In theory, 4PT accepts that Western responses to current ideological norms should come from a framework appropriate to Europe and the Anglosphere. In practice, those who believe that Putin’s traditionalist vanguard is the best hope for Western rebirth go far beyond this. Criticism of the Russian government is met with accusations of serving Western liberal oligarchs. Putin’s achievements become lionized, and his failures ignored. RT becomes trusted as a news source. (Before it appears in the comments, yes it is perfectly possible for both Western and Russian channels to be airing propaganda. One doesn’t exclude the other.) Russian media gives voice to radicals from across the political spectrum. The Kremlin itself condemns European right wing ideologies at the same time that it funds European right wing parties. This can be useful when voices marginalized by the ideological conglomerate of media, academia, and government are able to make their ideas heard. But Russia’s aim is not to create a resurgence of traditionalism, rightist ideas, or the values which strengthen civilization. Russia’s interests are its own, and its interest is dischord which will give it the opportunity to re-establish its sphere of influence. Even if one takes the position that re-establishment of Russian influence is a good thing,  it should be obvious that Russia is not here to restore the West, nor should we expect it to be.

The Communist traitor Alger Hiss testifies at the HUAC. Don’t be him.

Russia has always had a talent for weaponizing ideology. This goes back before Putin, even back before the hammer and sickle was ever hoisted on Russian soil. After the defeat of Napoleon, Tsar Alexander I went from being a sympathizer of liberalism and Enlightenment to promoting European unity against the Jacobin tide. When the time of the Tsars did come to an end, the internationalism of communist ideology lent the USSR a great advantage. From Asia to Europe and even America, communist faithful were manipulated into supporting the geopolitical interests of the USSR, the total absence of any workers’ utopia presumably going unmentioned. The NKVD and later KGB were skilled in infiltration and sabotage, but a lot of this depended on finding willing cooperators in the organizations they worked in. From State Department official Alger Hiss to the Cambridge Five spy ring, what makes many Soviet agents remarkable is that they weren’t just motivated by personal gain. Many of these people truly believed that they were serving a higher cause for the good of the world by serving the Soviet Union. They believed that the benefits of the West were outdone by its injustices, and that the injustices of the USSR were necessary for the Revolution. The lesson to be learned is this: when the interests of your ideology so systematically line up with the interests of a foreign power, it might be time to ask yourself whether you’re getting played. If you can’t tell who the useful idiot at the table is, it’s probably you.

But this skill at ideology and propaganda hid some important realities about the Soviet Union itself: chiefly, its stagnation. Soviet rule wrenched the country from an agrarian to an industrial position at stunning speed, at the cost of millions of lives from famine and other causes. Soviet institutions incentivized getting to know the right people rather than innovation and productivity. A socialist economy can function to a certain degree, especially when the state can simply move entire populations. But it could never attain the dynamism of the market economies, from American capitalism to European welfare states. The Official Truths of the USSR made for beautiful propaganda, because this propaganda was necessary to obscure the cold and real truths about how the country was actually being governed.

Many Westerners today have become fascinated with Russia. This time they’re people alienated by weak leadership and cultural masochism rather than by capitalist inequality. They see Western media and academia contesting each other to see who can do away with their heritage and self-respect fastest. It takes an impressive level of cognitive dissonance to apologize for every time the West asserted itself while simultaneously using drones to kill innocents a world away. By way of contrast, Putin has restored national pride to the hearts of many Russians. His cultivated image is one of unapologetic masculinity and forthright leadership. Little wonder that he would capture the imaginations of so many Westerners disgusted with their state of affairs. And so the question arises: how much is advancing 4PT, Eurasianism, and Putin propaganda doing for us and how much is it doing for Russia?

And once again, Official Truth obscures trends which still leave Russia fragile as a country. Of course, this isn’t to say that all Official Truths are created equal. Orthodoxy and cultural pride are nowhere so totalitarian as the Soviet system was. Properly framed, they can even aid in implementing solutions to some of these crises. But Russian expansion in geopolitics won’t protect the state from its failures in providing sound governance.

First, demographics. The reproductive crisis of the Russian population has been well known since the end of the Soviet Union. Despite a recent surge in births, official predictions still envision a decline resulting in significant economic and social stagnation. Ironically, modern Western liberalism managed to out-progress Communism, which meant that social mores in the USSR were more traditional than we are used to today. Today, cohabitation is up 30% for women, but a much lower number of these end up in marriages. At this point, the proportion of Russian women who get and stay married has dropped from 60% in 1990 to 34% just six years later. Today, the UN estimates that half of Russian marriages end in divorce. Mortality rates are higher now than they were during the 50’s – an increase which started around a decade later, in large part due to alcoholism. Russian men have born the brunt of this, facing high rates of chronic disease and a life expectancy of 64 years. That’s lower than their male counterparts in Iraq, who make it to around 70 years despite over a decade of war and a fundamentalist death cult controlling a chunk of their territory. Now as others have pointed out, these obstacles are not insurmountable, and Russia is indeed making progress. But if the result of its ideological shift is that resources are devoted to funding expansion rather than moving forward in its social and economic development, these advances could be undermined. Diplomatic pushes as with Egypt and the Eurasian Economic Union bring more opportunities with less costs.

“Putin is not the future of Russia. The future of Russia is us.” – Khodorkovsky, oligarch and Western liberal favourite. Bad governance is what he will exploit.

This brings us to investment in the population. If your people don’t feel confident enough to invest in the future, your country won’t have much of one. Two big incentives are health and economic opportunity. Tax cuts and benefits won’t encourage people to reproduce if their children are at risk of dying young and becoming caught up in crime or drug use. If Russian families are to keep reversing the demographic decline, they must be able to reverse their educational and medical decline. This requires stable institutions, which give people the confidence to make significant investments. The great failure of Russian governance since the fall of the USSR has been the inability to stem the tide of corruption. Putin’s supporters paint him as having smashed the corrupt oligarchy. In reality, corruption as a business model has grown under Putin’s rule. The Interior Ministry estimates that the average bribe has grown 26 times between 2008 and 2011, much faster than inflation. It’s a consistent issue with states which focus on ideology and personality cult to the exclusion of sound governance. It’s also what allows Western-funded dissidents to appeal to popular discontent. After the flags stop waving and the ruler returns to the capital, the grind of daily life goes on. The inability to build strong, trustworthy institutions makes the state fragile overall. There will come a day when Russia must make do without Putin. Perhaps he will have a successor ready to go. But should the Russian state take this risk? General health and order was much higher when the Soviet Union was dissolving. Not so today. A power struggle in the Russian state could tear the country apart.

And ultimately, the fate of Russia has dire consequences for the West, be it Left, Right, or divided between the two. Chechen fighters have been a core fighting force for Islamic State since its inception. Russia is a major supporter of Central Asian governments which will have to deal with hardened fighters returning from Iraq and Syria. The terrorist group is already leaving its mark in North Africa. A Russian collapse would give ISIS a free reign to increase its demands for loyalty from Islamists in the region seeking to ascend in the new power vacuum, and it has money, weapons, and experience to tempt them with. And whatever criticisms we have of Russia’s governance, the fact is that it remains a voice in opposition to the equally weaponized ideology which our own elites want to see overtake the entire globe. Whatever future the West has depends on having good political and economic relations with the growing powers of the new millennium. If all goes well, we will be one of them.

If pro-Russian Westerners overstate the glories of Putin, my belief is that Western ideologues will keep doing everything they can to damn Russia for rejecting them. There is a dangerous mixture of fatal hubris and existential terror at the heart of how the West today is being governed. We don’t know what the future map of the West will be. We can guess at ethnic and cultural demographics. We might imagine what ideologies will take over. But what we can say for certain is that our coming generations of leaders must find an antidote to this mixture and ingest it. 4PT and similar ideologies born in Russia have been crafted to secure the future of the Russian world. They will not do the same for the heirs of Western Civilization.

The post Russia Is Not Our Saviour appeared first on Social Matter.

For the uninitiated, Dugin calls his theoretical framework the Fourth Political Theory (4PT). Its name hints at its foundations. Dugin holds that since the Enlightenment, three political theories have wrestled for global control. Liberalism came first, and annihilated the old Christian and monarchic order. When it thinks about society, it focuses on the individual person. Communism came second, and rose in reaction to Liberalism. It takes the socio-economic class as its subject. This was because Liberal individualism failed to address the situation of the poor and working classes, now that the bourgeoisie had overthrown their own masters. The third theory is Fascism, and it reacted against both Communism and its Liberal predecessor. It tried to overcome the division of individuals and classes by basing society on a common foundation. In cases like Italy, it took the State as its starting point. In Germany, the racial volk played this role. Communism and Liberalism defeated Fascism, and Liberalism eventually overcame its former ally too, and now stands triumphant. Dugin claims that it can only be challenged by a fourth theory, which learns from the failures of former critiques.

His belief is that the failures of each ideology came from focusing on a single aspect of human existence. In fact, our world is a complex of all these things: we individuals are part of an ethno-cultural whole, a political order, and a particular station in that order. The 4PT claims to take a holistic view of the human being and accepts all these realities. Dasein – real existence in the world – can’t be so slickly reduced to a set of axioms. Humans are different. Ethnicities differ. Cultures and histories differ. Geopolitical realities differ. Because of this, societies develop different ways of existing. Liberalism claims to accept differences, but this is mere shadow play. In reality, it imposes a common value framework on all groups. Religion and culture become ornaments for liberal homogeneity. Neoreaction’s own framework agrees with this analysis. It condemns the idea that society can be constructed from an ideological blueprint. The bigger the plan for society, the more unknowns one faces. In fact, Neoreaction takes this further than 4PT. The Eurasian idea itself, with its vision of a federal union of states and de-Westernized cultures, is more detailed than anything Neoreaction puts forward. The presumption of knowledge is a dangerous thing to contend with. Instead, Neoreaction intends to be a toolbox to be used according to different sets of needs.

There are further comparisons. Western social science distinguishes between theoretical models and the “real world”. Both 4PT and Neoreaction critique this. Dugin talks about “practice as theory”, and believes that one cannot separate lived experience from ideology; Neoreaction discerns the prerequisites to Civilization from the historical record rather than manifestos. Liberalism claimed to leave individuals free to choose their own ways of living; the modern Liberal agrees, provided they make the proper choice. With Dugin, Neoreaction recognizes the slight of hand. All three have come to understand that unrestricted personal freedom is inimical to an enduring social order. The only difference is that the latter two are honest about it. Furthermore, Neoreactionary thought has overcome theological divides in the concept of Gnon – Nature or Nature’s God. Gnon’s laws cannot be suspended by activist judges or deconstructed by university professors. Societies must discover them and structure themselves accordingly. Meanwhile, Dugin has taken inspiration from the German Conservative Revolution and the Traditionalist School. As Dugin says in The Fourth Political Theory:

“Conservative revolutionaries want not only to slow time down, like the liberal conservatives, or return to the past like traditionalists, but to pull out from the structure of the world the roots of evil…and in so doing [fulfil] some kind of secret, parallel, non-evident intention of the Deity itself.”

