Cleaning Out the Closet. II

 
Politically, the most interesting thing that has happened to the Right has been the growth of its dissident faction, the Dissident Right(DR), a faction disgusted with what passes as the mainstream or institutional Right.  This dissident faction can be thought of as the overriding name for all the separate Right groups that are opposed to the current conservative status quo.  It's  not a unified force rather it's a collection of disparate groups that can be broadly categorised on how they approach the problems of politics and philosophy. As mentioned in my previous post the Dissident Right can be broadly divided into the "feeling Right" which is typified by the Alt-Right and the "thinking" Right which, I feel, is typified by Neoreaction.

Neoreaction, by its very nature, is an intellectual exercise  and therefore is always going to be a minority position. As Stanovich and cognitive science have previously demonstrated, the majority of men are "feels"  rather than "thought" driven. The Alt-Right, as mentioned in the previous post, is primarily a "feels" driven phenomenon and as the dissident right grows in numbers it is to be expected that the feels component will assume a greater significance. This is a problem.

Unfortunately, "feels driven solutions" are typical mob solutions, which tend to be violent,self-destructive and self-corrosive. Fascism (in all its variants) was a "feels" driven response to the problems of the early 20th Century and we all know how that ended up. The problem with the entryist invasion of the dissident right is that they are going to exert an influence on it simply by virtue of their mass, the task at hand is how to stop the mob from going stupid. This I feel is the role for NRx.

What distinguishes NRx from the Alt-Right is concern for the facts. The Alt-Right has no need for facts, it wants to embrace the myths, to be on the side of the God's  and, in that way, resembles some of the worst aspects of the Left (who were on the side of the Angels in Vietnam, for instance.) For Neoreaction, empirical observations matter and NRx forms its opinions and insights from the due consideration of the them.The critique of universal democracy, for instance, is not grounded in a "preference" or bias for for other systems of government, or the myth of aristocracy, rather it comes from a considered understanding, based upon the empirical observations of the "average voter". If Neoreaction had a motto, it would be Solzhenitsyn's, "Live not by lies".

What unites all of NRx, in my opinion, is a concern for the Truth. We may quibble on points of the truth but real problem is in what  divides NRx, and that is the scope of the truth.  I don't think many in NRx fully appreciate that contemporary NRx has a very deep metaphysical problem, which is best explained by the fact that NRx can itself be divided into two groups: Positivist (+) NRx and Non-Positivist (-)NRx. 

Positivist NRx is most typified by the Moldbuggian strain of NRx.  This issue at stake here is the understanding of Truth and Reality. In +NRx what is considered a valid truth is defined within the positivist metaphysic, a metaphysic which is shared by both the Left and +NRx . +NRx is therefore, simply, an intellectually honest, and better form, of Positivism. 

It needs to be understood that the Left is, in many ways, cognitively like the Alt-Right. It's largest contingent, the mainstream Left, is a culture which subordinates fact to myth,i.e the myth of radical equality, with "the feels" being the overriding imperative. However, there are a very few serious thinkers amongst the more intelligent Left, and the prevailing metaphysical system in which they operate is Positivistic.  The serious Left have always had an ambivalent attitude towards the truth, being willing to subordinate it for a greater cause, but where truth is admitted it is always done within the framework of Positivism. Therefore what distinguishes the a left positivist from a NRx positivist is the willingness to be believe in dishonest propositions.

Therefore we can define Leftism as;

(dishonest) Positivism in error = Leftism

However, and this is the kicker, error does not always have to be deliberate, sometimes its unintentional. Thinking is hard, reasoning is flawed, frequently biased and honest mistakes are made. The logic however is inescapable;

(honest) Positivism in error  = ? (hint, look above.)

See the problem?

What separates the two is malice not epistemology.

If you think about it a bit you get a bit of shudder when you realise that Moldbug is an unwitting plant.

Now, there's error and there's error. Errors in the physical sciences are unlikely to affect societal stability, errors in the our understanding of how humans interact are liable to be civilisation destroying.  Things like sexual morality may have a more profound effect on societal stability than, say, how you arrange the political governance of a country. The point being, that you have to have the capacity and intellect to see the toxicity, if you're an +NRx who can't see it, your societal prescriptions will mirror the Left, in either of its Marxist or Fascist variants when it comes to such matters.

Good quality +NRx thinkers will make few mistakes and therefore have a better grasp on reality but the "honest", poorer thinkers are the epistemological equivalents of Leftists. No matter how good any +NRx thinker is, he is still stuck within the confines of Positivism and when +NRx goes "bad" it goes Left. +NRx is unable to escape Modernism/Leftism because their underlying metaphysics are its foundations.  They are stuck in the Left Matrix and there is no way out.

