Lee Kuan Yew at St. John’s College, Cambridge.

Lee Kuan Yew is a contradiction. A Singaporean of Chinese descent, his critique of liberalism was in a sense uniquely English. At a time when Britain and much of its diaspora became the most enthusiastic supporters of liberalism and democratic modernity, his worldview has a spark of something aristocratic…dare we say, imperial? He does not fall into the postmodern philosophizing of the French, the quiet conservatism of the Germans, or the pious resistance of the Catholic countries. Instead, his critique was delivered with wit, candor, and the occasional stinging barb. Rather than bemoaning the changing times, he kept a stiff upper lip. He did not shut himself off from modernity, but sought to reshape and improve it. So what might we call this tradition, which nurtured such English sentiments in a child of the anti-colonial era? What is this unique expression of Reaction?

The British Empire was not the child of grand designs. As one author wrote long ago, when the Empire was still a lived reality and not a topic of history books ignored by modern education:

“The British Empire…is a typical British product. It is the result of gradual, almost fortuitous development, and not of deliberate planning. Its constitution is difficult to describe in terms of political theory, but it is a living political association in full working order.”

This seems to be a striking pattern in the history of English civilization. From the slow unification of the UK itself to a preference for the market system in modern times, the Anglosphere has harnessed its taste for personal liberty and benefited from what we might call an antifragile approach to social and political life.

It is a curious fact that there has never been in Great Britain any dynamic popular urge towards Empire building….even in the expansionist, Imperialist era of the last century, new lands were added to the domains of the Crown often reluctantly and with halting steps; and always there was opposition from the little Englanders, who raised powerful voices and powerful influences against the building of an Empire. In this century, following a brief period when the Empire was a cult and its prophet was Kipling, there has been among all but a few lack of knowledge and lack of interest. The Empire was taken for granted.”

No great crusades to be seen here. Britain’s scattered, varied, global scope of rule stemmed largely from the fact that its decision to start ruling seems to have come after it woke up one morning and realized that things might have gotten a little out of hand. I would put forward that as with England’s Empire, so too with its Reaction. The essence of the Anglosphere is one of exit and searching for new frontiers, and little surprise that it did not die with the advent of Social Progress. From across the Anglosphere we have had artists, poets, authors, and philosophers who have imagined a different future for English and Western civilization. The idea that modernity could not be wrested from the firm grasp of the Whig and the Jacobin was entirely foreign to these thinkers.

The Crowd, by Wyndham Lewis. The small figures in the grids remind one of modern skyscrapers – not a common site in 1915 when this was exhibited.

T. S. Eliot made his mark as a poet who turned modernity against the moderns. This “Classicist in literature, Royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion” believed that human nature was nowhere so pliable as the Enlightenment had imagined, and thus tradition was the result of generations of trial and error. In these sentiments he echoed men like Charles Maurras from across the Channel, who stated that it was necessary to “bring freedom downstairs to the people and restore authority at the top”. Eliot’s fellow American, Ezra Pound, was even more enthusiastic in his belief that there was a future beyond modernity. With his ally Percy Wyndham Lewis, he engendered a futurist art in Britain which attacked what it saw as a decadent and naively liberal literary establishment, epitomized in the Bloomsbury group. From elsewhere in the British realms, Roy Campbell came out of South Africa and began a career as a writer, defending the classical and Christian traditions through his poetry. He would end up going to Spain during the Civil War, and dying a Catholic after the faith captured his heart there. Closer to our day, we have thinkers such as Roger Scruton, who is renowned for his work on how the death of aesthetic beauty has mirrored a broader cultural dissolution.

Portrait of T. S. Eliot, by Wyndham Lewis

These very few examples are given to show a general trend. Insofar as we can talk about an English expression of Reaction, it is as much a patchwork as the Empire itself once was. The eclectic mix includes High Tory futurists, Nietzschean-minded Catholics, aristocrats and populists, traditional colonials and techno-commercialist capitalists. Its lineage includes Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and Yeats’ Second Coming. But there is something of a cohesive entity behind them. There is a shared suspicion that perhaps the baser elements of English civilization triumphed over the loftier ones. There exists an embrace of the future combined with a typically Anglospheric willingness to set out and discover the future for oneself. The English reactionary is pragmatic, appreciating that which has passed the tests of time.

Lee Kuan Yew possessed all these things. He may not be an English reactionary, but there was something recognizably English in his Reaction. Whatever the essence of this mindset is, our own Henry Dampier sees it in neoreaction:

“This is my tentative suggestion: if neoreaction is not English, then it’s incoherent, because most of its values are at least implicitly English…Considering that the cultural ailment afflicting the rest of the world has its roots in London, Washington D.C., and New York, the correction ought to be focused on those cities, also. For most of us, it isn’t a choice. We can’t suddenly decide to be Chinese, Swiss, Italians, Germans, Austrians, or Russians, especially if our roots are here. We want to believe, perhaps, that we have a choice in these matters, but there is no choice, because it was already made before we were born. We can no more elect to stop being English any more than we can elect to become frogs or wombats.”

It remains to be seen where exactly the English spirit of Reaction will make itself manifest. If I had to guess, I’d say that the reactionary mindset will become most apparent among those forced to make their exit, following in the footsteps of their ancestors. Across Africa, the diaspora lives on as a tiny, often-urbanized minority. Cape Town has remained an astoundingly English city in temperament. One need only go to its Victoria gardens or the Rhodes memorial to see that England left its mark. If a charter city is ever established here or elsewhere, the cosmopolitan Anglos will likely be drawn to it, bringing their cultural pragmatism with them to a project with little room for error. Australia has recently had something of a resurgence in its Anglospheric roots, with the government of Tony Abbott, a monarchist and cultural conservative. As the Asian powers increase their influence, perhaps we will see Australia and New Zealand become more aware of just how much they differ from their neighbours.

Of all countries, America has retained and grown the independent streak of the earliest English pioneers of the New World. The question is to what extent the melting pot has eliminated any identification with the heritage which bred that streak. In Canada, the Anglophone elite was without a doubt the Laurentian Consensus – the Anglo-Protestant liberal elite of Ontario. However, this consensus also established the progressive ideology which has undone its former hegemony. Anglophone Canada will remain a large majority of the country, but its conflicts with French or Aboriginal cultures begin to fall away as China, India, and other Asian powers make their presence felt north of the 49th. Finally, there is also the huge British expat population, many of whom have seen first-hand what measures places like Dubai and Singapore must use to properly govern a multiethnic and multicultural society.

Finally, I’d note that the vast majority of these groups – aside from those actually from the UK – would likely never think of themselves as “English”. American, Canadian, Australian, and South African identity has swept away the earlier British one for generations now. Nevertheless, the cultural inheritance remains. Each part of the English cultural and ethnic diaspora has adapted the mother country’s customs to its own environment. Yet many have retained a similar sense of pragmatism, ordered liberty, and remarkable adaptability. Those with such a mindset cannot long tolerate the ideological rigidity and praise of victimhood which are all too common in our day. Like their ancestors before them, they will leave it to its fate and set sail for greener pastures.

