Race, Nobility and Culture

(1) Discrimination should be on the basis of culture and not race.

(2) No one has developed culture to a high degree by focusing on race.

(3) No one has developed culture to a high degree by neglecting his heritage, which is partially racial.

(4) The cultured man stands as a free man, subject to none.

(5) The cultured man knows that not all men are cultured yet believes that they may still be a part of his commonweal. Thus, even if he discriminates against them he does not reject them.

(6) The cultured man knows that race mixing is only possible when both races have something to offer, thus opposes it all other cases.

(7) Races frequently come into conflict with each other. The man of culture avoids these conflicts as best as he can, as rarely does any race represent a spiritual principle.

(8) A race may be utilized for a higher purpose external to the race. Even in this case, the cultured person should serve the principle not the race and be sure to distinguish the two.

(9) Races sometimes wage defensive struggles for survival. That which is valuable from the race should survive. This is, however, on the level of culture. It is possible that the culture will survive while the race dies. Be sure to separate one from the other. Mourn with those who mourn; ease the pain of the dying.

(10)               Culture may run in the blood. Thus, there may be nobility which rises above a race even while it belongs to a race. This follows the same principle as culture in other forms.

(11)               Inherited nobility can be squandered. Those born ignoble can rise though service.

(12)               Nobility presents itself in the disparagement it feels toward material objects. Most notably, it does not care about wealth or life. The noble man has no fear of death and boldly serves his Lord.

(13)               Character is the development of culture such that it serves as an inextinguishable facet of the individual. It is often displayed in the physiognomy, particularly in noble people.

(14)               Ignoble people pursue love in the form of sex. Love pursues the noble in the form separated from the body, which it recognizes only as a vehicle.

(15)               The ignoble only serve what they can see and hear and in view of material punishment or reward. The noble serve the hidden Lord of all.

(16)               The ignoble are disparaged in times of dissolution. The noble have an inner joy hidden from the sight of the many.

(17)               The noble man follows the way in his every step, never shying from battle, never rushing towards it.

(18)               The noble man loves his body and thus he makes it his slave, beating it until it is ready for willing service.

(19)               The noble are able to recognize the good in every man, even his enemy. The ignoble live on dogma and hate the other.

(20)               God has been known in many forms to many peoples. Who would reject the form presented to his people while embracing another?

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“Family Values”

Following on from the last post, traditional and humanist China was fixated on family values, to a level which most of us would find oppressive. The West no longer is, it seems.

My wife and I married in our late twenties. Even as sexual mores were changing (and the birth rates falling) in the 70s, it was still what one did. If people marry at all here now it is after a period of cohabitation, usually if children are on the way – but many don’t bother. Except for (many) Muslims and Hindus, where the girls are paired off to their cousins to breed.

We bought a little house, and after only a few years had children, I went to work as the “breadwinner” while wife stayed at home and looked after the children,  a social circle of women’s groups and babysitting circles still in existence. It was free choice made by both of us. Neither of us are native to the area, and neither of us are religious. We are still together, after over 30 years of marriage (and yes, there have been some rough passages). This is not exceptional among the friends and relatives of my generation.

This now seems unbelievably archaic. For a start, to be able to buy a house largely on one modest income (albeit a middle class one) is not just not conceivable, except in those parts of the country where there are no decent jobs. Both sides in relationships have to work away, and if kids arrive at all, they have to be juggled with work. As a result social networks revolve around work.

The average length of a British marriage is now 12 years, it seems, and as for cohabiting couples, we don’t know. My instincts are that this is a social disaster (how often do we hear that absent fathers are the root cause of violent young men?) Taking the two main measures of social dysfunction as crime rates and inadequate birth rates (well below replacement) the facts are all over the place, however:

• As marriage rates have gone down, crime rates in nearly all developed countries rose sharply to a peak in the 80s/early 90s, but then have fallen sharply, but still higher than before the social changes that flowed (quite slowly) from the 60s.
• Scandinavia as the exemplar of secular society: marriage is almost dead, sexes very equal, a birth rate comparable to white America, low crime (it’s not like Stieg Larrson novels) except among immigrant ghettos where uber-traditional values still hold. To show it’s not just a post-Protestant thing, France is similar, but somewhat better at integrating immigrants.
• The UK has also seen falling crime rates, but they are higher as is anti-social behaviour, but concentrated in a native underclass: that is probably more the downside of our class system , as well as economic changes. Native birth rates are fairly healthy
• Conversely, those developed areas where cohabitation is still a no-no (southern Europe, east Asia) have disastrous birth rates.
• Americans still marry more than Europeans, even blue staters, but do serial monogamy with gusto irrespective of religious affiliation; crime somewhat higher, especially violent crime, in those areas where “tradtional values” are preached more.
• Capitalism doesn’t care about families, it wants productive units of consumption and production, irrespective of gender or other obligations, and to throw away the unproductive.

I don’t know what to make of all this. I certainly don’t think it has much to do with religion – already largely secular Europe stuck to traditional families till the 70s, and socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee exhorting the “women of England to go back to their families” at the end of the war is from another age: they did too, and produced an unexpected baby boom. Christianity’s hang up about sex led to ambivalence about families in the early Church, and formal marriage remained secular until the late middle ages – and then mainly among the aristocracy and bourgeois, where property was involved, the only sectors of western society that ever gone in for arranged marriage.

It is certainly a massive uncontrolled social experiment, whose results are uncertain (like chucking all that carbon into the atmosphere). It needs reasoned debate and research, but that seems hard, with entrenched positions from the fornication-is-a-sin school on the one hand and from radical feminists on the other. Divorce or separation may be better than being stuck in an unhappy Victorian marriage, but commitment means something too, and sticking through the bad times of a relationship – and a stable relationship is one of the best indicators of long term personal happiness, and having children of personal fulfilment.

Societies which focus a lot on families have either weak states, or distant autocratic ones, like ancient China – and without the complex layers of social institutions which the West has. Perhaps weak families are then necessary so as not to make society too oppressive.

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Secular Society: The Confucian Analogy

Not so long ago the intellectual consensus (for what it was worth) was that religion was doomed as societies modernised. That evidently seems to be untrue in some cases, not least the USA and now India. Now the reverse trope emanates from the religious right: that secular societies are doomed to extinction . I mean, just look at their birth rates as, with no eternal life to hope for, the élan vital somehow slips away.

The birth rate thing is complicated. The US does indeed manage to breed to replacement, more so in red states than blue, and the least fertile US state (Vermont) has a similar birth rate to the most fertile Canadian province (Alberta), while a great swathe of largely secular Eurasia, from Japan to Spain, sinks to lowest low fertility rates of below 1.4 children per woman, compared to a 2.1 replacement rate. Yet aggressively secular France matches the US (and not just its Muslims, who attend the mosque as little as nominal Catholics attend church anyway). Equally secular Scandinavia and the UK are not far behind.

There is evidence that the religious are marginally happier on average than the non-religious, other things being equal . They are not equal however; surveys indicate that most of the happiest countries are secular. There are various different measures, but small secular European countries all seem to rank top. Prosperity helps, but only up to a point – strong community and a fairly high level of equality seem more important (the US scores badly on the last). However, happiness isn’t everything, to say the least, it’s Brave New World enough as it is (without the hatcheries)

The other argument is that there is no precedent for a sustainable secular society. Er, no – the longest surviving continuous civilisation, China, was humanist throughout its history: there was a vague deity (Tien) but as distant as 18C deism. Even the most developed local “religious” form, Chan (Zen) makes no mention of God, and Daoism is equally vague.

This is not the first time that Confucian China has been compared with the modern West. With China in the process of headlong Westernisation, it seems that most of the cultural traffic between west and east has been one way. In a key phase of developing western modernity it was very much the other way, however . It is 1648. In Europe, the most devastating war to date in the continent has  laid waste to Germany, and in the process religious fervour had drowned in blood. Yet the shattered continent is about to embark on its brilliant ascent to the modern world , or to descend into atheism, depending on your point of view: the Enlightenment.

Historical analogies or models quoted by contemporaries, as ever in the West, leaned to Greece and Rome. But for the first time there was another empire that was idealised and misunderstood – the one at the other end of Eurasia, whose history shows an eerie parallel development, given that there was so little contact with Europe (even as to timing – Socrates and Confucius seem to have been contemporaries).