But Dugin’s response to these ideas also leads us to some of the clashes between Western Rightists and the Fourth Political Theory. Dugin has consistently charged the ideology of progress as racist, and the West as being a “globally deployed model of…ethnocentrism, which is the purest manifestation of racist ideology.” When he so closely echoes the rhetoric of university SJW’s, those otherwise sympathetic become understandably suspicious. There are two things we need to note. The first is that racism isn’t actually the accurate term to describe what Dugin means. In Fourth Political Theory, he states that racism also exists among cultures, classes and even technology. Clearly, “chauvinism” or “supremacy” would be more accurate words than “racism”. Dugin’s supporters explain that the term illustrates that the West uses ideology in the same way it once used race and religion – to justify itself as the standard for Civilization. But it’s worth noting that the word also allows Dugin to attack Western liberalism on its own basis.

Dugin takes as one of his premises that all cultures and peoples – including the European West – must determine for themselves how they choose to exist. In that sense, 4PT undermines modern Progressivism’s condemnation of Western identity and heritage. The 4PT is a weaponized ideology: its stated purpose is to take over from the failures of Liberalism. Western countries have often used liberal ideology to undermine states in opposition to Western interests. From Russia to Egypt, Western NGO’s have funded groups with liberal sympathies, as the ideology is particularly useful in such ventures. Since it focuses on the individual, Liberalism can delegitimize a political order by focusing on select groups who view themselves as being excluded from the political process. Of course, Western countries themselves do this all the time through electoral and speech regulations. Implicit in our laws is the admission that not everyone should have equal involvement in the political process. If the 4PT gains influence, Russia and other countries will have a strong ideological counterweapon to this tactic.

Nevertheless, this is not the only issue on which Dugin seems to compromise with ideologies antithetical to the values of the Right. While an ideological anticommunist, he has defended the Soviet Union as an expression of the Russian worldview.

“Thanks to those who will be engaged in the defense of the Republic of Novorossia and who experience this particular Eurasian Orthodox identity, the rest of the Russian population will learn more about its ideological identity. At the same time, the achievements of the Soviet Union will not be excluded but included in a broader context rid of orthodox Marxism, materialism and atheism. That is the Eurasian ideology: it mainly includes the legacy of orthodoxy of the Byzantine monarchy and Russian nationalism, not to mention the Russian interpretation of Soviet history as briefly expressed in National Bolshevism.”

To understand Dugin’s reasoning, we need to distinguish between ideological communism and the geopolitical entity of the USSR. Communism as an ideology is rejected by Dugin as the failed second political theory. Communism as a system of government was absorbed into a broader Russian culture and worldview. Hence, Stalin is today remembered by many Russians not primarily as a Communist, but as a strong central ruler in the Russian tradition of autocracy. Similarly, the modern Communist Party of the Russian Federation supports cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church. This is due to the Left-Nationalist faction currently controlling the party. The same pattern is reflected in the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples’ Republics attempting to secede from Ukraine. Soviet institutions, nationalist rhetoric, and Orthodox religion are woven together by supporters of Russian rule. For Dugin, this is part of an organic process. Under bolshevism, the Russian people suffered mightily. From Stalin on, they were also a superpower. In the post-Soviet age, the Russian mind must reconcile itself to its own historical experience.

Applied metaphysics

Neoreaction’s similarities with 4PT also contain its differences: both seek to deconstruct the liberal ideological premises laid in the Enlightenment. But Dugin is working in a society which holds fundamentally illiberal values, mores, and worldviews. Neoreaction exists in the sanctum of Liberalism, the West itself. If 4PT is a ship to let Russia sail on its own path, Neoreaction is a lifeboat with a map and compass that we hope against hope will get us to shore. Dugin looks at civilizations which must choose whether to follow the West’s path or not. Neoreaction looks at societies which must choose whether to follow Civilization’s path or not – and most seem to have chosen the latter. Moreover, Neoreaction stands firmly in a tradition of empirical analysis which Dugin categorizes as part and parcel of the Western “Atlanticist” thinking Russia rejects. The programmer who built an ideology in his garage stands in stark contrast to the bearded philosopher holding a rocket launcher in South Ossetia. As both ideologies accept differences, this isn’t necessarily a point of conflict. But it’s crucial to understanding the distinctions in methodology.

Both 4PT and Neoreaction are deeply concerned with Civilization. But this may also be the most fundamental point of distinction between the two schools of thought. For 4PT, the main emphasis is on the right to difference. Of course, Neoreaction agrees that different peoples and cultures must find their own particular modes of Civilization. But Dugin goes further, almost into relativism. He proclaims:

“There will be no universal standard, neither in the material nor in the spiritual aspect. Each civilisation will at last receive the right to freely proclaim that which is, according to its wishes, the measure of things. Somewhere that will be man, somewhere religion, somewhere ethics, somewhere materialism.”

This makes the difference clear. Dugin imagines many different civilizations. Civilization is simply a particular people’s mode of being – its culture, self-conception, and so forth. But Neoreaction goes further. Modes of being have consequences. They can make you master of the globe or they can send you to a humiliating historical grave. Beyond the many particular civilizations, there is a common phenomenon of Civilization proper. Violence and force are its foundation, because they are the tools used to create law and order. When people can live in peace and safety, they have the incentive to have families, invent, and improve themselves. When this is reinforced with responsibility to the common good, people invest in the future. The structures may differ, but the effect is the same: society flourishes. But when authority breaks down, families are abandoned, and the common good forgotten, a society will collapse. Sometimes, enough is protected that it can repair and be reborn. More often, it gets overrun and absorbed by healthier rivals. While 4PT focuses on the particular, Neoreaction is more willing to address those universal truths that all civilizations must contend with. And if it has no quarrel with Russia taking its own path, it can also see the omens that point to its incredible fragility at the present time. Any Eurasian future becomes less likely when the future of Russia itself is uncertain. From demographic collapse to economic woe, no stirring promises of a united Russian sphere can mask the problems besetting it. Neoreaction may have some lessons for Mr. Dugin yet, Atlanticist or not.

Next week’s article will be a neoreactionary analysis of Russia itself. It will cover geopolitical and domestic issues, as well as the Russian talent for weaponizing ideology.

The post The Crab and the Bear: On Alexander Dugin appeared first on Social Matter.

These days, I am far more skeptical.

A once great nation, undone by decadence and burgers.

To be clear, the data points which these predictions are based on put America in a pretty bad place. Yes, the debt is out of control. Expansion of welfare and warfare have destroyed America’s finances and reputation alike. Its governors govern badly. Its weary military “advises” even wearier troops against ISIS members with fire in their hearts and suicide vests over them. Despite this, Iran still gets held at arms length. At the same time it is getting challenged by Russia politically and China economically. Over-regulation at home, overextension abroad, and badly managed spending in all spheres.

But here’s the other side of the story. Whatever the ultimate fate of the USD and its global status, the United States still has tremendous wealth in its borders. Its population is over three hundred million, compared to China and India with over a billion each, but its economy is still among the biggest in the world and for now second only to China. Within its borders lie both natural resource wealth and technical specialization. New York’s economy is the size of Australia’s, and even poor, ruinous Detroit stands alongside Ireland. That sort of wealth doesn’t vanish in a puff of smoke if the USD collapses entirely. Even in a global economy where business can be outsourced across countries, the USA makes up a huge fraction of both production and consumption. It’s also a hub for service industries like consulting, marketing, advertising, finance, and law.

Abroad, the idea that America is in an across-the-board decline is also untrue. The disastrous Middle Eastern conflicts have drawn a lot of the world’s attention. Doubtless, the idea that you could overthrow a couple of dictators and eventually turn the region into Massachusetts plus minarets was an insane one. The American consensus is also being challenged in Ukraine by Russia and in the Asian and African spheres by China. But there is another side to this story. The countries which make up China’s backyard are not pleased to see its shadow falling over them. Some of Asia’s other growing economies would prefer America to have their backs. The US recently renewed its military commitments to the Philippines and Japan and is increasing its presence in the former. Other affected countries include Vietnam, Malaysia, and of course Taiwan.

This situation is very different from the Middle East. We are looking at political back and forth between growing economies with fairly stable states. There could be unforeseen circumstances: perhaps a demagogue will feed the flames of war following some crisis. For the time being, a full scale war between powers in the Asian region seems unlikely. That being so, America has an interest is maintaining close relations with those countries which will increasingly become its economic partners in the Asia-Pacific region. India’s alignment is still undetermined, but everyone has a stake in its future development. That’s why Prime Minister Modi is getting superstar treatment.

The rise of China may also cause other countries to reconsider their position. As China increases its African investments, the honeymoon will begin to fade and the realities of clashing cultures and interests will set in. While it is doubtless that China will become a political force on the continent, it may well be that some countries will play a double game or even favour American and Western investors who give them a better deal. From Asia to Africa, Brand America will remain a strong one.

All in all, I expect to see three major trends:

First, many Americans will find themselves interacting less with the US Federal Government (USG) on a regular basis. This will occur as the USG is finally forced to restructure failed programs like urban renewal and likely the current social security model. The private sector will continue moving in to repair government failures in areas from transport to education. Bankrupt Detroit is a prime example. Businesses are coming to its downtown core, the population of which is economically and demographically distinct from the rest of the city. The gentrifiers follow with their demands for security, good schools, and better governance, and with the means and willpower to make it happen. Many USG programs may return to state and even local levels after a long trend of federalization. Colorado and co are taking action on marijuana laws, and the South is attracting investment capital and domestic migrants sick of blue state taxes and regulation. Cities in said blue states may find creating their own charters to be a way to attract domestic migrants with initiative, brains, and ambition. As competition intensifies, it will make less sense to apply large programs across the whole country.

Second, the frontiers of American influence abroad will indeed morph and shrink. The world will become more multipolar as China and Russia try to stake out their own spheres of influence. Iran may act as a game changer for Shia Muslims in the Middle East. America and other Western countries will need to give resource-rich countries better deals. On this, the narrative of decline does have many of its facts straight, if not all of its derived predictions.

However (and thirdly), America may find itself actually exercising greater influence in those countries which choose to remain in its sphere. With the reality of China right next door, the US may be able to act more unilaterally to secure trade deals, military contracts, and political favours in Japan or the Philippines. This relationship will be especially important in the African countries.

In summary, I expect the America of the next generation to be one characterized by both stabilizing global power and a reduced, restructured domestic USG role. This is not contradictory. In fact, this is what the America of the Founding Fathers actually looked like. The average American pioneer might barely interact with the same USG that was waging successive wars against North African pirate kingdoms. The Presidents who conducted these wars? None other than one Thomas Jefferson and a certain James Madison. To view these changes as the end of America is naive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one notices that the purported hard-headed realism of American Demise so often seems to complement the political wet dreams of its proponents.

The post Don’t Get Too Bearish On America appeared first on Social Matter.