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

The post Seeds of England appeared first on Social Matter.

True to its name, the book is a bare-bones introduction to the arguments against democracy, rooted in a firmly reactionary frame. Detractors almost immediately complained that Anissimov was just rehashing the arguments against democracy articulated by the Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his magnum opus Democracy: The God That Failed (see here, and I [and I imagine the opinion would be unanimous among neoreactionaries] cannot recommend the book enough). Similarities notwithstanding, Anissimov also introduces a number of more interesting additions to the case against democracy, and puts Hoppe’s economic arguments in their proper place in a [neo]reactionary perspective, and also categorizes alternatives to democracy and their relations with it and each other. It is important to remember that Hoppe was not a monarchist himself, but only considered monarchy a lesser evil compared to democracy. Hoppe’s preferred form of human political organization, in an ideal world, would have been anarcho-capitalism.

Using Hoppe’s paradigm, a neoreactionary differentiates himself from libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and faithful believers in the democracy by rejecting democracy on Hoppe’s (and Anissimov’s) grounds, and then subsequently rejecting anarcho-capitalism, for whatever reason. The reasons for rejecting anarcho-capitalism might differ, and might be the very reason neoreaction conceives of itself as a trichotomy of blood-and-soil ethnonationalists, throne-and-altar theonomists and hyper-capitalist techno-commercialists. But I digress. The important take-away is that Anissimov has appropriately reframed Hoppe’s arguments as a reactionary should, and thus put the economic arguments against democracy in their appropriate context along with a series of others based on psychology, history, genetics, etc. I am not the first to notice that Anissimov is doing more formulating than original thinking, but I am also the last person to condemn some good formulating — all new ideas are old ideas after all, but that just goes to show the power of formulation.

Anissimov touches on a lot of fertile ground ripe for intellectual cultivation, although their details are deliberately elided in the interest of brevity. In just one chapter, we consider the “problem of civilization” from the viewpoints of chimpanzee gangs, human hunter-gatherers, early Sumeria and the proto-Greek Indo-Europeans and their culture of chariot-riding warrior-chieftains. I’m sure Anissimov realizes each one of these topics could easily fill up a thick tome’s worth of neoreactionary guiding, especially the last one. If it was the particularities of the proto-Greeks and their culture that gave rise to Western civilization as we know it, I’d love to see a long-view study of Western civilization since antiquity and how well it has done with regards to conserving this Ur-culture.

Anissimov also touches on the “Putnam argument” against democracy (i.e. based on Robert Putnam’s research that found that “diversity” reduces social capital) and various other trains of thought relatively palatable to the modern liberal mind. Other examples include the “cognitive bias argument,” that voters are influenced by too many unalterable biases to make good decisions on average, as well as the “polarization argument,” that democracy encourages political polarization and increasingly intrudes into non-political spheres of life. Bringing up the American Founding Fathers’ well-documented aversion to democracy and their blunt elitism is another classic anti-democratic spiel, although it probably serves more to reassure neoreactionaries of their sanity than convince — ahem — “democracy enthusiasts” of the illegitimacy of their favored political system, seeing as most of them have probably been taught by now that the Founding Fathers were slave-owning, old white bigots who ought to be summarily dismissed and ignored insofar as they aren’t overthrowing an even-more-incorrigible old white bigot like the King of England. But hey, no one said this was easy.

Anissimov spends a fair amount of time reiterating Hoppe et al.’s libertarian economic arguments against democracy, and also goes into a fairly long tangent on democracy’s relations to GDP (gross domestic product) and income inequality. Following the latter, he also goes on an even more tangential rant on why income inequality is not inherently wrong. This part of the guide felt quite out-of-place compared to the rest, since it went on too long for what was comparatively a minor issue, and especially one so terribly based in progressive propaganda, coming as it does straight from the ramen-infested bowels of Occupy Wall Street. Anissimov definitely forgot for whom he was writing his book at times — yes, inequality is a fact of nature that will be reflected in society; neoreactionaries do not need persuasion of this fact!

All in all, Anissimov accomplished what he set out to do. Many of his assertions and much of his evidence could be turned into full-length books in and of themselves, and I would advise any intellectual entrepreneurs to take note of this fact. Anissimov critiques democracy, but as much as he critiques democracy, he critiques the average voter, the dogma of equality and modern culture itself. If this was a guide, it was a guide to unexplored territories, beckoning to the bold.

The post Yuray Reviews Anissimov’s Guide for Neoreactionaries 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.

Are you a conservative or rightist of some kind? Have you heard about neoreaction? Have you heard good things about it? Have you heard bad things? Have you heard that neoreaction is just a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds with obscene power fantasies? Have you heard neoreaction is really just bunch of wimpy Yankees theorizing from an Ivory Tower (skyscraper?) in New York City? Have you heard neoreaction is just a poorly articulated justification for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry? Have you heard neoreaction is just a lazy, long-winded excuse not to engage in right-wing political activism? Have you heard, perhaps, that neoreaction is nothing more than another Jewish conspiracy to subvert the interests of white European Westerners and everything they know, love and stand for?

What you have heard, my friend, may not be entirely accurate. There has been ample, pained, and published work trying to answer the question “what is neoreaction?,” and the answer seems elusive yet. It is, however, less difficult to enumerate a list of things neoreaction is not. For example, neoreaction is not a motor vehicle. Neoreaction is not a form of government. Neoreaction is not libertarianism. Neoreaction is not [just] monarchism. Neoreaction is not a website. Neoreaction is not a Jewish conspiracy. Neoreaction is, for that matter, not a conspiracy of Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots or lazy conservatives. It is true that some Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots, and lazy conservatives all find a home in neoreaction — as do some Jews. Yet no single group dominates the neoreactionary bubble of thought, so much so that neoreactionaries delineate three separate zones of neoreactionary thought and affiliation, termed the Trichotomy of theonomy, ethnonationalism and techno-commercialism. In other words: faith, blood, and property. God, family, and guns. Everybody’s got a favorite, but nobody maintains less than all three.

Neoreaction was more-or-less founded by the prolific writer and programmer Mencius Moldbug sometime around 2007. This basic point seems to be agreed-upon by nearly everyone. Moldbug could easily qualify as a Jew (a half-Jew), a Silicon Valley nerd, and a pompous urbanite. Moldbug may have been the catalyst for this new intellectual phenomenon, yet before, during and after Moldbug’s de facto hiatus in 2013, neoreaction has flowered into far more than him alone. Dozens of neoreactionary articles are written every day. Neoreactionaries are meeting offline. Neoreactionaries are forming occult networks. If you don’t see neoreaction doing anything, that’s just because you haven’t looked — or, because neoreaction doesn’t want you to see what it’s doing. Moldbug hasn’t been scheming for years behind-the-scenes, directing neoreaction from a synagogue. He’s been busy with far less sinister things. So who exactly has been steering the NRx-Mobile, hidden behind tinted windows?

