The Turning: A Time to Build Spiritual Capital

“Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state…”

Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’

There has been both hilarious and disturbing outrage in this first month of Trump’s second term.

Liberal white South Africans have declared Trump a racist for opposing the ANC’s law which gives the government the right to expropriate any type of property without compensation. A landowner would have to vacate his property before appealing to the courts. And those courts would be special ‘Land Courts’.

Yes, expropriation without compensation is exactly what the name says it is. That’s why they gave it that name.

These same white South Africans believe that Trump’s criticism of the 140 laws which discriminate against whites, coloureds, and Indians is also racist. Because apartheid. Because colonialism. Never mind that these policies are killing and impoverishing the downtrodden they claim to care about. Foreign investment is grinding to a halt. The mining industry is dead. And government services are in the sewer. At least liberals get a chance to show how righteous they are!

Black South Africa has not responded with the American offer of refuge to Afrikaners with an assurance that white South Africans are welcome, but have instead accused whites of racism and treason and told them to get on the next plane out. They continue to sing about killing people like me.

Ramaphosa famously told an IFP MP in the early 90s his plan for whites:

In his brutal honesty, Ramaphosa told me of the ANC's 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.

Close your eyes. Breathe. And ask yourself if anybody, let alone a Christian, should be defending such a lunatic and his policies.

Around the world, people have been up in arms about the suspension of USAID. They choose to be ignorant of the fact the leaders of USAID have tended to be warmongers, like the architects of the crises in Libya and Ukraine, namely Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland. (USAID has long been known as a CIA front…)

Or that USAID funds such utterly bizarre programmes like Jesuit Refugee Services in Ireland, Moroccan pottery classes, TV shows in Iraq, bat research in Wuhan, sex changes in Peru, and gay shelters in Albania.

Trump has also done such awful things like banning child sex changes, rescinding foreign aid for mass abortion, and talking to Putin about mutual cutting of defence budgets and peace treaties involving nuclear power.

JD Vance recently travelled to a European security conference and asked why Christians were being locked up for silent prayer in Britain? What is European defending?

What has bothered me the most is the response to all of this news by church people. Some of these people have been acquaintances of mine.

Let me say this…

If Biden and Obama’s attack on the Christian faith, on the unborn, on confused children, on the middle class, did not pique any outrage…

Yet now, only now, you are offended by the bombast of Trump, by historically normal immigration and foreign aid policy, by seeking an end to constant interventionist wars, by recognizing there are two genders, by seeking to protect white people who are inarguably discriminated against in South Africa (the laws are on the books for all to see!), you really should perhaps spend the next four years in reflection, rather than blurting out your ignorant knee-jerk reactions in the public square.

If leaders who have practically deliberately destroyed their countries, leaders like David Cameron, Keir Starmer, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Angela Merkel, did not cause any emotional response on your part, clearly any emotional response you are having regarding Trump is irrational and media-induced.

Christians would do well to remember that leaders who have been historically regarded and revered as friends of the people of God, have had far more character issues than Trump. Think of murderers and adulterers like King David, Emperor Constantine, and Charlemagne.

Spare us all the clutched pearls!

And allow the rest of us to look beyond the politics of endless grievance, envy, and resentment, towards a politics of restoring shared destiny among peoples, of reaching for the stars, and of building a heritage for our children.

For we are in the midst of a spiritual turn. And many will be left behind…

---

In Charles Murray’s famous 2012 diagnosis of American carnage, ‘Coming Apart’, he depicts a superpower in which whole swathes of people are trapped by drugs, obesity, television, and debt. Meanwhile a bohemian upper class manage a decaying, bankrupt state.

At the same time, he hoped for an American rejuvenation. He borrowed the term ‘a fourth Great Awakening’ from the economist Robert Fogel to identify a strand of optimism for the future. Perhaps we are in the midst and birthpangs of an awakening, in which we transcend the struggle for material egalitarianism, towards an ethical and spiritual ‘egalitarianism’. In such a future, humanity re-assesses its use of technology, its attitude toward the value of physical health, and the worth of the soul. Solidarity is not state welfare, but, again, shared destiny.