Response to the shootings by Le Plus cartoonist JM:o

The horrific attacks on Charlie Hebdo  have brought forth a defence of free expression from politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens. But the outpouring of support is an exception in a broader pattern of events. The French President tries to call for a national unity that seems little more than a distant memory. Satirists across Europe convey their shock and grief – but everyone is rightfully nervous about republishing the Muhammad cartoons which put Charlie Hebdo on the radical Islamist death list. As Foreign Policy magazine and Reason.com have both pointed out, we are not all Charlie Hebdo, and not a few Western outlets once condemned them for using the same freedoms they now defend. FP recalls a victim-blaming Time article written after Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed. Author Bruce Crumley wondered how the common good could possibly be served by “tempting belligerent reaction”. The most disgusting response following the shootings came from a Financial Times writer who accused the magazine of “Muslim-baiting”. Despite generating a negative reaction, these articles seem to reflect the general trend of free speech more accurately than the vigils currently being held across the world. And even with #JeSuisCharlie trending, there is little reason to think that this will change.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the principle of free speech seems to be losing support among up-and-coming Western brahmins. Would the university which forbade students from discussing ideas the student union didn’t like ever allow cartoons attacking protected religions? Charlie Hebdo’s commitment to intellectual freedom is at odds with Harvard leftists who don’t believe that it should extend to violating their social activist forms of “justice”. One wonders how many of the speech codes which at least 60% of American universities now have would have banned it altogether. But is that the whole story? If these trends in academia and media were reversed, would free and open expression be secured? I submit that there is no reason to believe this is true. The key to understanding why lies in the nature of order in diverse societies.

Let’s look at a non-Western state known for being a cultural hub. Singapore is extremely diverse as a country. The three-quarter Chinese majority lives alongside Malays, Indians, and Western expats. English, Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, Malay, and other languages are widely spoken. Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and traditional Chinese beliefs are practiced. Yet Singapore’s stable and orderly society has been carefully engineered by its leaders and comes with tradeoffs. Free speech in Singapore is a very different thing. The constitution sets limits: citizens must respect the judiciary, and threats to racial or religious harmony are dealt with severely. To quote a 2013 report by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy:

“A person who promotes ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore can be convicted under the Sedition Act, and be fined up to $5,000 or jailed up to three years, or both…In recent years, the Sedition Act has been invoked on several occasions.”

The report details these occasions, and most include Chinese citizens making racist comments about Malays and Muslims. In one case, a Christian couple was punished for distributing anti-Islamic and anti-Catholic literature. Punishments range from community service to jail time. Singapore is constantly wary of the social consequences of their investment policies. From cultural differences in the rising Filipino population to the management of foreign workers, its leaders keep the country well away from the brink of conflict.

This helps us understand why Singapore employs the stringent laws it is famous for. Singapore enforces harsh punishments on minor infractions in hopes of avoiding greater disorder. When you can get caned for vandalizing a building, you aren’t going to start fomenting physical violence. It’s essentially a broken-window approach to racial and religious cohesion. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani employed a similar philosophy against petty offences while in office, known as a period when crime rapidly decreased.

Swedish Artist Dan Park responds to protesters. The sign says “degenerate art”, a term used by the Nazis. Via sydsvenskan.se

Hate speech laws in the West have much the same purpose. They are intended to keep ethnic, religious, and other minorities from feeling threatened by speech which could incite violence. Hate speech laws intended to fight political extremists become more widely used to ensure social cohesion as diversity increases. Flemming Rose, the man who originally published the fateful Muhammad cartoons at Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, knows this rather well. In a recent article, he recounts some of the most shocking examples. Did you know that in 2014 the Swedish government not only jailed an artist for his work, but also destroyed the offending pieces? In his book, Rose argues that such laws reduce humans to mere objects. Those who condemned the cartoons as inciting violence essentially painted Muslims as agency-less automatons, unable to resist waging Jihad against anyone who dares mock their religion. Or so Rose would say. And yet the reality is that the nature of the mob is very different than the nature of the individual. Gustave le Bon, the man who wrote some of the first work on crowd psychology, put it very eloquently:

“It is [because the crowd is more than just a collection of individuals] that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were bourgeoisie of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate, under the influence of some leaders, to send the most manifestly innocent people to the guillotine.”

What about diversity and its impact? Historically we see that the societies with the strongest traditions of free speech were also some of the most ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous. Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands lead the Press Freedom Index, a fact that Reporters Without Borders attributes to “a real culture of individual freedoms, a culture that is more integrated than in southern Europe.” Also near the top are Luxembourg, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Iceland, and New Zealand. The highest-ranking non-Western countries include Jamaica, Costa Rica, Namibia, Cape Verde, Uruguay, and Ghana. But wait, aren’t some of these countries pretty multicultural? In fact, although Namibia is ethnically diverse, its population is only 2.1 million and the country is 80-90% Christian. Most other ethnically diverse countries show similar trends of small populations, religious homogeneity, and economic stability. The exception is Ghana, which has made tremendous gains in education and press freedom despite having large Islamic and Christian populations, in addition to nine widely spoken languages. All in all, the contribution of culture cannot be understated, as evidenced by the country at the very top of the Index:

“The country that has headed the index since 2008, Finland, paradoxically evinces two obstacles to the development of a benign environment for freedom of information: defamation is punishable by imprisonment in certain circumstances, and just three companies own virtually almost all the national media. In practice, however, it is extremely rare for journalists to receive jail terms for what they write and there is a great deal of media pluralism despite the concentrated ownership. In a country where print is resisting digital well, the media are self-regulated through the Council for Mass Media, an independent body based on the voluntary membership of news media and journalists’ associations and funded mainly by member contributions.”

Given these patterns, the question before Western countries is inescapable. The new diversity brings tradeoffs. In countries with large populations, rapidly increasing minorities, and uncertain economies, one of those tradeoffs is between social cohesion and free expression. Governments in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the US are in the midst of historically unprecedented immigration flows. Europe now has a large Muslim population, Canada and Australia experience an increasing Asian presence, and the US has its expanding Hispanic population. If UKIP, the Front National, and all the other nationalist or right-wing parties were elected tomorrow, they would still need to contend with these factors – even if they managed to cut future immigration to historic lows.

As of this writing, there have already been several violent responses to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Foreign Policy reports that shots and even grenades have been used to attack two mosques in response, and a bomb was used in the eastern region of the country. The dream of the Western liberal was of a cosmopolitan, multicultural, free, and tolerant world. Unfortunately for them, the mass immigration that they supported may ultimately undermine the values they once prized. In Australia, a recent study showed only that 53% of citizens would choose a good democracy to a strong economy – and Australia’s economy is currently pretty good.

History indicates that that number decreases quite a bit when the economy tanks and conflict rises. Flemming Rose himself notes that Weimar Germany was characterized by lax enforcement of laws prohibiting violence. Whether by unwillingness or inability, the results were the same: those who promised order carried the day.  If populations tend towards order over and above freedom in times of strife, then it will be all the easier for governments to curb traditional rights in favour of social cohesion. Charlie Hebdo publisher Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier is reported as having declared that he would rather die on his feet then live on his knees. The words were tragically prophetic. The death of the values which Charlie Hebdo stood for will likely prove far less heroic.

The post #JeSuisCharlie Won’t Save Free Speech appeared first on Social Matter.

Dr. Zhang Weiwei

Al-Jazeera English’s Head to Head program recently featured a debate with Dr. Zhang Weiwei, renowned expert on the Chinese model of development and professor of international relations. It’s not the strongest of debates; AJE host Mehdi Hasan leaps from point to point and doesn’t grant Weiwei much opportunity to address the worldview and grand strategy of the Chinese State. As a result, Weiwei comes off looking weak at points. I’d encourage watching it anyway in addition to Eric Li’s fuller exploration of these topics. Hasan also seems to assume that the results of Chinese democracy would be good and desirable ones, ignoring that anti-Japanese and pro-expansionist nationalism would likely increase.

The problem is that Hasan attempts to frame the debate in a way which looks at China as operating almost in a vacuum, ignoring the fact that China has an entirely different culture and is in the process of transitioning from a brutal Communist system. We don’t consider Maoism as particularly relevant to the modern day, but a system which killed 40-70 million people cannot be overcome in the single generation of reform since 1978. It’s unsurprising that the West, with its increasing political time-preference, has trouble seeing this. Martin Jacques, the British academic and journalist, pointed out during the debate that no Western country had liberal democracy in the sense that Hasan articulates (universal sufferage, total freedom of the press, electoral rights and rule of law) during our own period of industrialization. I think this comment strikes at the far more interesting question which Hasan ignores.

Given that both China and the West are encountering periods of dramatic economic, social, demographic, and political transformation, which system has the greater potential to a) create long-term solutions for existing problems, and b) reform itself as necessary? A lot of political debate focuses on the question of what system or ideology is “better”: more democratic, more stable, and so on. The problem with this is that the world is a flux. Policies and entire political systems become discarded as new information comes in. The West again has trouble understanding this because all our reforms over the past few centuries have been in the direction of greater liberal democracy. But across the Eurasian sphere from the former USSR to China itself, a huge segment of humanity has experienced what happens when ideologies have a static idea of a “perfect system“, rather than structuring themselves so that new information will continually improve them.

Totalitarian practices arise when states are terrified of new information, and don’t even require the state ideology to be inherently totalitarian. Communist states once suppressed economic information showing that market systems were more productive, even when this was self-evident to the population (such as in East Germany). Theocracies suppress information which could challenge religious orthodoxy. German physicist Philipp Lenard attempted to marginalize Relativity on ethnic rather than scientific grounds – ironically, the Nazis ended up rejecting this claim because of its sheer ridiculousness. Progressive ideologues are increasingly coming to terms with the idea they don’t fucking love all science. In essence, totalitarianism is a sign of increased fragility.

This is actually one of the arguments for liberal democracy. Ideally, a liberal democratic state exists only to protect the rights of all citizens, and leaves them otherwise free to vote how they will based on their values and beliefs. Because the rights of citizens are sacrosanct, the state cannot avoid uncomfortable information. Of course, we can see today that this isn’t at all how things work out. States which begin as liberal, democratic ones end up being captured by special interests as much as any other system. Its system of rights makes it exceptionally ripe for entryist strategies employed by private and ideological agents. Policy is not passed on the basis of true information, but on what the populace believes to be true information. Rent seeking increases as parts of the population can vote themselves some portion of wealth. The saving grace of liberal democracy is that rights to free speech still exist to a far enough extent that we may be able to overcome these structural weaknesses. For now, anyway.

