My neoreactionary colleagues here have been very kind to allow my somewhat vanilla conservative commentary to populate these pages alongside their high theory of reaction. And I’m certainly grateful to have had the opportunity to share their audience of the disaffected Right. I also regard the formalization of their leadership, aims, etc. as a positive development, a move towards movement. Even this particular site is taking strides, promoting NRx heavyweight Henry Dampier to editor and recruiting NRx heavyweight Ryan Landry to Sunday column duties. All in all, then, I couldn’t be happier for everyone involved. But ultimately it’s not my scene, and I think it’s an opportune moment to stop playing the remora to its shark.

The bone that I’ve gnawed at most consistently over the last year here is that of the rhetoric of the Left, namely its deep and abiding mendacity. I’ve tried to point out in so many ways that its a gross error to take the critiques of social justice as good faith intellectual arguments that deserve to be met with good faith intellectual arguments of our own. I’ve tried to point out that the frame of these arguments itself—in which concepts like “racism” or “homophobia” are tools of a vast, white, cishetero conspiracy to maintain its cultural hegemony rather than simply largely irremediable and frequently adaptive features of human psychology—was formulated in such a way as to corrode the values of traditional America and Europe, to corrode the heritage of Christendom. And so even if the belief in the validity of these concepts is sincere (and not, as so often is the case, shameless rentseeking or convenient rationalization), the ideas themselves are poisonous and misguided. And I’ve tried to point out that a major failure of conservative discourse has been to accept these frames uncritically, which renders it impossible to stake out any truly conservative position.

What I’ve been less specific on, though, is what positive steps the Right ought to take. For the simple reason, of course, that I don’t really know. I know how bankrupt the thought and the criticisms of our cultural enemies are. What I don’t know is the ins and outs of a master plan to retake ground from them. I know what paths are dead ends. I don’t know the way forward.

It’s not really as hopeless as that sounds, though. The go-to protocol in quandaries such as this is to hearken to the counsel of your forebears, your elders, and your betters, to be faithful in the stewardship of what small parts of this uncertain universe God has entrusted to your care, and to patiently seek after the sort of wisdom needed to divine the correct path. All that and also to keep your powder dry. So that will be my plan for the foreseeable future. (Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to pass along any grand epiphanies I might have to Social Matter.) That’s how I’ll attempt to find my way forward, and I’ll be keeping an eye on neoreaction as it attempts to find its.

All you readers have my sincerest gratitude. God bless.

The post Ways Forward appeared first on Social Matter.

As I said, modern offshoots of that thinking operate within the same utopian frame. Not only in the conviction that we’re on the cusp of a golden future but also in the sense of offering simplistic solutions for how to transition into it. Feminism chases after the phantom of “gender equality” and promises a tomorrow when just as many women will graduate with STEM degrees as men. Their solution? Well, pink legos for one, but more broadly the society-wide dismantling of harmful stereotypes about double-x chromosomes and the generalized affirmation that, yes, girls can too do math. Anti-racism, the LGBT agenda (which seems to be skewing heavily towards the T now that the L, G, and B have succeeded so roundly), multiculturalism—all of these preach that the kingdom of heaven on earth is nigh and that all we need is some tolerance and/or dialogue and/or dismantling of “privilege” to finish manifesting it.

The social affordances of backing such obviously limited solutions have been discussed at length in this here corner of the Right, under the label “signaling.” And the attractions of signaling are real. Yammering on about how you just know in your heart of hearts that a little more love and maybe the courage required for us to own up to our internalized racism is what’s really going to turn this ship around… that marks you as a good person to your peers and in the eyes of our social superiors nationwide. It proves your right-opinion bona fides. Some people like to take this signaling to the next level and are always looking for a way to insinuate that they are prepared to out-tolerate and out-accept even other bonafide progressives, so eager are they to graduate into nirvana. To see one such signaling arms race in action, peruse social justice Tumblr. To see a slightly more sophisticated version, visit an open forum at your nearest college campus.

Something that’s received perhaps less attention than the social affordances of the utopian frame, however, are the psychological affordances of it. The interior benefits, rather than the exterior ones. Take “transgenderism” for example. The whole thing’s a mess. The people who typically identify as transgenders (especially the one’s that truly believe they are in the wrong body) are mental and emotional wrecks. They’ve got neurosis upon neurosis, above and beyond “gender dysphoria.” And it could be for any number of reasons. Bad home life, past sexual abuse, chemical imbalances, whatever. These are miserable people with a blasted hellscape of an inner life, unable to produce a realistic self-appraisal, often fighting suicidal ideation. But what does the conceptual neatness of the official LGBT worldview offer them? It offers them a conceptually neat solution. “There’s nothing wrong with you. The real fault is with all those bigots out there who can’t accept you. If we promote trans-acceptance thoroughly enough, society will embrace you and you’ll finally be able to sleep peacefully at night.”

That’s a lie, of course. It misidentifies the origin of their woes, and it mis-prescribes the cure. But how tantalizing is that prescription? How much would someone in that situation crave such a simple Rx? Faced with the prospect of staring down your own psychological demons, with no clear plan of attack and no clue where to start, how wonderful would it be to have someone come along and say, “This right here is actually all you have to do to be well again”?

An individual facing the, pardon my French, clusterfuck of race relations in twenty-first century America is in those same shoes. An individual appraising the ruin that the last fifty years has wrought on women and their families is in those same shoes. These situations are complex, almost menacingly so. Boiling the solution down to “end racism” or “end misogyny,” though, makes them seem far more tractable. It provides a clear (if primrose) path forward. It allows us to retreat from the complexity of our straits and in part relieves the anxiety associated with them. So that’s one of the psychological appeals of the utopian frame that characterizes so much of leftist thought these days. You can rationalize away the need for wisdom, for prudence, for insight, for perspicacity. You divest yourself of the heavy burden of having to comprehend your labyrinthine predicament and make an informed response to it.