1. Neoreaction is demographically less Jewish than a Hamas birthday party.

How could anyone imagine that a group adopting a mascot as supremely non-kosher as a crab was Judaic in any shape or form?

Shellfish: not kosher.

There are three Jews who are or have been involved in neoreaction. Two are half-Jewish. The third is quarter-Jewish. This makes them gentile enough to be Nazi field marshals. The three are the aforementioned Mr. Moldbug, Mr. Boetel from Radish Magazine, and the Anti-Democracy Activist. Mr. Moldbug is not religious, and hasn’t contributed a word to neoreaction since 2013. Mr. Boetel posts sporadically (the last time was in November), and makes a blogging out of masterfully mocking and deconstructing liberal-progressive narratives on history and current affairs. The Anti-Democracy Activist is a convert to Catholicism. Instead of the flag of Israel, he flies the flag of Rhodesia. If this here is a sinister Jewish conspiracy, it strikes me as a rather lackluster one. My Jew-dar just isn’t detecting anything. In any case, I must recommend reading all three men. And so what about the rest of the neoreactionaries?

The columnists for this very neoreactionary website include one Minnesotan Catholic, one Catholic Slav, a grizzly American Southerner and three Anglo-Saxon gentiles. Zero Jews. Guest writers have included Russians, Scandinavians, and more Anglo-Saxons of various kinds. No Jews to my knowledge. The aggregator for neoreaction, Reaction Times, is curated by a reactionary Protestant from Canada. Listed in the aggregator are 30+ sites maintained by gentiles of European descent, and three maintained by the aforementioned souls of the most tangential Jewish background. Aside from Mr. Moldbug, the most influential neoreactionaries are largely English, American and otherwise natively Anglophone. Russians, Slovenians, and Bulgarians make a mark too. Ditto American Southerners. The latest newcomers have been Croatian and Turkish. Hangers-on from Spain, Brazil, Scotland, the rest of the Anglosphere, South Africa, the Netherlands, Ireland, India, Panama, Scandinavia and elsewhere round out the neoreactionary sphere. I am still not aware of any neoreactionaries from Israel, nor any with surnames suffixed with ‘-berg,’ ‘-stein,’ or ‘-witz.’ Indeed, yours truly receives more traffic from Taiwan, Romania, and the United Arab Emirates than from Israel. Judaeoreaction? Why not Sinoreaction or Islamoreaction?

Current and active neoreactionaries are overwhelmingly European gentiles. The largest currents seem to be Anglo-Saxon, Roman Catholic, American Orthodox and Slavic. The most grossly over-represented ethnic group among neoreactionaries is not Jews, but South Slavs. The most cursory demographic investigation will reveal not just that neoreactionaries are not Jews, but that neoreactionaries aren’t necessarily Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots or lazy conservatives either. Some married with kids and others unattached students. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, neo-pagan and atheist. Former libertarians, former progressives, former Tea Partiers, former paleoconservatives, former fascists, former apoliticals, and former Marxists. Born and raised everywhere from Alaska to Australia. I think we even have a woman or two. The diversity of neoreaction, in fact, highlights precisely how non-Jewish it is. Jews, far from running the show the way they do for neoconservatives, communists, or progressives (but I repeat myself), are conspicuously missing. If neoreaction is a Jewish conspiracy, it is the first one without any Jews.

2. Moldbug alone is not the sole arbiter of neoreactionary thought.

Mr. Enoch from The Right Stuff objects to Moldbug’s dismissal of white nationalism and psychologist Kevin Macdonald’s theory of innate Jewish behavior. Many neoreactionaries find Moldbug’s original position lacking, myself included. Many more accept Macdonald’s theory. Many are explicit ethnonationalists. Is Moldbug’s Jewish ancestry preventing him from reaching some unsavory conclusions? Perhaps, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. Moldbug is not the sole arbiter of neoreactionary thought. His long deconstruction of the progressive worldview was an indisputable godsend to us Children of Modernity. His neocameralism — disputable. His poetry… eh. Key tenets of neoreaction, including the Trichotomy and the concept of Gnon, were not brainchildren of Moldbug’s. Neoreaction tangles with Evolian metaphysics, the tripartite caste society, entryism, geopolitics, holiness spirals, practical reaction, Western religion, “gene-culture co-evolution” and more, cheerfully and without Moldbug. Disagreements with Moldbug do not entail disagreements with neoreaction as a whole. Neoreaction is more than just Moldbug — which is why it’s called neoreaction and not Moldbuggianism.

Moldbug’s focus on Puritan/Protestant leftism to the exclusion of negative Jewish influence on Western civilization rightly irks some. Let it be repeated and emphasized that both Moldbug and neoreaction at large focus not on Puritanism, Protestantism or Christianity per se as the sicknesses of civilization, but rather the steady process of leftist degradation that used them as a vector over the centuries. No, Puritans wouldn’t approve of Iggy Azalea. This does not invalidate neoreactionary theories about leftism, holiness spirals, and Puritanism. It seems that now a more rightly neoreactionary position would be that both Jews and Puritans share significant blame for the decline of the West. An autopsy for Western civilization might read: “Immune system critically weakened by virulent holiness spiral and concomitant leftism. Fatal stroke from foreign pathogen.” There are surely many other groups and individuals who helped cause this untimely death in some way or another, but these two religious minorities seem to be the primary culprits.

Is Macdonald’s theory of Jewish behavior correct? If not, it wouldn’t be for lack of evidence. I don’t find the theory shocking, strange or unique at all. Macdonald does a thorough job of documenting what a hostile minority looks like. Regular minorities turn into hostile minorities after majorities try to forcibly convert, enslave, eradicate or otherwise injure them. Alternately, regular majorities turn into hostile majorities after minorities try to scam, deceive, impose on, thieve from or otherwise injure them. Minorities become hostile to survive. Majorities would argue that the minorities deserved it, being the dirty parasites and predators that they are. The minorities view the majorities the same way. Who “started it” is always impossible to figure out, and instead of turning to endlessly complicated conspiracy theories, it is much easier just to remember a simple heuristic: diversity plus proximity equals conflict.

3. Neoreaction answers the Jewish Question, once and for all.

Neoreaction, contrary to vitriolic accusations leveled against it, has not stayed suspiciously silent on the Jewish Question. Nick B. Steves wrote a three-part series on the issue. He concluded:

The Jews qua Jews are so uniquely destabilizing that no Jew could ever be trusted with any amount of power. They should be banned from our organization (presuming we had one) and probably forcibly relocated to a homeland of their own.

