The Final Stage Of The Cycle: The Era Of Liberty

This is the final installment of my trilogy (See: The Era Of Security, The Era Of Equality) on time, dealing with the era of Liberty.  I’ll go light on the historical part in order to discuss how ideology interacts with the flow of time and especially the role neoreaction can play.

In truth, the era of Liberty is more interesting to live in than to describe.  This is when anything seems possible.  Population grows, and with that comes territorial expansion in the form of colonization and conquest.  Trade and technological development proceed rapidly.  In every material sense, the era of Liberty is a period of improvement.

The era of Liberty gets its name from the way it arises out of the era of Security.  Once security has been produced, people stop worrying about whether they will live and start concerning themselves with enjoying the fruits of life.  They don’t just want to have life and property—they want to use them.  This involves an expansion of legal freedoms and an increase in political participation.  Traditional restraints on behavior become more relaxed, and power begins to shift from authoritarian institutions like the family and state into the hands of civil society.

Within the society, concord largely reigns in spite of this liberalization.  Old habits born out of the era of Security and present incentives combine to encourage a general respect for person and property even as other forms of authority start to lose their hold.  With this general peace, it becomes dramatically easier to acquire wealth, power, and status through peaceful cooperation; violence is most profitable when directed toward outsiders.  The neighbors of a society experiencing an era of Liberty would do well to maintain friendly terms with it.

It is the very success the era of Liberty enables which dooms it in the end.  There are two factors at work.  Success breeds excessively optimistic expectations, and when these are not met, resentment grows.  Also, the society grows wealthy and powerful enough that directing violence toward the outside is no longer as profitable as looting one’s fellows.  The state becomes ever more exploitative, and the poor become ever more restive.  If the politicians are clever, they will start to capture this unrest, preaching an antiauthoritarian gospel in order to increase their own authority.  Before long, the walls start to crumble, and when barbarians appear at the gates, they don’t even have to knock.

Consider the Angevin Empire as a case-in-point.  King Stephen I’s and the Empress Matilda’s warring typifies the violence of the era of Security.  King Henry II’s long reign and administrative reforms set the stage for an era of Liberty.  Richard Coeur de Leon inherited a secure enough position to attack the Saracens thousands of miles away.  Of course, the barons did revolt against King John, forcing him to sign Magna Carta, but after his death William Marshal and Henry III assured the barons of their liberties and so secured the monarchy.  When Edward I was on crusade and heard that his father had died, he continued fighting in the Levant and only returned to England months later.  There were still periodic rebellions to deal with, but England remained remarkable peaceful on the whole.

In terms of foreign affairs, the empire was at its greatest extent under Henry II on account of his inheritances.  Richard held on to his father’s possessions and fought successfully in the Third Crusade.  John found himself outmatched by the King Philip II Augustus and lost much territory.  Edward I attempted to conquer Scotland but his son was thwarted in this endeavor by Robert the Bruce.  The greatest successes of this period were the conquest of Ireland, the incorporation of Wales into England, and the campaigns of Edward III and the Black Prince in the early part of the Hundred Years War.  Still, the French marshal Bertrand du Guesclin managed to roll most of the Angevin gains back.  In each case of failure to expand, the reason was that the expedition was made against another state experiencing an era of Liberty: when the English king was strong and skilled, expansion could be remarkable, but a similar enemy could achieve the same for his own country.

England entered the era of Equality after the reign of Edward III.  The old king’s conquests were being reversed, the Black Death was striking Europe in general, and no one was happy with the situation—not the king, not the barons, not the clergy, not the commoners.  For the first time since Stephen’s reign, there were succession woes, resulting in the deposition of the Plantagenet dynasty and the rise of the Lancastrians.  England still had quite a bit of fight left in it, as France was to learn the hard way, but the stage was set for the Wars of the Roses as soon as Henry Bolingbroke ascended to the throne.

So how does ideology fit into this whole scheme?  There are several ways to look at it.  One is that each era is defined by the dominant theme of the dominant ideology.  This is the idea behind the names of the eras.  Ideologies are a-dime-a-dozen, but only a few really catch on.  These ideologies belong to the ruling elite, legitimating their rule over the non-elites.  Not just any ideology will do, however, and what kind of ideology will be dominant varies according to material and psychological circumstance.  During the era of Security, people want to be protected, so ideologies that help provide protection will be more successful.  In the era of Liberty, people want freedom from oppressive authority, and the era of Equality extends that desire to include freedom from any authority whatever.  At the same time, the success of each ideology sets the stage for its eventual defeat and transition to a new ideology.