Let’s not pretend, however, that this is a mental temptation that only our esteemed colleagues on the Left fall into. There are plenty of right-wing critiques that broadcast on that same wavelength, at least insofar as they offer ersatz refuge from the complexity of the modern world, insofar as they offer simplistic but psychologically palatable answers. All we have to do is get back to the Constitution! All we have to do is vote Obummer and the Dumbocrats out of office or, ahem, restore monarchy to the West! All we have to do is disband the state and institute voluntaryism! Within even conservative churches and denominations a similar pattern generally obtains. We are instructed with due diligence how to go out into the midst of the world and be as harmless as doves. Because that is a soothing message. We are rarely exhorted with equal enthusiasm to obey the second portion of Christ’s commandment: be ye wise as serpents. Because, well, that’s frequently a much harder row to hoe. At least cognitively speaking.

The fact of the matter, though, is that life is complicated. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any less so. We Americans, for instance, are living in the twilight of a collapsing multiracial empire, supervised by a detached and neurotic elite, infested top to bottom with increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracies, dependent on the uninterrupted operation of a byzantine infrastructure and food supply chain, an empire that’s splitting along any number of fault lines. And it would be nice to survive the oncoming collapse (hard or soft) more or less intact. So there’s too much at stake to devolve into platitude thinking at this point, whether those platitudes be left or right, no matter how much solace they seem to offer. We rightly ridicule social justice warriors for their care bear dreams and magical thinking. Let’s make sure we’re not engaging in wishful-thinking escapism of our own.

The post Retreating From Complexity appeared first on Social Matter.

Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion. People’s thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls. The thoughts of their hearts are too wretched to be sinful. It is perhaps possible to regard it as sin for a worm to nourish such thoughts, but not for a human being, who is created in the image of God… That is why my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one still feels that those who speak are human beings; there they hate, there they love, there they murder the enemy, curse his descendants through all generations—there they sin.

Growing up Southern Baptist, I can remember going to any number of Worth Waiting For events. At least I think that’s what they were called. Worth Waiting For was just one of many campaigns tailored for church youth groups to raise awareness about the evils of premarital sex. Now this is a perfectly needful message, especially in present-day Weimerica where our entertainments constantly encourage us rut like animals in any permutation of gender pairing or partner numbers that happen to titillate our interests at the time, where internet pornography normalizes loveless and degrading sex, where second graders are schooled in the subtleties of anal intercourse. In this atmosphere, young people desperately need sane doctrine on self control, on love, on marriage.

But these Worth Waiting For events were often pretty ridiculous in practice. They’d bring what amounted to motivational speakers who wouldn’t discuss the issues at hand except in the most tortuous circumlocutions. We’d watch sappy videos. Young girls would get “purity rings,” which were like engagement rings that your parents bought you, only instead of indicating that you were getting married they indicated your promise not to knock boots until you did so. And everyone filled out “pledge cards,” which were like non-legally-binding contracts with your future spouse that you were “saving yourself for marriage.” It was kind of a circus.

And, of course, the most conspicuous participants on the youth side where the kids least likely to find themselves in any sort of potential “temptation” situation anyway. (Church youth groups are not, in my experience, reservoirs of sexual magnetism.) They were homely girls and socially awkward boys (unlike your humble correspondent, who has always had his finger on the pulse of cool). And, again, there’s nothing wrong with being homely or socially awkward. But it did give the proceedings an air of unreality, a sense of disjointedness. The set of kids who were heavily involved in youth group had very little overlap with the set of kids drinking and partying and hooking up on the weekends. Most of the church kids were going to have a normal dating-to-marriage life anyway. They weren’t leaving a trail of broken hearts and illegitimate pregnancies behind them as they blazed their way to the next drug-fueled bacchanalia.

I often wondered, then, whether or not our pledges and our purity rings and our “chastity” really counted for much in the grand scheme of things. Or whether it was really just gilding an incapacity with the appearance of a virtue. I began to suspect that you wouldn’t get many crowns in heaven for avoiding a sin that you were never capable of achieving in the first place.

But nevertheless that sort psychology crops up all over the place. It’s along the lines of what old Nietzsche called “ressentiment,” where you re-translate your personal weaknesses as some sort of triumph in the ethical realm. The fey, noodle-armed, hoplophobic activist stomping around with his “Violence is Not the Answer” placard, for example—do his impeccable pacifistic credentials really mean much? He’s never used physical violence to solve an interpersonal dispute. Fantastic. But it’s not like he’d be able to solve much via fisticuffs anyway. So he’s treating something he can’t do as an outrage that other people shouldn’t do.

Kierkegaard, in the quote above, posited a sort of baseline humanity necessary for the ability to sin, to really sin. And I think he was on to something. There are people who are in thrall to such petty, squalid habits that, while yes what they’re doing must be in an absolute and theological sense a sin, it seems hardly fair to apply that word to their actions. Rising up against your brother in a field and slaying him, that’s a sin. Sending a husband off to die so that you can marry his wife, that’s a sin. Betraying our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for a bag of silver, that’s a sin. But eking out some marginal existence on Playstation titles and XXX videos, the edges and disappointments of life smoothed over by marijuana… is that really in the same experiential realm?

My take is not only that Kierkegaard is right about a baseline humanity required for real vice but that there is a similar baseline humanity required for virtue as well. And I think a lot of what gets passed off as Christian virtue, especially in the political realm, fails to meet that standard. It’s simply a surrender to ambient cultural norms dressed up as a victory over them. Christ once asked his listeners, “what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” He was assuming a certain level of psychological normalcy in his audience, a certain degree of well-adjusted adulthood. He was assuming a baseline humanity. And yet how often are bizarre crusades like mass immigration or wealth redistribution advocated by Christians who treat these initiatives as somehow essentially Christlike? They claim the his imprimatur while they are in the very act of handing their future generations, their sons and daughters, the stone of a failed state, the serpents of ethnic strife. Personally, I can’t see how this sort of conduct even meets the bare minimum secular standards for stewardship, much less the standards of love that God demands for those his providence has placed within our care.