It coincided with the first real substantial knowledge and indeed trade with China in history. The later 19 and 20 century image of China as backward benighted heathen was certainly not the 18^th century one, which as it happened reached the peak of traditional society – its Antonine age – with the three Qing emperors from Kang Xi to Qian Long, before the 19C collapse.  French philosophes were particularly impressed with a  model of how a humanist society could function; the English were less impressed by the despotism, but still incorporated Chinoiserie, willow pattern, and naturalistic landscapes into refined culture.

Historical analogies are dangerous and speak to the obsessions of the time – the benevolent Celestial empire in the minds of such as Voltaire and Diderot bore little relation to reality. Still, creativity usually proceeds by metaphor, and there are once again some interesting parallels emerging. I draw my examples largely from Europe, that steadfast redoubt of secularism, where immigrants apart, there is no real sign of religious revival, indeed the last bastions such as Ireland and Poland are crumbling.

The ethical state. Traditionally, in the West, ethics were a matter for a separate institution – the Church – although it did of course try to direct the behaviour of the state. This eroded with state churches in the Protestant north, but then in America the religious refusenik culture of the Puritans overcame an Anglicanism which lost status after the war of independence (although curiously surviving as an upper class faith, but eroding there to into secularism) : church(es) and state separated again. Islam was always much that way, although with a more rigid doctrine of how the state should be run and daily lives conducted.

Now in Europe (America remains a battleground) the state is responsible for ethics and care as well as government, and separation has gone. So it was in China. The modern  ethical state  has its separate priesthood – in the universities, social workers and the medical profession – but ultimately these are all responsible or employed by the state. I am not suggesting of course that the ethics are the same as Confucian ones – collective as opposed to individual responsibility, and unthinking deference to elders are not the modern way. There is though a liberal consensus, a mix derived from Christianity and the western Enlightenment, which has spread across the world as part of the modern package. Ironically “universal human values” is latter day Chinese coded language for resistance to the autocracy of the state, but it carries no religious overtones.

Eclectic therapeutic cults. Life can be unfair and hard to bear, even in the cosseted world of the modern social democratic state – and then we all die anyway, without even the promise of eternal life. Ethics alone are not powerful enough for many: the Chinese peasant believed in a host of gods and spirits, and after the time of troubles following the collapse of the Han empire in the third century AD, Buddhism spread like wildfire. At the popular level this wasn’t the austere praxis of the sutras and meditating monks, but a colourful world of  Buddhas and boddhisatvas past, present and future, treated as gods, and also replete with demons and evil spirits.

Confucian gentlemen did not do this stuff, however – it was vulgar and lower class. It might be permissible to indulge in the severely practical and this worldly practices of Chan Buddhism, or more in keeping with Chinese traditions to  retreat to write Daoist poetry. The point is that all this stuff was what Philip Rieff called therapeutic religion: it is not focussed on the after life (as all good Christians and Muslims should be, in theory) but on how to cope with this one.

So it comes round again. It is untrue to label Europe, for example, as atheist: most people have a vague sense of “there is probably something there” akin to Tien: it is just that it has little connection with their daily lives, and they are dubious whether Jesus is their saviour. A whole slew of therapeutic cults arise again to fill this vacuum, in descending order of austerity and respectability from psychotherapy and  Western Buddhism to mushy New Age stuff. Christianity is acceptable, but as just one of a number of choices for a therapeutic cult – and if Islam is ever domesticated, it will be by reducing it to the same level (with Sufism as a starting base).

A recurring base of Chinese cults was reverence for nature, now re-emerging as ecology and green politics. The desert cults of the Middle East had little time for these, seen as the Pagan enemy, and this still bedevils transatlantic politics on carbon emissions today, with religious attitudes entrenched on both sides.

This worldly, practical, rational, but in different ways.  Traditional China was good at technology, and indeed by Song dynasty times in the 11^th century got very close to an industrial revolution.  It never got science, however.  Every advanced civilisation has had art and literature, and usually performed more impressively than the West at the spiritual side. Despite some Indian and Islamic contributions, however, the glory of science is almost wholly Western.

The two roots of religion, I would maintain, are mystical experience and magic. The latter should have been eroded by science, which is why thoroughly modern men find it hard or impossible to believe the dogmas of the traditional faiths; the alternative, which the rise of various fundamentalisms exhibits, is to deny the bases of science altogether. China managed to blend the yang of practical statecraft and technology, with the yin of therapeutic mysticism.

There are numerous ways, however, where Confucian China and the modern secular West do differ. Confucian China was one of the longest lived civilisations in history, so it got something right about sustainable values, which arguably elude the modern global civilisation. This will be the theme of subsequent posts.

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Till the Longing is Less and the Good is Gone

Plato’s VIIth Letter, on Beauty

“There is no writing of mine on this subject nor ever shall be. It is not capable of expression like other branches of study; but as the result of long intercourse and a common life spent upon the thing, a light is suddenly kindled as from a leaping spark, and when it has reached the Soul, it thenceforward finds nourishment for itself.”

Plotinus, on the un-primacy of Evil

“Evil is not alone, by virtue of the nature of the good, and of the power of Good, it is not Evil only. It appears necessarily, bound around in bonds of Beauty like some captive bound in fetters of gold. And beneath these, it is hidden, so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still not be destitute of images of the Good and Beautiful for their remembrance.”

George Parkin Grant is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost thinkers that Canada produced in the last century. His Lament for a Nation burst on Vietnam-era Canada like a thunderbolt, and the reading public had strong reactions, one way or the other. He relentlessly criticized the developing American world-hegemony, characterizing it as “orgasm at home, and napalm abroad”. His diagnosis, which delighted many Leftists, nevertheless came from a “conservative and Christian perspective”, along with the old dominion Britishness which he saw going the way of the dodo-bird in the face of Canada’s desire to “Americanize”:
It appeared to him then, however, that Canada was making the same deal with three witches on the heath that America had. Like Richard Weaver, the godfather of the paleo-conservatives in America, Grant fingered the medieval debates over realism, and the forms of Western Christianity itself, as the fateful crossroads of a troubled modern world. But unlike Weaver, he did not leave these assertions general.

Grant never contented himself with a surface analysis. Although he would argue that these problems are “merely theoretical” for real Christians (whose hearts are in union with God), he asserted that a kind of civic and public darkness was culminating in the West, with America as its primary practitioner and disseminator.

“Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow…”

This darkness was public because no primary Good could be agreed upon, or even allowed to exist, in a universe which was totally objectified as an Object for the exercise of Technology and Will. The primary driving force behind Relativism was absolutely not tolerance (except as a pap for the “people”), but the belief that man, as part of Nature, was any longer anything but Object. Although Grant also argued that America and Canada had long been insulated from the intellectual effects of a darkness already given, and shielded by the very anti-intellectualism which had given it birth, he increasingly believed that the logical effects would make themselves known in the context of a global world, in which a universal, homogeneous world-state would effectively be a perfect tyranny.

Grant set to work tracing and clarifying the roots of the darkness. In his later works, he never preached or delivered invective, as he had done in Lament for a Nation. Deferring such work to his acknowledged saint and intellectual mistress, Simone Weil, a thinker and “saint” (who had also argued that mankind was essentially organic and required the kind of favorable environment which a plant did in order to begin the process of apprehending the Good), Grant instead set himself to unravel the mystery behind Modernity. Like Weil, and perhaps like Strauss (his other mentor), he believed that Christianity required a form of Platonism in order to stabilize itself culturally and publicly. In fact, public Christianity itself, as it had developed in the West, was actually part of the problem.

What follows is a series of extensive quotes which show the way Grant’s mind unraveled the mystery of the Zeitgeist’s operations. First of all, Western Christianity had interrupted the Platonism native to the West, cutting across ancient traditions:

“We must think through how the western interpretation of the Bible was responsible not only for the greatness of modernity, but for what was frightening in it. This kind of questioning cannot be faced by a Christianity that envisages reason as simply a human instrument, and therefore cuts itself off from philosophy. To understand technology requires that we try to understand what is the true relation between love and reason. Did Western Christianity go wrong in its understanding of that relation? The temptation is always to try to understand technology from within technology.” (Conv: Phil, 147)

This had transpired thanks to the English empirical tradition, operating on the central European one:

“But during the 17thc. Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke had achieved the terrible task of making Machiavelli widely respectable, and the new secular and moral science is particularly welcomed by the Protestants” (Tech&Emp).

It worked because it worked, because it was power. Quebec was as helpless against it as the Dominion states:

“Marxism is an advanced product of the West that appealed to French revolutionary ideas, British industry, and German philosophy. Many people in North America no longer appeal to any ideology beyond our own affluence…this position is wrapped up in Darwinian packaging… “(Tech&Emp,74).

