Brooks informs us that American culture is too centered around attaining happiness, at the expense of a different goal in life that is deeper and more important. Already, we think that this is a very strange proposition. Perhaps we find it hard to disagree. But since this is the Elite of our society, let’s go ahead and assume they have an evil ulterior motive.
David Brooks recently gave talk before the Aspen Institute. Brooks writes for numerous establishment papers, and has a reputation as the sort of conservative liberals like. Considering the pathetically liberal situation of the conservative movement in America today, this is really saying something. The Aspen Institute, let us recall, is hardly a town-hall meeting in Tupelo. Brooks informs us that American culture is too centered around attaining happiness, at the expense of a different goal in life that is deeper and more important. Already, we think that this is a very strange proposition. Perhaps we find it hard to disagree. But since this is the Elite of our society, let’s go ahead and assume they have an evil ulterior motive.
These ideas and these conferences have a trickle-down effect to the wider culture. Thus, they are very instructive in finding out where the Elite wants to take the country. Desire is a permanent feature of the human condition. Buddhism set its goal out explicitly as the elimination of desire (they desired to end desire) and one glance at modern Japan should instruct as to how successful this 2,600 year experiment was. Desire for happiness is such a nebulous idea that philosophers have spent volumes arguing about whether happiness and satiation are identical or whether one can be happy if one wanted to be, and became sad, etc. One thing is certain: Happiness is not the opposite of depth. Shallowness is. He might appear to be arguing against shallowness, but he uses the term “Happiness”. I wonder why. For a man smart enough to be able to call up complex cabbalistic arguments for accepting the misery of the human condition and continuing to serve one’s fellow man, this seems to be a strange oversight. Then there is his idea of “depth.” Traditionally, “depth” has been viewed as a function of contemplation. The contemplative and the active lives were known to Dante and the medievals by the parable of Rachel and Leah. The contemplative has always been viewed as higher, but it had very little intrinsically to do with the “service” that Brooks speaks about. It was in an inner direction, and service and charity are outward foci.
The real reason for the talk should be clear: they are priming us for “the new normal” when previously promoted things like rampant consumerism become untenable. They directed us to the one thing when it served their interests to do so and now they direct us to the other. The Elites have determined that, having served their agenda by spreading false values across the planet and by reducing all existence to a sort of chattel slavery to Mammon, it now suits them to reduce us to the level of serfs, and we might as well be prepared to accept our lot with all the amor fati of a character out of Russian literature. That’s pretty simple, and that is the most likely reason Brooks is making these points.
Of course, there is no point in saying we should try and be “deeper”. Some people are already “deep” and they will remain so, others will remain superficial. Miguel Serrano, in his classic travel memoir, “The Serpent of Paradise”, pointed out that perhaps, in the wake of the enormous psychological upheavals of the 20th century, the West would become more contemplative, and the East would become more active. This is exactly what we are seeing today, with the rise of the Asian Tiger economies and India, while at the same time the religious traditions of those countries are becoming less and less profound. Today, seminars on the business applications of the Bhagavad Gita are all the rage in India, and in China, my sources inform me that every single Taoist master is dead or in hiding. We in the West are getting less involved in the affairs of the world, or less able to involve ourselves. We are amply compensated: spiritual currents in the West are becoming more and more profound- look at the current right-wing “scene”. Interest has exploded in Evola and other metaphysical thinkers–while fewer rightists care very much about the “science of race”. This is mirrored in the general populace, which is increasingly rejecting climate science, evolutionary science, psychological science, etc. It matters little and less. The science of the skepticism movement is by no means limited to flyover country either. Many of our young undergrad philosophers are becoming enamored with complex arguments for the irrelevance of empiricism and positivism and all that “19th century baggage.” Perhaps for the wrong reasons, but these reasons do not matter. We are at the end of an Era. This is–for better or for worse–the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
But back to Brooks. He wants to get us used to less, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Here is the Big Secret. The processes which control the destinies of man and civilizations are cosmic and universal. Everyone is merely acting out his or her role in the drama, lila, the play. In a healthy, sustainable society, people have less materially, but also want for far less. Instead of waking up at 40 and asking, “is this it?” they will be inserted into the passion of the seasons, of Sowing and Reaping, Working and Sleeping, Sex and Death. They will struggle with the land and love it, they will raise their families and feel the warm embrace of community and identity. The future is Agri-Cultural. It is the Growth of the Soil. The elites are inadvertently paving the way for a beautiful future, because they cannot help but do so. They are themselves constrained by the stars.
I can say with confidence that heavy metal music has done far more to advance authentic right wing aesthetics, values, and yes, even philosophy, than all the failed institutions of the Beltway Right put together.
I grew up listening to metal. I have also had more than my fair share of interactions with various manifestations of the American Right for well over a decade.
With that in mind, I can say with confidence that heavy metal music has done far more to advance authentic right wing aesthetics, values, and yes, even philosophy, than all the failed institutions of the Beltway Right put together.
Whatever the political opinions of the artists involved (if they even have any), metal belongs to the Right. From the most simplistic party sing alongs to the highly complicated creations of serious artists, metal repeatedly stresses themes of conquest, self-overcoming, strength, and conflict. If the primary value of the Left is equality, than the primary value of the true Right is hierarchy. The common thread between an anthem about drinking with girls to the heavy drone of doom meal is the rejection of egalitarianism and the pretty lies of modernity. If leftists can “Imagine” along with John Lennon a world where the Last Men loaf about all day where there is “above us only sky,” metal provides the battle songs for those things it’s still worth to “kill or die for.”
Metal is about seeking glory and excellence–Wagner for the working man. Even a leftist who tries to channel metal will find themselves presenting an image of strength, vitality, and self-glorification. Whatever the political beliefs of a left wing headbanger, the aesthetics betray them.
The same cannot be said for what passes as the conservative movement’s “aesthetics.”
Some Christian conservatives hate metal because of the anti-Christian beliefs and symbolism of certain people involved. Obviously, this paints the genre with too broad of a brush–it’s worth noting that the “Satantic” imagery of many early artists was used to symbolize evil as something real and something to be feared. This is a far more respectful treatment of Christian theology than the contemporary Christianity–which holds faith as simply a means to fit in the occasional day at an inner city homeless shelter, stripped of any divine significance. Besides, most Christian conservatives today seem more intent on competing for who can adopt the most half-starved African children to bring to their McMansion than ensuring a promising future for their own children. So we shouldn’t be too concerned with their cries about how “evil” metal is.
Even those authentically anti-Christian metalheads attack the faith from a different perspective than your usual campus leftist. Metal is filled with critiques of the Christian religion for displacing the indigenous spiritual traditions of Europe, for allegedly promoting egalitarianism, and for serving as a force of repression on extraordinary individuals. It echoes Oswald Spengler’s charge that Christianity was “the grandmother of Bolshevism.” This is hardly the same old recycled anti-Christian tripe.
Beyond the ideology and aesthetics, metal is profoundly a “localist” genre. Bands must develop a following and work their way up, rather than simply being imposed on all of us by some record producer at age 19. This goes for a lot of the “pirate radio” that first popularized the genre as well. What was best about local metal radio shows was that they were proudly local institutions. The announcers were amateurish, half the bands were unknown, you couldn’t get a decent signal once you left the confines of the city it was based out of, and it utterly lacked the gloss and professionalism of a major radio station. It was something unique, an acquired taste. You would actually find out about new bands or new songs from it–something you can hardly get from major radio today.
When conservatism was serious, local institutions were prized for their own sake, with communities serving as the proper basis for affection–the “little platoons” in Edmund Burke’s phrase. Today, conservatism is composed of 20-somethings making 20 something a year plotting to give deracinated corporations tax breaks. For me, it’s the same conflict as listening to a new band on a metal playlist or hearing the same Rihanna “song” yet again on a “professional” station. The latter can only be called “culture” by a true cynic and serves as evidence that popular choices are imposed from above rather than the spontaneous “free market” of conservative/libertarian fantasies.
Metal as a genre, even in its lowest form, relies upon musicianship. At its best, it can sublimate profound themes within complicated melodic structures. You can’t “fake” good metal. It’s no accident that many younger metalheads find that they “graduate” to classical when they get older, in the same way that the talented musicians who pioneered the genre owe a debt to the maestros of Vienna and Bayreuth.
In today’s popular music, you can substitute Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Rihanna, the animated corpse of Britney Spears, and whatever else they are promoting in and out of any given melody. It’s hard to say if anyone would even notice–as long as you keep the autotune on. The themes are predictable, the melodies hackneyed, the “message” cliched–express yourself, even (especially) when you have nothing to say. Popular music is the soundtrack to American-style democracy, and I can think of no greater condemnation. If I can slightly borrow a famous phrase, when someone tells me the pop station is “culture,” I release the safety catch on my revolver.
Clearly, if conservatism is about upholding the established order, heavy metal music is hardly the kind of thing champions of the long extinguished Ancien Regime would be comfortable with. Of course, that’s sort of the point. We don’t live in a world where the “Establishment” is patriotic landed aristocrats defending the interests of Church and Crown. We live in a world where Fortune 500 companies fund groups that combat “white privilege,” where multiculturalism has joined hands with Goldman Sachs, where the justification for this System is outlined for you in your mandatory diversity training in the classroom and the corporate boardroom. It’s their system, not ours. Why do we want to make it more efficient or cut their taxes?
Who cares?
The Right can’t look to Burke in this context–they should look to Burzum. The System must be dismantled and metal is the soundtrack to that Revolution–even if the people playing it aren’t aware of it.
Want to do something that will make a difference? Save the money you were going to waste on supporting another huckster conservative politician promising to save America, and go buy some metal records instead.