I can see how such conduct is an opportunity for moral grandstanding, however, especially in a culture that already venerates the idea of the “other” and fetishizes all manner of aid poured out to them. And so I tend to think that these conspicuous Christians aren’t too different from some of us youth-group kids in our callower days, treating our inability to rock the boat (no pun intended) as a principled and praiseworthy refusal to do so. And while I sincerely hope that someday soon we will see a revival of the faith of our fathers in America, in the interim I would settle for a return of the basic sanity the tenets of that faith seem to me to assume.

The post Baselines for Virtue and Vice appeared first on Social Matter.

That’s not to say he never comes up with a zinger, however, or an interesting “piece.” In fact, I remember watching a documentary about him a while back. It was called Exit Through the Gift Shop. At the time, I thought he came off rather well. He seemed smart, competent, wryly funny. He definitely had any eye for, if nothing else, an arresting image that would resonate with his intended audience (even if the philosophies that he was pushing and that they were buying seem a little sophomoric under closer scrutiny.) There was a degree of talent there, which is something you couldn’t say for the other central figure of the film: Mr. Brainwash.

Exit Through the Gift Shop ends up revolving around Mr. Brainwash’s rise to fame in the art world. Evidently Brainwash got involved in the graffiti scene as a fanboy. He liked to follow guys around as they defaced property in new and interesting ways, and he videotaped a lot of their outings so that a record of their edginess would be preserved for all posterity. At any rate, eventually he got into the actual street artistry himself. The difference between him and Banksy, though, is that Brainwash is quite clearly dumb as a box of rocks. Uncomprehending. All of his “installments” are so obviously derivative of Banksy or a couple of the other graffiti scenesters that you have to assume he doesn’t have a functioning sense of shame, either. Here’s a representative piece. Visionary stuff. Nevertheless, the documentary had scenes from some of his exhibitions, and his reception in art circles seemed just fine. Upper-crust Californians wandered around them yammering about how cool and profound everything was and shelling out cash. According to Wikipedia, he’s had other exhibitions in New York and London. He’s sold pieces for upwards of $100,000. Brazen hack or not, he’s successful.

There’s a lot of speculation online about whether or not the whole documentary and the Mr. Brainwash character himself are yet another one of Banksy’s elaborate jokes. Watch it yourself if you want to. I couldn’t say one way or another. What I will say is that the plot of the movie strikes me as the history of modern art in miniature. It’s a cautionary tale about what when you set a low aesthetic bar for your medium in order to maximize your ability to make “statements” through it.

Like I said, Banksy comes off as a clever guy, and he could probably make it in a vocation other than cheap ideological hackwork. But that’s where he chose to make his stand. That’s the niche he chose to carve out: stenciling stuff onto the sides of buildings, a niche that chronically underutilizes any natural artistic talent he might have. That niche takes no skill, and it shouldn’t come as a suprise, then, when it starts to attract people who never had talent to begin with, who are doing the hackwork without the vision or even the sense of ironic detachment that their forebears had.

For my money, and I’m no art historian, that’s the cycle that got started around the turn of the twentieth century, when a bunch of artsy types in France and Italy started getting more interested in writing manifestos and épater le bourgeois than in producing works of standalone artistic merit. Many of the originators of these avant garde movements, many of their first or second generations, were trained and competent artists in their own right. They had the chops. But if your scene treats a signed toilet as having some profound critical merit, then your scene is (please forgive me for this) going to start getting clogged up with a bunch of shit work. Whatever cultural capital those artistic forefathers had—in the form of education, training, familiarity with the traditions and methods of their given craft—is going to atrophy away. There are examples of this generational decay wherever artists begin to emphasize the propagation of the message over the perfection of the medium. Guernica might not be your cup of tea, but it’s leagues better than the kind of “abstract art” you find hanging in coffee shops today. By the same token, I don’t think Frida Kahlo quite the genius she’s billed as, but she’s still several rungs higher than used menstrual pads on the grand hierarchy of feminist art. Most any MFA program in the country will evidence this decay. Since modern artists began conceiving of themselves primarily as social commentators, they ceased to become artists. Because ultimately it doesn’t take a lot of aesthetic sophistication to make that sort of commentary. Take it from me. I’m producing this social commentary right now in cargo shorts and sneakers.

My guess is that the grandest aesthetics emerge organically from the grandest civilizations, from societies where there’s some sort of shared vision for what the good life looks like and where there’s stability enough for artisans to realize that vision in relative peace. I have no prescription for how to achieve such a civilization, though, or any deep insight into that process. That’s what the other “Aesthetics Week” entries were for. I just wanted to poke a little fun at Banksy, who tells aging Boomers what they want to hear and thus enjoys a reputation that far exceeds his modest talents, and I wanted point out what I take to be a pretty common cycle in the world of modern art. One generation fritters away its cultural capital on cheap gimmicky art that’s beneath them, and soon enough they are replaced by successive generations of cheap gimmicky artists who are capable of nothing higher.

The post Banksy and The Generational Decay of Modern Art appeared first on Social Matter.

The language of this genre, online editorials, has been so abused by this point that I feel the need to clarify something here. I meant “raise questions” in the traditional sense of the phrase: I want to ask about something and I want to receive an answer in order to better understand my situation and order my conduct. I don’t want to “raise questions” in the contemporary sense, which always seems to imply that there’s already widespread agreement on a topic, at least among the aforementioned social superiors: “Twitter’s reaction to trainwreck freakshow Bruce Jenner raises questions about the persistence of transphobia in social media!”