And it also worked because of its own shallowness and incompleteness:

“Until very recently, the very absence of a contemplative tradition spared us the full weight of the nihilism which in Europe flowered with industrial society…it was possible to move deeply into a technological society, while retaining our optimism and innocence…(Tech&Emp,37).

The European dilemma would eventually reach us, but without Nietzsche’s jouissance:

“Nietzsche’s equivocation about the relation of the highest will to power and the will to technology has never been part of the English-speaking tradition….our liberal horizons fade in the winter of nihilism, and the dominating among us see themselves with no horizon except their creating of the world, while the pure will to technology (whether public or private) more and more gives sole content to that creating. In the official intellectual community this process has become known as the “end of ideology” .The very substance of our existing which has made us leaders in technique stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism” (Tech&Emp).

Nietzsche’s side-step would be unavailable to us, as we had learned Nietzsche from Weber. Grant endorsed Ernst Troeltsch’s definition of Calvinism as the key attitude/concept in driving the new hyper-Protestant anti-ethos which culminates around us in control/subjection of Nature, a Calvinism that was unaware of the complexity of the fire it played with. Because we are operating so fully in this mode, are more and more present in it, we are included in it. In fact, we couldn’t even ask the same questions Plato asked, because we could understand neither him nor ourselves. Oblivion of eternity was our self-definition:

“The very procedure of research means that the past is represented as object. But anything, in so far as it is an object, only has the meaning of an object for us. That is why it is quite accurate to use the metaphor of the mausoleum about our humanities research. Moreover, when we represent something to ourselves as object, we stand above it as subject – the transcending summoners. We therefore guarantee that the meaning of what is discovered in such research is under us, and therefore in a very real way dead for us in the sense that its meaning cannot teach us anything greater than ourselves.” (Role Conflict in the Humanities, p. 3, quoted in Conv, p.134)

Whatever else this New Man Ethos was, Grant admitted, it was not “flaccid”, but it had effectively eviscerated any possibility of judging or even thinking outside its own box, destroying the old liberal hope of speaking “Truth to Power”. What was more astonishing was the irony of a Christian West (and Christian elements in the West) devouring its own innards:

“Why is it, in the ancient world, that the materialists were the private, apolitical thinkers, while the Platonists were interested in the public realm, whereas in the modern world the nationalists are so directed?” (Conversation: Philosophy, 145).

Grant believed that this diagnosis was not “pessimistic” at all, a word that entered the vocabulary with Leibniz, who had contributed to the problem. Indeed, “the Good can take care of itself”. Affirming the Socratic Real, as opposed to the Nietzschean Dionysian ethos of tragedy, he was arguing that there was “something with tears, but something beyond tears”, a something that would make itself known, if in no other way, by intimations of deprivation of that self-same Good. Like Denis de Rougemont, in whose classic Love in the Western World we also find that same affirmation of something Good which exists beyond tragedy, Grant would have understood Dido’s line from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas – “Remember me, forget my Fate”. What was final was the Good, rationally apprehended. Tragedy and analysis gave way before it. Grant believed that this was what the Gospels had heightened.

This Good taught us, and at one time had done so publicly and culturally, that whatever else is true, it is not true that there are “human beings to whom nothing is due.” It may have endorsed slavery and practiced a thousand infamies, but it never affirmed that some human beings are outside of the pale of the Good. This Good was what “man was due as man”, in addition to being a vehicle of transcendence. It affirmed a microcosm, a mesocosm, and a macrocosm, and none of it based (primarily) upon any Objectifying of either Nature or Mankind as plastic to be worked by Technology, or a vacuum in which to exercise the will to technological (or any other kind of) power. Behind the conception of knowledge in the West, the most important fact of any society (for Grant), lies an affirmation of the will in a particular way which makes possible the historicism of Nietzsche and the abandonment of the Greeks for a final, total time (Conv: Phil, 142). Heidegger had given the clearest exposition of this anti-Greek fracture in his book on Leibniz, Der Satz von Grund. What was lost was not merely Plato’s teaching and emphasis on Bodies, but also the “absurd mystery of evil” in the context of a greater Light. Calvinist eschatology, positivistic Protestantism, & Hegelianism tended to confluesce.

“It has always seemed to me that Hegel makes God’s Providence scrutable, in a way we can understand…it was Leo Strauss who taught me to think this through” (Conv: Int.Background, 64).

“What we do to our own bodies and to other people’s bodies, is our partaking in justice here and now. We can’t learn anything about justice apart from bodies” (Conv:Theo&Hist, 104).

The particular is the nursemaid to the universal; without the particular, we cannot actually ascend to love the universal. Whether this is true to Plato or not, it was certainly Grant’s underlying creed. Also, Strauss taught him that in Christianity, revelation is received as being (a person), and not as Law, which explains Grant’s admiration of Simone Weil – “She has shown me how sanctity and philosophy can be at one” (ibid., 65). It is important to note that, apparently for Grant, although evil cannot be rationally apprehended, Love can. Or, rather, that Love is orderly, as well as sublime. Love lifts man up to participation in something higher, and it can be thought about and discussed, even in terms of history and culture. It begins with bodies and with segregate souls, passes through peoples and cultures (as vehicles), and it ends in the transcendent Good.

Saying that “science and technology are universal” really only means “let’s hire more people from Harvard and Cal Tech” (ibid., 105). Plato, by contrast, “proclaims the dependence of intelligence upon love in a much clearer way than Aristotle” (ibid., 107), a love which is awakened from local associations only, not abstractions. To talk of loving others (first) more than family is to talk “as if people do not have bodies” (ibid., 103). In philosophical jargon, it may be logically prior, but can never be so in Life.

Being an Ubermensch (freed from Chance, Nature, and Body), in this sense, involves creating one’s self-hood out of one’s self, like a spider. An older tradition sought to educate souls with the recognition that, in the words TS Eliot’s closing lines in Little Gidding – “the tongues of the dead are flamed beyond any of those of the living”. In speaking with them, one could not use power to deconstruct – one is challenged, responds, and is changed. This is what it means to truly understand. Obedience and Love are connected to Reason. One enters into a chorus of angels, if one can slip into heaven. Dare one say, you have to crawl through the eye of the needle? This noetic view of Truth as identical with the Good absolutely excludes the power-relationships and objectification which must, in the final sense, arbitrate all of modern knowledge, both as inner leaven, outer limit, and in a meta-form. The fact/value distinction is a symptom of this inner lie: in separating ’value‘ from ’fact‘, we ensure that our ’values‘ will be included in the account of fact which we dictate. Modern knowledge centers on what can be known, which is to mean, what we can demonstrate our control over. It will coalesce in terrible monisms centered upon the rewards of power or the rage of despair. Technique and technology alternately inform and dominate each other and the world. Modern man, at last, would also imitate as he understands, despite his boast.

Our era had chosen to forget all limits, manifesting itself in a war on Tradition for its own sake:

“In this era, when the homogenizing power of technology is almost unlimited, I do regret the disappearance of indigenous traditions, including my own. It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and that it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good? Or, can the achievements of the age of progress be placed at the services of a human freedom which finds itself completed and not denied by a spiritual order?”  (Conv:Phil)

This, of course, for Grant was related to the way we were treating our bodies, objectifying them to enlist them in a war on Nature, a war that would inevitably be carried home against the body itself (and all bodily associations, such as families, kin, nations, etc.). The Hegelians had relegated Evil to the lack of total historical knowledge (on the one hand) and thought to explain it in our own day by the lack of Progress.

“For the Hegelian, political philosophy does not stand or fall for its ability to transcend history, but its ability to comprehend it…only in the radical negation of theism is it possible to assert that mankind is making progress…eternity is the sum of the historical epochs, merely…” (T&E, Tyranny and Wisdom, 90-91).

For Grant, this was a total misunderstanding of the mystery inherent in evil and human nature, most likely caused by the abandonment in the first place of the only Light which could burn in the presence of radical evil and banish it.