The concept of the “middle class” is crucial for the liberal-capitalist ideology. Although it appeared later than the Marxist theory of class struggle and the famous communist doctrine of the two antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the very meaning of the term “middle class” has a much longer history and has its roots in the period of bourgeois revolutions and the rise of the Third Estate, which claimed henceforth a monopoly in political and economic spheres.
None of the words we use in the course of social and political discussions and analyses is ideologically neutral. Outside of ideology entirely, such words lose their meaning. And it is not possible to determine one’s attitude toward them unambiguously, since the content of any expression is shaped by context and semantic structures, a kind of operational system. When we live in a society with an obvious ideology, openly maintained as the dominant one, things are clear enough.
The significance of words flows directly from the ideological matrix, which is instilled through upbringing, education, and instruction and is supported by the active ideological apparatus of the state. The state forms a language, defines the meaning of discourse, and sets—most often through repressive measures, broadly understood—the limits and moral tint of the basic collection of political and sociological concepts and terms.
If we lived in a society in which communist ideology dominates, concepts such as “bourgeoisie,” “fascism,” “capitalism,” “speculation,” etc. acquire not only strictly negative connotations but specific meanings, with which capitalists, fascists, and speculators would categorically disagree. The disagreement concerns not only signs, but the very significance of words. The way a communist sees a fascist, or a capitalist seems to the fascist, might seem to a different party to be little more than a caricature or a distortion. And this, of course, works the other way around: fascism seems natural to the fascist, and communism, utterly evil.
For a capitalist, communism and fascism are equally evil. The capitalist most often does not think of himself as bourgeois. Speculation is for him a form of the realization of natural economic rights, and the system he defends he usually regards as a “free” society, an “open” society. Neither the Marxist analysis of the appropriation of surplus value, nor the fascist critique of the web of interest obligations and payments, and the international financial oligarchy, which usurps power over peoples and nations, ever convince him of anything.
Ideologies are similar to religions; hence Carl Schmitt speaks of “political theology.” Each believes sacredly in his own values and ideals, and criticism of or apology for alternative values most often has no effect (except for a few cases of confessional change, which occurs in the history of religion and in the history of political teachings).
Consequently, before speaking seriously about one or another term, it is necessary to determine in which ideological context we will be considering it. Someone will surely object: science must take a neutral position. That is impossible. In this case, science would pretend to the status of a meta-ideology, i.e. a kind of “true ideology,” of which all other ideologies are relative forms. But nobody will agree with this, even it should come into someone’s head to flaunt such ambitions.
In the religious sphere, syncretic teachings periodically arise, claiming that they are the expression of “absolute truth” and that all other historical religions are its relative manifestations. But as a rule, such tendencies do not enjoy great popularity, remaining the property of rather small circles and denied by major confessions as “heresies.” Science, likewise, cannot claim the status of a meta-ideology and remain relevant. But it differs from ordinary ideology by three features:
Thus, in considering any concept or term, it is possible to proceed in two ways: either to interpret it from the position of one or another ideology, not digging into its foundations and not comparing it with other interpretations (this is the level of propaganda and low-quality applied analysis/journalism), or to attend to the scientific method, which does not free us from adherence to an ideology, but forces us to reason, observing the three above-mentioned rules of the scientific approach (paradigm, logic, comparison).
We propose to consider the concept of the “middle class” in precisely this scientific spirit.
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (15th century)
The concept of the “middle class” is crucial for the liberal-capitalist ideology. Although it appeared later than the Marxist theory of class struggle and the famous communist doctrine of the two antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the very meaning of the term “middle class” has a much longer history and has its roots in the period of bourgeois revolutions and the rise of the Third Estate, which claimed henceforth a monopoly in political and economic spheres.
Before considering the “middle class,” let’s turn to the concept of “class” as such. Class is a concept of the social organization of modernity. Ancient orders and social-political systems were built on the caste principle. “Caste” should be understood as the doctrine that the inner nature of different people differs qualitatively: there are divine souls and earthly (feral, demonic) souls. The caste reflects precisely this nature of the soul, which man is not able to change during his life. The caste is fatal. The normal society, according to this conception, must be built so that those of a divine nature (the elite) are above, and those of an earthly (feral, demonic) nature remain below (the masses). That is how the Indian Varna system is arranged, as were ancient Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian, and other societies.
This caste theory was replaced by a more flexible estate theory. The estate also proposes a difference in people’s natures (the existence of higher and lower), but here the fact of birth in one or another estate is not considered a final and natural factor in the determination of belonging to a certain social status. Estate can be changed if the representative of a lower estate accomplishes a great feat, demonstrates unique spiritual qualities, becomes a member of the priesthood, etc.
Here, alongside the caste principle, is the principle of meritocracy, that is, rewards for services. The meritocratic principle extends also to the descendants of the one who accomplished the feat (ennobling). Estate society was predominant in Christian civilization right to the end of the Middle Ages. In estate society, the highest estates are the priesthood (clergy) and the military (aristocracy), and the lowest is the Third Estate of peasants and craftsmen. Precisely the same way, in a caste society, priests and warriors (Brahma and Kshatriya) were highest, and lowest were peasants, artisans, and traders (Vaishya).
Modernity became the era of the overthrow of estate society. Europe’s bourgeois revolutions demanded a replacement of the estate privileges of the higher estates (the clergy and the military aristocracy, the nobility) in favor of the Third Estate. But the bearers of this ideology were not the peasants, who were connected with traditional society by the specific character of seasonal labour, religious identity, etc., but the more mobile townspeople and burghers. “Bourgeois” is itself formed from the German word “Burg” meaning “town.” Hence, modernity gave first priority to precisely the townsfolk-citizen-bourgeois as a normative unit.
The bourgeois revolutions abolished the power of the Church (clergy) and aristocracy (nobility, dynasties) and advanced the model of building society on the basis of the domination of the Third Estate, represented by the townsfolk-citizen-bourgeois. This is, essentially, capitalism. Capitalism, in its victory, replaces estate distinctions, but preserves material ones. Thus, the notion of class arises: class signifies an indicator of the measure of inequality. The bourgeoisie abolish estate inequality, but preserve material inequality. Consequently, precisely modernity’s bourgeois capitalistic society is a class society in the full sense of the word. Previously, in the Middle Ages, belonging to an estate was one’s primary social attribute. In modernity, the entire social stratification was reduced to the attribute of material riches. Class is thus a phenomenon of modernity.
Georg Grosz, Eclipse of the Sun (1926)
The class character of bourgeois society, however, was perceived most distinctly not by the ideology of the bourgeoisie, but by Marx. He elaborated his revolutionary teaching on the basis of the concept of class. At its foundation was the idea that class society and the material inequality characteristic of it, elevated to the highest criterion, exposes the essence of the nature of society, man, and history. In Marx’s class picture, there are always rich and poor, and the rich always get richer, and the poor, poorer. Consequently, there are two classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and their struggle is the motor and meaning of history.
All of Marxism is built on this idea: when we speak of classes, we speak of two antagonistic classes, the difference between which is not relative but absolute, since each embodies in itself two irreconcilable worlds: the world of Exploitation and the world of (honest) Labor. There are two classes: the class of Labor (the proletariat) and the class of Exploitation (the bourgeoisie). In the capitalist system, the class of Exploitation dominates. The class of Labor must become conscious of itself, arise, and overthrow the class of Exploiters. They must create, at first, the Government of Labor—socialism. Then, after the last remnants of bourgeois society have been destroyed, communist society will appear, now fully classless. According to Marx, a classlessness is possible only after the victory of the proletariat and the radical destruction of the bourgeoisie.
For Marx, a “middle class” simply cannot exist. This concept has no independent semantics in Marxist ideology, since everything that is between the bourgeoisie and proletariat (for instance, the petty bourgeoisie or prosperous peasantry) relates essentially either to the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. For Marxists, the “middle class” is a fiction. It doesn’t exist, and the concept itself is nothing but an instrument of the ideological propaganda of capitalists, trying to fool the proletariat, promising a future integration into the class of the bourgeoisie (which, according to Marx, cannot happen, since the appropriation of surplus value prevents the proletariat’s enrichment).
We can draw the following conclusion: the term “middle class” is a fiction for Marxists, an artificial figure of bourgeois ideology, called upon to conceal the real picture of society and the processes occurring in it. At the same time, Marxists admit the fact of a transition from estate society to class society and, consequently, agree with the bourgeoisie that a society of material inequalities (class society) is “more progressive” than a society of estate inequality; they disagree with the bourgeoisie in that, for communists, this is not the “end of history,” but only the beginning of a full-fledged revolutionary struggle. Liberals, on the other hand, insist that material inequality is entirely moral and justified and maintain that the communists’ striving for material equality is, by contrast, amoral and pathological. For liberals, “the end of history” begins when everyone becomes “middle class.” For communists, it begins when the proletariat finally destroy the bourgeoisie and build a communist society of total equality.
The Middle Class within Liberalism
The concept of a middle class is implicitly present in liberal ideology from the very beginning. That said, it only receives full implementation in the course of the establishment of sociology, which endeavors to combine many avant-garde theses of Marxism (in particular, the centrality of the concept of class) and bourgeois conditions. Sociology is thus a hybrid form: ideologically, it is between communism and liberalism; methodologically, it emphasizes a scientific, analytic approach. We can distinguish two poles in sociology, the social (the school of Durkheim, the theories of Sorokin, etc.) and the liberal (Weber, the Chicago and “Austrian” Schools in the United States, etc.)
In any case, the specific character of the liberal understanding of class is the conviction that, in the standard bourgeois society, there is only one class, and all differences between the depths and the heights are relative and conditional. If, for Marx, there are always two classes, and they exist in implacable enmity, for liberals (Adam Smith, for instance) there is always ultimately one class—the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie nominally embraces the entire capitalist society. The poorest layers of this society are, as it were, incompletely bourgeois. The richest, on the other hand, area super-bourgeois. But the social nature of all people is qualitatively identical: all are given equal starting opportunities, setting out from which the bourgeois can either reach a certain level of success, or fail to reach it and tumble down into the incompletely bourgeois.
