Hungarian Conservative

‘Christian doctrine as taught by the Church of Rome had historically provided society with a point of reference for moral guidance, which subsequently “ensure[d] that politics remain[ed] rational and d[id] not fall into the trap of ideologies”. Yet since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the institutional Church, or some who speak for Her, have steadily dismantled the remnants of Christendom with ambiguous, if not erroneous teachings.’

‘If a society is exhausted in immanence, if people are not aware of the finitude of their own life, knowledge, and power, and if every goal of the person, the state, and politics is directed towards material interests, then the state will be exactly that Civitas Terrena, which is also Civitas Diaboli. Everything is justified by the stronger interest (Hobbes), pragmatism and secular science serve the immanent power goals of the great Leviathan, while real wisdom, taste, and arts, that make life pleasant (or just bearable) start to decline, wither, dissolve into a gigantically increased bureaucracy called the state.’

The lack of humility, modesty, the lack of deference to one’s superiors, the lack of discipline and respect are the main causes of most of the political and sociological problems of modernity. After all, according to the blind believers of progress, sailing never ends. However, according to conservatives, there is no such thing as an island of Utopia. Their problem in politics is not the search for an island that doesn’t exist, but: ‘[h]ow to get the disgruntled crew to help keep the ship of the state afloat, to keep it from capsizing and being shipwrecked?’

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the work is that its author is brave enough to challenge completely the established thinking and vision that takes historical progress and the associated rise of liberalism for granted.

‘Nation-states will be reduced in their functionality, becoming of secondary importance as entities, and the principle of territorial existence will slowly dissolve into a new, boundless uniformity. To use a rather un-English term, we are going to witness the deterritorialization of the world—a world deprived of the territories of its constituents, at least if we are to believe the new utopians.’

According to Thomas Molnar, intellectualism is only a brief flash between the religious and technological society. More dangerous than its waning light is its ‘thunder’, i.e. the unspoken problem of the Century, which is revealed unmistakably only after the lightning.

As philosophical materialism and the resulting transhumanism are atheistic systems of thought, it is extremely important for Harari—as it is for Dawkins—to deny the idea of God. Just as Richard Dawkins replaces a transcendent creator with the theory of evolution, so does Harari use evolution as a justification for the theory of transhumanism.