Do you smell latkes? I don’t. Jim has done a lot of his own commentary on Jews and cultural Marxism, Jews and anti-Semitism, Jews and Puritans, and Jewish misbehavior. Nick Land has staked his position. 28Sherman displayed a keen awareness of all things Jewish and political just yesterday. Neoreactionaries, steeped as they are in politically incorrect, anti-Semitic, old history books, are far more than acquainted with questions of Jews and Judaism. The perceived silence of neoreactionaries on this topic is not borne of conspiracy or cowardice, but conclusion.

The most perfunctory appraisal of the situation reveals that the Jews were and are a religiously and genetically distinct minority among Christian Europeans. Diversity plus proximity equals conflict. Each and every nefarious action attributed to Jews throughout history in the West can be traced to the ubiquitous and ever-present hostility that exists between different ethno-religious groups (or thedes or phyles). This hostility is a law of the Universe, a dictate of Gnon’s. Evil Jewish Bolshevism, depraved Jewish pornography, destructive Jewish capitalism, chauvinistic Jewish Zionism — all can be easily and sensibly interpreted as various manifestations of natural conflict between hostile groups i.e. Jews and Christian Europeans, Jews and Muslims, etc. There is little reason to zero in on the Jews and obsess about them as uniquely heinous among all the world’s peoples. The only thing unique about them is their continued survival despite the scale and length of their run-ins with foreign gentile civilizations, but this differentiates them by degree, not type — Jews are not at all the only hostile minority on the planet, and not at all the only one that’s survived to 2015. Various expressions of anti-Semitism throughout history, such as the Holocaust or the Russian pogroms, can also be sensibly interpreted using this paradigm of ethnic conflict. The manifestations of ethnic conflict may be complex, but the underlying causes are always the same: diversity and proximity. It is not difficult to figure out and most neoreactionaries have done so, and thus shut up about it.

Law of Gnon: This is what the out-group looks like to the in-group. Always.

The answer to the Jewish question, as Mr. Steves concluded, is quite simple: segregation and separation. This solution is not unique to the Jews, but is the standard tried-and-true, traditional method of solving the problem of the violence at the nexus of diversity and proximity. Note that unlike progressives, neoreactionaries do not believe one can abolish the laws of nature and turn diversity into a strength, least of all using the State. Diversity engenders animosity and eventually violence, and is thus a weakness. The only solution to diversity is unity. Separate and segregate. This axiom is true when considering Jews and Europeans, and it is true when considering any other two distinct groups.

This is how liberals see conservatives. Law of Gnon strikes again. Always.

-

Satisfied with the question of the Jews, neoreactionaries notice that the rot in Western civilization frequently attributed solely to the Jews had in fact existed long before subversive Jews did (see: Jim). Neoreactionaries notice that there exists an entire science of civilization with its own laws and principles. They notice that the architecture of contemporary civilization is slowly disintegrating. They notice saboteurs and invaders. Ahead they notice a barren grave with their names on it, and they notice grotesque monstrosities rising from Hades and beckoning to them with meticulously tailored malformed claws: “Check your privilege.” Neoreactionaries notice all this and judge it terribly unworthy. It is just a matter of opinion whether the next step is letting the edifice of civilization collapse, building a new civilization in the ruins, or attempting to stay the badly quivering columns.

Or maybe what’s needed is Zombie Hitler and another round with those damn shadowy Hebrews. But if so, close your Internet browser — you won’t find them here in neoreaction.

The post Neoreaction is a Jewish Conspiracy to Thwart the Incipient National Socialist Revolution appeared first on Social Matter.

Statue of Don Felix Sarda y Salvany. Photograph by Josep Renalias.

The good Dr. Don Felix Sarda y Salvany (1844-1916) was a Spanish Catholic priest and writer from Spain’s Eastern region of Catalonia. His scribal tenacity was impressive; the Don was the editor of the Catholic weekly journal La Revista Popular for more than 40 years, and in the years leading up to the start of the civilization-ending First World War, he published a twelve-volume series titled Propaganda catolica (“Catholic Propaganda”), dryly described by an unknown Wikipedia contributor as “a vast collection of short books, pamphlets, articles and conferences.” The Italian historian Roberto de Mattei says of the Don Sarda: “[he] was a popular priest in Spain at the end of the century and was considered exemplary for the firmness of his principles and the clarity of his apostolate.”

(I note here wryly that my Google Chrome browser attempts to correct the word ‘apostolate,’ describing [among other things] organized religious works, to the word ‘apostate,’ describing a religious defector.)

According to the Spanish Bibliography of Reference, the Don exercised an “apostolate of immense efficiency and resonance.” His writings against the growing liberalism of 19th century Europe achieved some level of notability after a series of Spanish political fiascoes from 1868-1874 that began with a liberal revolution and deposition of the ruling Queen Isabella II, followed by a short-lived monarchy under the Savoyard Prince Amadeo, followed by his own deposition and a similarly short-lived Spanish Republic that ended in 1874 when the original Queen Isabella II’s son Alfonso XII was restored as King of Spain in a military coup. Three coups, two monarchies, one republic, and all back to square one in just six years — politics today just isn’t as exciting as it used to be. But I digress.

I will here provide a choice quote of the Don’s so that the reader may be sufficiently intrigued to studiously follow the forthcoming backstory and analysis (my highlights in bold):

 “The theater, literature, public and private morals are all saturated with obscenity and impurity. The result is inevitable; a corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation. Liberalism is the program of naturalism. Free-thought begets free morals, or immorality. Restraint is thrown off and a free rein given to the passions. Whoever thinks what he pleases will do what he pleases. Liberalism in the intellectual order is license in the moral order. Disorder in the intellect begets disorder in the heart, and vice-versa. Thus does Liberalism propagate immorality, and immorality Liberalism.” (Liberalism is a Sin, Ch. 26)

During the 1868-1874 interregnum, the Catholic Church in Spain suffered a number of blows to its status, especially due to the short-lived First Spanish Republic that moved to establish a secular state. While Catholicism retrieved its status as the state religion of Spain after the restoration of the monarchy under Alfonso XIII in 1874, the sense of spiritual decay that had gripped Spain since the 18th century continued unabated. Yale historian Noel Valis describes a “a growing alienation from the Church,” and refers us to the observations of a Protestant chaplain in Spain Hugh James Rose, who dedicated an entire chapter of his 1873 book on the country to the “Decay of Faith in Spain.” Choice observations of Rose’s: “The Church of Spain … is an institution which has lost its hold on the masses, both educated and uneducated … [there is in the Spanish] a sense of spiritual drift, of having come unanchored from their religious moorings.”