Hence, Adam Smith takes as a standard situation the following classical liberal narrative:
The baker hires a worker, who has recently come to the city for work. After working as an assistant to the owner, the hired worker learns to bake bread and observes the organization of processes of interaction with suppliers and customers. After some time, the hired worker borrows credit and opens a bakery. After first working independently, he eventually hires a helper, who has come to the city for work, and the cycle repeats itself.
In this model, we see the following. Not only is society thought of as middle class, but there exists the already-middle-class and the not-yet-middle-class. In this picture, the hired worker does not form a peculiar type, but represents the potentially bourgeois, while the ready baker is actually bourgeois (though even he, coming to ruin, can theoretically be in the position again of the hired worker, the not-yet-bourgeois).
According to Marx, the quantity of riches in society is a fixed quantity, and the presence of two classes is based on precisely this: those who have riches will never share them with the poor, since life in capitalist society is a zero-sum game. For Smith, on the other hand, riches constantly increase. As a result, the boundaries of the middle class continuously expand. Capitalism is based on the presumption of the constant growth of riches for all members of society; ideally, all humanity must become middle class.
At the same time, there are two approaches to the middle class in liberal ideology. The first corresponds to left liberals: they demand that the super-bourgeois (the big capitalists) consciously share a part of the profits with the middle class and petty bourgeoisie, since this will lead to the stability of the system and to an acceleration of the growth of the middle class globally.
The second approach is characteristic of right liberals: they object to the burden placed on the super-bourgeoisie by taxation and welfare projects; they believe these contradicts the spirit of “free enterprise” and slows the dynamics of the development of the capitalist system, since the super-bourgeoisie stimulates the growth of the middle-bourgeoisie, which, in turn, urges on the petty bourgeoisie and the not-yet-bourgeoisie.
Accordingly, the concept of the middle class becomes, for left liberals, a moral value and ideological slogan (as in, “We must build a stronger middle class!”). For right liberals, on the other hand, the growth of the middle class is a natural consequence of the development of the capitalist system and does not demand special attention or elevation to a value.
In sociology, this basic ideological attitude of liberalism concerning the primacy of the middle class manifests itself in the relativization of the model of stratification. Sociology divides society into three classes: upper, middle, and lower (to this is sometimes added the underclass of pure marginals and social deviants). These classes are not identical to Marxist, nor to strictly liberal class concepts (since liberalism knows only one class, the middle class, while the others are thought of as its variations). This division fixes the dimension of individuals along four indicators: material sufficiency, level of fame, position in administrative hierarchy, and level of education. On the basis of strictly qualitative criteria, any person can be related to one of three social strata.
Here, the concept of class does not have a direct ideological content, but, as a rule, it is applied to bourgeois society, where sociology as a science appeared. This sociological classes, identified with social strata, should be distinguished from Marxist classes and from standard liberal conceptions about the middle class as the universal and single class.
In this case, in a bourgeois framework, the struggle for the rights of the underclass or support of the lower class (in a sociological sense) can be thought of as a left continuation of the liberal approach: attention to the lower layer of bourgeois society stipulates striving to facilitate its integration into the middle class, i.e. to pull them up the level of the bourgeois. For right liberals, such an effort is “amoral,” since it contradicts the main principle of social freedom: initiative and honest competition (the strong win, the weak lose, but such are the rules of the game; all should endeavor to become strong). The extreme version of right or even far-right liberalism is the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand.
Thomas Hart Benton, Steel in America Today (1930)
There is one other ideological system of modernity, which we have yet to consider—nationalism. Nationalism is a variation of bourgeois ideology, which insists that the standard horizon of bourgeois society should not be humanity (the “cosmopolitanism” and “globalism” of classical liberals) but society as defined by the borders of a nation-state. The nation or people is taken as the maximal unit of integration. The market is open within the boundaries of the nation. But in the inter-state system, economic activity transitions to the level of the state, not private actors. From here, there arises the legitimization of such instruments as tariffs, protectionism, etc.
Nationalism thinks of the middle class not abstractly but concretely, as the middle class of a given national formation of the state. Nationalism also, like liberalism, accepts as a standard figure of society the townsperson-citizen-bourgeois, but puts the accent precisely on citizen, and what’s more, the citizen of a given national state.
The “nation” as a political formation becomes a synonym of bourgeois society. For nationalists, beyond this society, there exists only a zone of national and social risk. The nation is thought of here as a community of the middle class. And the task consists in integrating the lower layers into the national whole, often with the help of welfare measures. That is why nationalism can possess numerous socialist features, though the ideological basis here is different: pulling the economically weak to the level of the middle class is a task of national integration, not a consequence of orientation towards justice and material equality. We see something similar with left liberals, who consider integrating the under-class into broader society as a condition for the stability of the development of the capitalist system.
Nationalism, as a rule, relates negatively to national minorities and especially to immigrants. This is connected with the fact that in the eyes of nationalists, these elements disturb the homogeneity of the national middle class. Moreover, some national minorities are blamed for concentrating in their hands too much material wealth, in other words, those who challenge the national middle class “from above.” Nationalist feelings of injustice are expressed in antagonism towards “oligarchs” and, often times, as “economic anti-semitism,” a sentiment that was not foreign to Marx himself. In turn, other non-nationals (usually immigrants) are blamed for increasing the numbers of the lower strata and underclass, the integration of which is complicated by national differences. A variant of anti-immigrant nationalism consists in the charge that the increase of cheap labor slows the process of enriching the “native” population and the “harmonious” (for nationalists) growth of the middle class.
After making these necessary methodological refinements, we can finally raise the question: what is the middle class for Russia? What are its prospects? Is it important for us or, on the contrary, are discussions about it optional and secondary?
It is impossible to answer this without turning to one of the three classical ideologies (including the versions contained in each through the polarities of left and right).
If we take the position of right liberalism, the answer is this: we should not pay attention to the middle class; the most important thing is to secure maximum economic freedom (that is, complete removal of government from business, taxes approximating zero, etc.), and everything will fall into place. Right liberals and consistent globalists are convinced that the growth of the middle class in Russia is not the goal; it is a consequence of the nation’s integration into the global economy, the opening of internal markets for external competition, and the prompt dismantling of an overbearing state.
If we take the position of left liberalism, then our attitude changes substantially. The broadening of the middle class is the number one task for our society, since the successful establishment of capitalism in Russia depends on precisely this, as does its integration into the international community. A small and weak middle class facilitates the degradation of society into “lumpens” and “oligarchs” and indirectly helps nationalistic and socialistic anti-liberal tendencies capture the minds of the population. Social injustice and inequality, the volume of the underclass, and the slow growth of the middle class demand special attention and the execution of goal-directed policies, since the fate of capitalism in Russia is at stake. Again, the struggle for the middle class is a slogan of left liberals. And they are the ones who would most likely focus this topic, since it is the core of their ideological positions.
If we are contemporary Marxists by inertia or conscious choice, then any mention of a middle class must evoke our rage, since this is the ideological platform of the sworn enemies of communism—bourgeois liberals. For communists, the following is correct: the narrower the middle class, the sharper the social contradictions and the more acute the imperative of the class struggle of proletariat against bourgeoisie. Thus, the communist perceives a large lower social strata and underclass against the background of prospering oligarchs as the ideal social picture. For communists, the middle class is a lie, an evil, and its absence or underdevelopment is a chance and window of opportunity for revolution. If some “communist” thinks otherwise, then he is not a communist, but a revisionist and compromiser with the bourgeoisie.
If we are nationalists, then the middle class acquires for us an additional dimension. It is thought of as the skeleton of national society in opposition to the “immigrant underclass” and “foreign-born oligarchy.” This is the peculiar notion of the middle class in the nationalist framework. And the cutting edges of this conception of the middle class are directed against oligarchs (the upper class) and immigrants (the lower class and underclass); the middle class itself is regarded as the national class, i.e. as the Russian class, which includes Russian entrepreneurs, Russian proprietors, the Russian bourgeoisie, etc.
It is impossible to speak of the middle class as such, without adhering (consciously or not) to an ideological position. But since in Russia, according to the constitution, there is no state ideology, theoretically we can interpret the middle class however we want. The fact that this concept has become the center of discussions attests to the fact that in contemporary Russia, by the inertia of the ‘90s and early 2000s, a liberal paradigm prevails. In the absence of a state ideology, liberals nevertheless strive to impose on us their paradigm as dominant.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment: a discussion about the middle class is taking place in a socially significant platform, for instance on one of Russia’s major television stations. Representatives of all possible ideologies of modernity are participating: Russian liberals, Russian communists, and Russian nationalists.
The first, a Russian liberals, would say:
The growth of the middle class and elevation of the level of wealth for the citizens of Russia is the main task of our society and government.
The second, a Russian communist:
Illegal privatization in the ‘90s put national property in the hands of oligarchs; look how our people live in the provinces in poverty and squalor!
The third, aRussian nationalists:
Illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Russians, and they’re all led by Jewish and Caucasian oligarchs. That is a catastrophe for the Russian middle class!
Despite the fact that the viewers might like all three positions, the jury and “respected experts” will, undoubtedly, grant victory to the liberals. For ultimately, we still find ourselves in the condition of the ideological dictatorship of liberalism. This would happen despite the fact that society, recognizing the right of liberal discourse, fully and persistently denies its supremacy and absolute right. (In contrast, for the political elite, liberal dogmas remain sacred and unshakeable.)
From this, we can draw a conclusion: the middle class and discussion about it reflect the ideological order of liberals among Russia’s political and economic elite. If we do not share liberal axioms, then we might not consider this topic at all, or else offer an interpretation (Marxist, nationalistic, etc.) that liberals will vigorously reject.