Another way to consider ideology is to use a different principle for dividing the periods.  We could call the era of Liberty the age of Expansion, the era of Equality the age of Overextension, and the era of Security the age of Chaos.  These terms assume a society and describe its material conditions.  The tail end of the age of Chaos and the middle of the age of Overextension bookend a generally good period, a time when you would want to live and to have your children live as well.  At the beginning of this period, a successful ideology will be one that encourages people to go out and accomplish things and to disregard the words of naysayers that things can’t or shouldn’t be done.  Anything is possible.

Eventually people bite off more than they can chew, and this allows opportunists to jump in.  Anything is still possible, they say, but we need to reject authority even harder than before.  This attempt at revival may work for a while, but eventually the society is so thoroughly undermined that it cannot sustain itself.  At this point, ideology can be said to drop out of the equation.  When survival is one’s primary concern, whether one espouses the right principles is less important than where they point their guns.  Still, ideology is crucial for building communities, and people will cling to ideals to help see them through tough times.  A new age of Expansion can begin when these primitive forces have had time to develop.

Finally, let us disaggregate a bit and consider what different ideologies, even non-dominant ones, will look like at different points in this cycle.  We’ll use conservative and liberal as labels.  Moderates of course exist at all times too, but their perspective is simply whatever compromise has been reached at any given time between the other two.  At the beginning of the era of Liberty, the liberals and conservatives both champion outward expansion and loosening of restrictions internally.  The difference between them is mostly a matter of personal taste and speed: the liberals are relatively more adventurous, while the conservatives are more cautious and slow.  As time goes on, however, the two drift apart somewhat.  The conservatives become complacent, and the liberals become unsatisfied.  Liberals discover ever new reforms to make and realms to conquer.  The conservatives eventually ratify all the liberals’ accomplishments, but it takes them time.  Until then, they oppose liberals’ gambits, but by the time the era of Equality rolls around, conservatives are of a sort that would have been repugnant to the liberals of the era of Liberty.  By the end of the era of Equality, the liberals are all gone, and the conservatives look ridiculous.

Now let us consider neoreaction: how do we fit into this whole scheme?  Most simply, neoreaction is a reaction to the prevailing ideologies of the present day. “Progress” has been the watchword of the past few centuries. Conservatism keeps moving along with liberalism, and we’re not interested in playing catch-up to the Left.  If things continue as they have been, Western society, which is currently dominant, will be very soon left on the ash-heap of history.

But the thing is, there’s nothing we can do to stop that from happening.  The West is doomed to fall, just like Rome before it, and countless other societies.  Nothing can stop this from happening.  There are two different ways we can deal with this fact.  We could take a not-on-my-watch attitude, trying to hold back the pernicious advances of the Left and restore some of those principles and practices made us great.  If this sounds like garden-variety contemporary conservatism, that’s because that is exactly what it is.

Neoreaction would have some advantages, though, if it were to enter this struggle.  For one thing, we understand our adversaries on the Left better than ordinary conservatives do, and we can speak their idiom.  With this knowledge we can mount a more effective defense: we know what our enemies will say even before they do.  Additionally, we do not fit the mold of any other conservative faction.  This means that the Left will have a harder time responding to us and that we can devise completely new tactics.  Under the banner of neoreaction, the Right might even be able to go on the offensive.

Unfortunately, this aggressive approach involves making our peace with contemporary society and politics.  Sure, we want to change them, but we would still have to work with and within them.  Far more agreeable seems a literally conservative approach, finding or building some community and working to insulate it from the collapse of Western civilization.  With luck, we might be able to lay the ground for a new order to replace the old, remedying the vices of the West while preserving its virtues.

Both of these programs have a requirement, however, one that neoreaction does not currently meet.  We need something concrete that we are for, a thede of our own whose interests we can champion.  For whose sake will we mount the rostrum or the battlements?  Who will fund us, who will stand with us when the Left notices our work and decides to destroy us?  Being opposed to modernity means that we find ourselves opposed also to nearly everyone participating in it.  But it is not enough to have an enemy; we must also have friends.  Otherwise, neoreaction will be even less than a hiccup in the endless cycle of time.

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