It is in this context that Don Sarda’s magnum opus was released, the 1886 book Liberalism is a Sin, which was subsequently reprinted up to twenty times by 1960. Salvany, who believed liberalism “is the burning issue of our century,” found a quick rebuttal to his work by the liberal-leaning Catholic intelligentsia — both pieces were submitted to the Roman Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation of the Index (the successor institution to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum — List of Prohibited Books). The Congregation’s secretary ruled soon after in favor of Salvany, finding errors in the rebuttal and “uncharitable insinuations” about the good Don.

To illustrate the then Church’s zealous and masculine dismissal of liberal protests, I will excerpt the secretary’s letter to the liberal Bishop who ordered the rebuttal:

To The Most Rev. Jacobo Catala Et Alboso,

Bishop of Barcelona

Most Excellent Sir:

[…]

D. Felix Sarda, merits great praise for his exposition and defense of the sound doctrine therein set forth with solidity, order and lucidity, and without personal offense to anyone.

[…]

The same judgment, however, cannot be passed on the other work, that by D. de Pazos, for in matter it needs corrections. Moreover, his injurious manner of speaking cannot be approved, for he inveighs rather against the person of D. Sarda than against the latter’s supposed errors.

[…]

Therefore, the Sacred Congregation has commanded D. de Pazos, admonished by his own Bishop, to withdraw his book, as far as he can, from circulation, and in the future, if any discussion of the subject should arise, to abstain from all expressions personally injurious, according to the precept of true Christian charity; and this all the more since Our Holy Father, Leo XIII, whereas he urgently recommends castigation of error, neither desires nor approves expressions personally injurious, especially when directed against those who are eminent for their doctrine and their piety.

[…]

Fr. Jerome Secheri, O.P.
Secretary of the Sacred Congregation Of the Index.

Don Sarda had the full backing of the Roman Catholic Church of the late 1800’s, and his works built on the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors) issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX in 1864, which condemned, among other things: pantheism, naturalism, absolute rationalism, socialism, communism, and modern liberalism. This is all relevant to the crux of this entire piece, which finally manifests itself: that the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany, and his contemporaries in the Catholic world, were not just potentially in agreement with the tenets of the nascent neoreactionary school of thought (more introduction to it can be accessed here, here and here), but fully paleo-neoreactionaries, a clumsy description which we might condense into reactionaries, with the understanding that our contemporary neoreactionaries are rediscovering reactionaries and applying their insights to the chaotic world of 2015 (hence, neo-). I will now highlight several key tenets of the 21st century neoreactionary school of thought that were articulated nearly word-for-word by the 19th century Don, and, crucially, firmly defended by the Catholic Church at the time, as illustrated above. There are far more instances of overlap that I will go over comprehensively sometime over the next 1-2 weeks on my personal blog, Ara Maxima, but these three will suffice for now.

1. To Hell with the journalists.

The contempt that most Westerners hold for the “mainstream media,” and the much deeper contempt that neoreactionaries hold for journalists themselves is rooted in a very real and consistent tendency for journalists to style themselves as heroic investigators of dark secrets held from the masses for illicit gain, but to act in reality as left-wing propagandists advancing a uniform agenda of feminism, multiculturalism, LGBT-ism, and a myriad of other -isms through a long-cultivated routine of mental gymnastics and/our outright fraud. The result is a “mainstream media narrative” divorced from reality to one degree or another, useful only to leftists (Don Salvany’s “liberals”) for political purposes — namely, attacking and crushing with overwhelming propaganda the rightist resistance they invariably face.

“Here are theoretical and practical Liberals. The first are the dogmatizers of the sect—the philosophers, the professors, the controversialists, the journalists. They teach Liberalism in books, in discourses, in articles, by argument or by authority, in conformity with a rationalistic criterion, in disguised or open opposition to the criterion of the divine and supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Ch. 9)

“Amongst Liberals we must not forget to include those who manage to evade any direct exposition or expression of the Liberal theory, but who nevertheless obliquely sustain it in their daily practice by writing and orating after the Liberal method, by recommending Liberal books and men, measuring and appreciating everything according to the Liberal criterion, and manifesting, on every occasion that offers, an intense hatred for anything that tends to discredit or weaken their beloved Liberalism. Such is the conduct of those prudent journalists whom it is difficult to apprehend in the flagrant advocacy of any proposition concretely Liberal, but who nevertheless, in what they say and in what they do not say, never cease to labor for the propagation of this cunning heresy. Of all Liberal reptiles, these are the most venomous.” (Ch. 9)

“And all this comes of a foolish desire to be estimated Liberal. Insane illusion! The usage of the word Liberal makes the Catholic who accepts it as his own one with all that finds shelter in its ominous shadow. Rationalism is the toadstool that flourishes in its dark shades, and with Rationalism does such a journalist identify himself, thus placing himself in the ranks of the enemies of Jesus Christ!” (Ch. 13)

2. To Hell with the “moderates.”

A more niche contempt held by the modern Dissident Right at large — including the gamut of neoreactionaries, monarchists, paleoconservatives, white nationalists, New Rightists, identitarians, right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, radical traditionalists and so forth — is the contempt for the mainstream right-wing political forces that exist in every Western country but act as little more than controlled opposition for the zealous Left, making loud noises in parliament halls but inevitably and invariably capitulating to the Left’s demands, only to style themselves as the vanguards of the old order a decade later — but not the primordial rightist order, but the 10-year-old new order of the Left!

“This class has not fully penetrated into the domain of truth. That they will ever enter the city of light depends upon their own sincerity and honesty. If they earnestly desire to know the truth in its fullness and seek it with sincere purpose, God’s grace will not fail them. But they are in a dangerous position. On the borderland between the realms of light and darkness, the devil is most active and ingenious in detaining those who seem about to escape his snares, and he spares nothing to retain in his service a great number of people who would truly detest his infernal machinations if they only perceived them. His method, in the instance of persons infected with Liberalism, is to suffer them to place one foot within the domain of truth, provided they keep the other inside the camp of error. In this way they stand the victim of the devil’s deceit and their own folly. In this way those whose consciences are not yet entirely hardened escape the salutary horrors of remorse; so the pusillanimous and the vacillating, who comprise the greater number of Liberals, avoid compromising themselves by pronouncing themselves such openly and squarely; so the shrewd and calculating (according to the measure of expediency—how much time they will spend in each camp), manage to show themselves the friends and allies of both; so a man is enabled to administer an official and recognized palliative to his failings, his weaknesses and his blunders. It is the obscurity that arises from the indefiniteness of clearly defined principles of truth and error in the Liberalist’s mind that makes him the easy victim of Satan. His boasted strength is the very source of his weakness. It is because he has no real solid knowledge of the principles of truth and error that he is so easily deluded into the belief of his own intellectual superiority. He is in a mental haze—a fog which hides from him the abyss into which his vanity and pride, cunningly played upon by Satan, are invariably drawing him.” (Ch. 8)

3.  Demotism

Demotism, the idea that a ruler must rule “in the name of the people,” is a malady of civilization omnipresent in the post-Enlightenment period: the three great dragons of the 20th century, capitalism, communism and fascism, all ostensibly ruled “by the will of the people,” a stark contrast to the aristocratic monarchies of Old Europe which ruled not “by the will of the people,” but “by the will of God.” The idea of demotism is a uniquely neoreactionary insight, which the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany foreshadowed heavily in this excerpt on the differences between Catholic and secular governments, and their relationships to monarchical and republican governments. Don Sarda’s point seems to be that the crucial worth of a government lies not in its constituted political form i.e. whether it is republican or monarchical, but rather in its agreed-upon basis for legitimacy — the people, or God? Couldn’t an absolute monarch be a demotist, and wouldn’t this constitute a problem? And couldn’t a republican government consist of ardently religious aristocrats sharing a divine right to rule over the masses? There is ample room for debate here.