In conclusion, we can conduct an analysis of the middle class in the context of the Fourth Political Theory. This theory is built on the imperative of overcoming modernity and all three political ideologies in order (the order has tremendous significance): (1) liberalism, (2) communism, (3) nationalism (fascism). The subject of this theory, in its simple version, is the concept “narod,”roughly, “Volk” or “people,” in the sense of “peoplehood” and “peoples,” not “masses.”
In its complex version, the subject of this theory is Heidegger’s category of Dasein. We can say, as an approximation, that narod must be thought of existentially, as the living, organic, historical presence of Russians in a qualitative spatial landscape, in the expanses of Great Russia. But if the subject is the narod and not the individual (as in liberalism), not two antagonistic classes (as in Marxism), and not the political nation (as in nationalism), then all the obligatory elements of the modern picture of the world change. There is no longer materialism, economism, recognition of the fatefulness and universality of the bourgeois revolutions, linear time, Western civilization as a universal standard, secularism, human rights, civil society, democracy, the market, or any other axioms and buzzwords of modernity. The Fourth Political Theory proposes solutions and horizons knowingly excluded by liberalism, communism, and nationalism. (More on this is found in my book The Fourth Political Theory and my new book The Fourth Way.)
On the whole, The Fourth Political Theory, when applied to the problem of the “middle class” says the following:
The transition from caste to estate and from estate to class is not a universal law. This process can occur as it did in modern Western Europe, or it can fail to occur or occur partially, as is happening today in non-Western societies. Hence, the very concept of class as applied to society has a limited applicability. Class and classes can be identified in modern Western European societies, but whether they can replace the caste inequality of the soul and human nature is not at all obvious. Western societies themselves are confident that classes do so. But an existential approach to this problematic can call this into question.
The most important thing is how the human relates to death. There are those who can look it in the face, and those who always have their backs turned to it. But the origins of the social hierarchy, the fundamental distinction between people and the superiority of some to others consists in precisely this. Material conditions are not decisive here. Hegel’s interpretation of Master and Slave is based on this criterion. Hegel thinks that the Master is the one who challenges death, who steps out to encounter it. Acting in this way, he does not acquire immortality, but he acquires a Slave, one who runs from death, lacking the courage to look it in the eye. The Master rules in societies where death stands at the center of attention. The Slave acquires political rights only where death is bracketed and removed to the periphery. So long as death remains in society’s field of vision, we are dealing with rule by the wise and heroic, philosophers and warriors. This is caste society or estate society. But not class society. Where class begins, life ends, and the alienated strategies of reification, objectivation, and mediation prevail.
Hence, the Fourth Political Theory thinks that the construction of society on the basis of the criterion of property is a pathology. The fate of man and narod is history and geography—but in no way economics, the market, or competition.
The Fourth Political Theory rejects class as a concept and denies its relevance for the creation of a political system based on the existential understanding of the narod. Even more so does it reject the concept of the “middle class,” which reflects the very essence of the class approach. The middle class, like the middle (that is, average) person, is a social figure situated at the point of maximal social illusion, at the epicenter of slumber. The representative of the middle class corresponds to Heidegger’s figure of das Man, the generalized bearer of “common sense,” which is subject to no verification or examination. (Das Man is often translated into English as “The They,” in the sense of “They say so-and-so will win the election this year…) Das Man is the greatest of illusions.
The middle, average person is not at all the same as the normal person. “Norm” is a synonym for “ideal,” that to which one should strive, that which one should become. The middle person is a person in the least degree, the most ex-individual of individuals, the most null and barren quality. The middle person isn’t a person at all; he is a parody of a person. He is Nietzsche’s “Last Man.” And he is deeply abnormal, since for a normal person, it is natural to experience horror, to think about death, to acutely experience the finitude of being, to call into question—sometimes tragically insoluble—the external world, society, and relations to another.
The middle class doesn’t think; it consumes. It doesn’t live; it seeks security and comfort. It doesn’t die, it blows out like a car tire (it emits its spirit, as Baudrillard wrote in Symbolic Exchange and Death). The middle class is the most stupid, submissive, predictable, cowardly, and pathetic of all classes. It is equally far from the blazing elements of poverty and the perverted poison of incalculable wealth, which is even closer to hell than extreme poverty. The middle class has no ontological foundation for existing at all, and if it does, then only somewhere far below, beneath the rule of the philosopher-kings and warrior-heroes. It is the Third Estate, imagining about itself that it is the one and only. This is an unwarranted pretension. Modernity and capitalism (in the sense of the universality of the middle class) is nothing more than a temporary aberration. The time of this historical misunderstanding is coming to an end.
Thus, today, when the agony of this worst of possible social arrangements still continues, you must look beyond capitalism. At the same time, we must value and take interest in both what preceded it, the Middle Ages, and in that which will come after it and that which we must create—a New Middle Ages.
Translated by Michael Millerman
In the latest episode of Pope Francis trying to prove that he is the Spiritual Bolshevik-in-Chief, the Vatican permitted the performance of Jewish and Muslim prayers within its sacred sphere today.
In the latest episode of Pope Francis trying to prove that he is the Spiritual Bolshevik-in-Chief, the Vatican permitted the performance of Jewish and Muslim prayers within its sacred sphere today.
While the Church would never allow traditionalists to lead Masses in the Vatican, they’ll let people who don’t accept even the basic tenets of its religion to rent out the city for a day to make a meaningless gesture “for peace” in a land that will never know peace.
Put aside the religion debates within our circles for a moment and realize that this is a perfect symbol of the new faith of the Western world. A faith that treats every belief system as equal (unless they express White Identitarianism and condemn modernity), only stipulates that you be a “good” person (meaning following every guideline of the pervading politically correct dogma), orgasms to equality, demands tolerance for all (except certain evil White people and Boko Haram), opens up their sacred halls to foreign peoples, and celebrates the culture of the stranger while denigrating their own.
All the while knowing that these alien people would never extend the same generosity to Western religions.
In any case, it’s just another Monday in Pope Francis’ mission to spread egalitarianism to every corner of his Church.
As far as anti-establishment contemporary fiction goes, Derek Turner’s Sea Changes is among the best one is likely to read in English today. In tone, it is clearly a satire;…
As far as anti-establishment contemporary fiction goes, Derek Turner’s Sea Changes is among the best one is likely to read in English today. In tone, it is clearly a satire; in sensibility, it is clearly traditionalist; but in sentiment, it has the added virtues of temperance and compassion, qualities that steer this novel clear of the vices that have afflicted others dealing with immigration and the tone and character of modern race relations—Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints comes to mind—which have usually been vehicles for sublimated spleen. Perhaps the reason is that this novel was aimed at a mainstream audience, and not at fellow outsiders looking for a wink and a nod.
Sea Changes tells the story of Ibraham Nassouf, a young Iraqi. Desiring to escape the poverty and limited prospects of existence in his native Basra, he sets sights on emigrating to England, dreaming of the sort of life he had seen in Western media and magazines; his very grim and unpleasant journey, however, ends badly, for, having paid, along with dozens of others, a gang of human traffickers to take him to Britain, the latter decide to throw their human cargo into the sea and spray it with bullets after being challenged by a British coastal patrol. Ibraham is the only survivor, but he is washed on the beach along with forty or so of his fellow migrants, mostly African. The discovery, the suggestion that the migrants may have been murdered by local racists, and the throwaway remarks of a stolid farmer who finds himself in front of a television camera, being asked for comment by a reporter hyper-attuned to the racial angle, triggers a noisy media event, which dominates and is the raison d’être of the story.
Unusually, sympathy is with Ibraham, despite the fact that he funded his migration journey with money he earned working for a gangster in Basra. In a serio-comical fashion, at once caricaturesque and sophisticated, Turner skilfully conveys the squalor, uncertainties, precariety, mentality, and transient relationships involved in a journey of this nature. At each stage, Ibraham is reliant on a shady link in a long chain of sleazy, crooked, callous types who, while outwardly amiable, well-wishing, and occasionally hospitable, nevertheless make a living, or supplement their income, by fleecing the immigrants passing through. Ibraham is portrayed exactly as migrants are portrayed in Western media: a well-meaning, somewhat childlike, hard-working poor devil escaping war or poverty, and willing to go through hell for a better life in a rich Western country. Similar treatment is accorded to the Mediterranean countries of Europe forced to deal with the ever-rising tide of Third World migrants: the latter are seen by the authorities as pests, to be moved around and put out of sight in processing centres, where they languish in boredom and inactivity, but where they learn about rights they never imagined they had. It is a shadowy, confusing, and unforgiving world, constantly in flux, where every human is both predator and prey. What is worse, once Ibraham arrives at his destination, England, that paradise of the North Atlantic, it turns out his troubles have only just begun, for he becomes the ball in what is for him a confusing game of political football, in which he, the migrant of colour, is manipulated as a tool by the white English who, while appearing incredibly kind and helpful to him, are in fact completely self-absorbed and do not give a hoot about him. Eventually, he attains his dream—after some difficulty, he is allowed to remain in the United Kingdom—and he is even given permission to import his family. But life in London proves a tremendous disappointment, and we leave him living in bleak accommodation, jobless, with embarrassing flatmates, and in the throes of alienation, living in—but not part of—a culture he neither understands nor any longer wishes to understand. Looking back, life in Iraq, difficult as it was, at least offered community, friendships, and meaning. The process of migration proves destructive.