“Virtually all the candidates for the Standing Committee of the Party, China’s highest decision-making body, have served at least twice as a party secretary of a Chinese province or at similar managerial positions. It takes extraordinary talent and skills to govern a typical Chinese province, which is on average the size of four to five European states. Indeed, with the Chinese system of meritocracy in place, it is inconceivable that people as weak and incompetent as George W. Bush or Yoshihiko Noda of Japan could ever get to the top leadership position.” – Dr. Zhang Weiwei

China’s defenders portray the Chinese model as being based on a meritocratic approach to governance and a low-time preference “civilizational state” appropriate to Chinese culture and history. This applies to Chinese business as well as government. The Economist describes a focus on speed as being vital to the Chinese model of management. China is skilled at carefully selecting aspects of Western strategies and technologies which it believes to be appropriate. Companies begin selling quickly (skipping the Western norm of beta testing) and then rapidly incorporating market feedback in order to improve the product. The goal is not to out-innovate the West, because China realizes that this is not as yet possible. Its strength is its huge resource base, and so it focuses on “accelerated development” instead. Presumably, it will begin to shift toward innovation as it increases its human capital base. This may help us explain the phenomenon of ghost cities in China. The model is wasteful on the one hand as resources may be pumped into enterprises which yield losses. But it’s also geared towards increased antifragility, since China is willing to bear the brunt of losses in order to strengthen its long-term development. This is only possible with China’s system of government, in which politicians cannot attempt to overthrow the government for every short-term loss. Examining how China improves this technique to decrease its wastefulness will be something to look at in future.

Overall, China’s model of governance more closely approximates how large private corporations operate (don’t let the apparent waste throw you off – Silicon Valley gets similar criticism). In a competitive market, firms must minimize waste and optimize development if they want to maintain their customers. This applies to firms with high market power as well as ones without. Like corporations, China must deal with corruption, human error, short-term biases, and so on. But because China is currently competing against both developed countries like the US and developing ones like Brazil or India, it also faces similar competitive pressures in how it governs the country. The West has not faced such pressures from outside its own region for a long, long time – perhaps not since before the colonial era. As China and other countries shift economic and political power away from the West, our own governmental structures will no longer enjoy the luxuries of wasting resources because of ideological impotency. This goes beyond questions of economic policy. Foreign policy and our approach to demographic issues will also change. Conservatives who howl against President Obama’s sensible approach to Cuba will join progressives who think that evolution no longer matters on the dust-heap of history.

My argument here is not that the Chinese model is a perfect model. The moment a perfect model is discovered, a new crisis will return it to imperfection, and the Chinese model may soon face its first major test. The question is which model is better equipped to respond to our rapidly shifting economic, social, and technological conditions. Which will take a more long-term approach in planning? Which will maintain stability through crises without stifling dynamism and innovation? At this moment in time, China is adjusting their ideology to deal with the new reality. The West is largely trying to ignore the new reality in order to protect its ideological biases. It’s not hard to see which one is more fragile and less effective.

Of course, the West will continue to produce massive wealth and the Western powers will continue to be major contenders for a long time coming. But let’s not be deceived into thinking that we built that. The economic and political position of the West is largely the result of previous generations. The current management is taking some steps to maintain that, such as making us more energy independent. But our ideologies are dangerously undermining us. The conservative base still thinks that talking about how awesome the US is will make it true. The progressive base is stuck in the same old rut of wanting increased welfare benefits while undermining economic incentives and social cohesion. Europe is already challenging this establishment. The barbarians reach the peripheries first.

Meanwhile, China views the whole thing from the perspective of practical businessmen. They continue to learn from others while adapting it to their own context. They reach their hands out to those who want to work with them. They are increasing pressure against their political and economic competitors. In the words of Dr. Zhang Weiwei:

“If you think our model is good, you can learn from us. If you think our model is not good, we don’t care.”

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Background: The ENR was birthed in 1968, the year of the student uprisings which became iconic in French political culture. The term “68ers” is used to describe the generation which led the social, sexual, and cultural revolutions of these last few decades. Its intellectual core was in the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne, or GRECE), founded by Alain de Benoist and others. These thinkers shared a broad intellectual heritage, including the German Conservative Revolutionaries, Oswald Spengler’s cyclical and organic vision of history, the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola, and other intellectual currents. It distinguished itself from the mainstream right by levelling critiques against not just communism, but also free market capitalism and American cultural hegemony, considering them two sides of the same materialist coin. This led to a renewed focus on political theory and the role of culture in the realm of politics.

Specifically, the ENR aimed to promote a “Gramscianism of the Right“, adapting the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change goes hand in hand with – and usually follows – cultural and social change. In the words of Het Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter, “the ideological majority is more important than the parliamentary majority.” Prior to 1968, reactionaries had taken the line that, even with cultural decline, the common people were still inherently conservative in their temperaments even if they were sometimes enticed to revolutionary causes. We can see this echoed today in the “silent majority” and “Main Street” rhetoric of modern conservatives. The ENR’s aim was to break with what can be called the time-machine reactionary view: that defeat of revolutionary elites would enable to restoration of a traditional order. 1968 and its era were a proof to the ENR that the culture itself would have to be retaken before change could come at the political level. This led it to pursue a project of “metapolitics”; its thinkers scorned party and even “radical” activism, preferring to rethink philosophical foundations and create cultural memes to counter the ’68er ideology of Social Progress.

Drones for democracy!

For much of the ENR, especially Alain de Benoist, this entailed the critique and rejection of monotheism in general and Christianity in particular in favour of an “authentic” European tradition. While some embraced neo-pagan practices, de Benoist himself employed polytheism on a more theoretical level. In his work On Being a Pagan, he espouses a “polytheism of values”. This lays the groundwork for his “ethnopluralist” doctrine that every people has the right to its own space and territory, where it can pursue its own form of development. De Benoist argues that it is monotheism that lays the groundwork for universalism. Universalism is used in a sense similar to Moldbug’s, but with broader scope: it is the idea that there is an objective moral order which humans must come in accordance with. Religious objectivism is present in the Christian idea that all peoples must become Christian in order to attain salvation. For de Benoist, it is this idea that creates the foundation for Social Progress. A people further along the path of progress may, or perhaps even must, undertake the project of lifting others to its position, whether the others want to follow them or not. This idea is foundational to materialist communism and liberal democracy alike. Specifically, it is expressed through the terror-tactics of the NKVD and the freedom-bringing bombs of the NATO alliance in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. For de Benoist, it is only a return to a polytheism of values – the idea that there is no objective Social Progress and that different peoples must have different moral orders, religious worldviews, and collective destinies – that will overthrow the present order and allow Europeans to return to their true spiritual tradition.

It should be noted that the extent to which ENR thinkers believe Christianity can be reconciled with European rebirth varies. The Neue Kultur manifesto summarize the doubts of certain adherents:

“Our school stresses the primacy of life over all inherited worldviews, the primacy of soul over spirit, the primacy of feelings over intellect, and finally of character over reason…hence it follows that our school is opposed to all systems of an absolutist character, given that these systems imply the idea of determinism, of a single truth or of a monotheism, in which we discern the roots of totalitarianism. Our new school shares the view that the common denominator for all these systems lies in universalism, i.e. in the teaching of egalitarianism, be it of Aristotelian, Thomist, Judaeo-Christian, or Marxist origin…”

Those familiar with Moldbug will know that he laid out a nearly identical thesis: the Ultracalvinist Hypothesis. Christians interested in neoreactionary thought have written on this topic as well. Yours truly remains unconvinced that Christianity is inherently geared towards the values the ENR ascribes to it, and hopes that intelligent Christians will be able to educate their co-faithful on the subject. De Benoist himself does not totally reject Christianity, and other authors such as Dominique Venner were more explicit in citing its contributions to Western civilization. Nevertheless, the ENR’s conclusion is that Christianity must come to terms with how its doctrines were used to shape the early foundations of Social Progress.

Who: These are some names which come up often in the European New Right.

Alain de Benoist – discussed above. Recently, de Benoist has also published a critique of modern mass democracy and called for a rethinking of the place of democracy in our political institutions. He conceives of democracy as being a system to ascertain the general will, not a good in and of itself, and advises a return to small-scale, organic democratic systems like those which survived for centuries in Switzerland, Iceland, and Athens. Specifically, democracies can only function in groups which already have a strong sense of common identity, the very things which Neoreaction terms thedes.

Dominique Venner – Venner got his start in the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, a group which opposed Algerian independence and carried out an opposition campaign against both the Algerian FLN and French President de Gaulle. After serving time in prison for this affiliation, Venner went on to become the historian of the ENR, focusing on what he considered to be the authentic European tradition exemplified in the works of Homer and those who took inspiration from him. On May 21, 2013, he committed suicide in Notre Dame cathedral. The popular press lambasted him as a bigot who carried this out as an extreme protest against the gay marriage campaign of the Hollande government. Venner’s own view of his action was far more radical. He viewed his suicide as a final act of resistance against the order he opposed all his life, and chose Notre Dame because of its centrality to the French culture and tradition: “she was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins.”

Guillaume Faye – Faye was one of the main theorists of the French New Right during its growth period in the 70’s and 80’s before leaving it to pursue a career in journalism. He made a re-entry into the ENR and Identitarian scene with his work Archeofuturism. This work may be of particular interest to neoreactionaries because of its focus on systems thinking. It predicts a European collapse through a “convergence of catastrophes”, demographic, economic, social, and environmental, and its eventual rebuilding along archeofuturist lines. The work includes a short fictional story where a European official tells the story of the Catastrophes and the rebuilding of Europe to a visiting Indian student, who is herself a member of her country’s post-Cataclysm aristocracy. The rebuilt Europe is a patchwork of states with various forms of governance (the Duchy of Brussels, the Kingdom of Bavaria, and the National-Popular Republic of Serbia to name some examples), which exist alongside rural traditional communities. These are all united in a continental Eurosiberian Federation stretching from Brittany to the Bering Straight. About 20% of the populace has access to advanced technology, while the rest live in traditional low-tech communities. Faye envisions this as allowing humanity to continue its technological progress without placing the planet in environmental and social peril. In addition to this work, Faye has written other works focusing on European ethno- and geopolitics. Unfortunately, there has been something of a split between Faye and de Benoist in recent years, as de Benoist considers Faye’s militantly anti-Islamic stance to be too radical. Faye has recently promoted a pro-Israeli policy for Europe in order to counter Islamic influence, while many Identitarians support the Palestinian cause.

These three figures have received the most coverage in English translated work on the ENR. An extended list of figures can be found in Appendix I of Tomislav Sunic’s work on the topic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right. Such figures include Robert Steukers, who maintains the Euro-Synergies website which publishes essays in multiple languages and Pierre Krebs, the leader of the German branch of the ENR.

The ENR Today

German and Austrian Identitarians.

The writings and ideas of the ENR are undergoing a resurgence today as their writings become published in English, thanks to both independent translators and publishers like Arktos Media. In Western Europe they have influenced the Identitarian movement which has grown in France and Germany, the two countries where the ENR was strongest. Markus Willinger, young leader of the German Identitaere Bewegung (“Identitarian Movement”) reflects strong influences in his work Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers. Apart from his focus on the cultural sphere, the idea of ethnopluralism promoted by Alain de Benoist has appeared in many of their works and direct actions. They have also abandoned conceptions of “national identity” promoted by previous generations of state-nationalists, preferring an organic approach where regional, national, and European identity are all given their just due. Thus French identitarians identify less with the Jacobin French nation-state and more with the diverse regions which make the real France. This is reflected in the Identitarian preference for forming city-level groups such as in Nice or Vienna. The actions of previous generations of nationalists which suppressed regional cultures in favour of “national” ones (think Franco with Catalonia or France with Brittany and Occitania) are anathema to the identitarian idea and to the metapolitical worldview of the ENR.