Given the destruction of the Past in the engines of Modernity, to what else can we appeal but a “dead” past? Resources on the ground were scarce, and the Future did not exist yet. There are few living reminders of how our ancestors captured a public Good (with all of its faults, warts and all). The situation was dire and complicated, for “How can man not be destroyed should he continue in this,” asked Grant, “and how will he not be destroyed if he tries to stop?” One is reminded of the old saying about “it is difficult to dismount a Tiger”. He even appealed to Kant against the rationalization of the will in man to nothing more than an organ or technique of raw dominance over objects:

“It is not my business here to describe the holding in unity of these two sides – timeless good and historical will – as it is laid before us through an account of the modern arts and sciences, in the edifice of Kant’s three critiques. However, in an era when the oblivion of eternity has almost become the self-definition of many of us, it is necessary to insist on the side of the timeless and universal good in Kant’s system. Indeed this side is shown with startling clarity in Kant, when despite all the causes which might lead him to propound the philosophy of history as an essential part of any true philosophical teaching, he turns back from possibility of such an enterprise because it would involve our moral choices depending on knowledge other than the timeless fact of reason itself. See The Critique of Judgement, paras 83 and 84…” (ESJ, p.98).

Kant and Rousseau had managed to reconcile the old and the new accounts, but their successors had not been so fortunate or honest. There was something which had “flamed forth in the Gospels and burned still”, for Grant, exemplified most fully in the Johannine Gospels. Grant called himself a representative of the Vedic wing of Christianity. And from this Platonistic and evangelical high ground, he went on in work after work to lay out the nature of the enemy before us, an enemy in which the issue of cybernetics (Who has the helm? who says “When”?) would increasingly become critical, especially given the movement against traditional human rights in the issue of Abortion. We were now left with a view of human nature as perfectly material, utterly arbitrary, and infinitely malleable. Duty and self/government had been destroyed as fictions, along with the Good, but paradoxically, the darkness would now compel our assent, even as it denied any value whatsoever:

“Now when from that primal has come forth what is present before us: when the victory over the land leaves most of us in metropoloi where widely spread consumption vies with confusion and squalor; when the emancipation of greed turns out from its victories on this continent to feed imperially on the resources of the world; when those resources cushion an immense majority who think they are free in pluralism, but in fact live in a monistic vulgarity in which nobility and wisdom have been exchanged for a pale belief in progress, alternating with boredom and weariness of spirit; when the disciplined among us drive to an unlimited technological future, in which technical reason has become so universal that is has closed down an openness and awe, questioning and listening; when Protestant subjectivity remains authentic only where it is least appropriate, in the moodiness of our art and sexuality, and where public religion has become an unimportant litany of objectified self-righteousness necessary for the more anal of our managers; one must remember now the hope, the stringency and nobility of that primal encounter. The land was almost indomitable.”

From In Defense of North America, Technology and Empire (24,40):

“How far will the race be able to carry the divided state which characterizes individuals in modernity: the plush patina of hectic subjectivity lived out in the iron maiden of an objectified world inhabited by increasingly objectifiable beings? When we are uncertain whether anything can mediate that division, how can we predict what men will do when the majority lives more fully in that division? Is there some force in man which will rage against such a division: rage not only against a subjectivity which creates itself, but also against our own lives being so much at the disposal of the powerful objectifications of other freedoms? Neither can we know what this unfolding potentiality tells us of the non-human: as we cannot now know to what extent the non-human can in practice be made malleable to our will, therefore we also do not know what this undetermined degree of malleability will tell us of what the non-human is. Is the non-human simply stuff at our disposal, or will it being to make its appearance to us as an order the purposes of which somehow resist our malleable-izings? Are there already signs of revolt in Nature? Despite the noblest modern thought, which teaches always the exaltation of potentiality above all that is, has anyone been able to show us conclusively throughout a comprehensive account of both the human and the non-human things, that we must discard the idea of a presence above which potentiality cannot be exalted? In such a situation of uncertainty, it would be lacking courage to turn one’s face to the wall, even if one can find no fulfillment in working for or celebrating the dynamo. Equally it would be immoderate and uncourageous and perhaps unwise to live in the midst of our present drive, merely working in it, and celebrating it, and not also listening or watching or simply waiting for intimations of deprival which might lead us to see the beautiful as the image, in the world, of the good.”

One quickly sees that in all his major works, he repeatedly and strongly affirms the centrality of the insight that it was unconstrained will, or will bereft of Reason and something beyond Reason, which has lead us to “Modern Times”. Manichean Evil was paramount, there could be no final Good or Reason. Socrates was, quite frankly, dead wrong:

“Socrates turned away from tragedy (and what was given in its truth about sexuality) in saying that what was final was not the abyss, but Good. The greatest achievement of the modern scientists and philosophers was the destruction of Greek rationalism with its ‘substances’, its ‘truth’ and its ‘good’. The greatest height for man was laid bare in Greek tragedy, in that it made plain that the basic fact of existence was our encounter with an abyss – our encounter with the finality of chaos. Classical rationalism is seen as a species of neurotic fear, a turning away from the elementary fact of the abyss by means of a shallow identification of happiness, virtue, and reason. Our study of it must be a kind of historical therapy (similar to the way Nietzsche proposes to free us of Christianity). That therapy is a means for the educated to bring themselves to an even greater height than that proclaimed in tragedy. It will be a greater height because it will now take into itself both the primacy of the abyss, and the overcoming of chance made possible through scientific technology. This will enable the great and the noble to be ‘masters of the earth’. The combination of the primacy of the abyss with technology will produce the Ubermensch – those who will deserve to be masters of the earth. Humanity has been a bridge in evolution between the beasts and those who are higher than human beings. Nietzsche may have been the great political critic of Rousseau, but he accepts his account of human origins. Reason does not open us to the eternal; its greatness has been to transcend itself in its modern manifestations, so that we are both able and deserve to be masters of the earth…

In Nietzsche’s conception of justice, there are other human beings to whom nothing is due – other than extermination….Whatever may be given in Plato’s attack on democracy in his Republic, it is certainly not that for some human be–ings nothing is due…what gives meaning in the fact of historicism is that willed potentiality is higher than any actuality…(85) Why should constitutional regimes be considered superior to their alternatives if human beings are basically ids?” (p. 88, 94, 85)

From Nietzsche and the Ancients, from Technology and Justice:

“The danger of this darkness is easily belittled by our impoverished use of the word ‘thought’. This word is generally used as if it meant an activity necessary to scientists when they come up against a difficulty in their research, or some vague unease beyond calculation when we worry about our existence. Thought is steadfast attention to the whole. The darkness is fearful because what is at stake is whether anything is good. In the technological era, the central western account of justice clarified the claim that justice is what we are fitted for. It clarified why justice is to render each human being their due, and why what was due to each human being was ‘beyond all bargains and without an alternative’. That account of justice was written down most carefully and most beautifully in The Republic of Plato. For those of us who are Christians, the substance of our belief is that the perfect living out of that justice is enfolded in the Gospels. Why the darkness which enshrouds justice is so dense – even for those of us who think that what is given in The Republic concerning good stands forth as true – is because that truth cannot be thought in unity with what is given in modern science concerning necessity and chance. The darkness is not simply the obscurity of living by that justice in the practical tumult of the technological society. Nor is it the impossibility of that account coming to terms with much of the folly of modernity, eg., the belief that there is a division between ‘facts’ and ‘values’; nor the difficulty of thinking that truth in the presence of historicism. Rather it is that this account has not been thought in unity with the greatest theoretical enterprises of the modern world. This is a great darkness, because it appears certain that rational beings cannot get out that darkness by accepting either truth and rejecting the other. It is folly simply to return to the ancient account of justice as if the discoveries of the modern science of nature had not been made. It is folly to take the ancient account of justice as purely of antiquarian interest, because without any knowledge of what we are fitted for, we will move into the future with a ‘justice’ which is terrifying in its potentialities for mad inhumanity of action…who has been able to think the two accounts together?”

From English-Speaking Justice:

“But the difference between the ancients and the moderns as to what is due to all human beings should not lead us to doubt that in the rationalist traditions, whether ancient or modern, something at least is due to all subjects, whether we define them as rational souls or rational subjects. Whatever may be given in Plato’s attack on democracy in his Republic, it is certainly not that for some human beings nothing is due. Indeed to understand Plato’s account of justice, we must remember the relation in his thought between justice and the mathematical conception of equality. In Nietzsche’s conception of justice there are other human beings to whom nothing is due – other than extermination. The human creating of quality of life beyond the little perspectives of good and evil by a building, rejecting, annihilating way of thought is the statement that politics is the technology of making the human race greater than it has yet been. In that artistic accomplishment, those of our fellows who stand in the way of that quality can be exterminated or simply enslaved. There is nothing intrinsic in all others that puts any given limit on what we may do to them in the name of that great enterprise. Human beings are so unequal in quality that to some of them no due is owed. What gives meaning in the fact of historicism is that willed potentiality is higher than any actuality…oblivion of eternity here realizes itself politically. One should not flirt with Nietzsche for the purposes of this or that area of science or scholarship, but teach him in the full recognition that his thought presages the conception of justice that more and more unveils itself in the technological West.”