The closest to villain in the novel is John Leyden, a handsome Left-leaning journalist replete with fine phrases and crusading zeal, yet also egotistical, vain, shallow, arrogant, hypocritical, infantile, and spoilt rotten to the core. The reader does not end up hating him, however; rather, he comes across as a buffoon—a cog of the system he helps maintain. In the end, we are left to wonder about his motivations, for he is clearly not psychologically healthy or normal, despite his polished façade and professional success. His main antagonist is another journalist, Albert Norman, an old, grizzled, jaded, fat, wealthy, peppery, recalcitrant reactionary, whose politically incorrect column is both popular—indeed, it is the only thing levitating the circulation numbers in an otherwise modernising (=flagging) newspaper—and the last bastion of sense in a world gone mad. Along with Ibraham, Norman is Turner’s vehicle for some of his commentary on modern Britain, but, though almost heroic, he is ultimately an object of pity, for he is eventually defeated by the forces of ‘progress’ and even comes to realise his own futility. These two characters constitute the poles between which we find an array of depressingly familiar types: the thriving ethnic activist, the anti-racist thug, the Gerry Gables of this world, the ‘modernised’ offspring of rural parents, the cynical politicians, the semi-illiterate socialists, and, of course, the equally opportunistic, but far less skilled, anti-establishment politician. The latter, incidentally, a Nick Griffin analogue, has a seat in Parliament, until his party is banned in a swell of righteous fervour. Though stereotypes, all appear as three-dimensional characters, neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and indeed very human. All are, nevertheless, cogs in a machine.
Turner’s assessment of the situation is, therefore, that the problem is not the malfeasance of particular individuals, though some are more contemptible than others: everyone is implicated in some fashion, knowingly or unknowingly, actively or passively, whatever their individual reasons, however sensible their course of action may seem in the circumstances. The problem is systemic. And what sustains the system, in this case, is not the media, nor the politicians, nor any particular ethnic group, since they are all part of it: it is the idea that equality as the highest good—the highest expression of moral enlightenment. This is not explicitly stated in the novel; the latter is very focused on how British society today thinks about race and immigration. Yet, it is obvious, or it should be, that, in a type of society in which ethics possess singular importance, as is the case in Western societies, despite the corruption of modern times, what drives the tone and character of race relations today, and the debate on immigration, is the ethics of egalitarianism. That is what drives all the chatter, all the policies, all the decisions, all the actions and reactions despised by the type of reader who will read these lines. Without it, there would be no Sea Changes, nor a need for it. This is what, in my opinion, is most admirable about this novel, and why it is, to date, the most serious treatment of today’s cultural malaise, despite its satirical tone and occasional incursion into outright caricature. This is the only illustration I have seen in fiction of the way egalitarianism produces unfair, unjust, invidious, and unhappy outcomes. Something worth pondering.
There are, of course, some minor niggles, stemming from this being Turner’s first effort at fiction. I was distracted by the presence of superfluous adverbs, for example, a common mistake not made by more experienced writers of fiction, and not tolerated by professional editors at large mainstream publishers. And I am not a big fan of the front cover and general layout, which I think undersells the content. The book is, indeed, far better than it looks. Yet, this aside, Turner’s prose is elegant, effective, and rich with beautiful metaphor and well-crafted phrases. It is consistently good all the way through, and there is no sagging in the narrative, despite the predictable unfolding of events; it is, in fact, a page-turner, which sails along at a leisurely pace. Above all, Turner is to be commended for having successfully negotiated, with humour, sensitivity, and insight, a topic given to hysterics (on both sides), making the case against egalitarianism for readers of any political persuasion, radical and conformist alike.
A conservative is someone who identifies with an institution but will not accept the means necessary to create or maintain it. This especially extends to religion, where modern Christians will adopt the trappings of Sacred Tradition and the heritage of a particular denomination but enthusiastically condemn their own past. What they want is simply for modernity to suffer them to exist. What they worship is egalitarianism – and the “god” they invented is simply a marketing scam.
A conservative is someone who identifies with an institution but will not accept the means necessary to create or maintain it. This especially extends to religion, where modern Christians will adopt the trappings of Sacred Tradition and the heritage of a particular denomination but enthusiastically condemn their own past. What they want is simply for modernity to suffer them to exist. What they worship is egalitarianism – and the “god” they invented is simply a marketing scam.
L’enfant terrible Matt Heimbach and longtime white activist Matt Parrot operate the Traditional Youth Network, an organization that fights for “Traditionalism” with heavy Christian overtones. Both Matts are converts to Orthodox Christianity, and incorporate their faith into their activism, with explicit role models including the Romanian Iron Guard, the Greek Golden Dawn, and to a lesser extent, Putin’s Russia. To many reactionaries, Traditionalists, and white advocates, an Orthodox civilization with what Dugin calls the “Byzantine idea of the symphony of powers” is gradually forming a counter-bloc to the post-modern “West,” which seemingly defines itself by multiculturalism and sexual degeneracy. This may be actually happening — or it might just be another example of the hard right falling into its classic error of seeing what they want to see. (Ron and Rand Paul anyone?)
Whatever the case, despite the reputation of Heimbach and Parrot as primarily white advocates, much of the TYN’s energy is directed towards restoring a kind of old-fashioned Christian moralism. They oppose feminism, homosexuality, and the breakdown of the family. A true organic society, they argue, is opposed to both “rape culture” and “slut culture.” Thus, a group of TYN activists, featuring a bearded Heimbach sporting an Orthodox cross, protested a “Slutwalk” at Indiana University. As to be expected, they were attacked by violent leftists, giving us the amusing image of Matt Heimbach, Cross-Bearer, defending his comrades.
Soon afterward, one Father Peter Jon Gillquist issued an “important message” to his congregation saying that Matt Heimbach had been excommunicated. Normally, this would be private of course, but “as in the present case of Matthew Heinbach” [sic] it was necessary to trumpet his actions to the world. “Heinbach” apparently was only received into the church because Father Gillquist did not know about Heimbach’s “nationalist, segregationist” views. And after all, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).”
This is similar to the denunciation of Jewish convert “Brother Nathaniel” by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia on the same grounds that “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all (Colossians 3:11).”
Naturally, various “Orthodox bloggers” hastened to make sure they were also counted among the elect. A Father “Ernesto Obregon” implicitly compared TYN to a pedophile – perhaps an unfortunate insult for priests to be slinging these days. Obregon also confessed he had a “nightmare” that TYN’s views would be seen as Orthodox. As terrifying as it sounds,
“They continue to post very pro-White messages on their Facebook page. No, they do not post overtly anti-other ethnic group messages…Nevertheless, one finds direct links to more toxic groups…. one encounters messages very much in favor of each ethnic group being able to maintain its cultural identity, and encouraging people to marry within their ethnic group to preserve that identity and keep each ethnicity separate and clearly identifiable.”
And we can’t have that. At least among whites.
Eric Jobe, a Ph.D candidate who mostly “specializes in Hebrew poetry, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Second Temple Judaism,” offers us some subtle and intellectual rhetoric that it is a “satanic delusion” to believe in racial integrity. Also, “racism and ethnic nationalism is just such a malignant tumor and an infectious disease that has no place among the holy people of God.”
There’s also one Sister Maria Gwyn McDowell. Sister McDowell is a “feminist [and] a student of liberation theology” with a “doctorate in Theological Ethnics from Boston College.” She entertains herself by suggesting that the Theotokos is on the side of Pussy Riot and publishing other “anti-kyriarchal” amusements. A real model of piety – and one who need have no fear of excommunication.
The most important response, however, is that of the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher who giggles about getting to use words like “repent” and “heresy” to attack “racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism.” “When things like this happen in public, the Church must speak clearly and uncompromisingly about them,” Dreher intones. Dreher also throws in a sneering reference to “neopaganism” for good measure. No Church Militant for the “Crunchy Con.”
Interestingly, many of the self-proclaimed Orthodox Christians critical of TYN do not come from the customary Orthodox background of ethnic communities. Fr. Gillquist is the son of Archpriest Peter Gillquist, who led a movement of former Protestant evangelicals into the Orthodox Church in America. Dreher is a former Methodist who converted to Catholicism and then Orthodoxy. Father Obregon,
another convert, is upset about “pro-White messages” but trumpets his Cuban ethnicity in the very name of his blog precisely because it is not a traditional Orthodox community. And while “McDowell” claims to be a longtime member of the church, her participation in it seems to be characterized by her desire to change everything about it. Not surprisingly, she writes that members of her family were “Jewish… card-carrying communists.”
Perhaps more than any other Christian denomination (not including the poorly attended “national churches” of Europe), the Orthodox Church is characterized by its close identification with national and cultural boundaries. The explicit identification of the two is condemned as the heresy of “Phyletism.” However, formal condemnation does not change the fact that Orthodox Church organizational bodies tend to be rooted in a particular community and even churches in the United States are closely linked to ethnic groups with a strong identity. Like Mexicans coming to America or Yankees coming to the South, Dreher and his new friends are doing their best to turn their refuge into a carbon copy of the thing they once fled by condemning this.
More importantly, as even McDowell admits, the Orthodox Church is not exactly a bastion of egalitarianism. It could even be called a particularly “kyriachal” institution. Groups like the Black Hundreds and the Iron Guard were inspired by Orthodoxy and received the blessing of church officials. St. John of Kronstadt was a member of a nationalist party and expressed his dedication to the Russian Tsar, as highlighted by TYN. The Church Father St. John Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos explicitly blames the Jews for the crucifixion and suggests that the “chosen people” of God are now Christians – “They became dogs, and we became the children.”
Of more relevance is the traditional Eastern Christian unity between church and state. The Russian government and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church are pushing a new narrative of an Orthodox “Russian world” that will provide an alternative to the decadent West, much to the wailing of the media. Patriarch Kirill explicitly identifies the mission of his church as a defender of a “Russian world” that is a “distinct civilization” based upon Orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, possible ecclesiastical divisions among Orthodox communities are becoming a forerunner to possible political divisions in Ukraine.