I’ll further preface this post with a tactical note about the rhetoric surrounding law enforcement in America. I take it as a given that the US legal system and its various institutions are sick. They’re dysfunctional. I don’t know that the decaying empire we live in has an institution that isn’t sick. Its schools, its churches, its media outlets, its military, certainly its governing bodies—all of them are in various stages of senility and dissipation. They’re all in need of “reform.” (Preferably the type of reform that consists of cleansing fire from Almighty God, but that’s neither here nor there.) Folks on both sides of the aisle can agree with that to one extent or another.

The way liberals frame the dysfunction of law enforcement, however, makes any sort of cooperation or “dialogue” with them an absolute non starter. A dead end. They want to chalk up everything to institutional racism and the subtle white supremacy of shooting strong-armed robbers who assault police officers in the middle of the street. But that’s not the root issue. So any solutions that are premised on that analysis are going to be ineffective at best, exacerbatory at worst. There are any number of liberal talking points that follow this pattern. Violence against women is an issue that ought to be near and dear to the heart of any conservative, gender role traditionalists that we are. Violence against women is also an issue that figures prominently in liberal speechifying. But they insist on framing it as a byproduct of a heinous patriarchal conspiracy to keep women under the masculine thumb. They then propose legislation that tilts at the windmill of that conspiracy (and, purely incidentally of course, galvanizes young women who feel threatened by their overheated slogans to vote for them).

You can’t solve violence against women from a frame that misdiagnoses the problem as misogyny. You can’t effect reform in our legal system from a frame that misdiagnoses the problem as racism. And so you should never, under any circumstances, attempt to ally with the Left on these issues or issues like them where there’s an illusory common ground. Don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. Don’t give them an inch.

(Libertarians, as my Social Matter colleague Dampier pointed out earlier this week, are fond of the tack I just described, to which I say fine. Signal how much you hate “the thugs in blue” and score your points with the nominally anti-authoritarian Left. Have fun going down the rabbit hole with your fellow travelers. Tell Cathy Reisenwitz hello for us.)

At any rate, the real question that keeps occuring to me, especially having watched the race riots that have been flaring up intermittently since last August, is how ought the Right to relate to police officers? It seems like a fraught question, but a pertinent one. There several thinkers on the Right, thinkers whom I generally respect, that take a hardline stance against the current crop of law enforcement officers in our country, a stance that I think transcends the superficial “Fuck that police!” posturing that often issues from libertarian camps.

And it’s hard to deny that they have a point. Central to the concept of anarcho-tyranny, a critique that I take as accurate in the main, is the role that law enforcement plays in constricting the freedoms of the social middle. How effectively have American police departments been co-opted into that scheme? When I hear stories, like the recent one out of Wisconsin, of SWAT teams executing no-knock raids on innocent families, out of nothing but sheer political ill-will, it’s difficult to say that they haven’t been. And then there is the issue of militarization, and the us-versus-them mindset that it promotes. I know that when I hold a sixteen pound sledgehammer, I really want to put it through a wall, necessary or not. I can’t imagine how I would feel driving a sixteen-ton MRAP down Main Street. Can we arm our police officers like soldiers and expect them to not act like an occupying army? Even more questions remain. Is police work too politicized for our own good? Are our cities too large and crowded for there to be any sort of legitimate community bonds between the patrols and those patrolled? A lot of these are above my paygrade.

My take on the issue is that hardline anti-cop attitudes, even of the more sophisticated variety, overstate the point. The one fundamental political reality that I believe in is that there will always be an “us” and a “them.” (Your “us” and my “us” might not perfectly align, admittedly.) And I also happen to believe that some of us, perhaps many of us, are on the force, that they joined for more or less honorable reasons, and that they’re incapacitated from doing their work because America as a whole cannot or will not square with a lot of the ugly truths that necessitate that work in the first place. In this analysis, the police don’t differ all that much from public school teachers. Yes, there are any number of bad apples in that bunch. But not all of them are, and many of them have become so because of the impossible tasks our society at large has given to them to accomplish. (I.e. “Figure out why we have a persistent achievement gap between these different groups. Your answer cannot be ‘group differences.’”)

If my instincts are right the question then becomes one of coordination. How ought conservatives go about coordinating resistance with their fellow conservatives in uniform? What would that look like on an individual level? Do recent federal power plays to exert more control over state and local police departments help or hurt us in this regard?

If my instincts are wrong, the situation is even bleaker than I’ve given it credit for. But I’d be willing to give a hearing to anyone who wants to explain how I am wrong and how it is, in fact, even bleaker than I’m giving it credit for.

So sound off, if you will, on the PQ. Feel free to bring in perspectives and insights that I haven’t even alluded to. Like I said, I’m a little out of my depth on this one. I just think it’s a relevant field of inquiry right now.

The post A Slightly More Immediate PQ appeared first on Social Matter.

Another prime example is the vast gulf that exists between the normal person’s understanding of the phrase “critical thinking” and that phrase as it’s understood in contemporary American universities. In everyday parlance, to think critically about a subject is to give it a thorough and rational appraisal and to maintain appropriate levels of skepticism and self-reflection throughout that appraisal, being sure to adjust as best you can for your own biases and predilections. It’s the practice of careful reasoning, essentially, a skill that takes some time to develop and to which some are more suited than others.