Alexander Dugin

Russia has also seen influence by the ENR, particularly in recent dialogue between Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin, the Russian thinker who is influential in the Kremlin and the mind behind the Eurasian Movement. This culminated some time ago in the End of the Present World conference held in London (somewhat ironic, given both men’s suspicion of Anglosphere influence in Europe), where Dugin and de Benoist gave talks. Dugin has taken pains to distinguish his conception of the Russian people or narod from earlier state-nationalist conceptions, instead proposing a more organic entity distinct from not just the state but also the mere “population”. This has been useful for the Russian approach to ethnic Russian populations outside their borders, in Crimea and in Donetsk and Lugansk, both components of a possible Novorossiya. There is a difference between the visions of the “Eurocontinentalists” who support some kind of union with Russia, and Dugin’s own Eurasianist project which envisions Russia looking east and becoming a distinct center of cultural and political influence from Europe. It is unquestionably the latter which has influence in the Kremlin at the present time. Western media has picked up on this influence following the events in Ukraine and Dugin scholars are now even being interviewed on mainstream outlets.

Why Should We Care?

For two reasons: to glean useful ideas from their work and in order to know what intellectual currents are gaining ground on the Right across the Atlantic. Two of the other main topics which the ENR has discussed in its work are the political theory of German scholar Carl Schmitt and the economic and social thought of Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto.

Schmitt held that all societies – including democratic ones – sometimes encounter situations where normal institutions have to be suspended in order to ensure the security of the state and society. In ancient Rome, this occurred through the office of Dictator, which was held for the last time by Julius Caesar. Schmitt called such a crisis a “state of exception” (in German, Ausnahmezustand). The person or institution which decides when the state of exception arrives is the real holder of sovereignty, regardless of whether this is formally recognized or not. In Schmitt’s Germany, that would one day be Adolf Hitler. In a country like Saudi Arabia, that is the monarchy. In Egypt, the struggle between the government, army, and judiciary was caused by the question of who would truly hold the reigns of power after the fall of Mubarak.

Vilfredo Pareto talks about the relationship between ideology and states. As Sunic writes in his work, “each government tries to preserve its political institutions and internal harmony by a posteriori justification of its political behaviour…in sharp contrast to its a priori political objectives.” This means that governments will justify harsh or “bad” actions by deeming them necessary for the greater good. This is more than just rhetorical deceit: people often do believe that such actions are justified, and in fact they may be. This also extends to political movements. In particular, movements designed to appeal to self-conceived “oppressed minorities” may use egalitarian ideology as a justification for their actions. Of course, it is only ever a facade. These things are dispensed with when power is obtained. Nevertheless, it is to equality that an appeal is continually made when political power is exercised, even when this has long since become nonsensical (such as in the USSR). The applications to the modern Social Justice movement should be self-evident. Neoreaction will find that this echoes many of its own analyses of progressive political and cultural power grabs. As Pareto states:

“[Equality] is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor, the latter being their chief concern.”

A lot of similar issues are at play in Europe as in Canada and the USA. Europeans are struggling with the results of egalitarian and democratic ideologies on the level of social technology, demography, and identity. The New Right has its grounding in a more continental tradition, as can be seen by its influences in Heidegger and the existentialist milieu; Neoreaction is more analytic and stands in the Anglo-empirical tradition of social science. That said, the two share many motivational and normative elements. Moreover, ideas like those of Pareto and Schmitt and concepts like archeofuturism and ethnopluralism will certainly be of interest to those interested in neoreactionary analysis. Above all, the idea that cultural shift must come before political change is vital to understand. Before a city or region becomes politically autonomous, the people living and working there must identify as a thede which can function autonomously.

I encourage those interested in the political tradition of the Right to further research the authors above and below.

Works:

Against Democracy and Equality by Tomislav Sunic
New Culture, New Right by Michael O’Meara
On Being a Pagan by Alain de Benoist
The Problem of Democracy by Alain de Benoist
Archeofuturism by Guillaume Faye

Alain de Benoist’s French website is available here.

English translations of ENR works have been published at:
Euro-Synergies
r/European_New_Right
Fourth Political Theory
Amerika.org
New European Conservative

An earlier version of this post appeared at This Rough Beast.

The post An Introduction to the European New Right appeared first on Social Matter.

The concept was formulated by Plato in his Republic. He describes a myth which would be told to the Republic’s citizens. Its people were born of the Earth and should care for it as their mother; the gods used gold, silver, brass and iron when they created people. This is why people differ in their abilities. Everyone should achieve the potential they were born with. But people mix, and so we might see a golden child born to a silver or brass father, or a silver child born to a golden one. The myth contains a prophecy that the city will be destroyed if the man of brass or iron rules over it; if the guardians of the Republic give in to nepotism, they will tempt the wrath of the gods. A populace seeing the guardians abuse their rank will likely revolt. The guardians must seek out golden children born to other castes, and not let their own children become guardians if they don’t deserve it.

Because the citizens believe this myth, they take stewardship for the earth and maintain an effective, responsible government. In short, a noble lie can be defined as a myth which will lead people to work for the greater good when they believe it – regardless of the fact that it isn’t true.

To some it represents the most dangerous sort of cynicism: state guardians lying to their people in order to keep them in line.  For others, Plato had stumbled upon an unpleasant but necessary truth about how politics works.

Fast forward to the stormy decades following the French Revolution.

Joseph de Maistre wrote in defense of royalism and Catholicism – Throne and Altar – and denounced the project of the Enlightenment. He believed that its intellectuals had severely misjudged human nature. De Maistre also believed that human societies functioned better when informed by a myth. Isaiah Berlin in his lecture on de Maistre calls it “a form of government which reason cannot reach to”. While the Enlightenment trumpeted the glories of rational inquiry, de Maistre believed that a State which could have its legitimacy undermined by reason and critique was a dangerous thing. De Maistre viewed human nature as essentially sinful, vicious, and corrupt. Considering that he saw the utopian dreams of the revolution drowned in the blood of the Terror, we can hardly blame him. Like Plato, de Maistre upheld the necessity of a strong authority which would direct Man away from his bloody and destructive passions and allow him to achieve his potential. For this reason he defended the Holy Inquisition in Spain; though it employed techniques which many (even in de Maistre’s day) found deplorable, it prevented religious conflict which could have ultimately destroyed the Catholic monarchy. Thus, authority is preserved and greater potential violence curbed.

Catholicism formed the unassailable myth which the kingdoms of Western Europe had to base itself on. De Maistre advocated ultramontanism – the view that the Pope should exercise political as well as spiritual authority. He believed that the authority of the Pope and Church provided a bulwark so firm that, wonder of wonders, serfdom could safely be abolished! He did not think so highly of the Russian church, which was why he advised Tsar Alexander I to maintain serfdom there. If Russian serfdom were abolished, de Maistre was sure that “a few mutineers from the universities” assisted by subversive elements at home and the “sect that never sleeps” abroad would ultimately annihilate the Russian monarchy.

De Maistre even targeted science as a threat to the state. Berlin explains that “scientists are undesirable because they establish doubt”. Doubt as the foundation of inquiry eventually becomes doubt undermining the legitimacy of authority. When this authority is eroded, only the vice and violence of Man at his worst can follow. As far as de Maistre is concerned, great rulers eschew science “which is why the Romans imported Greeks to do their science for them” (Berlin).

These views shock the modern reader at first. Isn’t our whole world built on science and its technological fruits? Aren’t our political systems dependent on the idea that anyone can question the government? Aren’t Plato and de Maistre planting the seeds of totalitarianism and fascism?

Perhaps we assume too much of ourselves. Let’s take one last leap forward.

In 2009, a fellow named Jason Richwine wrote his PhD thesis at Harvard on the topic of hereditary intelligence and the variation of IQ between ethnic groups. An explosive topic? Doubtlessly. One which many might challenge? Certainly. A few years later, Richwine completed a study about the costs of immigration for the conservative Heritage Foundation. Activists promptly dug up his PhD thesis and used it to get him purged from the organization. Soon after, Scientific American blogger John Horgan published wrote this post. In it, he suggests that research on race and IQ should be banned outright.

Think about that a moment. A magazine dedicated to informing people about science published an article suggesting a ban on scientific research. Why?

“For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value. Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior…Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies. Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse.”

Horgan likely doesn’t realize how radically anti-Enlightenment his sentiment is. Doesn’t rational inquiry value knowledge for its own sake? Aren’t the heroes of the scientific tradition precisely those individuals who defied convention? Imagine if Copernicus had thought that no good would come of upsetting geocentrism and Man’s central place in the universe.

Most radical of all is the principle embodied in his thought. When scientific research upsets the common good and the social order, it is no longer desirable to pursue it. It doesn’t matter whether Richwine and his fellows are right or wrong. As a society, we base ourselves on the values of democracy and equality. This research threatens that foundation. That is the end of it. The place of democracy and equality appears to be one which “reason cannot reach”. The position which scandalized us in the pages of de Maistre is openly promoted in the pages of popular magazines.

Lest I be accused of anecdotal evidence, let me point out the broader context. As we saw in my previous article, free speech seems to be losing fans these days. This shift is occurring both in establishment institutions and among young activists. Recently the American Association of University Professors had to denounce the impact of trigger warnings on academic freedom; this happened after growing support for the concept from activist circles, including many students. Professors defending academic freedom against students? Imagine telling that one to the Free Speech Movement. This goes beyond speech codes that at least 60% of American universities and colleges already have. Across the pond, the University College London discovered that a student club was discussing books and political philosophies which they didn’t like. Hitler or Chairman Mao? Nope, Nietzsche and Heidegger, amongst others. The university decided that right wing ideas had no place on campus and simply banned the club. The Daily Beast article on the subject reported that similar bans have been placed on everything from songs to newspapers across UK universities. The latest support for this shift comes from over at Harvard itself. The Crimson, Harvard’s student paper, ran an opinion piece by Sandra Korn which openly opposed the concept of academic freedom. Instead, the author suggests that the university must run on the principle of “academic justice”.

“Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?”

Like most of us, Ms. Korn probably learned about Galileo’s trial at some point. It seems she has decided that the Inquisitor’s chair is more comfortable than the free-thinker’s. We moderns are not so different from Plato and de Maistre after all. Yet surely if Ms. Korn and her comrades shouldn’t fear research if they are right in their views? The scientific method is built on trying to disprove hypotheses and theories. Does politics need more protection than science? It’s hard to see why when you consider that politics must accept reality as much as science does. As an extreme example, let’s say your religion holds that diseases are caused by negative emotions and that germs are a myth invented by heretics. When a plague hits, how likely are you to survive? Before the plague, you might be a peaceful society united by positive thinking. Afterwards, you’re a feature in the history of medical imbeciles. The noble lie walks a fine line. Push too much, and you become very fragile very quickly.

