I’ve been chewing on Kristor’s observation that, to put it bluntly, the West is now completely Leftist. Aside from a few antiquarian pocket-realms, there is no point of strength or power that promotes or defends anything other than Leftism. This inescapable conclusion is in many respects disturbing and disheartening and in others liberating.
Even if we can build our own cultural enclaves, the Left will not leave us in peace, nor will the enemies outside our gates be idle. We ought to both man the battlements and purge the poison of Leftism from our civilization’s bloodstream. Otherwise, Western civilization will perish.
This is an eminently Western outlook. From the pass at Thermopylae to the Catalaunian fields, from the walls of Constantinople to the forests of Tours, from Paris to Jerusalem to Constantinople once more, from Malta to Vienna and even to Rorke’s Drift, the history of the West is replete with heroic defenses against impossible odds. Better men than we have risked far more in defense of the West. It would be unmanly to surrender without a fight.
But what do you do when the barbarians are at the gates ready to sack your city and everyone of any importance within is inclined to let them? You could try to rally the populace, but you’d lose, and even if you won, the primary beneficiaries would be the very backstabbers you were rebelling against. They wanted to stop you when their very lives were threatened; once you’ve given them security, they will pull out their knives and get to work. It seems that the city is beyond saving, and frankly, should be destroyed. The prudent man will recognize this fact and take the measures necessary to secure the future of himself, his family, and whatever else he can salvage.
(The tension between these two perspectives, by the way, was the main point of Separate Ways.)
If Kristor is right, and I believe he is, then there is no Western civilization for us to defend. Sure, the West is a geographical expression; sure, there are people living there; sure, there’s the idea of the West, but tectonic drift isn’t our enemy, the people don’t want our help, and the idea, well, that idea includes and incorporates Leftism, which is a Western invention after all. The triumph of Leftism means that we, as enemies of the Left, are also enemies of Western civilization as it has evolved in real life.
Here’s a supreme irony: everyone opposes Western civilization. Everyone. The invading hordes are, of course, interested in looting the West; the Left believes they need to destroy the West in order to achieve universal salvation; we want to see the West fall, so that it can rise from the ashes. No one supports the West as it exists.
Still, such defense as there may be is in the hands of the Left, and that creates an interesting situation. Self-preservation, if nothing else, may force Leftists to jump ship, or otherwise change their ideology. The possibilities for the future are basically these three:
- The Left sides with the invaders of the West and successfully suppresses any resistance.
- Leftists adjust their ideology to allow for effective defense.
- Leftists abandon Leftism, trading it for a new ideology.
2 and 3 look very similar, but there’s an important difference: in 2, Leftism remains ascendant at least officially, which has a variety of qualitative effects.
Before looking at these three possible outcomes, let’s perform a thought experiment on a smaller scale. Specifically, let’s imagine that the Left decides to squeeze the university system, cutting off all federal funding until minorities receive their fair share of tenured professorships. The analogy between universities and the society as a whole is not perfect, but it can still be illuminating.
Academia has three ways it could respond: it could argue on its own behalf using parts of Leftist ideology, it could cast aside Leftism altogether, or it could bend over and be screwed. The humanities and perhaps even the social sciences would go with the third option—they’re too committed to the most radical forms of Leftism to seriously dissent—but the STEM and professional fields are independent enough that they might do something different.
In order to justify their lack of diversity, these fields would have to some kind of race realism. If they stick with Leftism, this would be reviving something like early 20th-century Progressivism: the universities train expert technologists who perform vital social functions, such as building airplanes and computers, or healing the injured and sick. Prestige in the field is handed out according to results, and some races produce better results.
What the Right-wing version of this response would be is hard to say. There are, of course, conservative defenders of academic privilege, but their conservatism is the Leftism of twenty years ago, if that. The actual Right these days is hostile to the present system of higher education, reciprocating its feelings, and so would be perfectly happy seeing the groves of Academia hewed down.
Whatever the arguments proffered, however, the Leftists controlling the state are unmoved and shut off the money spigot until the professors yield. In due course, adequate numbers of blacks and Latinos are hired and given tenure, many of them in positions for which they do not remotely qualify because there simply aren’t enough qualified minorities to fill all the necessary positions. The star of the Academy falls, and potential students begin to go elsewhere. It is still possible to get a good education at a university (especially since a good chunk of the actual teaching is done by non-tenure track faculty and graduate students who don’t have enough money and prestige for anyone to be concerned about their diversity), but the expense grows and the reward shrinks.
At the same time that students abandon university education, universities experience a flight of the competent: The best and the brightest, especially in technical fields, realize that academic life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and move to the private sector. Some do actual work, while others join alternative educational institutions. These schools are unlike to provide the same breadth of education as universities do, but they do prepare students for remunerative work.
The Left, of course, does not take this challenge lying down. The government subsidizes college students, keeping attendance up, and cracks down on alternatives. In the short-run, this means that the quality of education falls. The long-run outcome depends on whether or not the existing state maintains undisputed power, which brings us back to the original issue of how the Left responds to invasion from abroad.