Needless to say, what passes for critical thinking in higher education—the liberal arts and the social sciences in particular—bears no resemblance to that practice whatsoever. In fact it’s often close to the inverse of that practice. Instead of reasoning from observation to conclusion, the college version of critical thinking is a game where the conclusions are known well in advance, where the conclusions can in fact be reliably deduced by neat and self-contained formulae entirely independent of input from the observed world.  And the fun comes in inventing the observations. Today’s undergraduate already knows that whatever thing he happens to dislike at this moment is actually deeply misogynistic, transphobic, or white supremacist. He already knows it’s problematic—no appraisal necessary. And so the mental effort conserved is expended on creating an appropriately academic-sounding explanation for why thing X is so deeply and systematically bigoted.

Let’s say, for instance, you’re one of these undergrads. Let’s say you’re a self-assured, rainbow-haired young feminist boarding the campus shuttle so that you can make it to your music appreciation class (in which the works indigenous peoples and women are woefully underrepresented by the way) on time. And let’s say you run into your natural enemy: the frat bro. As you board, he stands up and gestures for you to take his seat, the shuttle having just reached capacity. Well, this is a perfect instance in which you might exercise your budding powers of “critical awareness.” Because you just know that guy is being a “shitlord” right now. Based on that knowledge, you can then deduce that’s he not offering you a seat out of politeness at all, or that he is only to the extent that politeness itself is a set of social mores propagated by men in order to control female bodies and normalize their expectations of feminine behavior. And so his politeness is actually entitlement, the easy assumption that he ought to be able to direct you when and were to sit or stand, to circumscribe the limits of your personal autonomy, to override your agency. He practically raped you.

Or we could take this scenario in the other direction. Imagine that the hated frat bro didn’t offer you his seat. He just sat there ignoring you as you got on the bus; maybe he was even manspreading. Well that’s an easy one, too, if you postulate that he’s a “dudebro douchecanoe.” Obviously he’s accustomed, as members of the dominant classes are, to feeling comfortable in public, to occupying as much space as he cares to, to ignoring the legitimate prerogatives of second-class citizens like you (whose bookbag was heavy enough even before the addition all those socially-conscious pin-on buttons). It’s really kind of triggering to watch him now, luxuriating in his bubble of cultural status, safe at the social apex, capable of turning a blind eye to his surroundings without fear of rebuke or reprisal. The whole scene’s enough to make you sick. White male privilege. Gross.

The point here, of course, is that it’s easy to generate social justice diatribes against the frat bro no matter what he does or doesn’t do. Because such diatribes are flexible in that regard. And they’re flexible by design.

The ultimate reason why the critiques our institutes of higher education inculcate in their students have such an elasticity to them will be familiar to most of the audience here. The reason is they’re part of an intellectual tradition that is itself simply an elaborate rationalization of antipathy for the West. The critical theory that informs our current critical thinking amounts to nothing less than a total criticism aimed at the civilizations of Europe and America—and not even a good faith one, which is why its methods are corrosive and opportunistic ones. The manifold and multiplying schools of thought that fall with that penumbra thus share only a target: traditional white culture in general and normal white men in particular. And so the fact that they can spin any behavior (or lack thereof) into an attack on those targets oughtn’t be surprising.

But I get the sense that there’s a more proximate reason for the nature of our “critical thinkers” as well. It’s true that they’re heirs of an older, anti-Western intellectual tradition. But precious few of these latter day Tumblrites have anything approaching the academic wherewithal of their forebears, and thus they practice their inherited liturgies in a much degenerated form. This latest generation of undergraduates really only, as I suggested before, concerns itself with saying the right-sounding words. It concerns itself with the appearance of scholarship but not the substance thereof. Words like “rape culture,” “privilege,” “hegemony,” “toxic masculinity,” “ethnocentrism,” “structural racism,” and so on are to them very little more than ritual elements of an incantation. They’ve found that if they string enough of them together, they not only usually get their way but they are also magically granted credence and moral legitimacy. They don’t understand the provenance of their vocabulary, but they’ve found that it’s nevertheless efficacious to bring to bear against whatever is currently irritating their exquisitely sensitive psyches.

What would you do, if you had such powers? Would you be tempted to use it in an ever expanding set of circumstances? Would you find yourself solving ever pettier and more mundane problems by such arcane interventions? Would you, in the escalating course of your addiction, graduate from deploying your dread spells against macroaggressions to microaggressions and then finally to situations where there’s no aggressions at all but simply a “culture” that somehow aggravates you? Perhaps you wouldn’t, being the fine upstanding Social Matter reader that you are.

At any rate, circumstances have recently conspired to grant an exceptionally sheltered and petulant cohort of college students these fantastic capacities. And they’re using them exactly as you would expect. And all I can add is that to this esoteric art they learn in classrooms across the country their professors still have the audacity to apply the moniker “critical thinking.”

The post Cargo Cultists on Campus appeared first on Social Matter.

I’ll admit that, as a card-carrying cisheteropatriarchal shitlord, that sort of prohibition appeals to my inborn sense of chivalry. I don’t know that I’ve read enough Nietzsche—or even could read enough Nietzsche—to cheer on the depredation of the weak by the strong. I think that those able to have an obligation to watch out for those vulnerable ones whom God has put providentially under their care. Men to women. Adults to children. The community to a member of it who has fallen on hard times. So the quibble here is not really with the “don’t bully your inferiors” formulation but rather with the bizarre calculus by which the various pundits and writers who market that line go about establishing the hierarchy. In other words, their idea of marginalized groups doesn’t exactly jibe with my idea of reality. Most of the time, in fact, they’re radically out of sync.