The question we should ask is, what truths become obscured because of our myths? Let’s say that we extend the Horgan-Korn philosophy to any sort of research on differences between ethnic groups. After all, won’t the idea that differences exist between ethnic populations erode egalitarianism and feed racist biases? Well, then we’ll be extending that to medical research. That  means not knowing that Asians can face greater risks of Alzheimer’s or  that some medicines be more beneficial for black people. If you’re an Asian or black person, those might be facts you’d like to know. Westerners overwhelmingly trumpet liberal democracy as the best form of government for everyone. Accepting that wholeheartedly will blind us to critics like Eric X. Li. We will refuse to examine the pros and cons of alternatives because the question is already settled.

And what about Plato? While his Republic was fictional, religion was central to the Greek city-states. Athens was under the patronage of Athena. These myths had teeth; when Socrates was executed, one of the charges against him was impiety. Yet this city also produced Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and other eminent philosophers. Greece produced a huge variety of philosophies, from Democritus and his materialism to Pythagoras and his mathematical mysticism. Despite being founded on religious cults, the cities did not feel threatened by the many interpretations (and even rejections) of these myths. Even Socrates was not attacked until people believed that he supported the bloody rule of the Thirty Tyrants. The city could find a place for both the mystical interpretations of philosophers and the simple devotion of the peasant. By contrast, our universities seem to be narrowing the boundaries of interpretation and discourse by the day.

If our society requires myths and common narratives to bind us together, not all myths are created equal. A narrative which encourages cooperation and is open to interpretation is beneficial; it doesn’t blind us to the pursuit of truth, and it creates a functioning social order. A narrative which forces you to deny reality and encourages conflict does the opposite. Thus the current generation of progressives find it necessary to clamp down on everything from philosophy to science to maintain their grip. Sooner or later such a myth has to evaporate. Human beings are experts at denying the facts right before their eyes, but even we have our limits. No, those dinosaur bones weren’t put there by Satan. No, racists didn’t come in the night and sabotage that medical research. The earth really is that old. That medicine really is better for black people.

The noble lie causes its believers to work for the greater good. But if our myths cause us to deny reality, we will stagnate instead of improving. A myth which destroys us is not noble – it is only a lie. Modern Westerners find religious myth far more archaic than ideological myth. But America now relies on Orthodox Russia to send them to space. India and China are getting in on the action as well. Their students are expanding the search for knowledge at the very moment ours don ideological blinders. The “sect that never sleeps” may simply be outcompeted. Nature and whatever gods brought it forth do not suffer fools. Perhaps the factions in our academies will have their way; but we may just discover that the right demigods can deliver truth and liberty better than the blind mantras of Social Progress.

The post Ignoble Lies appeared first on Social Matter.

I’d like to begin by proposing the following: in any society, religion’s role is to make truth-claims which result in certain actions being considered right and good, and others being considered wrong and bad. Questioning the common religion is considered subversive (or at least something no one respectable does) because the implication is that you are justifying bad actions and attacking good ones. This guiding role is the defining core of how religions operate on the social level.

Now I’m sure that objections to that definition are already coming up. After all, it seems rather broad. Many things could come under that definition. Isn’t that exactly how ideologies operate as well?

Yes, yes it is. But we’ll get to that part in a moment. Let’s start by examining a common neoreactionary claim: namely, that the ideology of social progressivism acts as a religion.

Now that seems a bit unwieldy. First of all, most religions include gods and divinities in their truth claims. How can a system which makes no reference to gods act like a religion? But in fact, not all religions depend on gods either. Buddhism, for example, is recognized by everyone as being a religion. Yet it functions without the need for gods. In particular, belief in a creator God was rejected by the Buddha and his successors as being based in delusion. Now the fact is that many Buddhist cultures do include worship of a variety of deities. However, these deities are usually local in nature, and Buddhism was incorporated into these practices. The fact that no single god appears across Buddhism should be enough to show that no god is essential to Buddhism. Buddhists do not reject the possibility of higher dimensions and beings, but these too are considered to be subject to Karmic law. In fact, Buddhist writings warn that gods, when worshiped, may simply contribute to the attachment which binds humans to this world. While no particular god is held to be real or not, they are at worst a mere distraction from the path to Enlightenment. Thus we see that gods, while common, are not a necessary feature of religion. So progressivism is not barred from acting as a religion by not claiming any gods.

The second big objection is that religions are defined by making metaphysical claims. They claim to interact with a spiritual realm and have rituals. Ideologies don’t make any such claims, unless they’re religious in nature already like Islamism is. Progressivism in particular claims that one should tolerate all beliefs. Progressives hold a diversity of political opinions and religious views. Now it’s true that religions do make metaphysical claims (or at least assumptions). Ritual and action defined by spiritual intent is central to all religions. But to what extent does this impact how religion operates as a social phenomenon?

One example worth looking at is the practice of Shinto in Japan. On the one hand, 64% of Japanese don’t believe in God. On the other hand, 80% of the population reports taking part in rituals which descend from the animistic beliefs of ancient Japan. Buddhism is another major Japanese religion and we saw above how it views the worship of gods. In modern Japan, people accept varied and contradictory views about the spiritual world with which the temple priest is said to interact. Nevertheless, a huge majority of the society is still united by this religious tradition. Hinduism also was home to a huge variety of metaphysical philosophies. Some of them preached that the world was united in an underlying spiritual unity; others preached atheism and matter as the only reality. The rituals of Indian gods united a society which differed in their interpretations of those rituals. In ancient Greece, peasants who believed in the real power of Zeus and philosophers who most certainly did not attended the same temples. Even Christianity, where unity of belief is far more important, has tremendous philosophical diversity. The Catholic Church claims both the humanist Erasmus and the arch-reactionary anti-humanist Joseph de Maistre in its ranks. Now progressivism is an ideology, not a religion as such, and its claims aren’t spiritual in nature. That’s why people from a variety of religions can profess to it. But religious believers can also argue and contradict each other all they like, so long as their views don’t contradict the core beliefs of the religion. Neither religion nor ideology depends on total metaphysical agreement in order to unite a society.

So what sort of agreement do they depend on? Well, as we saw above, what unites Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism is that each of them operates in society through certain rituals, creeds, and ideas. Specifically, certain behaviours, actions, and attitudes become considered desirable. If a religion becomes institutional and widely recognized, adherence to these norms becomes a necessity for social respectability. Personally, I prefer thinking of them as memeplexes. A memeplex is a system of memes (ideas or behaviours) which is internally consistent and self-reinforcing. Memes compatible with the system become selected for, while those incompatible with it are rejected. In daily life, this means that certain behavours become socially respectable and others cause one to be ostracized. Some ideas and attitudes are good and proper, others are bad and dangerous. In Catholic Spain, piety toward God was praiseworthy. In Communist Russia, it was considered superstitious and condemned. Spain operated on one memeplex, Russia on another. In modern Russia, protecting the traditional Christian form of marriage is viewed by many as patriotic. In more and more of the West, it’s condemned as bigoted and loses people jobs. Now Russia’s memeplex has changed, and I’ll make the case below that the West operates on yet a third one.

This is the form of agreement which is essential in religion. Humanists and anti-humanists are both present in the Church because the memes they propagate are not incompatible with Christian doctrine. Ritual, not belief, is the essential core of Shinto, which is why atheists, Buddhists, and pantheists can all take part in them. In the same way, you can be a social progressive and be a Christian, atheist, or Jew. You can be in favour of intervention in Iraq (like Obama/Clinton) or against it. But you can’t reject the idea of equality. You must accept the idea that religion has no place in the State. A modern progressive probably can’t oppose gay marriage and still claim the label either. That’s because both religion and unbelief can be compatible with the progressive memeplex. Progressive arguments can be formulated for both intervention and non-intervention in Iraq. But egalitarianism is a fundamental meme within progressive ideology. Therefore, anti-egalitarian ideas are incompatible with it. Remember, not every individual in a society needs to accept these norms. Many times, it’s actually hard to see that there’s an orthodoxy at all. That’s because we think on a very marginal level. Actions and ideas get condemned because “everyone knows that that’s bad”, not because “that’s contrary to our memeplex.”. But enough people do act and think similarly enough that society develops certain recognizable norms.

Bolsheviks smash icons at an anti-religious demonstration; memetic war in action.

This is where we finally come to the question of non-religious memeplexes. What happens when a formal religion stops being the dominant cultural force? The promise of secularism has always been that religion would play no part in affairs of state. French and Turkish secularists go even further and demand the expulsion of religion from public life, including in dress, which is why they ban burkas. During the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, religion was purged from the state. The communist ideology was officially atheistic and anti-religious. Russian Orthodox Christianity had been an important source from which Russians derived their values, worldview, and attitudes about morality. With it purged, an opportunity emerged to see what would replace religion. Of course, it was Communism that replaced it. It was pretty effective at doing it too. Communism makes claims about reality (atheism, materialism) and creates a historical narrative (class struggle). It even has a vision for the future (proletarian revolution, the classless society). With these two elements, it could determine which actions were right and which were wrong. Those actions which contributed to the Revolution and worked toward equality and worker solidarity were good and praiseworthy. Those actions which supported the capitalists and the reactionaries – and eventually anyone who wasn’t the Bolsheviks – were bad and punished. Communism informed which actions were desirable. Communism was the framework within which respectable debate occurred. Communism was the ideology which you had to accept to become socially respectable in the USSR. In other words, Communism replaced Christianity as the overarching memeplex. Communism didn’t just purge Christianity; it replaced it as the working paradigm of society. It usurped the role of religion in society because it shared so many of its features.

This is what I mean by “the necessity of religion”. Human beings are social creatures. In order for meaningful communication to occur, we need some measure of common understanding. If we can’t agree on what actions are good and bad, we cannot act together. If we can’t decide which goals are worth pursuing, we can’t move forward. In order to answer those questions, we need to have fundamental values which we hold in common. Some system of fundamental and assumed beliefs and attitudes has to arise, or else society faces internal conflict and disintegration. The promise of secularism was that no religion should dominate that agreement. But if not religion, then what? France and Turkey answered that question by imposing modern Republican values, secular to the point of being anti-religious. If your religion or culture conflicted with those values, the expectation was that you conformed. Among the younger generation, progressivism is flexing its muscles as well. Here’s a short list of people who have felt the effects by being rejected from the sphere of respectability. Universities in particular have experienced shifting norms. The “safe space” ideology, which prizes tolerance and acceptance above dissent and argument, has caused politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be blocked from speaking on campuses, which should now be safe spaces in and of themselves. But political activism does not a memeplex make. After all, the point of a dominant memeplex is that it is accepted by society at large. The Millennial generation is probably the best example of what happens when progressive values become the new norms. Millennials have a tendency to be apolitical, but as a whole are extremely socially progressive. If you reflect those values, most Millennials will support your actions. If you don’t, most Millennials won’t. If Millennials are roused to action by conservative attacks on our rights (birth control), but acquiesce to progressive ones (banning speakers with the wrong opinions), which side will win out? Not even God is immune. This might be the defining force which has allowed the ideologies above to override concerns about “free speech” or “open debate”.