Suppose the Left—I really want to say collaborates with the enemies of the West, but we’ve already seen that’s not right—let’s go with, persecutes Westerners. Then we’d see a similar flight of the competent from existing institutions, and the Left would crack down on them just as it would on alternative education institutions. In order to escape the Left, skilled workers will collaborate with the invaders, offering their services in exchange for protection. Eventually we’d see a largely non-white society with enclaves of skilled whites. Leftism would provide the ideological justification for this arrangement so long as whites proved themselves useful and the new rulers were prudent.
Now imagine Leftism reforms itself a bit to allow for exclusion of non-whites from Western countries. This scenario I do not see lasting very long. Whatever particular principle it is—universalism, humanitarianism, egalitarianism, anti-white racism, general nihilism—that one believes is at the bottom of Leftism, it will undermine any such reform attempts. The world in this scenario looks much as it does in the first, only blacker and browner and with even more people turning toward Mecca. At least Leftism as ideology dies out.
Finally, imagine there’s no Leftism—it’s easy if you try. The alternative to Leftism has to have both a racial and a religious basis: the West belongs to white Christians. No alternative will work. For all the ferocity of ancient pagans, today paganism has less vitality to it than a cow mutilated by aliens. Political outcomes depend on how quickly the jettisoning of Leftism takes place—if it happens soon, some semblance of democracy may survive; otherwise, something else.
Regarding the 3 options presented in paragraph 7 I think there is a valid fourth option. The rise of a radical far right movement that gains power. I’m not just LARPing here and masturbating out loud, it’s happened before and as you well know history is littered with events coming to pass that no one predicted. I won’t speculate on how this option may happen (as that would be LARPing). Instead I’ll just say this, never in my life time (40+ years now) have I ever seen a bigger disconnect between the official media and government positions (the Cathedral if you like, but actually the Synagogue) and the common man on the street, nor have I seen the common man so far right leaning in his everyday chatter (outside universities, of course).
What S. Johnson said (above).
We don’t want to save the West. We want to conquer it.
I know it probably irks the staid conservative establishment-types with their bourbon and jackets of Tweed, but we need to think of ourselves as rebels, dissidents, brigands, guerrillas, and corsairs.
The problem with thinking of ourselves as rebels, dissidents, and corsairs is that it tends to attract degenerates. We need mannerbunds that attract the healthy, smart, strong, courageous, and moral. Those mannerbunds will be the forces that (correction) RE-conquer the west.
I believe it was Fred Reed who noted that the pattern of corrupt, decadent, declining empires is that they become simultaneously more tyrannical and more incompetent. The first part is bad news for us, but the second is a saving grace. A ham-fisted government (and military) increasingly staffed by single moms, transsexuals, and Affirmative Action hires will be easy to stay one step ahead of for smart people who know how to remain below the radar. This will be even more true if the kind of smart people who used to make up the government’s security services decide not to go into government service, and perhaps even to make common cause with the likes of us.
Keep your lawn mowed, keep your taxes paid, and keep your car’s registration up to date. Don’t exceed the speed limit, don’t smoke marijuana on your back porch, don’t go to protests, and don’t write letters to the editor under your real name. Be cordial with your neighbors, but don’t offer them any more information than they ask for (“Why don’t you see my kids get on the school bus every morning? Oh, that’s because we homeschool. Homeschooled kids have very high college acceptance rates!”). Dress nice, look respectable, and avoid talking politics or religion with people you don’t know.
In other words, be smarter than the incompetents. If you are, you can probably avoid their tyranny.
A scary concept would be something like the Chinese Sesame Credit system where citizens are ostracized by their fellow citizens if they are suspected of having “anti-social” views. Merely keeping your views on the downlow isn’t enough. You have to actively support the goals of the party to keep your score up.
There was never any such thing as ‘Western Civilization’.
Per the law of identity, we’d all need to agree on the essence of Western Civ to be talking about the same thing. What’s indispensable about it, what makes it what it is.
If Western Civ had an identity, we’d all know exactly what it is, and how to divide Western Civ from not-Western Civ.
In all the discussions I’ve seen using the term no one can agree on that division.
But everyone acts like they’re talking about the same thing. Which is impossible.
I know I have impressions tied up with the term. I have a lot of things I associate with it.
But these come from my own experience. People telling me there was this thing called ‘The West’, and telling me a bunch of things were part of it, but without ever telling me what it was about them that made them so.
I was left to figure that out on my own. To try and derive my own justification of what counted as Western Civilization. I had a tangle of immaterial impressions and arbitrary associations. And those didn’t seem to be shared by everyone.
In the end, I gave up on the term. Language is only useful to the extent it can communicate, and you need agreement for communication. I don’t see that here.
Rather than focus on some hazy Western Civ, I think it’s better to name the phenomena you think ought to be preserved, or instantiated.
For example, I think I ought to live in a society where the homicide rates is less than 1 per 100,000. One where people share my ethnicity, share much of my own life experience, and speak my language. One where human inequality is admitted, rank in society is default hereditary, and hierarchy is clearly communicated.Where people respect bloodties, and God, and His Church.