What is at stake is two differing ways of viewing the church, and in a larger sense, religion. TYN sees the faith as a one element of a people composed of “faith, biology, and culture.” A faith may be universally applicable, but it should support a people’s right to maintain its own separate existence. It is an ordering principle for a people. Whatever the theological truth of this, this is how most religions develop, particularly the Eastern Christianity characterized by strong links to the state and organized along national lines. The Russian Orthodox Church of today sees itself in this way.
The second way is to regard religion as a purely abstract creed that can be adopted by anyone. This is at the heart of Jobe’s chest pounding about a “holy people of God” who may be from any background, but adopt certain beliefs. It is the “proposition religion.” Jobe, McDowell, Fr. Obregon, and Fr. Gillquist reflect this in their oddly simplistic and emotional pronouncements that Orthodox Christianity mandates the destruction of white ethnic identity.
The reduction of Christianity to “you are neither Jew nor Gentile, man nor woman” seems almost designed to force non-suicidal whites to adopt explicit Identitarian religion and Neopaganism. Dreher clearly senses this, hence his attack. But Dreher is the most dishonest of TYN’s critics because he wants to have it both ways. Dreher is pursuing what the late Lawrence Auster called an “unprincipled exception” to liberalism. He wants a conservative denomination that reflects his interest in place and community and allow him a superficial dissent from political correctness once in a while. However, he will not tolerate anything that has a definitive statement against liberal universalism.
As Dreher’s own life shows us, Catholicism used to be the cliché conversion faith for American conservatives trying to look hard. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when the Pope was condemning “Americanism” as a heresy. However, that is increasingly hard to sustain when the contemporary Vicar of Christ tweets profound wisdom like “inequality is the root of social evil.” Of course, that hasn’t stopped Catholic conservatives from maintaining the proud post-Vatican II tradition that whoever is Pope didn’t actually mean whatever the latest tripe he served. But it has reduced the Church of Rome’s appeal. Now the hot new thing is Orthodoxy, but the same hollowing out process has already begun, at least in America.
What is called “religion” in the modern world isn’t really religion at all. It’s simply a collection of empty rituals that serve as variations on the same egalitarian theme. Absent a direct connection to community, religion is viewed publicly like choosing a sports team or a favorite food – a private preference of little consequence. The fact that almost all religions are identified with ethnic communities or a past connection to a regime or cultural order simply makes it easier for people to continue to align with it out of shallow nostalgia. But the linkage is no longer explicit.
As modernity runs its course, the churches actually serve as a necessary safety valve. They give people the illusion of identity without the substance. They present the form of Tradition while preaching a doctrine of destruction. And they carry forward the existence of an institution while hollowing it out from the inside. Those churches that try to cling to doctrine in the face of this usually fall into the trap of the “unprincipled exception” themselves – for example, hammering on the sin of gay marriage, while fanatically preaching about the evils of racism. Far from being an obstacle to modernity, the churches are a ne
cessary facilitator, a tool to systematically render would be Traditionalists either impotent or counterproductive.
Before long of course, the institutions are exhausted. What is, after all, the Unitarian Church other than a tax dodge for progressive activists? What are the mainline Protestant churches but facilitators of mass immigration? And what is the bulk of the Catholic Church today but yet another ornate temple to social democracy, albeit one that opposes abortion on the grounds of egalitarianism? Those believers that are left are betrayed by their own shepherds. Viewing the collapse of American churches, it seems that Orthodoxy is simply a generation behind. Like American conservatism, American religion is a “game, a way of making a living,” in the words of Joe Sobran, another man who took the heritage of his church seriously and paid for it.
Dreher bases his career (such as it is) on the importance of “place,” but peoples create significance and meaning, not tracts of dirt or old buildings. And peoples sustain a faith or doom it to oblivion. Whatever the truth of a particular doctrine, once cut off from the ethnic roots that sustain it, a faith will either wither and die or transform into a golem like monstrosity that will choke the life out of the very community that gave it existence.
Joseph de Maistre, a great Christian reactionary, wrote that every people gets the government it deserves. This may be true of the churches as well, as the denominations are drying up in the shallow soil of 21st century America, leaving the real seekers for Truth bereft. Matt Parrot asks, “What does a man do when his championship of Authority and Tradition results in his traditional authority prohibiting his life’s work immediately and without warning?” Perhaps the answer is that the authority he bowed to is not a real guardian of Tradition or legitimate authority. Perhaps it doesn’t even have a stake in its own long term survival. Perhaps, it doesn’t want to be saved from itself.
It is not for me (of all people) to answer which side “God” is on in this fight. But I can say this with certainty. Whatever God TYN’s critics worship, it is not the God of St. John of Kronstadt, St. John Chrysostom, or the soldiers that fought in the name of Holy Russia throughout the centuries. It is not the God that sustained the monarchies of Eastern Europe, the oppressed Christians groaning under Muslim occupation for centuries, or even the Russian faithful of today.
It’s just the politically correct god of the Market Place, decrying the newly invented sins of “racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.” It’s a god who doesn’t offer salvation or even damnation, but just passive aggressive lecturing. It’s a god our rulers depend on even more than the most tyrannical autocrat of the past depended on his state church. And if that’s the “God” we’re expected to bow to, I’d rather be a “heretic” – or a heathen.
Frazier Glenn Miller, aka “Rounder,” aka Frazier Glenn Cross, is a perfect example of the self-important, self-aggrandizing Fuhrer in his own mind that plagues the “far right.”
The purpose of contemporary political debate is not to discover truth, but to tag your opponent with positions he can’t defend. Like in other marketplaces, the man who profits most in the “marketplace of ideas” isn’t the one with the best product, but the one who is the best salesman, the slickest talker, and the best psychological manipulator.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is the undisputed Jordan Belfort in the con artist competition that we call democracy, and all their skills are in full display in the wake of latest violent self-immolation here in the Land of the Free. Of course, they couldn’t ask for better material.
Frazier Glenn Miller, aka “Rounder,” aka Frazier Glenn Cross, is a perfect example of the self-important, self-aggrandizing Fuhrer in his own mind that plagues the “far right.”
Miller, known as “Traitor Glenn Miller” among white nationalists, was once the leader of the White Patriot Party who issued a tragicomic “declaration of war” against “ZOG” which he sent to law enforcement. Of course, his “war” quickly collapsed and he promptly testified as a witness for “ZOG” against his “comrades” in exchange for freedom (and, it is rumored, booze), earning well deserved scorn from activists around the country.
Now, he has achieved the masterpiece of his despicable career by emerging as a fat, neckbearded lunatic shrieking about Hitler in the back of a police car after murdering three white, non-Jewish people. Whether Miller is a professional anti-white activist, a sociopathic traitor, or simply a drunk who is too stupid and evil to be allowed to live makes no difference. Nor will it make a difference to the people whose lives he took, or the families that he destroyed. He will simply be remembered as someone who made an invaluable contribution towards the utter destruction of European Civilization.
Not surprisingly, the SPLC is in full preen, and doing their best to “link” Miller to as many people as possible, especially those he previously sold out. Their collaborators in the controlled media are also doing their best to use Miller’s disgusting crime to discredit anyone who doesn’t want to see all whites share the fate of Miller’s victims.
Intriguingly, one of the official enemies are “Odinists.” Daniel Burke, the SWPL stereotype who edits the CNN Belief Blog has a breathless hit piece on Miller’s supposed “neo-pagan religion.” The source for this is Miller’s rambling autobiography which holds that “Valhalla does not accept Negroes” and ends with “Praise Odin, pass the ammunition, Sieg Heil, and Heil Hitler!”
Of course, Miller’s most “successful” career phase came when he was organizing the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which later became the White Patriot Party. The organization explicitly organized around Christian Identity ideology and symbolism. As the article states, Miller presented himself as a “traditional monotheist” when he ran for office (as a Democrat, as the Beltway Right gleefully insists.) Moreover, when Miller spoke at a college campus in 2012, he apparently self-identified as an atheist.
Nonetheless, the SPLC is having none of it, and Burke dutifully reprints their official statements as Holy Writ. “The faith’s obsession with genetic purity, racial supremacy and conquering supposedly lesser peoples is a recipe for violence,” bleats one of their mouthpieces. Still, after protest, the article was revised to include comments from those who hold Asatru is a “peaceful and proudly multicultural religion.” Lefty neo-pagan blogs eager to jettison folkish belief systems are also seizing on the incident and the likes of Heathens United Against Racism are making the rote pronunciations that “there is no place for racism in heathenry.”
Though many supposed neo-pagans are angry with CNN for the hit piece, all of this is part of the same agenda. The danger – and potential – of what is commonly called Asatru is that it challenges the metapolitics and moral foundation of modernity. Egalitarianism, “human rights,” and the universal basis of morality underpin both secular and Christian morality in the modern world. The moral positions of an Episcopalian bishop and an Ethnic Studies professor are essentially indistinguishable. Even the more conservative denominations such as the Roman Catholic Church or evangelical parishes challenge secular humanism only from the Left, with the former claiming that progressives need to be more concerned about the unegalitarian implications of abortion and the latter worried about the racist consequences of evolution.
Real Asatru is a fundamental challenge to this entire worldview on two levels. First, as an identitarian religion, it denies the universalistic basis of morality and the Kantian categorical imperative. It holds that we have greater commitments to our kinsmen and those bound by oath to us than we have to racial aliens scattered throughout the entire world. In contrast, both modern Christians and secular progressives seem to attach greater importance to the children in Africa than they do to white children in their own community.
But there is a greater truth at the core of the Old Way. Odinism is a call to hierarchy and to excellence. Odin is not just a god or a deified man, but a path to continual self-overcoming. Salvation, insofar as it is offered, is accomplished through great works in service to the tribe, not through abstract belief. The pagan did not fear hellfire but a dull, grey afterlife that could only be avoided through acts of courage and legendary heroism. To enjoy life with the gods after death, it was necessary to pursue becoming a god here on Earth.