“A government, whatever be its form, is Catholic if its constitution, its legislation, and its politics are based on Catholic principles; it is Liberal if it bases its constitution, its legislation, and its politics on rationalistic principles. It is not the act of legislation—by the king in a monarchy, by the people in a republic, or by both in a mixed form of government—which constitutes the essential nature of its legislation or of its constitution. What constitutes this is whether it does or does not carry with it the immutable seal of the Faith and whether it be or be not conformable with what the Christian law imposes upon states as well as upon individuals. just as amongst individuals, a king in his purple, a noble with his escutcheon or a workman in his overalls can be truly Catholic, so states can be Catholic, whatever be the place assigned them in the scale of governmental forms. In consequence, the fact of being Liberal or anti-Liberal has nothing whatever to do with the horror which everyone ought to entertain for despotism and tyranny, nor with the desire of civil equality between all citizens; much less with the spirit of toleration and of generosity, which, in their proper acceptation, are Christian virtues. And yet all this, in the language of certain people and of certain journals, is called Liberalism. Here we have an instance of a thing which has the appearance of Liberalism and which in reality is not Liberalism at all.

On the other hand, there exists a thing which is really Liberalism and yet has not the appearance of Liberalism. Let us suppose [i.e., imagine] an absolute monarchy like that of Russia, or of Turkey, or better still, one of the conservative governments of our times, the most conservative imaginable; let us suppose that the constitution and the legislation of this monarchy or of this government is based upon the principle of the absolute and free will of the king or upon the equally unrestricted will of the conservative majority, in place of being based on the principles of Catholic right, on the indestructibility of the Faith, or upon a rigorous regard of the rights of the Church; then, this monarchy and this conservative government would be thoroughly Liberal and anti-Catholic. Whether the free-thinker be a monarch, with his responsible ministry, or a responsible minister, with his legislative corps, as far as consequences are concerned, it is absolutely the same thing. In both cases their political conduct is in the direction of free-thought, and therefore it is Liberal. Whether or not it be the policy of such a government to place restraints upon the freedom of the press; whether, no matter under what pretext, it grinds its subjects and rules with a rod of iron; a country so governed, though it will not be free, will without doubt be Liberal. Such were the ancient Asiatic monarchies; such are many of our modern monarchies; such was the government of Bismarck in Germany; such is the monarchy of Spain, whose constitution declares the king inviolable, but not God.

Here then we have something which, without seeming to resemble Liberalism, really is Liberalism, the more subtle and dangerous precisely because it has not the appearance of the evil it is.” (Ch. 12)

Without regard to political or religious identity, I recommend all sane men take a day or two to carefully read the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany’s Liberalism is a Sin. Filled with biting commentary, no-holds-barred reactionary criticism, and such ardent and unforgiving opposition to the leftist-liberal movement that would make the staunchest Ultramontane blush, the entire text is available for free online at this link. Go, young men of the post-modern world: let your ancestors’ spiritual guides’ teach you the real things that they’ll never teach you in school.

The post Enter the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany: Liberalism is a Sin appeared first on Social Matter.

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.

Sonja talks about eco-fundamentalism as a religion – a belief system based on emotion instead of evidence. I’d just call it Political Environmentalism. This is the sort of environmentalism which thinks that all pollution is bad and rejects technological solutions to ecological problems as somehow impure. It’s the belief system which leads people to link anti-capitalism and ecology – never mind that the Soviets devastated their environment. Sometimes it’s backed by a back-to-nature sentiment or an idealized version of non-western cultures living in harmony with the planet. Sonja does a good job of showing why these mindsets are at best naive and at worst dangerous. I fully agree that some of the major ecological problems stem from lack of property rights, tech, and population pressure.

But I’m going to lay the eco-fundamentalist conception aside for a moment. My own academic background is in the economics of food and natural resources. I often cross paths with people involved in conservation, climate science, forestry, and similar work. I’ve seen eco-fundamentalism at work time and time again. But I’ve also seen saner people. I can’t think of any mainstream environmental economist who would push zero pollution, for example. Instead, economists state that the benefits of pollution should outweigh the costs. Furthermore, externalities have to be internalized. For example, if your company causes damage to land, you need to pay for its proper restoration. Few people would disagree with that principle. Certainly no rightist accepting the value of personal responsibility should.

Let’s scale up. The purpose of the state is to preserve order and stability. This is a central tenet of neoreactionary thought. Now let’s say that agricultural companies are operating in your state. But they’re generating large negative externalities! Land is being damaged, insects are being poisoned, mono-cropping is impacting biodiversity. This presents a clear threat to the biological resiliency of the state. The companies don’t have incentive to change their practices; maybe they can buy land elsewhere at a lower price than changing their practices would leave them with. In this situation, the state must intervene to fulfil its function. It must make sure that the companies pay the full cost of their operations. The response will probably be something like “but then won’t those companies leave anyway?” Yes, probably. But they would have had to leave when damage to the land made it impossible to use further anyway. The cost to the state is the same, but by playing it safe the state has preserved vital biological resources.

Scale up again. An oil company operating in international waters screwed up and oil is churning out into the ocean. There are several states bordering that ocean. Those states will have to deal with ecological damage, health effects, and economic loss. It’s in the interest of these states to prepare for such an eventuality, especially when oil companies are operating in that ocean. It’s also in the interest of these states to cooperate when creating these safeguards. Businesses also like a single set of rules more than a variety of differing ones because it’s easier to follow. It’s the same reason multinationals like free trade treaties. Here we see the foul spectre of international law arise, which elicits fear and disdain from many on the right. But international laws have existed for millennia. From the treaties between Rome and Parthia to the Peace of Westphalia, cooperation benefited the states involved.

The point of all these examples is to show that ecological concerns are well  within the purview of hypothetical neoreactionary states. The result by definition is environmental law and regulation. The principle of subsidiarity should be followed here. I’ve heard the counter-argument in discussions that the majority of environmental problems are local in nature. This is true. National laws which try to regulate local effects often have their very own set of negative externalities. Nevertheless: non-local environmental problems are by definition bigger problems even if there are less of them.