You see, according to our moral betters on sites like Gawker or Salon, I shouldn’t mock a guy like Michael Sam because he’s part of an oppressed group—two, in fact. He’s already double “stigmatized,” already a social pariah, eking out a marginal existence on the scraps that drop from the dinner table of polite society. And I suppose they might have a point. I mean consider his ordeal. Upon coming out of the closet, he was subjected to fawning op eds and adulation from Hollywood, media figures, and politicians. He had instant celebrity cruelly foisted upon him, interviews with nationally syndicated magazines and news shows. He got a shot at the NFL despite an underwhelming showing at the combine and a spot on Dancing with the Stars afterwards. He even got a congratulatory phone call from the President of the United States. Imagine if you will the fortitude it would take to endure such slings and arrows. Imagine the bravery required. Sam is obviously approaching the end of his rope. Some mean-spirited ridicule from an anonymous internet poster might be the last straw for a man so beset and hounded by the world.

Then compare Sam’s travails to the kid-glove treatment that a walking, talking concentration of privilege like Brendan Eich enjoyed even after it came out that he had donated money to a popular and successful campaign for a state constitutional amendment in California. All he got was an online lynch mob and a public smear campaign that involved even employees from his own company, that he co-founded and built from the ground up. All he got was fired and forcibly separated from his life’s work. So everyone should feel free to pile on him, since his obvious status as darling of American society insulates him from any negative outcomes.

Obviously the notion that a black homosexual is ipso facto socially inferior to a white male doesn’t match up with the cultural contours of contemporary America. Instead, it’s a function of the strange cosmology of the social justice Left. Theirs is a worldview where Hate and Bigotry are nigh omnipotent, charting the course of civilizations, driving generations of men and women to fundamentally misappraise their fellow human beings, fighting against the very arc of the moral universe and frustrating its bend towards justice. To them, as I’ve argued here and elsewhere, these concepts have a massive explanatory power, are the keys to understanding great swaths of human history. And so anyone who allies themselves with hatred or bigotry (or racism or homophobia or misogyny or whatever the flavor du jour is) is obviously in league with the powers and principalities that hold sway over our vale of tears. And anyone who belongs to one of the designated victim groups that these powers wage their eternal war against are just that: victims. They are the underdogs, despite the testimony of your senses. They are the bullied, damn your lying eyes. And thus they are sacrosanct under the no-punching-down commandment.

If you were so inclined, you could compile quite a list of these instances of bait-and-switch. Our recent history is rife with them. A lot of early anti-discrimination rhetoric, for instance, promised a fairer, more meritocratic States. And to many well-intentioned people this seemed perfectly in line with the ethos of our founding fathers, one where no one was disqualified from the pursuit of excellence by a so-called “accident of birth.” Let everyone pursue happiness to the best of his ability, uninterrupted by governmental interference! But nowadays we recognize meritocracy for the white supremacist construct that it is and instead engage in a top-down, totalitarian effort to pave the playing field and smooth every last point of “disparate impact” out of existence. We leverage the full strength of DC to make sure no actual meritocratic fair play takes place. The same could be said of the “question everything” rallying cry of the Left’s revolution in higher education. That appealed to many aspiring scholar’s sense of intellectual curiosity. But a little while later it became clear that certain dogma were quietly exempted from that directive. There are certain “truths” that you were not only discouraged from question but stood liable to lose your welcome on campus if you did so.

In a sense, then, this week’s ruminations are just an extension of last week’s. It’s important to realize that even when the enemy is speaking words that seem to resonate with you, he isn’t actually referencing ideas that will not, visions of a future that don’t. The signifier might be identical, but the things signified are not. Because the fundamental assumptions, the worldview of the Left creates contradictions where we see none and erase contradictions that we’re positive exist. We see a mostly unremarkable football player enjoying the favor of all the good and the great in contemporary American society, with the entire media-government complex in his corner. The Left sees an outcast bravely fighting against the implacable tides of bigotry. Well.

There’s really no use in trying to have a discussion where you find some common ground between these two poles. And it’s clinically insane to follow the other side’s prescription for having such a discussion “ethically.” There’s nothing doing there. Personally, I say find a better use of your time. Pick a worthy target. Punch away.

The post Punching Down and Liberal Cosmology appeared first on Social Matter.

In this thought experiment, which side would you say is likely to win the city? If you had to bet.

The cleverer readers at home have no doubt already surmised that what I’m actually asking you to contemplate, in the most general terms, are the differences between conservative and liberal strategies in the Great American Culture War, a conflict that is now some fifty or sixty years ongoing. Liberals conceive of the culture war as a war, a conflict in which they have an enemy who must be beaten. And so wherever this enemy rears his white, cishetero, Christian head, they take their pot shots at it. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to think of the culture war as a debate of sorts rather than a dominance struggle for social preeminence. And so they couch their propositions in the language of principle (even when those principles are in fact ex post facto rationalizations) and occasionally pull out a devastating gotcha about the other side’s “hypocrisy.”

(I do have to admit, in the interest of thoroughness, that the situation isn’t quite so dire as it is in the imagined scenario above. In that scenario, team red operates on universal rules. In reality, however, a great number of the rules with which team red attempts to police public discourse aren’t universal at all but actually blue in origin. So the situation for real-life conservatives is a bit more dire, in fact.)

You have to admire the Left for it’s clarity of vision. It has identified its enemies, and it does what it can to drive them from the field. The recent fireworks in Indiana are a perfect illustration. Team blue knows that Christians are hateful homophobes, and so it goes to bat for the right of homosexuals to sue them over wedding cakes. The Right, with its characteristic acumen, mistakes this bushwhack for a principled stand. “Ah!” they say, “But if you support the right of a gay man to force a Christian to make a cake then you must support the right of the KKK to force a black baker to make a cake!” The average liberal couldn’t imagine a more irrelevant rejoinder. They aren’t making any such proposition at all. In their calculus, Christians (of the Not-fans-of-Pope-Francis type at least) are the bad guys and thus their interests are hateful and invalid and must be opposed. The KKK are bad guys and thus their actions are hateful and invalid and must be opposed. You attack bad guys. You don’t attack good guys. Whence the confusion?