This is where neoreaction asks an uncomfortable question: what happened to all that freedom?

“Oh, make sure you tell them I only mean free from federal restriction. Corporate and media censorship is still cool.”

After all, the goal of liberalism was to create a society where freedom of thought and expression was encouraged. Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t we meant to be beyond having the state impose its values on people? Wasn’t questioning orthodoxy something to be celebrated? With the memeplex idea, it’s easier to understand the shift. When a memeplex becomes culturally dominant, it becomes more and more difficult to empathize with those who disagree with it. After all, those who think or act differently from the memeplex are bad. Now, when society is divided 50-50 between those who believe in traditional Christian morality and those who don’t, each side has a choice: demonize half the population or just say “fine, but you shouldn’t impose that on other people”. If only 5% of the population believes that premarital sex is sinful or that valid marriage must occur between heterosexuals, then it’s easier to demonize them for holding the belief at all even when they pose no threat. When hippies were a derided minority, social progressives believed in freedom of speech at a cultural level, not just a political one. After all, it’s no fun getting fired because you want the troops back from Vietnam. But in our day, progressive rhetoric has changed. Now the goal is to restrict where free speech should apply to the legal minimum. In other words, as a memeplex becomes dominant, freedom becomes less important and uniformity increases. As it becomes institutionalized, it’s necessary to agree with the memeplex in order to be respectable. Even parents face these questions. Parts of the Chinese community in Vancouver have opposed cultural progressive influences in schools. The position of the schools is that children have to learn about things like LGBT issues somehow. The hidden assumption is that these programs will help them learn the right mindset. The good mindset. The mindset of decent and respectable people. Someone’s orthodoxy has to win out.

This is what neoreactionaries mean when we say that social progressivism acts as a religion. As time goes on, certain memes triumph in the culture wars. The first shift in attitudes is slow. The sexual revolution faced tremendous cultural barriers and it took decades to see values change. Gay marriage, on the other hand, was first legalized in 2001 in the Netherlands; only 13 years later it is anathema to oppose it. We live in an age where this paradigm now informs the values of our generation. Its fundamental claims of equality and personal freedom are more or less unquestioned. It informs our actions as well. To support the next big Cause is good, and proof of your tolerance and open-mindedness. To practice a religion with traditional values is acceptable so long as you don’t contradict the overarching narrative. To actually challenge that narrative is something only bigots, reactionaries, and basement dwelling virgins do. (As an aside, a good rule of thumb about what beliefs are respectable is to see which shaming language is okay to use.)

Like the Russians a century ago, this generation in the West has experienced the victory of a new memeplex. What makes this memeplex fundamentally different is that it doesn’t claim the authority which religion does, or even like other political ideologies do. It insists that tolerance and personal freedom, free from judgement, are the Most Important Thing. Can’t we all just get along? But this is a delusion. In order for societies to function, commonality of values and visions must exist. Even a society which values tolerance above all else draws the line somewhere. Inevitably, certain ideas win out. Certain attitudes gain cultural dominance. Others become unfashionable, disrespectful, or outright heretical. Only bad people say or do those things. True, the new memeplex isn’t necessarily a religion, united in a single institution. But when all is said and done, when new orthodoxies are in place and new groups of heretics are shamed, purged, and punished, the only major difference is that the Church knew what it was.

The post A Faith By Any Other Name appeared first on Social Matter.

Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question where I’ll end up claiming atheists caused Nazism. It stands as I wrote it. So let’s try and answer it. Was it Hitler? One would think so…to an extent. But one man could never have acted on such a scale alone. Surely there is some responsibility to be shared around. Other top Third Reich officials? Again, presumably. But many of those never personally killed a single individual. So…guards? Soldiers? The engineers who designed the camps to begin with? It’s a rather vexing question.

The problem is that everyone seems convinced that it’s not them. The answer given by the individuals who actually killed prisoners is well known: “I was only following orders.” And that’s chilling, but do we not expect the same of our own soldiers? After all, modern soldiers fighting for democracy find themselves killing innocent people too. One might expect, idealistically, that they refuse, but most will also admit that it’s not the place of the individual soldier to decide what orders to obey. One need only consider how most people would have reacted to a soldier fighting in WWII who refused to take up arms because he wasn’t so sure Hitler was such a bad guy. And oh, there were some. The same goes for Saddam in Iraq, and so on for every other war. Every rank in the military is obeying the higher ups. And in Germany, the military as a whole was just obeying its political Commander in Chief, as was the political apparatus of the NSDAP and the Reich. Yet the fact remains that without them Hitler would never been able to invade the next apartment building over in Vienna, much less most of Europe.

Let’s try another one. Who was responsible for those who perished in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Well, the fact is that we did prosecute the prison guards and engineers who manned the camps of the Reich, so it only seems logical that those who built Fat Man and Little Boy share the same responsibility. But here the problem becomes even murkier. What if the engineer has no idea what his little project is actually intended for?

Richard Weaver considers this question in his work Ideas Have Consequences, in chapter III: “Fragmentation and Obsession”:

“At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a force of seventy thousand persons laboured at an undertaking whose nature they knew little or nothing about; in fact, wartime propaganda had been so effective that they took pride in their ignorance and boasted of it as a badge of honour or as a sign of cooperation – in what? It is just possible that a few, and I should be willing to say a very few, had they known that their efforts were being directed to the slaughter of noncombatants on a scale never before contemplated, or to a perfection of brutality…might have refused complicity.”

As with the Third Reich, had it not been for all those engineers the bombs would never have gone beyond a blueprint. But it seems terribly unfair to put the blood of the first Atomic bombs on their souls, ignorant as they were. Surely the main responsibility lies with those who organized the project and hired them to do their work. But again, they could not have gotten anywhere without the engineers, knowing or not. The thing about specialists, as most of these people were, is that their position as specialists demands that someone or other harmonize them into a productive (or destructive) whole.

Goethe was a German example of the gentleman: writer, thinker, and statesman.

Weaver compares the extreme trend of specialization to walking down an insane asylum. Each patient is characterized by exhibiting a single trait to an extreme degree, while being lacking in all others. Such a patient cannot be reasoned with “any more than any other psychotic.” However, Weaver also points out that one could imagine these extremes being harmonized together into a single person, an organic whole. Once upon a time, as Weaver goes on to explain, the specialist found his opposite in the gentleman. The gentleman was characterized by the study of the liberal arts. Indeed, many of the greatest figures of the British and European Empires and even the United States were students of the classics, history, and philosophy.

What state do we find the liberal arts in today? On the one hand it’s fashionable, especially among conservative types, to ridicule those who study the arts as deadbeats. Why don’t they get real degrees and actual jobs? On the other hand, the only use many of the liberal arts students themselves seem to make of their knowledge is deconstruction. Instead of pursuing truth, the liberal arts graduate today knows only that there is no such thing as truth. On a personal note, I find it amazing how many people I see studying philosophy in university and making comments along the lines of “oh well, at the end of the day none of it really matters anyway.” Weaver begs to differ. He even says so in his title.

What Western academia has to a large extent forgotten (or purged from memory) is that the gentleman himself was the result of the first stage of intellectual decline. Weaver notes that before the liberal arts became a gentlemanly end, they were a means. Specifically, they were the tools of the philosopher. While the gentleman used the liberal arts in order to better understand society, the philosopher used them to orient himself and the society around him to a higher order.

“[The philosopher] stood at the center of things because he had mastered principles. On a level far lower were those who had acquired only facts and skills…For the philosophic doctor was in charge of the general synthesis. The assertion that philosophy was the queen of studies meant more to him than a figure of speech; knowledge of ultimate matters conferred a right to decide ultimate questions.”

St. Basil the Great was a theologian and influenced communal monasticism – his spiritual descendants would preserve the works of Western civilization through the collapse of the Roman order.

Both the gentleman and the philosopher stood at the center of their societies because it was ultimately they who carried out the “reconciling of all interests.” The gentleman sought to reconcile them toward the end of a stable and prosperous order, while the philosopher went further and sought Divine ends. If the opposite of the specialist who plays the role of cog in the machine is the philosopher who is meant to keep the whole thing running and on track, it seems obvious that it was the National Socialist German Workers Party itself which was intended to create the “general synthesis” for the whole German people.

Would it have been possible for every engineer, soldier, and prison guard to have undertaken an intellectual resistance (we have, after all, been speaking about the realm of ideas)? The officers of the NSDAP were well-schooled in their ideology and in service to their Fuehrer. The vast majority of the population was too busy working and fighting and trying to stay alive in the face of a horrifying war to take part in ideological warfare (though of course some did). Certainly, physical resistance to the Third Reich was possible. But in the same way that only a fraction of those living in the Reich formulated its foundational ideology, only a fraction of the resistance took part in ideological warfare. Following the war, this laid the groundwork for de-Nazification. The new government did not leave it to each individual to examine their conscience and come to a conclusion about the years of 1933-1945. Rather, censorship and re-education was deemed necessary by Western and Soviet sides alike. Implicit in this project was an understanding that the war of ideas was fought by a minority, educators and intellectuals tasked with educating the populace about what was good and instructing them to guard against what was evil. Not much has changed since the days of the gentleman and the philosopher, who played the role of uniting the specialist craftsmen, merchants, farmers, and families of their countries into an organic whole. If a specialist without a society is a psychotic, a society without a mind is a zombie.

How do the philosopher, the gentleman, the NSDAP officer, and the educator in Allied-occupied Berlin go about their synthesis? This is done through the creation of a narrative. This narrative may be spiritual, cultural, or political, but it always tells a story. Here is the way things should be, be it in the future or in the Golden Age (Christendom, Empire, Reich, Democracy). Here is why we aren’t there now (the Fall, ignorance and barbarism, the Jews, the Nazis). Here is what we can do (go to Mass, do your bit for His Majesty, support the Fuehrer, support democracy). Here is what deviation from this path looks like (the heathen, the savage, the liberal, the fascist). Here is how it can be combated (join the crusades, fight for King and Empire, serve in the Party or the Wehrmacht, vote in elections and report Nazis in your neighbourhoods).

The key is to create a narrative which communicates principles in ways people can understand. A successful narrative doesn’t so much tell people what to think as it does how to think. The only question we need to ask to discover the narrative we operate on is, what questions do we never ask? We don’t ask them because it would mean challenging the fundamental assumptions we are barely aware of. Basically, the point of this narrative is “the inculcation of correct facts and good morals“. Does that sound as religious to you as it does to me? Sure there aren’t necessarily gods, but they’re not essential to Confucianism, or all Buddhism either. It’s not always concerned with personal salvation, but neither were Shinto or the cult of the Emperors. A religion by any other name would be as holy.