Grant never proposed a “solution”, though he did wonder about the possibility of placing the goods of Progress at the service of a higher Good. Unlike Strauss, he was not reticent about his faith, nor did he deny that perhaps, in the end, charity or “compassion” for man was the supreme Good after all, with a nod to Feuerbach. But he did attempt to delineate where our accounting of ourselves had severed taproots in Tradition necessary for any human existence at all, a destruction which already manifested itself in the modern disorientation, a disorientation that crystallizes in irrational joy every time some bulwark of the idolatrous Past is brought crashing to the ground.

Grant stands as a permanent challenge to those who glibly undertake to asset that all evils exist in the world through Tradition, or lightly assume that man can effectively “will” to create his own realities without it. He was one of the few “conservatives” who carried out a deep foray into occupied territory, and his criticisms deserve to be meditated on by fellow conservatives or progressives of good will who would wish to remember that it is not Philosophy’s job to self-assure the elements of desire and naked will in man, even in a New Age. As Grant would say, Tyrants do not seize power to become warm, and the global situation had rendered man peculiarly adapted to control. For Grant had watched Strauss give masterful answers to the subtle Kojeve’s articulation of a new Hegelianism, and he left convinced that history was not the home of all truth, nor was Truth apprehended in the absence of our bodies. For the fullness of something beyond tears, he turned to Weil, from whom he ordered his experience of God. In this, Grant was a European of the old breed, but it made him a dangerous critic of the new. For Grant, the longing for that Good was not less, and that Good could never completely go, but it would exist forever as intimations of deprivation, even in hells of our own making.

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Easy Game

We do not always know who is predator, who is prey and how to distinguish the two, or even if we should. It is all a game, we are told, and our chiefs, whether justices or executive officers, can only articulate the corporate good — to maximize profit. Corporations are thus not corporate as bodies, which, show eventually the absorption of excess calories by a plethora of hitherto unknown diseases, ultimately leading to cardiac arrest, particularly when the electric grid shuts off. The corporate magnates who stand above it all will declare the saboteurs murderers and terrorists for disrupting the energy supply, for the only rule of the game is not to disturb the game and the “heads” of the body are not mindful of the health of any other parts, leaving them incapable of responding to even the slightest bit of pressure without immediate and complete shutdown.

We are, thus, unsurprised to find our leading corporate lights in the form of internet companies formed by the well blown bubbles highlighting the American dream of social unity via cybernetic cables, mindspheres losing distinction in democratic bliss, thousands of clicks and “likes” without a single way to dissent from ever loader public opinion, no longer articulated by stump speech or verbal assent, but remote gesture via machine formed API.

It is now well known that growth sectors in the new economy are the continual supply of medicines to those who will never be healthy, the sloshing of capital from shore to shore in the carry and drop trade, virtual instruments of deliberately opaque value, and, now a new type of American casino by pioneered by the sons and daughters of the Alamo, games deliberately engineered to absorb the mental cycles and material wealth of those last sad sons and daughters of the revolutions and all of those forced to embrace their brand of democracy by the sword.

As they will tell you, there is simply too much money to be made to make a maxim of not being evil, or, worse, formulate a positive idea of the good. And the end is what it has always been, the predators gather round while the sick and lame and easily addicted are picked off as easy game.

There are many poker chips already on the table. Those who arrived already made their killing and now sit, cards on the table, eying each other curiously — knowing that the only way the game can continue is if more are convinced to come to the table. But China has already bought in and old Europe injected with a passivity inducing drugs, trading dictators and kings for glib democrats.

Soon the game will be up and, where our executive officers can no longer find fresh meat, they will turn to carrion.

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A Weak People

Carl Schmitt quotes Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue at the close of his Der Begriff der Politischen (The Concept of the Political), “Ab integro nascitur ordo.” A new order is born from the renewal. Schmitt claimed that a world state could not exist, that such an attempt, where legitimacy rested primarily on economic means could and would lead to a dystopian world state — a system in which a people might be legitimately, according to this emerging economic order, be exterminated merely for being unable to pay their debts.

As Leo Strauss commented in response, Schmitt’s affirmation of the political “is nothing more than the affirmation of the moral” which is necessarily undermined by purely technological culture, such as that provided the anti-narrative mentioned in a previous essay (and also described by Strauss). While Schmitt ultimately falls back on a weak moral category, resistance, Strauss dissolves the possibility of the moral — there is no imperative.

Thus, we witness this dystopia emerging, not only in that the legitimacy of states is articulated by their ability to maximize the participation of their citizens in markets, as with Philip Bobbitt’s work, but where not only the default but also primary evaluative mechanism for the value of any thing, including human relationships, is in reference to personal (or corporate) utility.

Thus, in a world in which numbers, especially when cast as “science” in the field of economics, are the primary evaluative method, the default mechanism for evaluating the value of any relationship must accord with personal utility.  The same is true for all functions related to relationships (e.g. sex). Accumulation of partners may not be the goal, but, as specified by economic science, accumulation of ‘good moments’ likely will be, often taking the primacy of ‘fun’ (see our discussion of the fall of Batman).

This means that no-fault, previously the exception, becomes the norm. Every contract should be able to be broken by any party when the exchange of words/fluids leading to any other exchange is not kept. Which is to say, any purely quantitative system tends towards complete fungiblity as a ‘perfect’ state. Descriptions here serve a purely cosmetic function.  Any usage of word ‘marriage’ approaches a lie, as its origin and intention are not in keeping with the purely cosmetic function which it now serves. ‘Relationship’ would be closer to the truth, but really, any words are acceptable as the fundamental nature of the transaction and conceptions remains unquestioned.

Thus, each sphere of action becomes little more than a game, one should/must play to win in order to maximize. Is it permissible to use words with purely cosmetic function, allowing the other party to think according to old structures, while one embraces personally the new, the entirely economic? Certainly it does not make sense to be in the middle, embracing both new and old paradigm, neither fully. The probable answer within the means presented is, it does not matter — do what you need to succeed. Thus, not only do relationships and marriage cease to exist in any meaningful way, so also does the concept of a truth and a lie. There is only utility, which is frequently reducible to pleasure.

We will not comment at length on the moral salves available to those who wish to utilize them. Nicholas Kristof compares the estimated 800,000 trafficked each year with the 80,000 at the peak of the American slave trade, but advocates neither starting at home nor fundamentally rethinking, but more overseas initiatives (and lobbying!) for the globally connected. Anthony Daniels looks closer to home:

A hundred yards from where I write this, twelve-year-old prostitutes often stand under streetlamps on the corner at night, waiting for customers. The chief of the local police has said that he will not remove them because he considers that they are sufficiently victimized already, and he is not prepared to victimize them further (his job, apparently, being to empathize rather than to enforce the law). The local health authorities send a van round several times at night to distribute condoms to the girls, the main official concern being to ensure that the sex in which the girls take part is safe, from the bacteriological and virological point of view. It is the authorities’ proud boast that 100 percent of local prostitutes now routinely use condoms, at a cost to the city’s taxpayers of $135,000 a year, soon to be increased by the employment of a further outreach worker, whose main qualification, according to the recent job advertisement in the local press, will be “an ability to work non-judgmentally”—that is, to have no moral qualms about aiding and abetting child prostitution. Meanwhile, local residents (such as my neighbors, a banker, a lawyer, an antiquarian bookseller, and two university professors) who object to the presence of discarded condoms in their gardens and in the street outside their homes have been offered a special instrument with which to pick them up, in lieu of any attempt to prevent them from arriving there in the first place. And at the same time, the overwhelming majority of the work done by the social workers of the city concerns the sexual abuse of children, principally by stepfathers and mothers’ boyfriends who move in after biological fathers move out. (Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses)

In this arena one observes the previously ‘free-range’ people, the American homesteaders, struggling to adapt to their life gravitating in the same direction as the mechanized cattle industry, not realizing that the dictum “do unto others” has always related also to the animals around them. Neither die with or from a surfeit of artificial hormones, they simply cease to live in a meaningful way. Moreover, “resistance” is primarily a function of debates over cosmetics. Given this context, it is surprising they fight for the word or even discuss fighting for ‘marriage,’ a concept they have abandoned in every meaningful sense, just as they fight for “life” for those who, by virtue of physical infirmity or terrible situation will never have a “life” in any sense more than a simple binary assertion.