Here’s where we should address the elephant in the room: global warming. Generally speaking, neoreactionaries are suspicious of climate science, and not without reason. But here’s where things get tricky. On the one hand, the political impact of climate science means that politicians desire certain results. Collectively, these results provide the politicians with a Useful Truth. Like anything related to politics, Useful Truth can conflict with real Truth. Eventually, Useful Truth becomes Official Truth and that’s pretty damn hard to overturn. One of the tenets of eco-fundamentalism is that Green Energy is pure and good and oil companies are corrupt lobbyists. The problem is that most industries end up lobbying and acting in their own interests instead of the common good. Green energy is no exception. The logic of the skeptic is simple from here: interests from progressive politicians to environmental consultants benefit from results which tighten regulations and create green energy demand to reduce carbon. Therefore, climate science is compromised and cannot be trusted. The issue is that this narrative leaves out the other half of the story. There’s a collection of interests which benefit from fighting Warmist climate science and disproving its findings. And that collection of interests has got deep pockets too. So we must apply the same chain of logic to them. The person who believes the science behind global warming to be in thrall to Useful Truth must say the same about those who denounce it.

I don’t have a solution to the above quandary to publish here. But I want to take a step down the road. The problem is time-preference. Actors on both sides have relatively high time preference. Businesses (both oil and wind) must think in terms of shareholders and profit cycles, not generations. Politicians (both Bush and Gore) must think in terms of special interests and election cycles. This problem is exacerbated because these interests control the state which could otherwise take a long-term view. In other words, it’s necessary for the state to lower its time preference in order to accurately assess  and confront threats to ecological stability. Isn’t this long-term view of politics exactly what neoreaction demands?

Sonja references the fact that the climate has always changed and will always be changing, from the age of the dinosaurs to the Medieval Warming period. One response Skeptics give Warmists goes like this: non-human causes changed the climate throughout history, so isn’t it wrong/overblown/presumptive to attribute such a significant human cause to modern changes? I think this is fallacious, but I’ll let you pursue that for yourself. Humans are one of many factors which can impact the climate – but we are one of the factors. What remains is the question of how much weight we should give that factor. And even if humans have a negligible impact, this does not mean that all changes are favourable to humans. States will become more fragile if extreme weather events become more normal. Investment in increasing resiliency requires a time preference low enough to not see an ROI until a statistical outlier shows its face. The commenter SanguineEmpiricist was dead on when he said that we can’t tiptoe around ruin events when we only have one earth. The fact that these events might be hard to predict doesn’t provide an escape; that signalling sometimes rules over substance should only make us more worried. Nassim Taleb (a skeptic of anthropogenic warming) expressed this sensible view: do not shake up an extremely complex system when that system could cave in and doom us. (This is also why a Taleb student would be suspicious of large, centralized solutions, by the way.) Massive deforestation and destruction of vital insect populations definitely constitute a shake-up. Sure, a ruin event could be a complete outlier. But it only takes the one. The best thing which could happen for the state would be a source of knowledge which exists outside of the current academic nexus.  One which could conduct the research necessary to verify or falsify the current models. I believe Moldbug calls this a “truth service” and dubs it the Antiversity.

And here’s where the neoreactionary approach to this issue should lie. First, we should acknowledge the simple fact that political interests substitute Useful Truths for real Truths – and then admit that this applies to both sides of this debate. Second, it needs to be admitted that ecological systems are highly complex and difficult to analyze – and that’s exactly why states have an interest in making themselves ecologically and biologically resilient. Changing climates and long-run environmental consequences are far from Black Swan events. Third, the work of the Antiversity begins now. The hydra image of the Green Movement which many on the right have leads to a confusion of issues. There’s a sense that to buy into restricting pesticides which harm bees requires going the whole nine yards and chaining yourself to a nuclear plant. The Antiversity is a truth provider and advises on that basis. Does the evidence swing in favour of pesticide toxicity? Regulate. Does it come down against the efficacy of wind energy? Get rid of the subsidies.

I hope this article serves to create a better frame of mind for approaching ecology. As happens time and time again, political signalling tends to overrule reason when it comes to the issue and very few on the right or left are immune. Useful Truth and Official Truth are worthless when they don’t reflect reality. The neoreactionary approach must be better. The work may be complicated. The method surely isn’t.

The post On Ecological Realism 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 disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

That phrase contains all the hope and promise of political freedom of speech. One pictures intellectuals and workingmen alike discussing ideas unhindered. There is no idea so sacred, no value so widely held, that it is beyond critique. Without the power of the state guarding some official truth, only reason and logic can test their strength.

That’s the theory, anyway. But the theory and the real history of free speech are very different. The modern era institutionalized free speech as a safeguard, not as an ideal. Acemoglu and Robinson are two economists specializing in institutional development. In How Nations Fail, they discuss how various interests vied for power following Britain’s Glorious Revolution. Agreements between these factions to uphold the rule of law were self-serving. After all, the emergency powers you allow your friends one day are ones your enemies can usurp the next. Further studies seem to show the same behaviour at work. Democracy and its freedoms are “a way of committing to reforms when the likely alternative is the guillotine or the firing squad.”

The thing about this model is that the incentives are different. In the idealist vision, people commit to free speech because they desire a tolerant, liberal society. In the latter one, it’s because people don’t want to risk being silenced themselves. Problem is, it only takes one bastard who thinks they can get away with it to tear the whole thing down. The conditions which foster free speech on a political and cultural level are fragile indeed. As we’ve seen here at Social Matter, we’ve got a whole gang of bastards at it this time. The internet has been a haven for free speech. Campaigns have been fought to protect those freedoms from governments and businesses alike. Who’d have thought that its well-established denizens would be the ones using the internet to limit speech?

Free speech doesn’t just function as a constitutional right; it also defines the great game of politics. It introduces a rule which players in the game have to follow. Those on the top can’t use their power to limit what their opponents say about them. Those trying to get to the top can’t use silencing tactics on their way up. Like any game, there are a variety of strategies which players – parties, political leaders, activists, etc – can use to try and gain political power. What are some of them, and how does each strategy affect the resiliency of free speech?

First, each player could agree to respect free speech norms. That means that no one undermines anyone else’s rights to free speech. No rallies howling for the silencing of the enemy, no secret plans to invoke emergency powers. Each player incurs a cost upon gaining power because their opponents will be able to criticize them. But the benefit is that no other player will be able to silence them either. That’s pretty big, especially since the majority of people usually don’t hold political power directly. Free speech remains stable. The system functions.