Those are just a few of things I think ought to be. I list them generally, but could go into more detail. What’s important is that I know how to divide what I want from what I don’t. I could explain exactly what I mean by respect for God, the exact outward signs and behaviors I’d expect to see from people if that were the case.
I’ve never seen that in all this talk of Western Civ, which is supposed to be something we’re all familiar with, but no one seems to know to describe it in that detail.
It’s best to dispense with conventional categories if they’re ill-defined. We can divide up the world and categorize it in a more coherent way, on the basis of the qualities and patterns of phenomena we observe.
That’s part of why engineering has advanced so far in the modern age. I think we need to apply that same level of clarity to the rest of our language, and thought. It would do much to eliminate the ambiguity that is so vital to the survival of progressivism.
Ironically, the nominalism which you seem to espouse has over the past 5-600 years become a feature of the very Western Civilization which you deny exists.
There are modes of social organization that strongly tend to be Western: Monarchy, federalism, subsidiarity, freedom, property, the role of religion in a state, the role of reason. No taxonomy of civilization or biological creatures will be perfect, and to insist it be perfect is to insist upon no taxonomy.
The “West” is just a ghost, there is nothing worth fighting for. Libertarian capitalism, what Reagan said we had to fight for, is as progressive as anything else.
Good stuff, and I think your point about the universities is actually a really good microcosm that can be applied up and down the institutions of the West.
The way I see it, there are three competing factors at play
1) The privileged leftist elite, who are largely white, have done very well for themselves, control the levers of power in government, academia, and media a la Gramsci, and are piloting the West through rocky seas to their envisioned utopia
2) The whipped up hysterical low classes. The current purges at university are being conducted by blacks that have gone off-script. They were supposed to attack Conservatives and other thought-criminals, not just ANY white man, but since Conservatives are like dinosaurs on college campuses, of course, the beady eyed professors come under scrutiny for their own hidden racism. OWS, same thing. These are the people with IQs so low that leftist propaganda actually drives them insane.
3) The enemy at the gates. Obviously the big one is Islam, currently in its own holiness spiral that is far more destructive than many anticipated (honestly, I did not see ISIS coming. I was assuming a sly Muslim Brotherhood type wave across the M.E.) but China is also in this category… for now. They are essentially non-Occidental societies that are very competitive. China because of its marshaling of resources and capital, and Muslims because of their birthrates and warlike culture.
The borders are broken. A compartmentalized world is destroyed, and San Bernadino is the latest example of this. All of these different paints and blending. The enemy at the gates is not at the gates, he’s inside because nobody wanted to raise the drawbridge.
I come back to entropy, as Laliberte talked about. Things predicted are coming to pass. Ironically, the dead leftist child-ideologies, Stalinist Communism and National Socialism could withstand all this. I predict pretty miserably in many aspects, but they would not be heading for the kind of cataclysm that Liberalism is leading to.
“The West belongs to white Christians” – this is a claim of historical birthright and ownership. I like it, but it is not enforceable with present conditions. The Left has killed both concepts. People just don’t identify as their own ethnicity, let alone white in large numbers. I have spoken to many Europeans at least who think a national just has to have a passport. The average British person does not think black British is any less British than white British. This can only stem from a destruction of racial identity, something the left has been working on since the demise of Nazism. We don’t need to go into detail on Christianity, that story is even bleaker in most instances.
Aleksandr Dugin said “The American Empire (his term for the Western order) must be destroyed.” I tend to agree, but then we have a dilemma, and that is, how can the healthy Western aspect survive this to take ownership of his soil? Its going to be like the scramble for Africa. This is why I think the Reactionary project is to foster a strong minority, a collection of cells that is ‘redpilled’ as they say, and when the time comes can implement these ideas and seize the reins from anarchy. Whether we help to advance the timeline of that anarchy (I think Land hints at this) is another question. When the time comes, the tipping of the scale depends on what is actionable. We need people who are…
A) Of the desired stock
B) Correct in their spiritual/political orientation so that they approach problems not from the lens of Modernity, but from the lens of Tradition
C) Are willing to die if necessary to achieve our political aims (this is where I would say that religious component you mention is essential)
The aims of our activities should never constitute the harnessing of popular opinion for some kind of tidal revolution. This is a mistake, and Marxist power-brokers realized it when the revolution never sparked in Italy, and they all ended up in Mussolini’s dungeons. Nor should our aims align at all with Liberal concerns. Do not be sucked into the Counter-Jihad perspective at this critical juncture, which is just the rational 8th of the Liberal intelligentsia concerned about their own survival. Islam is a hostile externally originating threat, but one that can be repelled with by conventional means. To kill a nation, Islam has to slaughter its population. Liberalism just has to take control of their television sets.
Climate conditions are entering a warm phase for us. Fear, paranoia, distrust, discontentment, hostility, stupidity: these things are at heights relative to the last 60 years at least, not including the sporadic near-miss nuclear incidents. People are forced now to worry about what happens far away, because of globalism. We’re heading in the right direction. My concern is if events start cascading before preparations have gone beyond the mere theoretical level.
I do not fear that the Modern Age will continue. I fear that while others survive beyond it, my people won’t.