"Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!"
So said the enraged antihero of "A Man without a Country," a short story published in The Atlantic in December, 1863. The United states was still in the middle of a war that would determine whether or not the nation would survive as one or as a nation divided; a war fought largely because of ideas about what it meant to be a nation, what it meant to be human and what it meant to be a people of faith.
The protagonist, a young man named Phillip Nolan, had been tried for and convicted of treason when he rashly uttered the words that sealed his fate. Nolan got his wish. He was exiled on a series of ships, an exile that never ended. No one ever spoke to him again of his country. It was only as Nolan lay dying that he heard about the America he'd repudiated some fifty-five years before his demise.
At the end Nolan realizes he loves his country more than family. Without his country, he feels he is nothing. As the man to Nolan was allowed to say his last words relates:
"Then he asked me to bring the Presbyterian 'Book of Public Prayer...and I knelt down and read, and he repeated with me -- 'For ourselves and our country, O gracious God, we thank Thee, that, notwithstanding our manifold transgressions of Thy holy laws, Thou hast continued to us Thy marvelous kindness.'
"Then he turned to the end of the same book, and I read the words more familiar to me -- 'Most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold and bless Thy servant, the President of the United States, and all others in authority' -- and the rest of the Episcopal collect. 'Danforth,' said he, 'I have repeated those prayers night and morning, it is now fifty-five years.' And then he said he would go to sleep.
"And I went away."
How alien the spirituality and vision of "The Man without a Country" seems today. Who today would have the temerity to write as Edward Everett Hale wrote? To do so would be to have one's literary death sentence decreed by the New York Times. Most certainly a writer like Hale would not be read by today's globalists, for whom such godly piety combined with love of nation is anathema.
As for Hale's vision of nations and Christianity?
The "opiate of the people" is to be replaced by a new beatific vision of a globalist, secular world order that is the antithesis yet imitator of the vision of the Kingdom of God represented by the Church universal; a vision articulated by St. Augustine in his City of God that is the transcendent Kingdom of God revealed and ruled by Christ.
Replacing the beatific vision of Christianity is a new universal, but secularist world order ushered in; an order in which human beings' allegiance is to a global City of Men ruled by elite priests who act as gods for the masses. Preachers of the globalist vision present an ersatz kingdom that is the opposite of the City of God.
Like the Christian vision of the universal Kingdom of God, the religion of secular globalism claims universality, but is an earthly minded substitute for the Church universal. The Christian vision sees the Church universal as God's kingdom ruling the earth. The religion of globalism sees an earthly, utopian world order in which all men pay allegiance to elite priests who rule over a World City without national borders.
Sometimes the substitute beatific vision is expressed in terms of a "global village," a mystical entity that takes the place of the family of God. The globalists' family of humanity is without distinction of country, tribe or creed. The ideal human being, like Phillip Nolan, is seen as detached from country and faith. He is exiled from everything that gives his life meaning in order he become an abstraction, a tabula rasa on which a new program might be written by those who are superior. The universal citizen of the new secularist world order does not know yet what he will be. But rest assured he will be told by those who know better than he.
The world citizen adrift in a sea without horizons will come to know this much: Anything to which he has been or is attached must be and will be demolished. The secularist vision requires complete destruction of the old; including nations, institutions, faith and even historical memory itself; hence, for instance, the constant attacks on the Christian Church and on the reality and concept of nation and the human being. Devotion to faith, family, nation is not only suspect, but considered positively injurious.
In sum, the ideology of globalism involves stripping humanity of its former and unique status as beings created in imago dei and the substitution of the idea of humanity as genderless units.
As Eric Hoffer, author of the prescient book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements wrote:
"To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctiveness. He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan, or Tadao -- a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by assimilation of the individual into a collective body. The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings…To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.
"The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough. In every act, however trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring form the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than from his individual prospects and abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone. (Must always be watched by the group.) The individual is absorbed into the collective."
Globalists embrace what Hoffer recognized as an "unbounded contempt for history." The erasure of history inevitably means attacking the past and established institutions possessing history; institutions such as the Church and documents such as the U.S. Constitution. Only the future matters. The present is busy with wreckage of what exists, even if what presently exists has a thousand year or more heritage.
That is because for globalists, the present is a shadow and illusion -- merely a "passageway to the glorious future." It is a meagre "way station on the road to Utopia…The radical and the reactionary loathe the present."
Therefore, the present is treated ruthlessly, including the present bodily form of the human. Both must be mercilessly scourged in order something new is created; something perfectly fitted for the new vision.
As Hoffer writes, "The radical has a passionate faith in the infinite perfectibility of human nature. He believes that by changing man's environment and by perfecting a technique of soul forming, a society can be wrought that is wholly new and unprecedented."
Ultimately the new beatific vision for humankind means embracing the Hegelian concept of a collective consciousness, a "Geist" that is a single "mind" common to all men. What is that vision?
As philosopher R.C. Solomon noted, "The entre sweep of [Hegel's]'The Phenomenology of Spirit' is away from the 'disharmonious' conception of men as individuals to the 'absolute' conception of all men as one. In the 'phenomenology' we are concerned with the inadequacy of the conceptions of one's self as an individual in opposition to others…and in opposition to God."
For Hegel, Solomon goes on to say, this opposition is resolved by a conception of one's self as a member of a family or community. Absolute consciousness (salvation) is recognition of one's self as universal spirit. "The concept of 'Geist' is the hallmark of a theory of self-identity -- a theory in which I am something other than a person." [Italics added.]
The transgender movement, for example, is the spearpoint of a philosophy in which humanity is something other than people as previously understood for thousands of years. It is a proselytizing movement on behalf of Hegel's idea of the world geist. As such, it is not a civil rights movement, but a direct attempt to denature humanity; that is, to smash the ancient concept of humanity as made imago dei. It is an attempt to radically transform humanity itself, replace Judeo/Christian concept of the human being with a de-gendered, robotic and malleable unit -- a nonperson who is merely part of the universal world soul.
But to be a unit detached from nation, faith and even one's individual humanity is to be nobody. It is to be a drifter in a sea of nothingness even more surely than Philip Nolan was adrift at sea; who was, yes, a man without a country, but a man nonetheless.
To become a unit with nothing to believe in, not even one's own humanity; to have nothing to be loyal or faithful to; to be a nonentity without family, nation or faith is be become a slave. The new globalist world order would make slaves of us all, fit only to serve a cabal of superiors.
In the above respect, the new world vision is nothing new. It is merely the revival of the rationales behind all empires, ancient and modern. Whether the vision of Hellenization dreamed of by Alexander the Great; whether the vision of eternal Rome ruled by demi-god Caesars; whether the vision of a Thousand Year Reich ruled by a noble race; whether the vision of a global communist international brotherhood in which the common man was to reign -- the actualization of the imperial, earthly vision of man is always the same. Human beings are regarded as units to be ruled by powerful others. Human beings are enslaved.
Against those visions and the present day globalist vision stands the Christian beatific vision of the New Jerusalem, a view in which the entire human race, men and women, are transformed by the realities of the transcendent Kingdom of God, putting the beatific vision of a holy city to work here on earth.
Which vision will prevail will depend on the retrieval of the idea of the human being as created imago dei; and along with that, the revival of the unique stories and heritages of nations; particularly, the revival of the idea of nations as under the sovereign rule of a loving God who created all of us.
Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her thoughts have appeared in many online journals, including RealClearReligion, CNS, Fox News, National Review, Russia Insider and many others. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
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