Indeed, real Asatru can hardly be called a “religion” in the traditional sense, as practice, ritual, and belief varied widely from tribe to tribe in both pre-Christian Europe and among heathens today. It is something you do, not something you believe. The deeds that are performed are in the service of a greater overcoming. The heathen unapologetically seeks greatness, in wisdom, strength, and beauty. There no possible reading of egalitarianism within Germanic paganism because there is no doctrine of the equality of souls. All men are created unequal, both here and in the afterlife.
The problem is that both “racist” and “anti-racist” self-styled heathens feel the need to simply adopt Christian symbolism and morality and substitute Nordic names. For the “far right,” a comic book belief in the Nordic gods as simply being “badass” or “stron
g” neglects the reality that the pagan conception of life is tragic – even the gods are born to die, and their power is limited. It makes no sense to pray to “Odin” or “Thor” as a Christ figure who will simply redeem people from their own failures or weaknesses.
Asatru is deeper than just a “warrior faith” for twenty something males – it is a system of archetypes, rituals and values that enables a different way of life. Acting the same as everyone else and living a life fully enmeshed in modernity is not walking the Odinic Path. Living apart from ritual, nature, and the sacred does not give someone the right to call himself a pagan as long as he is wearing a Mjolnir he ordered off a website.
For the Left, it is even worse, as they accept modern Christian egalitarian morality and simply substitute the names. Just as the Christian God has slowly devolved into a fuzzy Martin Luther King in the sky as He is slowly stripped of his Germanic trappings, so is Glad-Of-War transformed into a pacifist whose moral code is indistinguishable from the Unitarian Universalists. After all, by whatever name they call it — be it Jesus Christ, “Reason,” the Earth Goddess, or even the degenerate All-Father they have now conjured — egalitarians ultimately worship the same thing. The dream of a world without struggle, and thus without distinction, is the sacred vision of the left wing pagan, who finds even the remnants of orthodox Christianity too demanding. Instead of the sacred galdr of the runes within a vé hallowed by sacrifice and filled with the essence of bood and smoke , the litany of universalist pagans is John Lennon’s “Imagine,” played from a Mac, surrounded by weed and patchouli oil.
As for Traitor Glenn Miller, his shifting styles and stated beliefs indicate that he never actually lived as a heathen, nor believed in it. It was simply a collection of symbols that could be tacked on to make him seem more important and fearsome. And, it must be admitted, he is not alone. The caricatured “Viking Religion” too often serves as a cover for the weak who seek to make themselves appear strong.
The Hávamál, the Words of the High One, are not license for indulgence. Instead, they warn to avoid pointless pleasure seeking and retire from the feast early, to moderately consume alcohol, to listen to the counsel of the old and the wise, to be a courteous guest and host, and most of all, to speak meaningful words or remain silent. Each word simply leads to another word – but each deed leads to another deed. Wild boasts of pointless violence, breaking of oaths, militant posturing, and the murder of defenseless members of the folk are not just shameful acts — they are treason against the folk and the gods.
Yet it would seem to me that such metaphors as “cultural Marxism” or “liberal Nazism” are not really the best characterizations of PC. The best label for PC I ever encountered was “totalitarian humanism.”
In light of Mozilla’s CEO having to step down for his opposition to same-sex marriage, here’s Keith Preston’s take on the ideology that dominates the West today
Many on the alternative Right are inclined to refer to PC as “cultural Marxism.” In some ways, this is an apt metaphor, as the PC ideology bears a resemblance to the reductionist concept of class antagonism that orthodox Marxism advances. If the dualistic class dichotomy of “proletarians and bourgeoisie” is replaced with a newer dichotomy pitting feminist women, minorities, gays, immigrants, the transgendered and others having been or believed to be oppressed against the “hegemony” of “straight, white, Christian, males,” then similarities between PC and Marxism do indeed emerge. However, PC could in some ways be compared with totalitarianism from the other end of the political spectrum. If the duality of “Aryans” believed to be oppressed by and in mortal struggle with “the Jews” is replaced with the aforementioned dichotomy advanced by PC, a reductionism of comparable crudity likewise becomes apparent. Yet it would seem to me that such metaphors as “cultural Marxism” or “liberal Nazism” are not really the best characterizations of PC.
The best label for PC I ever encountered was “totalitarian humanism.” I can’t take credit for this term. I lifted it from an anonymous underground writer some years ago. Read the original essay here. Here’s a particularly enlightened part:
When one looks up the word ‘Humanism’ in an encyclopedia it states that Humanism is an ideology which focuses on the importance of every single human being. That it is an “ideology which emphasizes the value of the individual human being and its ability to develop into a harmonic and culturally aware personality”. This sounds fair enough, right? Indeed it does, but it is my firm belief that the explanation here does not match the humanism of our time.
The so-called Humanists I have met have been putting a strong emphasis on humanity as a gigantic community rather than on the individual. Often one will even find alleged humanists who insist that the views, aspirations and basic happiness of indigenous Europeans is of no importance. Instead, these Humanists say, indigenous Europeans should bow down and forget about their own wants and desires for the greater good of humanity. The greater good of Humanity usually seems to be to take no interest in Europe’s cultural heritage and integrate into a grey, world-wide, uniform “globalization” with the Coca-Cola-culture as loadstar.
Totalitarian humanism is a derivative of the classical Jacobin ideology that loves an abstract and universal “humanity” so much that its proponents don’t care what has to be done to individual human beings or particular human cultures in order to advance their ideals. Perhaps the best summary of the political outlook of totalitarian humanism was provided by the maverick psychiatrist and critic of the “therapeutic state,” Thomas Szasz:
In the nineteenth century, a liberal was a person who championed individual liberty in a context of laissez-faire economics, who defined liberty as the absence of coercion, and who regarded the state as an ever-present threat to personal freedom and responsibility. Today, a liberal is a person who champions social justice in a context of socialist economics, who defines liberty as access to the means for a good life, and who regards the state as a benevolent provider whose duty is to protect people from poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs.
Dr. Szasz wrote this passage nearly twenty years ago. Nowadays, the laundry list of “poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs” might be lengthened to include classism, ageism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, looksism, fatphobia, thinism, beautyism, transphobia, producerism, “appearance discrimination,” speciesism, adultcentrism, pedophobia, chronocentrism, and other creative efforts at dictionary expansion. Likewise, the therapeutic component of totalitarian humanism has expanded so as to include the supposed necessity of state action to save us all from fatty foods, salt, smoking, and soda vending machines in public schools. Like all totalitarian ideologies, totalitarian humanism has its contradictions, hypocrisies, and absurdities. For instance, public acts of anal intercourse are regarded as virtuous and courageous manifestations of human liberation and personal fulfillment, while smoking in bars or even in strip clubs is a grave menace to public health. Suggestive music videos and violent video games are symptomatic of an oppressively patriarchal and testosterone-fueled society, while surgically altering one’s “gender identity” is just routine day-to-day business, like getting a tattoo.
As one with something of a taste for the bizarre and eccentric, I might find the PC circus to be little more than a philistine but amusing bit of outrageous entertainment, akin to professional wrestling or the old freak shows of carnivals past, if it weren’t for the fact that these folks are hell-bent on imposing their “ideals” on the rest of us by force of the state. Totalitarian humanism is a war on sovereignty. It is a war on the sovereignty of individuals against arbitrary and coercive authority, the sovereignty of non-state institutions against political authority, the sovereignty of organic communities against a centralized leviathan, the sovereignty of nations against global entities, the sovereignty of history, tradition, and culture against prescriptive and prohibitive ideology. Totalitarian humanism is an effort to reduce all of us to the level of dependent serfs on a plantation ruled by an army of overly zealous concerned mommies and busy-body social workers backed up by the S.W.A.T. team and paramilitary police. Give me beautyism or give me death.
The beast won’t starve. The beast is still getting seconds, and dessert, and a nip off that dusty old bottle of port from the cellar.
Originally published at Jack-Donovan.com
So, you’re going to refuse to buy something from company x, even though it would be to your immediate advantage to do so.
You want to “starve the beast,” or “refuse to support a company that __.”
That’s nice.
NO ONE CARES.
Sure, if a small business has a handful of customers, and half of them stop buying in protest, you can really force an owner to re-think his policy. It’s standard procedure for leftists to bully mom and pop shops into baking lesbian wedding cakes, or run them out of business by smearing them as “racists” or “sexists” or some other offense to the People’s Revolution of Hand-Holding Vegan Transvestites. Happens all the time.
But a company operating in a national or global market isn’t going to notice if 1,000 radical weirdos switch brands of shampoo. Unless you manage to shame them in the mainstream media and your objection goes viral, no one will even notice. You’re a rounding error.
The beast won’t starve. The beast is still getting seconds, and dessert, and a nip off that dusty old bottle of port from the cellar.
Your refusal to open your precious little purse is not only pointless, it’s also reductive. If your critique of modernity is that it reduces us all to bank accounts and units of labor, then why reduce your protest of modernity to a financial transaction? You may say, “to hit ‘em where it hurts,” but since it doesn’t hurt, then why bother?
I understand not wanting to luxuriate in the tasteless decadence of Wal-Mart, but if they have the lowest price on something you need for your survival or to advance your own concerns — GO BUY THAT SHIT.
No shot-callers care about your personal boycott, which matters about as much as your fringe vote, so refusing to buy something you could use or paying more to buy it elsewhere is self-destructive asceticism at best, and vapid in-group social posturing at worst. You’re not starving the beast. You’re starving yourself, or starving your cause.
Use the system. Use it like a whore. Take what you want from it and leave the rest for the rats.
And what’s more — instead of boycotting, turn the whole thing around.
Don’t worry about withholding money from the people you don’t like. Concentrate on putting resources into the hands of people doing things you enjoy or believe in.