The fact that they have such a clearly defined enemy is, incidentally, why the Left can mobilize effectively despite being a creaky, Frankenstein mass of mostly incompatible interest groups. Mexicans will ethnically cleanse blacks when their territories run afoul of one another, but they both vote for the same party. Homosexuals don’t always enjoy the gentlest of treatment from their Muslim friends, but they nevertheless routinely support Democratic politicians who promise more immigrants and “refugee resettlements” from all the vibrant corners of Africa and the Middle East. The Democrat coalition is organized not around a coherent vision of the future but a shared opponent.

It would serve the American Right well to catch up to their counterparts in this respect. The fact that the Left’s vision of the future is less than coherent doesn’t mean it will be any less Hell and misery for almost everyone involved. In this future, the children we don’t abort will be referred to by gender neutral pronouns as they’re taught lessons on anal sex in elementary. In this future, pedophilia will be “de-stigmatized.” In this future, America will be a rich, multicultural mosaic of ethnic and religious conflict. In this future, the federal government and the financial powers behind the throne will continue their rapine of the wealth of the middle class. In this future, Detroits and Fergusons will proliferate. (So will sharia zones.) In this future, the nuclear family will continue to disappear. In this future, if the lights do go out forever, it will seem almost a mercy to any normal Americans left on that final evening.

There are, all around you, individuals and groups working to realize this future, this dystopia. These people are your enemies. Many of them consciously and deliberately mean you harm. Many of them mean you harm as a byproduct of their devotion to one or more of the inhuman ideals of social justice. All of them mean you harm, and they will harm you unless they’re stopped. They will extinguish you from this very earth. College professors penning op eds about America’s ongoing struggles with racism. Mark them. Protest marchers attempting to stamp out the last dying embers of the institution of marriage. Mark them, too. Donors purchasing politicians in DC. Journalists dutifully looking the other way. Immigrants recreating cities in the likeness of the Third World. Church groups and nonprofits importing them. Ideologues in the family courts. Activists in judge’s robes. Politically-saavy careerists in police departments and the military. Feral teens in the street. Tally them up. Keep a list. These are the enemies. Quit trying to figure out to refute the logical principles you think they’re acting on. Figure out instead how to resist, how to thwart, how to beat them.

The post Rules of Engagement appeared first on Social Matter.

The premise of the movie wasn’t the dealbreaker. It was supposed to be one of those “gritty facts behind the glorious legend” type deals, which tend to skew bad but aren’t categorically so. (I don’t care what anyone says, The 13th Warrior rocks.) It wasn’t even the opening fight scene, which was admittedly pretty bad. It was more the fact that the writers of King Arthur had obviously never met a feelgood liberal trope that they didn’t like and seemed to be in some kind of contest to squeeze as many into their screenplay as possible. Even in the brief span of runtime before I tapped out, they had racked up quite a count.

First of all, things were shaping up so that some Catholic bishop from Rome was going to be the bad guy. So they were going full steam ahead with the r/atheism notion that institutionalized religion (that is to say religion) was cooked up as a scheme by the rich and powerful to consolidate their power over the credulous masses. The bishop was this shifty Italian fellow, jealous of accolades and luxury and seemingly looking for an excuse to burn someone at the stake. There’s a scene where his page is giving detailed instructions to one of Arthur’s knights about how the bishop has to be seated at the head of the table when he arrives for his conference. And then of course the bishop is visibly incensed when he gets to the hall and the table is round. Better luck next time, Catholicism! Take your church hierarchy and shove it.

There were also a few moments that favorably contrasted the noble-savage paganism of the Round Table knights (in this version Galahad is some Sarmatian nomad from the steppes rather than the paragon of Christian chivalry) with the ritual and reliquaries of the Church. And Arthur himself, although Roman and nominally Catholic, has no use for pomp and circumstance or the clergy either. So we can go ahead and check the “everyone should be spiritual but not religious” platitude box as well.

For my money, though, the saddest part of the whole affair was the way the movie went about establishing the superhero bona fides of Arthur and the villain bona fides of the Saxon he presumably beats in the closing act of the film. The audience is supposed to gather that Arthur is a good guy because he talks about “freedom” and the “equality of all men” at every given opportunity, whereas the Saxon is a bad guy because he’s racist. I wish I were exaggerating. But they really did put liberal democratic talking points into the mouth of a fifth century Roman, and they really did make a point to underscore how prejudiced the warlord of the Saxon invasion was in his first few lines. There’s a scene where the Saxon fellow comes across one of his soldiers in the process of raping a native Briton. He prohibits the coupling on the grounds that his superior race shouldn’t mix with the inferior peoples they conquer and then kills the solider and the woman both. Him allowing the rape of the inhabitants wouldn’t have been evil enough. They had to go bigger, better—really evil. They had to make him a eugenicist.

The wife informs me that Guinevere (Kiera Knightly) turns out to be woad-bedecked, kickass warrior grrrl from north of Hadrian’s Wall. But I never made it far enough to see her. I had seen enough.

The common thread in all of these sins against silver screen, of course, is that they are failures of imagination. And in this King Arthur differs from the vast majority of Hollywood’s output by degree only and not by kind. One of the longstanding attractions of fiction is that it allows you to inhabit exotic places and times, see the world through different eyes, that sort of thing. But the modern liberal doesn’t seem to want anything to do with that practice. Why would he take the time to imagine how the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain might have looked to a Roman? Or what it might have looked liked to a Saxon? Why go through all that effort to think about what honor, virtue, courage would have looked like at a distant and receding frontier of a once-omnipotent empire? It’s much easier to assign standard, progressive American sensibilities to your protagonists and have the guys who are out to thwart them be religious and/or racist. That’s what “The Narrative” boils down to, of course. Enlightened egalitarians nobly defying backwards reactionaries who are clutching to old ways. Why improve on a perfect formula?