In fact, whether or not a copy of the Ten Commandments hangs in a courtroom matters not at all. What matters is the concept of jurisprudence applied within that courtroom, the basis of which has been abandoned for multimedia spectacles and megachurchs.  Should we be surprised when the spectacle ends and the citizens involved return to speculating on current and afterlife fortunes, rendering all attempts at “change” null and void? Or that the book supposedly at the center of their religious practice is primarily presented as tool to help them achieve this maximization?  Or that end times prophesies, the rapture, or the Jewish people are going to help them achieve this mystical jackpot?

While cattle ‘moo’ in their mechanized pens, Schmitt offers us this chilling reminder of the nature of the existential struggle which remains, even if covered in the shadows:

“If a people no longer possess the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”

As Clausewitz notes, it is the defender of the city who will and must be the first express violence if he wishes to be successful in his defense.  The arsonist with the torch can burn down an entire village if he is not first apprehended, and this apprehension will likely require an act of violence. But as Strauss also realizes, it is exceedingly easy to go from to this point to advocacy for “dangerousness” for its own sake.

Thus, the question is not simply what constitutes a weak people, but what constitutes a people, and the failure to ask the question and, perhaps, define what constitutes a people (or race) worth preserving ultimately undermines the strength of the people in question. Consequently, the quest for the definition of the political is necessarily a question of an ideal sense. Thus, we cannot reach it simply at the extremes, and to focus solely on the extreme case is to abandon the search for the political for politics.

Knowledgeable readers will know where this took Schmitt, and, indeed, it is emblematic of the whole struggle. Liberalism, as defined by Schmitt, must be separated from modernity, which is simply the necessary multiplication of loyalties on the basis of multiplicity of communities based on new forms of connectivity provided by technology. Which is to say, it is not necessarily an ideal, it is simply fiberoptic cables lying across the ocean floor and politicians suddenly able to talk on the phone.

Indeed, if merchants pursued this connectivity for its own sake, or for their sake, does this invalidate the connectivity? It is neither a barrier nor a help towards awareness; a multiplication of contingent loyalties is not necessarily an abrogation of a single essential one.

We then affirm the importance of the search for the essence of the political, and find that we must first, in the words of Rosenstock-Huessy, go back to Descartes, hoping that we may find a new order along the way.

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The Anti-Narrative

Sexism, racism, homophobia, culturism. All of these -isms take part in the grand narrative of oppressed peoples, tied together and advanced against conservative elements of society, usually without any understanding of the elements they criticize. That is, to say, this grand narrative is essentially an anti-narrative, possessing no positive element, and ironically performing the same function Schenker accuses Wagner of musically — playing on the expectations of persons influenced by prior traditional concepts to destroy those concepts.

This is not to say that in any of these cases (women, Jews and other non-European races, homosexuals) there are not legitimate grievances against the power structures that preceded and oppressed them. It is to say that the narrative that has accompanied their attainment of greater political power has not provided any significant formative or positive aspects to replace the structures which preceded their ascent.

However, conservative values and power structures having totally eroded (America possesses the last ebb, but it is a weak and pitiful ebb), the world seems set for completely anarchy, or rather, the rule of the machine and purely quantitative apparatus which is the last bastion of competence.

What is ‘racism’ according to this anti-narrative? By definition, it is simply anything that denies the oppressed race’s journey to liberation. What is ‘liberation’ ? It is simply an increase in power relative to whomever previously possessed it. According to the narrative, a decrease of power and other social goods is acceptable so long as the oppressor ends up the relative loser. See for example, the state of Zimbabwe. Consequently, the purveyors of this anti-narrative do not care so much about the people (who have suffered far worse under Mugabe than Ian Smith) but about the emotive high felt by participation in the mass movements which accompany the spread of the anti-narrative, not dissimilar to frequent African genocides.

Consequently, it is common to accuse anyone who opposes third world dicators, even Obama, as racists, simply on the basis of the anti-narrative’s endorsement of oppressed third world peoples and sympathizer. Is this simply a yielding to the definition of the anti-narrative? Certainly, but the fact remains that for this word, as with ‘sexism,’ anti-semitism,’ ‘Islamophobia,’ there simply are no other definitions. The result is when one uses provided words or is forced to make the denial, ‘I am not a racist,’ one essentially yields all non-quantitative discourse to the violence of purveyors of this mode of discourse. One has, ipso facto, become a slave.

Why does one instinctively react with the phrase, ‘I am not a racist’ ? The reason is essentially fear. The grand narrative of oppressed peoples has achieved such cachet that not to immediately voice assent is to risk violence upon your person. Usually threat of social ostracization is sufficient. Human beings, especially when deprived of close knit communities of persons with similar cultural presuppositions (as is especially the case with the current phase of global capitalism), are unable to voice an opinion which counters such a narrative and will immediately fall back into the societal line. At a higher level, various interest groups exist in America which attempt to destroy the careers of persons who threaten this narrative.

American religion possesses two layers. The first layer is America’s civil-religion, with its own telos and pattern of ritual and law which govern the state. Accompanying priests and teachers of the law perform essentially the same function as earlier state-religions. In Catholic Spain shared holidays focus on the liturgical calendar. In the American civil-religion shared holidays are those of the civil-religion, celebrating wars and saluting past heroes for their function with the civil-religion. What is the function of a theologian in a Catholic state? Generally to determine what is and is not permitted within the context of the received tradition. What is the function of a lawyer in the American state? To discuss the permissible within the context of the more recent traditions of the American state. In the Protestant-derived tradition the code of law takes primacy. Sola Scriptura.

The second layer are the various actively religious sects which complement America’s civil-religion. Christian sects catering to the upper classes have always been well integrated into the civil-religion and have tacitly endorsed the norms of the civil-religion even when this runs against the stated traditions of their own sect. The rest participate in what essentially is revivalist religion, the focus of which is the production of an experience of God’s love. In traditional revivalist sects there is also reorientation towards telos called salvation. In American revivalist sects this telos is often subordinated to the telos for individuals in the civil-religion, namely the pursuit of happiness.

The traditional American civil-religion possessed as its starting point various philosophical principles current among Anglo and French philosophies. Because the state was founded by consensus, there was no well-defined telos. To the extent there was definition, it was found in Jefferson’s writings, which never made their way in law. Nonetheless, there remained in many sectors an active devotion to the principle of ‘liberty,’ the subject of a very large statue in the harbor of America’s largest city.

What did ‘liberty’ mean? It meant the greater extension of the American civil-religion by missionary effort. The primary selling point was that individuals insofar as they wished to follow the American telos of pursuing their own happiness they could do so better within the context of the American civil-religion. Native peoples who preferred their own traditions to the American civil-religion were not permitted to maintain them.

The ‘rights’ dialogue from the beginning (see Alasdair Macintyre) was an attempt to separate ethics from the religious tradition and present them as derived by reason alone, never philosophically sound but with other reasons for appeal. During the twentieth century, the predominant stream of effort within the American civil-religion was the greater extension of these rights, predictably resisted by the American South.

Along the way two interesting things happened. First, the influx of self-described oppressed immigrants from Europe led also to the introduction of the anti-narrative, which upon arrival was immediately directed against the oppressive ethics and rule of those of Northern European descent. The second was the increased integration between the lower layer (revivalistic religion) with the American civil-religion. The argument made was that the ethics of the New Testament are not about apolitical worship, but the love of the New Testament requires action. The direction of implied action was of course the ‘rights’ already existing as an implied good within the American civil religion.

Having essentially completed its triumph horizontally, also extending in part into Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the American civil-religion now attempted to complete its triumph by extending its reach vertically into the lower layer of American revivalistic religion. MLKjr represents this clearly, but the key thinker is Reinhold Niebuhr, who picks up the disorganized fragments of neo-Orthodoxy and reformulates it with respect to participation in the American civil-religion, particularly an endorsement of what one might call ‘welfare capitalism.’ The liberation theologians attempted to discount revivalistic religion; Niebuhr and MLKjr attempted to integrate it with the state-religion.

Because of the pragmatism of the American populace and their detachment from the events and history on the European continent, the propagation of the anti-narrative (initially targeted specifically toward Europeans) had limited success; Marxist liberation theologians retreated to the academy or media institutions and focused on the de-education of the youth by overthrowing oppressive traditional ethical values. The language was that of violence and intimidation, especially relying on extending universally accepted wrongs within the American populace. For instance, any use of power to suppress destructive speech was labeled with Nazi similitude. If the purveyor was ethnically Jewish, certainly also ‘anti-semitism.’ Through such means the purveyors of the anti-narrative were able to extend this cachet to other subjects, including all discussion of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexual practices. Moreover, as typical with this approach, it was to do the opposite of the traditional ethical notion that was especially lauded and seen as admirable.