For Murray, his hope is that such an awakening restores the old virtues of self-reliance, industriousness, and neighbourliness that characterised the original vision of America. A re-building of cultural capital, separate from the decrepit monster that is the modern state.

I have written a great deal on the philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, and it intrigues me that these sentiments align with his concept of a ‘Second Religiosity’, in which an aged Civilization hearkens back to the faith and spirit that first animated its Culture phase in one final flourish.

We can see all around us that the ‘West’ is driving on fumes. We have eaten up the capital bestowed on us by ancestor-builders, without much contribution from ourselves. We have advanced in technics in many ways, but our sense of peoplehood and aesthetic value has decayed.

Murray, like Spengler, and like that other great philosopher of history, Hegel, all posit that history is not merely driven by material forces, but by spirit, and that spirit is embodied by great men. Hegel called this ‘the cunning of reason’, the Providence of God working through History.

But if History is moved by spirit and the great men of our times, this is not to say that the material is unimportant or even lesser than the realm of ideas and belief.

Some time ago, I wrote a piece entitled The Energy Crisis is a Spiritual Crisis. In an age of deindustrialisation, carried out most notably in countries like Germany, South Africa, Britain, and, to some extent, the US, we must trace the crisis not simply to the bare fact of rising energy and regulation costs or the mobility of capital and labour, but equally the feeling of malaise and a lack of destiny and solidarity amongst those peoples.

Energy is life. The Greek word ‘energeia’ meant Actuality, the achievement of Potential. And we no longer Act on Potency. It is the word ‘energeia’ that is used in the Greek New Testament to refer to the Power that effected Christ’s Resurrection. Any great Culture has only built because of a belief in ‘energeia’.

The American economy has, for decades, been driven only by a simulacrum of ‘energeia’, the printing of money to pump stocks, to bandage the loss of real value creation, which is the only source of well-paying jobs for bread-winning fathers. This value creation is also the only means to solve inflation crisis: the human ingenuity to create value, to harness ‘energeia’, to soak up the inflated money supply.

A return to ‘energeia’ requires the kind of great awakening described by Murray or Spengler. It requires the return to a belief in shared destiny, rather than the mere inertia of a mechanical, massive state.

But it also requires men and women to lead this great turning, to recover a sense of will that can never be found in the state behemoth.

Using the terminology of the French political theorist, Bertrand de Jouvenel, I have previously described this burgeoning class as the ‘new aristocrats’, who are set to take a kind of sacred revenge upon a state that has stultified their potential. Nietzsche aptly described such a class as the ‘creators of peoples’ who bestow ‘love and faith’, rather than ‘destroyers’ or ‘tarantulas’ who merely manage ‘states’.

The natural enemy of the aristocrats is, for De Jouvenel, the ‘high-low alliance’ of state and managerial elites with their state dependents: welfare beneficiaries, including the activist class: journalists, boutique sexual minorities, aid workers, often funded by the likes of… USAID… makes you think.

This alliance is rent-seeking. It wants to squeeze the ‘middle’, the value-creators who do not need or want the oversight of the managerial state. Their natural right is freedom, because they can bear its burden. Thus they build ‘castles’. Businesses, farms, schools, religious communities. And then those castles are attacked. Endless red tape. Carbon taxes. Affirmative action. In South Africa, school independence is under attack, as is private healthcare, as is private property.

But there comes a time when there is the energy is to fight back. And this energy both builds and flows from capital. The most important kind of capital is spiritual capital.

You might look at Trump, Vance, Kennedy, Gabbard, and see flaws, see pasts, see mistakes.

But we all have flaws; we all have pasts.

I see them as symbols. Rough and incomplete ‘attempts’ to seek ‘energeia’.

A door that is opening, harbingers of something that is approaching.