It’s a fundamentally stunted worldview. And, to be honest, I don’t know why it has such a hold on the contemporary Left. But it does. It does to the point that they insist on the narrative not just in their entertainment but in their news as well: “#BlackLivesMatter Protestors Take A Stand Against Police Brutality!” “Gay Americans Fight for the Basic Human Right to Sue Bakeries!” The details of the situation never matter, the countervailing evidence, the complexities. They’ll have their narrative come Hell or high water.

I’ve argued before that the core assertion of the social justice critique (i.e. that we are all fundamentally the same and would achieve similar outcomes in a fair world) means that people have to actively shut down their pattern-recognizing capacities, which makes them functionally stupider, less able to process reality. And I’m confident that’s part of it. It could also be, though, plain old victor’s complacency. They’ve been winning the culture war for nigh unto seventy years now. Their narrative has triumphed, and, with no credible challenges to necessitate ingenuity on their part, they’re just stuck in something of a conceptual rut.

All I know is that their movies, their books, their blogs are chock-full of tired liberal tropes that have only the faintest and most tenuous relationship to reality. Zombie thoughts shuffling along doggedly, long after their decomposition has set in. And I know that, while you’re out there on the Right scheming up how to present credible challenge, you should feel free to flick off the programs that have been infected by those tropes. Go read a book by a more vital, hungrier writer. From a more thoughtful time. Or, hell, just watch Black Hawk Down again.

The post The First Twenty Minutes of “King Arthur”: A Movie Review appeared first on Social Matter.

Of course picking on the PUAs is picking on the lowest-common-denominator of manosphere thought. The movement as a whole is bigger than snake oil e-books and midget mestizo game coaches. It produces more serious thinkers, more sophisticated critiques as well. Jack Donovan comes to mind. There’s a lot of meat in The Way of Men. One of his central insights is, of course, not a particularly new one but an important one nonetheless and one effectively presented. It’s that the contemporary world is too safe, too stable, too rubberized really to suit men. And it’s hard to argue against that one. Most American boys spend their formative years logging in long hours of docile desk-sitting in school. They graduate to office jobs where it’s more docile desk-sitting, punctuated now by the occasional HR seminar on sexual harassment or racial sensitivity. Food is readily available. Physical conflict is a rarity, mortal danger even more so. And it’s not even that all these conditions are necessarily bad, just that they present few challenges that require any masculinity of men. Men get soft, bored, even depressed. They seek increasingly artificial outlets for their basic drives: video games, spectator sports, porn. (Donovan’s phrase “Bonobo Masturbation Society” alone is worth the price of the book.) In many senses, modernity offers very little to them.

Donovan is also eloquent on those basic drives. Perhaps the cleverest part of his scheme is how he posits masculinity as a sort of technology for survival in the uncertain, dangerous conditions that obtained for much of human history. He talks about the “tactical virtues” of masculinity. This move is profoundly anti-feminist (unlike one of those other misshapen scions of the manosphere, the MRAs, who are anti-feminist in only the thinnest and most trivial of senses). He’s arguing that masculine virtues like strength and courage are not just good but necessary, that they’re the means by which human tribes stake and maintain “perimeters” against the chaos beyond. (Another landmark work of his, “Violence is Golden,” outlines how stable Western societies still bank on the masculine ability to do violence and to do violence well, even though they require only a small portion of their overall male population to participate in it, which harmonizes his critique of a too-safe society and his insistence on the necessity of masculinity.) This is, of course, a more rhetorically effective and a more philosophically coherent rebuttal to the Hannah Rosins of the world than one can manage by whining about unfair feminism is or how it’s gone “too far” these days. It’s a legitimately reactionary stance.

Now one of the common criticisms of this kind of thinking is that it’s obvious. That any normal young man who was raised in a household with a respectable father understands both the real compromises that civilized life demands of men, as well as the enduring value of manhood. And that’s true. A lot of men raised under those circumstances do understand these ideas to one extent or another. But it’s somewhat fanciful to think that early twenty-first century America is producing an abundance of normal upbringings in two-parent homes for its sons in the first place. So you either leave those thousands, maybe millions, of mis-raised boys to their anomie, their disatisfactions, their constant bombardment by the lies that our schools and media tell about masculinity, or you give them some message not unlike Donovan’s: “There is a reason you feel out-of-place and underutilized. You were designed for more demanding pursuits. Your people have need of the sort of man you can become.”

This is all just to say, really, that there are babies in the manospherian bathwater. And that goes for many others beyond just Mr. Donovan. Even in the crassest forums of the PUAs you can occasionally see glimpses of impulses worth salvaging, worth encouraging even. There are people attracted to “game” simply because they are tired of being sadsack losers who have no control over their own fortunes, romantic or otherwise. You have young men groping for some sense of personal agency, of personal efficacy. That’s not an unworthy gesture. In fact, you could make the argument it’s a superior mentality to the lowest common denominators of other facets of the alt-Right, who produce a lot of lofty theorizing and loftier LARPing but very little personal exertion at all. It’s a good start.

Of course I believe that the West, that Christianity, that America has produced any number of masculine ideals that excel in every way the primeval man, that strong, brave, competent savage on the hunt for suitable mate. But that doesn’t mean the red-blooded primeval man ceases to exist in those more perfected models, only that his inclinations have been chastened or channeled or honed as necessary to cooperate with the greater project of civilization building. But a wan, etiolated Millennial is unsuitable for either of these things, for survival or for contributing to the health of his nation. Right now we are awash with specimens like that, and, despite some of its excesses and its embarrassments, the manosphere is interested in producing of these Millennials a crop of red-blooded men. I’d humbly suggest we focus more on graduating those post-process men to yet higher callings, rather than laboriously cataloging all the shortcomings of that process itself.

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