By the time of Obama’s youth certain sectors of the American academy were so overrun with purveyors of the anti-narrative (anthropology especially, as it had always distinguished itself from ‘missionary’ work) that his mother could say of her fellow countrymen while traveling that they were ‘not my people.’ In other words, the Marxist justification of violence toward the oppressors was being taught to the younger generation at almost all top-tier universities outside of quantitative fields.

Another interesting shift happened after the second World War. This was the increasing feeling of American triumphalism on the basis of the self-destruction of Europe, the American-led rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the creation of a ‘universal’ human-rights platform, and military preeminence enjoyed. Consequently (and despite the obvious derivative nature of America’s founding ideas from Occidental precedents) Americans developed a strident belief in the possibilities of the ‘new,’ complementing and providing ease to the spread of the anti-narrative even during the Cold War period. The historical account taught in American schools shifted to an exaltation of this cult of the ‘new,’ complemented by the anti-narrative wherever possible — by definition destroying the very concept of history.

Another interesting trend was the movement of purveyors of the anti-narrative under the umbrella of religion, which always enjoyed an protected status in the American state. Most recently, adherents to black nationalism realized they could more successfully prosecute their claims within Christianity; many Marxist activists also claimed Christianity and became liberation theologians. Because of a lack of centralized authority in such traditions or American academia generally, there was no way for persons of a traditional orientation to prevent the appropriation of their tradition for political means, especially under the constant threats of violence internal to these various institutions.

The political alliances later formed were a logical extension of the essential triumph of the aforementioned ideas. At the beginning of the twentieth century the American right remained populated by persons claiming the essentially negative definition of ”freedom from,’ instead of the downward extension of the American civil-religion. For instance, the civil-religion enjoyed little power over ‘marriage,’ which was essentially a stamp on the basis of the traditional religious definition. The expansion of ‘rights’ complemented by the anti-narrative led to the gradually successful establishment of a broader definition of marriage in the minds of the younger generation which has yet to be complemented by complete recognition by law (but certainly will within 20 years). Another current example is the faith based programs. Under the Obama institution, faith-based organizations receiving federal funding are to adjust their hiring practices based on the norms of the civil-religion, effectively destroying the particularity of any religious sects seeking still to provide social services as a distinct second layer.

Adherents to traditional religions generally are ignorant of these larger trends, typically working through the political/legal system and attempting create little geographical bubbles in which they can oppose the norms of the civil-religion (for instance the debate over evolution education in Kansas). In general, Catholics are less inclined to accept the American multi-layered solution. In general as immigrants from oppressed peoples, they trend towards wholesale support of the anti-narrative, although there is also a conservative faction which is essentially Constitutionalist and unsurprisingly seeks to maintain a traditionalist approach towards America’s founding documents. One especially interesting segment are the Catholic converts, many of whom support the primacy and extension of the American civil-religion but because of pessimism regarding current trends wish to extend its lifetime by the adoption of conservative Catholic principles, especially within the field of ethics.

In early first century Christian documents, ‘true religion’ is defined with respect to action on the behalf of disadvantaged persons. Although the American civil-religion has similarly always placed emphasis on action with respect to ethics, the source for these ethics has always been problematic. Figures like Lincoln grounded their actions on some combination of moral intuition and biblical sources. Obama claims to do the same, especially clear allegiance to Niebuhr’s project.

The problem with moral intuition or passion as a grounding mechanism is that there is no measurable element and it can easily become tied together with other sources for passion, especially one’s greed or self-interest. To the extent that one expresses admiration for Lincoln (as I have on various occasions), it nonetheless seems that the positive elements he hoped to foster in the American republic have been, in many respects, displaced by the triumphalism and greed of the Northeastern establishment. This pattern has continued to the present day, despite the many positive contributions made in other sectors.

It is frequently claimed that the string of conservative Catholics, bible-believing evangelicals, and Jews who support Israel for religious reasons represent a threat to the extension of the professedly secular American civil-religion, as they support what is essentially a national narrative on the old twentieth century model, which was supposed to be replaced by the ‘new’ combination of the American civil-religion and anti-narrative. This is essentially correct. Despite some who have attempted to articulate a Jewish universalism (Rav Kook) the foundation of the Jewish state in many respects no different from the blood-and-soil nationalism which preceded it, simply a substitution of ethnicities, and has not yet made a full transition to Jeffersonian democracy.

The irony is that many of the more intelligent expositors of support for this state within America do so in opposition to similar governing structures, even those with a religious basis which effectively resisted the Marxist influx. They depend on the anti-narrative in their discussion of destruction of previous models, yet without offering anything genuinely new. The interpretation of capitalism is as the great destroyer, that destroys communities and creates individuals, and then as Schumpeter predicted, leaves them unable to mount any coherent resistance to the triumph of this anti-narrative.

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Tradition and T.S. Eliot: A Journey to the East?

We shall not cease from exploration
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

What is tradition? What is orthodoxy? Wherein lies the greatness of poetry? These questions not answered, Eliot moves forward in time to new formulations, new questions. Why tradition? Why orthodoxy? Why “great” poetry? These questions easier to answer, yes, though answers no less convincing.

Why not? T.S. Eliot believes in tradition but not Tradition. He selects what is appropriate for today on the basis of his historical sense, his sense of connectivity to that which preceded him, which ultimately prevents him from reaching the beyond — Tradition as a living concept. The tension in his mind, appropriate, is between religious form and dogma and poetry, which must extend beyond it. There is very little great religious poetry, he avers, because the gifting of the poet and religious sentiment are different. This true, but what he fails to recognize is that his connection is nothing but a broader set of forms, not amounting to Orthodoxy in a sense distinct from orthodoxy, because the impulse for them is different from either truth or beauty. Community remains preeminent; poetic feeling he describes is a method of forging and maintaining such. The fire and the rose never appear in their full luminosity.

Eliot protests at the ascription that he is describing the feeling of a defeated generation in the Wasteland, but the critics are right. His orthodoxy is the remnants of religious feeling found in the neglected wainscot, in an country church, barely attended and in disrepair, not missionary monks or warriors ready to fall under the sign of the cross. It is a quaint clutching feeling, and, when it attempts to be more, fails except when in defensive posture (“gun rather loose in the holster”), or stating the problem (“farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust”).

Nowhere is this failure more apparent than in Eliot’s colossal contradiction in “Goethe as Sage” — European poetry is great because it is universal. But how can Europe, or America for that matter “invaded by foreign races,” or with its native culture “effaced,” be a representative of a universal culture? Eliot falls into a quantitative assessment. Greatness is a matter of numbers, not of the mass of men, but of the elite: scholars and men of culture. They have told me Goethe is great, the last great representative European poet, and thus I must grapple with this at, perhaps, the expense of my “orthodoxy” and Puritan sentiment.

Both are thusly abandoned as despair gives way to sentimentality and a new category, “wisdom,” that supersedes orthodoxy and does not correspond to truth, the embrace of quantity of cultured opinion, and the death of that which Eliot claims to love, Europe.

Perhaps Eliot’s failure comes early as he attempts to “confine [himself] to such practical conclusions” as are immediately ascertainable and applicable (TatIT) — this wonderful American pragmatism, which forces him ultimately to a shallow conception of greatness, consisting of nothing but abundance, amplitude, unity — and an abundantly shallow “universality” (GaS).

Did not Eliot already say on such:

“The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel toward God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can understand, but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it becomes meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death. It is equally possible that the feeling for poetry, and the feelings for poetry and the feeling which are the material of poetry, may disappear everywhere, which might perhaps help to facilitate that unification of the world which some people consider desirable for its own sake.” (oPaP)

Thus Eliot condemns himself and his own unified conception of wisdom — the modern age began a long time ago. We are not apprehensive of death. Death is the beginning. Seeking has no limitations, backwards, outwards, and ultimately forwards, through our abandonment of our shallow sentiment and necessary deaths. Our battle not to save the Europe of Goethe, but to find what jade remains in the ash and use it to forge new parapets — the question not whither, but whether and how to use found jade in this divinely sanctioned task.

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T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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Finding Truth

Each man regards his pet subject as most important, most fundamental, most widely applicable.

My own private alkahest is contemplative or mystical practice.