What happens when a player stops following the rules? Well, that depends. In stable democracies, openly saying you oppose free speech erases any hope of gaining power. That’s why politicians have to play a careful game. It’s common to hear that certain speech infringes on other rights: it’s racist, it offends religious rights, it undermines national security, and so on. Even Communists and Fascists invoke the security of the state or the people. It takes a pretty ballsy authoritarian to straight up deny the right to speak. In stable liberal democracies, destroying your chance to gain power is a huge cost. In unstable regimes, like Britain during 1688, Weimar Germany, or Greece today, the game is a bit different. If things get bad enough, you might find yourself being the only one willing to stand up for free speech. In that case, the costs to you are high (since your enemies can speak against you) but the benefits are low (you will be silenced if you lose power). In Britain, players took this into account and stabilized the situation by accepting open criticism. In Germany, radical groups ended up battling it out until Hitler and his allies emerged victorious in 1933. Greece’s ultimate fate is yet to be determined, but it doesn’t look great.

None of this is radical thinking. But here’s where it gets interesting. Since it’s in no one’s favour to oppose free speech, how can one avoid the costs of free speech without openly opposing it? Let’s look at Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement (FSM) helped spark the student movements of the 1960’s. Their vision of free speech was certainly not restricted to the government. This was the dawn of the New Left. As Jacobin Mag explains, the Old Left was never a fan of “bourgeois freedoms” like speech. It reeked of the capitalist liberal democracy they sought to overthrow. So the very name of this student-led rebirth of Left-wing theory seemed to repudiate the old militancy. Nevertheless, strong ties remained between the student movements and the Old Left. Barbara Kay recounts the history of Bettina Aptheker, former Communist Party USA member, radical left activist, and student leader of the FSM. She was raised in a radical home, where “Party line” was a serious matter. Her father believed in Comrade Stalin and became his staunchest defender on the American Left. Despite supporting free speech in America, she was by her own admission not such a fan when it came to free speech for the USSR. For the record, the CPUSA was one of those critics of “bourgeois freedoms”. From a former member:

“Discipline in the Communist Party is voluntary, but in the silent background is the sword of excommunication. Without the power and religiosity of expulsion, the Communist Party could not exist as it is. Before the moment of the Khrushchev secret speech, expulsion from the Communist Party was akin to eternal damnation, the body alive but the soul already dead for eternity; and so powerful had this conviction of the membership become, and so widely and sincerely had they promulgated it, that millions of non-Communists considered anyone who bore the label of expulsion from the Party as a lost and damned soul, a corrupt and dangerous human being who no longer owned the right of admission to the society of men of good will. To a sincere and devoted Communist, expulsion was almost as bad as death – and sometimes worse.”

Fast-forward to 2014. The long march through the institutions is complete. One study found a third of faculty members admitting they would discriminate against people with conservative political views. Nicholas Dirks, Chancellor at Berkeley, now warns against “division and divisiveness that undermine a community’s foundation”…during his FSM 50 year anniversary talk, no less. The idea that “we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so” (Dirk) has overturned “defending to the death” your enemy’s right to speak. Now, in our model of the game of politics, this attitude should incur a great cost. Isn’t the agreement that everyone must respect free speech?

Marcuse: architect of our age?

As Radish has shown, these trends aren’t the product of over-zealousness or misguided idealism. Herbert Marcuse, philosopher of the Frankfurt School and the New Left, went into detail about the nature of political toleration. He believed that freedom was only useful in the service of Social Progress and political liberation. This demands “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left”. A feminist professor physically assaulting female pro-life students (including a minor) is a pretty good metaphor for the whole thing. Roger Nash Baldwin, co-founder of the ACLU, summed up this sentiment in an infamous quote:

“I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers’ rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies, at home and abroad.”

I won’t re-print the entire Radish article, but I encourage everyone to read it. The use of political freedom as a strategy to gain power is nothing new. This is the third strategy which our game must consider. In the democracies which these movements operate in, they want to avoid the costs incurred by opposing free speech. By necessity, this requires them to officially favour free speech, and other democratic rights. As Baldwin so eloquently shows, this is entryism: the player pretends to agree with the commitment to free speech in order to be accepted. Moreover, the player continues to uphold this official commitment to political rights once they have gained power. However, through slow re-definitions of those rights and freedoms, they are able to silence opponents over time. Of course we all want free speech, but can we really turn the university into an unsafe space? After all, when your ideology has not only political but also cultural dominance, your power increases exponentially. We saw above how Communist Party influence extended far beyond Party members. We’re living in a time where most people accept the values of Social Progress, tolerance, and equality. If activists and philosophers want to re-assess those terms, who’s going to say no? Isn’t that their job? Once you can get people to advocate equality of rights in the same breath they use to advocate revoking rights from certain groups, you’ve pretty much won.

This strategy is the most threatening of all to free speech. When a group openly opposes free speech, people can ally against them. The battle is in the open. But in the face of the entryist strategy above, the challenge is more difficult. One has to fight to reveal the hypocrisy of the player employing this strategy. Until their actions become too blatant to ignore, this treads a fine line between conspiracy theory and fact. When the player holds the weight of moral authority, as the Social Justice movement does for many progressives and youth, defense becomes even harder. If large numbers of people see you as a “bad person”, whose rights can be revoked without any threat to the freedom of “decent people“, then they have no reason to protest. The player avoids all the costs of openly opposing free speech while gaining many of the benefits over the long term. This would make the strategy very attractive to political actors who can pull it off. Once the facade no longer holds, cultural and political power are strong enough that it no longer matters. If you’re really lucky, maybe you can even get people to admit that free speech was a bad idea. After all, look how many bad people were able to subject decent people to their bile through exercising that right.

The most recent victory of this strategy was at 4chan. The haven/sewer of internet free speech appears to have been successfully purged of many of its moderators. Given the seductiveness of the entryist strategy, the question is how to guard against it. Those liberals and progressives truly committed to free speech must begin to examine who they have allied with. Those committed to free speech for other reasons need to consider their situation as well. Above all, pursuit of Truth – scientific, philosophical, and intellectual – demands free speech because it requires inquiry and criticism. If the game includes rights to free speech, then players have the incentive to use the entryist strategy. Therefore, new rules and protections need to be built to guard against it. Some are trying to do just that. Created in the wake of events at 4chan, 8chan is experimenting with allowing anyone to make their own board. Following the principle of free exit, if people become unhappy with the direction of one board, they can just switch to a new one. This makes it difficult for anyone to silence opponents through restrictions and purges. Even a small minority can just escape to their own board. It’s an option almost no minority  – ethnic, political, or otherwise – has in real life. It also reduces the benefits of the entryist strategy. After all, once your motives become obvious, people will just leave. That’s one solution, and others are doubtless forthcoming.

More than anything else, the internet may have made the entryist strategy much harder to employ. Whether this is enough to overcome it completely remains to be seen. If one thing is certain, it’s that we are moving into a new phase in a conflict as old as politics. The game has changed.

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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.

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