that is ultimately otherworldly, and that can also base our meaningful relationships with community including our environment, in a Christian hybrid of incarnationality and mysticism. This Christian panentheism (based on the linking of Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1), of Creation being in Jesus Christ, the logoi of the Logos, among other things overcomes the paradox of “socially constructed” but essentialist views of race and sex as identities in modern globalism.
From an Orthodox Christian standpoint, the harmony and order of the Logos, Christ, is a mystery that is non-essentialist, not fitting the above-mentioned more general philosophical critique, although He provides meaning to Creation. A believer in Orthodox Christianity identifies with emptying the self in Jesus Christ, rather than asserting one’s self in racialist and sexual identitarianism in the “will to power” of a Western consumerist desire for self-identity. From the non-modern and non-Western Orthodox Christian standpoint, it is only with God’s mystical and uncreated energies, articulated by the logoi of the Logos (the words or harmonies of God, not His essence or any essentialist self of our own) that we can hope to serve universal Truth in the Person of Jesus Christ. That’s through a synergy of divine grace sparkling through our lives and the ascetic effort of opening our hearts in living for Christ, and not ourselves. Natural law in Orthodoxy is the spark of God’s love in our hearts, not an abstract or ideological matrix of essentialist sexual and racial identities. Cosmologically, Orthodoxy sees traditional marriage between a man and a woman as symbolizing an anthropology of reciprocating service, seen as an image of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church as the Bride. Ultimately this also reflects the relational identity glimpsed in the mystery of the Holy Trinity.
The news report about the proportional rise in LGBTQ+ identifying people in the U.S. reminded me of how in many ways the real problem with identitarianism in the global West, a background concern of the above-mentioned book, is not found in even nationalism and fascism so much as in progressive identitarianism that is both sexual and racial. In its ideology it is every bit as clinging and immersive and ultimately destructive as the “permanent lie” that Alexander Solzhenitsyn critiqued as basic to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union: A type of virtual reality that is delusional (prelest in Orthodox terms), and which he warned rightly is found in neoliberal globalism, in distinctive ways, just as in Nazism and Communism historically.
The new Gallup poll data shows nearly 1 in 10 American adults supposedly identifying as LGBTQ+. Yet you may recall how, back during the “long march” of the LGBTQ+ movement in the U.S. in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we were told again and again that this campaign would not affect Christians negatively in any way. The libertarian vision shared by many establishment Republicans was that same-sex marriage, established by the 2015 Obergefell decision, would “domesticate” LGBTQ+-identifying people, while not harming established American Christianities. Later, the 2020 Bostock decision, which extended federal equal rights originally intended for men and women to all “gender identities” and multiple “sexes,” was similarly seen as a kind of neutral extension of liberty. The misnamed 2023 U.S. “Respect for Marriage” act was the first successful national legislation (outside of court decisions) upholding same-sex marriage, and passed with bipartisan support in Congress.
But between the striking down of anti-sodomy laws, culminating in the SCOTUS Lawrence v. Texas decision of 2003, and more long-term cultural change (stretching back to the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, and including the uproar over Anita Bryant’s much-mocked campaign against homosexual rights in the 1970s), statistics related to religious practice and married families in the U.S. show a steady drop in percentages. Is there a causal correlation or is this all part of a major cultural trend? Likely both. Probably not coincidentally, going back close to two centuries ago, The Communist Manifesto identified the undermining of the traditional family as a basic goal for what since has become called, in recent times, a refined “Cultural Marxism” that is more Brave New World than 1984.
The unspoken part of the effect of the rise in LGBTQ+ identitarianism, paralleling the rise in racialist identiarianism in the Anti-Racism and Anti-Colonialist/Settler movements (represented in Critical Race Theory as a correlation to Queer Theory), is an undermining in American culture of traditional Christian cosmology tied to anthropology of sex and family specific to Christian culture. This makes it increasingly impossible for traditional Christian family live and thus transmit culture across generations to survive in American society.
Homosexual identities early in this century were set by the U.S. CDC at about 2.5 percent of the population, and transgenderism a fraction of a percentage. But driven by generational change, and especially the growth of bisexualism and with it a pansexuality exemplified by polyamory, the level keeps rising, with Generation Z having the highest proportion. It is likely to be higher than 10% in the next decade. The new emerging model, largely accepted across a spectrum of young people regardless of whether identifying as LGBTQ+ or not, is completely different from the traditional Christian-related model, and does not tolerate the educational and legal replication of the latter in any meaningful way.
What happened to the idea that sexual orientations and identities were hereditary and fixed, and thus had to be recognized as identity rights in the same way as race (which itself is more elusive than assumed and has become moreso)? The statistics indicate to the contrary that such orientations and identities change with the culture.
In essence, we’re seeing that the whole underlying claimed premise of the push for LGBTQ+ marriage and rights was false. Those identifications are primarily cultural and social, not fixed. And what has been harmed is traditional Christian culture of family and sex that historically undergirded the American sense of a republic as based on a Christian-rooted sense of virtue closely tied to inter-generational incarnational family life. All this happened without real national discussion or choice, but in effect through propaganda and subversive campaigning, in which the culture has become increasingly intolerant of traditional Christian views. Whether the two models can co-exist in some kind of neutral pluralism in the long term is increasingly statistically in doubt.
In the end, the real essentialist identitarianism lies with racialists promoting a mystical “people of color” as a globalizing identity connected nonetheless to particular constructions of race and ethnicity for purposes of advancing careers and power. Likewise, the parallel advancing of an equally mystical sense of sexual minorities that, while socially constructed, are also presented paradoxically in essentialist identity terms.
This new identitarianism, seeking its own harmony and order in visions of an elusive secular or techno-pagan system of “social justice,” is intolerant of traditional Christian anthropology of sex and family as a basis for the American republic.
The cultural trends and long-term “culture wars” involved in this are in many ways not visible or legible to most Americans politically. While currently the new Trump administration has pushed back on some aspects of racialist “anti-racism” and transgenderism, deeper acceptance of the ongoing roots of the sexual revolution remains. The “Trumpist” movement and the technocrats involved in it seem to embrace homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and accept the underlying polysexual and identitarian roots of a new vision of American family life, as seen in the personal histories of President Trump and his chief adviser Elon Musk.
With Catholicism and Protestantism rooted in a more rationalistic and individualistic cultural of natural law that helped birth the current Western identitarian ideology, only the Orthodox Church provides in traditional Christianity a firm foundation for advancing a non-essentialist and truly mystical view of identity as based in self-emptying Jesus Christ, in the fullest Trinitarian Christian theology. Orthodoxy simply takes the debate into another dimension in its end run around the identitarian totalitarian trend of the secular Global West and the latter’s advocacy of harmony and order as social control in the service of human “will to power.” For more details on the Orthodox approach, see my article “ICXC NIKA: The Liberty of Theosis,” in the collection I co-edited entitled Healing Humanity from Holy Trinity Publications.