Herein lies the necessity of the narrative. As we saw, it is impossible for the majority of society to take part in the lifelong work which synthesis requires. If you aren’t willing to become a monk, or study the arts, or guide the party, or deconstruct the authoritarian personality, then the life of the brahmin may not be the one you are called to. Fortunately, society does not live by brahmins alone. Nevertheless, society cannot live without them either. Each member of the social order, hearing the voice of the brahmins, lifts their eyes from their own work in order to gaze together in a single direction. The responsibility of the brahmins is to make sure it’s the right one, which is why religious and political heresies both tend to incur the wrath of established power. The narrative is not just a necessity in the prescriptive sense; it will necessarily be found in any society not in the midst of disintegration, unless humans either stop being concerned with ultimate matters or else become a race composed entirely of mystics. Neither seems to be on the horizon.

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”
– Joseph de Maistre

The post The Necessity of Religion appeared first on Social Matter.

Progressives are skilled in outrage. The Islamic State is creating a society which any civilized person will find much in to be outraged about. Worse yet, they are indoctrinating children into the beliefs which spur those actions. However, we must go beyond outrage if we are to ask how exactly the Caliphate manages to attract so many people with its message. Below is the part of the Vice documentary which deals with this appeal to youth and I recommend you watch it before reading on.

Two seemingly contradictory narratives have been playing out in our media. The first is that the Islamic State is attempting to return to a barbaric, medieval way of life unfit for the 21st century. The second is that the Islamic State has harnessed social media and technology in its outreach in extremely sophisticated ways, indicating outside funding as well as experience and familiarity with the latest technology. One need only look at the numerous Islamic State affiliated accounts on twitter (which will not be linked here), not to mention the fact that the group deemed it fitting that the Caliphate be announced via hashtag (#CaliphateRestored). But the fact is, these narratives seem directly opposed to each other. How can a group so bent on barbarism also be so skilled with media technology? How can they maintain such an effective online presence? How can they be so…hip? I’d like to suggest that the modern Western mindset is incapable of comprehending Islamic State propaganda, much less effectively countering it on a cultural level, precisely because the modern Western mindset is trapped in a framework of social progress which forbids imagining any future but the one it seeks to impose on the world.

The first thing which caught me while watching the Vice documentary is the sheer strangeness of the opening scenes. Laughing children going swimming? Men with their sons and daughters? This is quite removed from the scenes of bearded, machine gun wielding fanatics which most people associate with the name of the Islamic State. If you ignore the fact that the children are bragging about killing infidels and apostates when they’re all grown up, it’s almost charming. Later in the video we see the Caliphate celebration in Raqqa, Syria. Once again, it’s striking to see how much of the audience is young. Teenagers and young adults sit while a fighter talks about how he, like many, traveled from Europe to fight for the Caliphate.

“I notice that only children say hello to us, and they send us kisses from far away. When old people look at us with a frightened look. They don’t know that we are the best people on the planet! After the prophets come the Mujaheedin!”

This striking appeal sums up the contradiction between the Islamic State’s message and the Western interpretation of it. Western media talks about the Islamic State as returning to fundamentalist barbarism. The Islamic State, however, views itself as establishing not only a new age of Islamic purity, but as waging a war for the future. As far as its fighters are convinced, losing the war means that Western hegemony will lead to the effective apostasy of traditionally Muslim lands. The youth will become increasingly irreligious and reject spiritual values. This was already seen during the 20th century when secular ideologies like Arab nationalism and socialism drove many intellectuals to abandon Islam for Social Progress.

To the progressive mindset, the idea that one could actually look at the modern, progressive world and answer “no thanks” is unthinkable. To do so doesn’t just you beyond the pale of civilization; it can only mean that you are not really part of the 21st century. The problem with that is, of course, that it is the 21st century and the Islamic State is just as real as the most progressive and post-religious subcultures of the Western metropolises. The neoreactionary, however, is better equipped to deal with this phenomenon. The vision of the Islamic State – modern technology and science informed by radical Islamic values – is essentially an archeofuturist one. It has been refocusing its propaganda to promote not just war and struggle, but also a softer message depicting daily life in the Caliphate. Those living in the Islamic State laugh and play and go swimming, just like we do. However, they also adhere to a creed which demands that its values be spread to the whole world. That’s what makes them different from us, right?

Well, what exactly is the Western ideal? What constitutes Social Progress? What makes us good and them evil? To begin, the Islamic State kills people who disagree with them. We don’t do that! Well, except extremists, but they’re the bad guys, even if it does result in the occasional innocent wedding becoming a massacre. But that’s different. The Islamic State crucifies innocent people, whereas we are civilized and kill them with drones while sipping coffee somewhere far away. And there’s that funding of insurgent movements in countries we don’t like, but politics is politics. Oh yeah, and we do promote democracy in stable countries too, but shouldn’t we help freedom-seeking people become free? Unless of course they’re in Crimea, but that’s because Ukraine is modern and progressive whereas Russia is autocratic and backward and horribly traditional in its Christianity.

Oh alright, fine. So maybe we do promote our own set of values in the world and yeah, sometimes you gotta break some eggs to make a suitably 21st century omelet. But again, that’s different! The Islamic State is a theocracy! It kills people because they disagree with what they think God told them women should wear! It’s based on a religion! Our values are about freedom, democracy, and progress. That’s obviously good. And we value rational thought when we create those values, not claims that God talked to us in a cave!

What say you, Monsieur Moldbug?

Suppose you have two faiths. Both claim to be absolutely and undebatably true. Faith A tells you it is an ineluctable consequence of reason. Faith B tells you it is the literal word of God. Which is more likely to be accurate?

The answer is that you have no information at all. Perhaps faith B is the literal word of God, but you have no way to distinguish it from something that someone just made up. Perhaps faith A can be derived from pure reason, but you have no way to know if the derivation is accurate unless you work through it yourself. In which case, why do you need faith A?

In fact, of the two, faith A is almost certainly more powerful and dangerous. As anyone who’s majored in Marxist-Leninist Studies knows, it’s very easy to construct an edifice of pseudo-reason so vast and daunting that working through it is quite impractical. And this edifice is much more free to contradict common sense – in fact, it has an incentive to do so, because nonsensical results are especially subtle and hard to follow.
Whereas when the word of God contradicts common sense, the idea that it might not actually be the word of God isn’t too hard to come by. In other words, if faith A contains any fallacies, they are effectively camouflaged, whereas the “and God says” steps in faith B’s syllogisms are clearly marked and brightly colored, and faith B pays a price in skepticism if God’s opinion is obviously at variance with physical reality.

Now, don’t take more from this than is necessary. Obviously one shouldn’t prize the unthinking acceptance of claims to revelation over rational grounds for ones’ values. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the vast “rational” foundation of Western values has such a hydra of premises, some true, some false, many conflicting with and contradicting each other, that we cannot even begin to outline what our value system is. We ought to be free, equal, and ruled by justice. But is this the freedom linked to property upheld by Locke and Jefferson? Or the equality and justice instilled at the point of the State’s tax collectors, regulators, and hate-speech censors believed in by the modern progressive? The leviathan of alternative meanings attached to these three words has served to render them useless as political rhetoric. Yet despite the absence of any meaning behind these words we are confident enough to believe that we must impose them the whole world over. As the drift toward increasingly progressive norms picks up, we even see fit to damn countries like Russia for having the same opinions on marriage that we ourselves shared from millennia past up until the last couple of decades.

The neoreactionary understands the potential for blood and suffering inherent in any universalist system of values. The Islamic State tortures, crucifies, and kills innocent people, many of them fellow Sunni Muslims, many of them children, in order to implement its system of rule. It does so in a vacuum of power left by the United States, which operated under an alternative universalist ideology in which the suffering caused by war and the bodies of  children who simply happened to be at the wrong wedding are justified so long as every country and people are brought under the banner of Freedom, Democracy, and Progress…whether they want it or not. The neoreactionary also suspects that war will likely always be with us, that it is sometimes justified and tragically necessary, and that in this particular situation more will die before order is restored. That said, one cannot help but feel a bitter sense of irony when it seems that the path to defeating the Islamic State may be to back the very people so many died to overthrow. War might sometimes be necessary, but a useless war born of hubris is nothing short of an abomination.

The Islamic State in all likelihood cannot surrender. It has spilled too much blood, it has made too many promises to too many zealots and radicals. The core of its being is a mission of holy war to extend its borders until they encompass the entire globe and the black flag flies over every city in the world. As I write this, His Holiness Pope Francis hasendorsed the use of force against the Islamic State in accordance with the doctrine of Just War. The Arab countries seem content to let the West continue to handle things, and it is doubtful that Russia and China will jump in to share in the blame for what comes next. Aside from Assad and other players already involved in the conflict, it is only Iran, directly threatened by the Islamic State, which has recently intervened. It seems that it will fall to the Western powers to once again play a defining role in the region’s future, whether by action or inaction.

After over a decade of democracy promotion following the 9/11 attacks, the idea that liberal evangelism may not be the best policy after all has hit the West square in the face. The neoreactionary understands both the religious form which these values take and their causative role in the Islamic State’s promotion of a violent path to an alternative future. To totally defeat the Islamic State means to leave it not just militarily vanquished, but robbed of support. To do this, we must recognize the simple fact that not everyone wants to be us. To offer economic and political cooperation in pursuit of peace and order in the region means accepting that we are working with a largely Sunni population which embraces traditional Islamic values. They have lived side by side with Christian, Shia, Kurdish, and Yazidi neighbours for literally centuries and most are no doubt glad to continue doing so in peace. The establishment of a Western-style democratic state in Iraq created a situation where these populations are in constant competition to capture and maintain control over the state apparatus. The neoreactionary also understands this causal relationship between liberal democracy and inter-group violence. The average liberal democrat does not.

In summary, the neoreactionary doctrine dispenses with zealous democratic fundamentalism. The numbers of dead since the American overthrow of Saddam – from war, from sectarian conflict, and now from conquest by a fundamentalist state – are far too many. How many more must die before the Western dream of a liberal, modern, progressive Iraq is finally achieved? The neoreactionary response is simple. First, dispense with democratic fundamentalism and work with other stakeholders to destroy the Islamic State, from local Sunni and tribal leaders to Assad and Iran. Second, undermine the Islamic State’s support by cooperating with Muslims rather than forcing them to choose between Westernization and fundamentalism. Third, make sure that the political institutions developed in the wake of this minimize inter-group violence. This can only be done by avoiding the use of competition for the control of centralized power as a basis for politics. The Hashemite Kingdom of old seems archaic to us, but as the New Statesman article notes, the fellow Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan still stands while Libya, Egypt, and Iraq have slipped into turmoil. Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara explicitly blames the power vacuums left by the US in the wake of removing Saddam and bin Laden as creating the perfect environment for the Islamic State to arise. The neoreactionary understanding of political institutions demands the use of resiliency to shocks and effectiveness of rule as markers of success, and it is exactly these types of institutions which Iraq (or perhaps its successor states) will have to build in order to restore peace, order, and security to the land.

If Iraq is to overcome the brutal religious fundamentalism of the Islamic State, the Western powers which, one way or another, will play a large role in determining its future must overcome their own ideological fundamentalism. Western ideas of what a free, modern, and democratic Iraq should look like are worth little when the path to their realization lies through so many rivers of blood.

The post The Signalling Caliph: Neoreaction, Iraq, And The Islamic State appeared first on Social Matter.