The French Revolution marks a turning point in western history that cannot be ignored and seemingly cannot be understood. My favorite story about the Revolution is famous French historian who on his deathbed complained he spent his entire life studying the Revolution and would die without understanding it. This should be the deathbed scene of all French historians. The Revolution starts a new period of history and coming at the beginning it is so unformed and amorphous that discerning and explaining the details in a convincing manner may be impossible. Whether you are right or wrong about the Revolution the subject matter is vaguely formed that broad agreement seems to be impossible. With later developments from this influence there is little debate, the world broadly agrees on the Russian Revolution of 1917. But by that time the trend started by the earlier French Revolution had become so clearly defined and formed that the public agrees on the shape and nature of the Russian Revolution. The earlier French Revolution is like an embryo in which the future shape of the animal can never be agreed on. Yet it is this embryo which marks the start.
The French Revolution started left vs right politics and this has remained the dominant feature of western politics since. The start was embryonic and vaguely formed but it is still the start. The terms left and right refer to where like minded political groups would sit in the Revolutionary parliament, the terms are understood so quickly that the understanding must be instinctive. The left seeks to equalize regard and the right seeks to concentrate regard. This is instinctively known and all that is needed is names for the concepts latent within the human mind. It is from this start that the political obsessions of the last two hundred years come from, left vs right, Labour vs Tory, Communist vs Fascist. The competing strategies of equalizing or concentrating regard.
These opposing strategies only appear for the first time in politics during the Revolutionary period, these opposing strategies have been at play in religion since the dawn of time. Man instinctively recognizes these strategies and applies one or the other to his religious life. The concentration of regard on the authority an unchanging scripture or on the rulings of an unchanging elite vs the equalization of regard among all believers and the right to be guided by one’s personal revelation. The tension between these two forms of religion is a constant in world history. What is new is applying these competing ideas to domestic politics. This application of religious concepts to politics was no improvement to either religion or politics, as the following history has clearly shown.
The violence unleashed by the French Revolution is explained by the formula that society exists to produce better individuals and to reverse this order and say individuals exist to produce better societies eliminates any moral protection the individual has. The reversal of the proper relationship leads to a reenactment of the religious narrative of Christianity with a tragic and bloody reality to what was meant as metaphor. First God tries to create a perfect human society by killing all but the best, Noah and his family. A captive breeding project. Create a race of purely good humans by killing all but the best so a new race can be born free of evil. A genocide by God for the purpose of purifying the human race of immoral elements. And Christian narrative says this failed, good and evil are in every heart in the Solzhnitsiyan manner. A captive breeding project with mankind can never work. After the French Revolution this is tried in reality through several twentieth century genocides. The metaphorical captive breeding project of the Flood is made real and returns the same results, good and evil are in the heart of every man and so a captive breeding project truly enacted can no more succeed than the mythical destruction of all but Noah.
After the Flood failed God chose a people to favor and rule over the world to force the world to obey his morality. This is the Vanguard theory Lenin created in 1905 when he created the Bolsheviks. A small minority will force the majority to be good, once they have been forced to be good they will see the benefit and continue on their own. The Vanguard theory of Lenin is the same plan Moses had and neither worked. And so the Christian narrative says that viewing the failure of his second attempt at creating a new world God decides make the world better from the bottom up, by taking human form and inspiring the good in all men and motivating goodness without force. In the Christian narrative this third attempt by God to remake the world is the one time he got it right. The captive breeding project failed, the Chosen/Vanguard project failed, but making the world better from the bottom up by reaching out to the goodness in all people worked. In this Christian narrative any return to the captive breeding project or the Chosen People project is simply reenacting a failure. After the French Revolution both these failures were reenacted. The legacy of the French Revolution was to bring religious impulses into politics and so destroy both worthy politics and religion.
This new period of history has a focus on ethnicity and class that never existed before. The specific focus is on the wealth and success of ethnicity and class, the comparative standing of each group. The bourgeoisie’s wealth compared to the villeins was the start. The bourgeois cities were begun along the Rhine circa 1000 ad in the chaos following the collapse of the Roman Empire. These cities received the right to self government and kept it through the centuries by disproportionately bearing the burden of taxation. A new culture started in these cities and this culture was more successful than the surrounding countryside in all countries. Thus started the focus on the influence of culture on success, the dominating theme of modern politics. Man’s instincts convince him that regard is the currency of success. This conviction leads to the false belief that the more successful cultures are succeeding through the instinctive method of using regard as the currency of success. And so if they are more successful they are hoarding regard for the purpose of hoarding wealth. This tragic misunderstanding will continue to dominate politics until such time the human race has a rational approach to the influence of culture on success.
The rational approach is understand man’s instincts evolved in a world where all wealth comes from nature and man is amethodical. In this environment man evolved to view regard as the currency of success as the group is the key to success and the group only exists if members believe it will be successful. A circular logic making regard the currency of success. This circular logic can only be broken by a vertical movement upward away from the starting point of human nature, a vertical movement towards using regard to choose between methods and not people. Only this vertical movement upward can end the left vs right obsession begun during the Revolution.