The last article on the Axial Age raised a fair bit of discussion. It’s enough to ask people to follow you back to the beginning of the Common Era to seek for the roots of liberalism—going back another 1,000 years is only for the truly mad. One of the points of discussion that arose in private channels was the relationship of conscience to antinomianism. I assume that anyone reading this already understands how liberalism becomes antinomianism, but the connection between conscience and antinomianism may be less clear, so we will clarify this relationship here.
I think one has to understand the construction of conscience in the same way as one understands the construction of race.
There is no race of one; your individual feelings of conscience do not comprise the totality of the racial conscience. You are a cell in the body. Anyone's individual conscience may lead them in one direction or another, just as any feature, it may be well-formed or malformed. But it is only that which is reproduced in the race that matters. Nature rewards a collective conscience which is formed in accordance with it; it punishes a sense of conscience formed in opposition to it.
We see this already in liberalism and in queerness. Those whose individual consciences allow for abortion, elevate hedonism, or devalue heterosexual norms find their own birth rates plummeting. The conscience of a liberal does not last.
I think one has to understand the construction of conscience in the same way as one understands the construction of race.
There is no race of one; your individual feelings of conscience do not comprise the totality of the racial conscience. You are a cell in the body. Anyone's individual conscience may lead them in one direction or another, just as any feature, it may be well-formed or malformed. But it is only that which is reproduced in the race that matters. Nature rewards a collective conscience which is formed in accordance with it; it punishes a sense of conscience formed in opposition to it.
We see this already in liberalism and in queerness. Those whose individual consciences allow for abortion, elevate hedonism, or devalue heterosexual norms find their own birth rates plummeting. The conscience of a liberal does not last.