Don’t go out of your way to avoid buying something from a company you hate. Go out of your way to buy something from a company you like.
And don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. It’s good practice in Portland to assume that everyone I come in contact with is some kind of Progressive, if not a complete hippy fruitcake. If I worried about that, I could never support anything local. If they’re doing something I think is essentially good, but for all of the wrong reasons, that’s probably still better than most of the alternatives.
Money is only a means — a way to achieve an end. Withholding money is a passive-aggressive scold, not a positive path forward. If you want to exert a positive influence, instead of being a miserable bastard who is always against everything, show people in your sphere how you are using money as a means to support ideas that matter to you.
This, too, can be obnoxious once it catches on, as you well know if you’ve listened to SWPLs (or urban elves, as I call them) brag about buying recycled toilet paper or “free trade” coffee beans.
It does, however, seem to be more effective than bitching all the time, or financially handicapping yourself by refusing to buy trivial things at the lowest price.
The following was delivered as a speech to the Britain-based Libertarian Alliance on February 10th.
The following was delivered as a speech to the Britain-based Libertarian Alliance on February 10th. You can listen to the speech there.
To understand the rubbish heap that England has become, it is useful to look at the circumstances that prompted the emergence of the modern State in Europe.
Around the end of the thirteenth century, the world entered one of its cooling phases. In a world of limited technology, this lowered the Malthusian ceiling – by which I mean the limit to which population was always tending, and beyond which it could not for any long time rise. Populations that could just about feed themselves during the warm period were now too large.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, this pressure was suddenly relieved by the Black Death, which seems to have killed about a third of the English population, and probably about a third of the human race as a whole. The result was a collapse of population somewhat below the Malthusian ceiling. In turn, this led – in England and Western Europe, at least – to an age of plenty for ordinary people.
However, continued cooling and a recovery of population led, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to renewed contact with the Malthusian ceiling. So far as we can tell from the English statistics – which are the most complete and generally accurate – ordinary living standards fell rapidly throughout that century. With mild variations, they continued to fall until the last third of the eighteenth century. While the ceiling tended to rise during this period, the corresponding tendency to higher average living standards was offset by rising population. Living standards began to recover strongly only after the middle of the nineteenth century, when renewed warming, joined by the Industrial Revolution, lifted the ceiling out of sight. Even so, living standards in England did not recover their fifteenth century levels till about the 1880s. It was later elsewhere in Western Europe.
I think these natural forces go far to explaining the sudden emergence of religious mania and political unrest in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Reformation and Wars of Religion can be explained partly in terms of an unfolding intellectual change. Ideas are an autonomous force. At the same time, the force of the explosion we date from 1517 has its origin in perturbations of the Sun, or whatever other natural cause drives changes in the climate.
One of the responses of the governing classes to the spreading wave of instability was to centralise and greatly to strengthen power. Most notably in France, but in Western Europe generally, kings were exalted far above their mediaeval status. Because they were unreliable members of the new order, nobilities were brought under control, and power was shared with humble officials, who might collectively grow powerful, but who individually could be made or broken as kings found convenient. The various divine right theories of this age were the legitimising ideology of the new order.
In France, the King withdrew to Versailles. The leading nobles were required to live with him, thereby breaking their connection with the land from which they were allowed to continue drawing their wealth. Much government was given to a class of office holders, who multiplied their functions and arrested much tendency to economic improvement in ways that I do not need to describe.
I turn now to England. In some degree, there was a growth of absolutism here during the sixteenth century. The Tudor Kings ended the civil wars, and made themselves supreme and unchallenged. Because England was an island with only one land border – and Scotland was easily managed – there was no need for a standing army; and standing armies, and the consequent arms race between states with land borders, were a secondary cause of the growth of absolutism. Even so, the Tudor Monarchy ruled England through a strong administration centred on London.
This growth was arrested and reversed in 1641, by the abolition of nearly every body of state unknown to the Common Law. The Privy Council remained, but its subordinate institutions – Star Chamber, for example, and the Council of the North – were swept away. The immediate result was civil war, followed by a republic run by religious maniacs. But this soon collapsed, and the Monarchy was restored in 1660.
However, the Restoration was of the Monarchy in name only. It is best seen as an aristocratic coup. The Restoration Parliament finished the work of 1641, by abolishing the feudal tenures, by which the Monarchy had kept control over the nobility. The landed aristocracy gained something like absolute title over their estates, untouchable by the King. The network of fights and obligations that tied them to those who worked the land was simplified to a relationship of landlord and tenant.
From the 1660s, we can see the emergence of an aristocratic ruling class checked only at the margins by the Crown. Before then, Members of Parliament were often humble men from their localities, who needed to look to their localities for expenses and even salaries. Very soon, the Commons was flooded with the younger sons of peers and aristocratic nominees. Andrew Marvell was one of the last of the last Members of Parliament who needed to draw a salary. The commons became an aristocratic club. This process was hastened by the decay of many boroughs and the growth of the more or less unrepresentative system that was ended only after 1832.
There was one attempt at reaction by the Crown. Charles II presided over the growth of a new official class. Samuel Pepys is the most famous representative of this class. But there is also Leolyn Jenkins, the son of a Welsh farm labourer, who was educated in the Roman Law – not the Common Law – and who led the parliamentary resistance to the Exclusion Bills by which the aristocracy in effect tried to seize control over who could be King of England.
But James II overplayed his hand, and was deposed and exiled in 1688. Thereafter, the aristocracy did control appointment to the Crown, and was able to monopolise every institution of state – allowing those that failed to serve its interest to atrophy.
During the eighteenth century, the internal administration in England became largely a matter of obedience to the Common Law. History was written backwards, so that it became a narrative of struggle to maintain or to restore a set of ancient liberties that were usually over-stressed, or even mythical. I suspect that any educated man brought forward from 1500 to 1750 would have failed to recognise his own England in the standard histories. The tension between competing institutions and legal systems that shaped his life had been reduced to a set of struggles over a Common Law that was only one element in what he considered the legitimate order of things.
I repeat that ideas are an autonomous force. The whiggish ideologies that dominated the century were strongly believed by the ruling class, and were beneficial to the people as a whole. Opposition to Walpole’s excise, and the Theatres Bill cannot be simply explained as the play of sectional interests, or the work of politicians hungry for office. There was an almost paranoid suspicion of government within the ruling class, and a corresponding exaltation of the liberties of the people. But English liberty was also a collateral benefit of the aristocratic coups of 1660 and 1688. Self-help and a high degree of personal freedom were allowed to flourish ultimately because the enlightened self-interest of those who ruled England maintained a strong bias against any growth of an administrative state – the sort of state that would be able to challenge aristocratic dominance. People were left alone – often in vicious pursuits – because any regulation would have endangered the settlements of 1660-88.
Our understanding of English history in the nineteenth century is shaped by the beliefs of the contending parties in that century. The liberals and early socialists demanded an enlarged franchise and administrative reform, because they claimed this would give ordinary people a controlling voice in government. The conservatives claimed that extending the franchise would lead to the election of demagogues and levellers by a stupid electorate.
This does not explain what happened. Liberal democracy was a legitimising ideology for the establishment of a new ruling class – a ruling class of officials and associated commercial interests that drew power and status from an enlarged state. The British State was not enlarged for the welfare of ordinary people. The alleged welfare of ordinary people was merely an excuse for the enlargement of the British State. The real beneficiaries were the sort of people who thought highly of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
If this analysis is correct, men like John Stuart Mill and even Richard Cobden were at best useful idiots for the bad side in a struggle over which group of special interests should rule England. The real heroes for libertarians were men like Lord Eldon and Colonel Sibthorp, who resisted all change, or men like Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, who, after the battle for “reform” was lost, found ways to moderate and, in the short term, to neutralise the movement of power from one group to another. Or the greatest hero of all was Lord Elcho, who kept the Liberty and Property League going until he nearly and hundred, and who fought a bitter rearguard action for an aristocratic ascendency that was intimately connected with the rights to life, liberty and property of ordinary people.
This is not to romanticise the aristocratic ascendency. Eighteenth century England was a brutal place filled with injustice – the game laws, the press gang, a chaotic civil and criminal law, pervasive corruption. All the same, utopia has never been on offer. I will end by addressing myself to left-libertarians like Kevin Carson and Keith Preston. Their critique of the corporate elites and the plutocracy that are hurrying us into tyranny is fundamentally correct. But they are wrong to denounce the aristocratic ascendency that preceded the system under which we now live. It would have been nice for England to emerge into the modern world as a land of masterless men – of yeomen farmers and independent craftsmen and tradesmen. But this was never on offer. By the time the eighteenth century radicals found their voice, the only alternatives on offer were aristocratic ascendency and middle class bureaucracy. Old Lord Fartleigh had his faults. He hated the Papists, and thought nothing of hanging poachers. But he would never have thought it his business to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy, or whether we could smoke in the local pub.
Let it never be forgotten that the demolition of aristocratic rule was largely completed by the Liberal Government elected in 1906. This was the Government that also got us into the Great War, and kept us in it to the bitter end. The kind of people who formed it had already given us most of the moral regulation that we think of as Victorian – regulation that was usually resisted in the Lords. Since then, these people have taken up one legitimising ideology after another – national efficiency, the welfare of the working classes, multiculturalism, environmentalism, supranational government. The common thread in all these ideologies has been their usefulness as a figleaf behind which ordinary people could be taxed and regulated and conscripted, and generally made to dance as their rulers desire. Perhaps the main reason why Classical Marxism never became important in England was that, just when it was very big in the world, Keynesian demand management emerged as a more suitable legitimising ideology for the ruling class we now had.
I therefore commend the English landed aristocracy. If I am now, in middle age, an increasingly radical libertarian, it is only because I have realised that the system raised up by that class can no more be restored than the class itself can be made supreme again.
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