I encourage everyone who feels even slightly inclined to investigate this realm of experience to do so, and soon. I feel strongly that, if there is to be any genuine instauration at all, whether of an individual, of the West, or of human civilization as a whole, it must be grounded in mystical experience.

By “mystical experience” I mean, at the most basic level, management of the mind that leads to the diminution of delusion. One’s attention can be stabilised and focused, improving the functioning of one’s mind and causing one to become less bewitched by one’s senses, thoughts and feelings.

Basic attention stabilisation techniques are available in all the major religions, and nowadays there are plenty of nonreligious mental training systems for the more rationally inclined.

I look forward to the day when “Ment. Ed.” is as ordinary a part of education and daily life as “Phys. Ed.” is today.

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There are those who will want to go further. They may have discovered that, as a result of mental cultivation, the habitual functioning of their mind, and indeed their heart, can undergo dramatic and unanticipated alteration. They will have realised that this means that the mind is not stable, not absolute and therefore not to be trusted as a guide to truth. Yet they still want to know: what is true?

It has been said that there is no hunger without a corresponding food. Once the hunger for truth has been awakened, the nourishment that will satisfy it must be sought. This is almost impossible to do on one’s own. A guide or teacher must be sought. How to go about this? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Get into the habit of being honest with yourself, and ever more ruthlessly so, especially about your motivations.

2. Develop the faculty of self-observation. Not self-analysis, self-judgement, or self-regard: self-observation. As you move through the day, whenever you can, bring careful, neutral awareness to whatever it is you are doing, saying or thinking. Aim always to have “someone” on watch.

3. Learn the difference between opinion and fact.

4. Look on your home turf first. Don’t go running to foreign or exotic groups merely because you feel like doing so. Mine the resources of the faith of your fathers.

5. Investigate spiritual teachers thoroughly. Ask them genuine, hard questions – the ones that keep you up at night. Study their behavior minutely.

6. Don’t jump to conclusions, unless there is some severe moral deliquency going on.

7. When you commit to a teacher, do so wholeheartedly.

8. Be aware of social and emotional phenomena attendant upon joining a group and don’t be deceived by them: the pleasures of belonging, receiving high quality attention, acquiring status and so forth, are not spiritual things and should not be regarded as such.

These are only a few suggestions that might help. At the end of the day there is no set of rules that will guarantee that you will find someone who can help you. It may take a plunge into despair and a readiness to lose one’s life before you encounter a teacher. Or the right one might be just down the block. What is important is that if you really want to learn, you must begin searching. Life is short.

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A little bit about myself: I was raised nominally Catholic but my family wasn’t particularly religious. I began meditating in 2000 because I wanted to be able to concentrate better, and to see if I could not-think, which sounded very appealing. I read a few books on how to sit and began. I spent no time on doctrine – I wasn’t interested.

After about four months I had a powerful experience of compassion for the suffering of others. It really shook me up. I had no idea what was happening. Eventually it began to mellow and broaden into a heightened ability to relate to and help other people.

I knew I ought to look for some guidance about the experience, but I didn’t; five months later I moved house and in the process fell out of the habit of meditating. Three years passed during which I underwent a profound inner degeneration that featured things like attacks of pure inauthenticity and that left me planning my suicide in minute detail. I knew that I had to return to practice, and that I couldn’t do it on my own, so I moved into a small community of Buddhist contemplatives.

I lived there for three and a half years, did a lot of meditation under careful guidance, and got back on track. The improvement in my attitude can actually be traced on the Spengler fora – my postings there for the first few years are full of critical anger, very hostile things, but now they are much more constructive and pleasant. The pseudonym “Cioran” is no longer appropriate.

I must emphasise that I am not an authorised teacher of any sort, and I claim no level of enlightenment. I am just an amateur encouraging people to practice their religion seriously instead of playing with thoughts and feelings as is so easy to do. I only talk like this anonymously or to people who ask about it directly. If you met me socially I’d probably not bring the subject up at all.

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Time of the Nets

Alain de Benoist writes on the Internet age:

The twentieth century ended in November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 21st century unofficially begun in 1993, with the first diffusion on a vast scale of the Internet. There is no doubt: the coming of the “global web” announces an unprecedented epoch: the Age of Net. The Internet is a net whose circumference is unlimited and whose centre is nowhere. This decentralised, interactive, horizontal medium, that connects its users at the speed of electron, establishes a sort of planetary brain whose neurons are the connected individuals. More than thirty million people have already entered this global communicating society, that easily overcomes frontiers and controls. Each month, one million new “contacts” join this system. On the “info-highways”, where writing, sound and image blend in a unique numerical language, a New World is rising, a “cyberworld”, populated by “cybercitizens”. Neither governments nor politicians have so far understood the exact measure and the consequences of this phenomenon.

Every technological evolution creates its own ideology, and this ideology drives social change. In traditional societies, human relations were mainly territorial and took place in a continuous spatial dimension. Urbanisation has deeply modified this model. To the disjunction between the place of work and the place of residence some social praxis’ have been added that daily permit to exit one’s own domicile (multilocalization). Space becomes a property like any other, that can be sold, amassed or exchanged. The advent of the net transforms and accelerates this process. While communication becomes the essential engine of social relations, the extension of the net contributes to the fragmentation and the “uninstitutionalization” of society. There is no more belonging, no more adhesion: “to be on-line” is the categorical imperative. Political parties no longer represent an efficient means of achievement for individuals, while civic associations and single issue movements overwhelms trade unions. In the world of the net there are no more nations or populations, but multiple and winded belongings: tribes, Diaspora and clans.

Walkman and mobiles are tools, among many others, that contribute to free man from steadiness. “Tomorrow streets and squares”, Alain Finkielkraut says, “will be invaded by busy mutants talking with themselves”. Thus a nomadic society is created – nomadism of tools, of values and of men – that privileges a cross-sectional modality of communication, flattening all the classical institutional and pyramidal structures. A virtual world, with no distances and no expiration is growing: a world of uncontrollable crypted net, in which unmaterialised objects circulate and return materialised at the end of the process they’re involved in; a world that could also become a financial jungle, where the Stock Exchanges are transformed into electronic casinos.

In addition to nomadism there is cocooning. Internet is a communication tool, but its form of communication abolishes the dimensions of space and time, that are(were) the context in which, until yesterday, human freedom was expressed. In this way, the net imprisons the individual in a private sphere that is more and more limited to the abuse of a remote control or of a keyboard. The progressive sliding of the job place towards the address (telework) goes in this same direction. If world can be virtually discovered remaining at home – philosopher Paul Virilio argues – why should we exit? Finally, the net emphasises all the essential features of this age: the mood for immediacy (i.e. zapping), the oblivion of history and of “the reasons”, the enjoyment is conceived as a privileged way of access to the experience. Freedom of expression is more and more restricted in its commercial form, the absolute sovereignty of the consumer. Bill Clinton defined the electronic commerce “Far West of the total economy”. In a universe in which everything is accessible through a toll (global marketplace), only the market still distracts people from loneliness.

The advent of the net also creates assemblages of a new type. When 300,000 persons are gathered in Paris for the “Gay Pride” day, when the world-wide Days of Youth inspires one million catholic young people to join in Longchamp, when hundreds of thousand persons take part in Belgium to a “white march”, when two million Basques protest in public square against the attacks of ETA, when a million Germans take part in Berlin to a “love parade”, when one million Italians demonstrate in Milan against the division of their country, when an innumerable crowd meet in London for the Ascension-day in paradise of Lady-D, former-Madonna of tabloids and instantly proclaimed Saint and martyr once dead, the sociologists refer to “unidentified popular movements”. These, more or less spontaneous, huge assemblies truly represent the type of manifestation that corresponds to the world of the net.

Besides the obvious diversities of motivations, they all are a unique phenomenon: post-modern ways of affirmation of a feeling, a belief or a shared way of life, set inside the current tendency of affirmation of communitarian identities, that go beyond the limits of the usual belongings.

So, flows replace territories everywhere.

The Internet is only the most immediately visible form of this deterritorialisation. We are only at the beginning of a phenomenon, and whoever believes that it could be reversible in the short term is probably wrong. The advent of the world of the internet is a challenging question. The state of tomorrow will depend on the way we will be able to give it an answer.

Source here. Trans. A.Boraschi.

Nomadism, immediacy, and focus on commercial forms are all characteristics of the current age. The revived Conservatory forum is intended to some degree to be an answer to de Benoist’s question. What else is possible?

That depends largely on you — or, rather, us.

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