The great divide between the past and modern world lay in our understanding of reality, Positivism was a reduction in recognition of the scope of it. The pre-moderns, and most of the world bar the West,  holds the view that there is more to reality than can actually be "accessed" by our biological senses. Religion was the principal access path to these other verities and hence the importance of it in non-Positivist societies. Non-Positivist NRx, (-NRx) takes religion into account by explicitly rejecting the implicit limitations of Positivism and views religious insight as akin to empirical data.  As mentioned in a long previous post, Faith is a sensory modality.

Relgious faith, particularly the religious faith of the West serves therefore as another dimension of information in the analytic of -NRx. -NRx doesn't reject  the empiricism of Positivism, rather it sees its data set as incomplete. -NRx needs to be thought of not as anti-positivist, rather it is supra-Positivist. Science still matters, but so does the "faith" data. In -NRx there is NO conflict between faith data and empirical data, rather, reason aims to find a reconciliation with both since the truth is a singularity, incapable of contradiction.

It needs to be understood that Positivism's unrelenting march throughout the late 19th and early 20th Century came about because it was the first to consistently apply the principle of the primacy of empirical data over theory, despite its simultaneous reduction of the scope of it. It insisted on reason being "calibrated" to real world findings. Tradition and custom were unable to achieve this calibration and thus were pushed aside as Positivism "delivered the goods" in the form of technological progress. The tragedy of the 20th Century has come about because traditionalism was unable to deal with Positivistic success.

-NRx takes the principal of the primacy of empirical data over theory and incorporates it into a wider data set.  -NRx is a sort of fusion between traditional concepts of the scope of empirical data with the positivist insistence on the primacy of data. It's a fusion product. This, however, puts -NRx explicitly against traditionalism, insofar as traditionalists elevate custom above the truth. This, itself is not a bad thing, given traditionalism's utter failure to combat the Left. New approaches need to be tried.

I personally don't think any political program on its own is going to work. What is needed is a spiritual renewal of the West but the traditional spiritual "institutions" have proved themselves unable to face the challenge of modernism. It is my hope that -NRx will act upon these institutions to instill a "bottom up" renewal of Western society, instead of a "top down" Franco like solution which has failed in the long run. Politics matters as well, but the primary task now is to reform the religious institutions of the West, still  I feel -NRx has a role in stopping the "feels" right from drifting and becoming too crazy.

The pathogen that is eating away at the institutions of the West is not a lack of scientific knowledge but moral decay.  Intelligent but corrupt officials destroy the efficiency of government, Hi IQ cads and whores destroy the institution of the family, Journalists lie, Doctors murder, Judges administer social justice instead of law, and everyone lies. That's why any revival of the West will primarily consist of a moral revival and not a technological solution. The excluded data set must be incorporated else there is no way out.

Cleaning out the Closet: I

I think 2015 will be seen as a watershed year for the Right. As mentioned in my previous posts, it was a year of mixed blessing and I thought I would try to take stock of the situation as now it stands now in what I would call the Dissident Right. I think it is important to distinguish between the Alt-Right and NRx since the two are different yet people seem to use the terminology interchangeably at times. The Dissident Right (DR) can be thought of as comprising of both NRx and the Alt-Right who are united, at least, in a rejection of what constitutes the post war Institutional Right(IR) . 

Now, by DR, I mean the Right that has abandoned the post war conservative institutional consensus, in other words, what counts for "mainstream Conservatism" which is currently in its death throes iacross the Western World. The recent National Review edition against Trump is an example of the conservative consensus flailing about to keep the traditional constituency in tow. There seems to be global revolt of the rank and file against the institutional conservative establishment which increasingly fails to meaningfully distinguish itself from the Left. Furthermore, I think we've reached a sociological tipping point, in that extent of foreign migration (and its media coverage) has finally started to fuel a nativist backlash and, more importantly, the economic forces of globalisation have finally started to seriously impact upon the middle class.  Globalisation, whilst it was putting out blue collar workers was not a really issue for the Right but now that its pernicious effects are being felt in Middle Class--(politically the class that matters most)--a serious revolt has begun to brew.

It is these rebels from institutional conservatism which I call the Dissident Right. Now, the DR needs to be understood as comprising of two main streams;

1) The "feeling" Right and,
2) The "thinking" Right.

The "feeling Right" is pretty much owned by the Alt-Right, by which I mean the Radix like crowd.  This group "intuits" its political position and its rejection of the IR is more a case of the "feels" rather than the "thinks". It's essentially a romantic movement. In Richard Spencer's Political Theology, myth is more important than fact. The reason this is because any factual analysis of the "White" situation leads to uncomfortable truths. Truths which stymie the "racial awareness" renewal.  In brief, the White goyim are bringing the misery down, on themselves by themselves. It needs to be pointed out that the SJW's who are currently pushing for more "diversity" are nearly all white white. Attribution of decline to external groups such as the Jews, whilst having some plausibility, are unfounded so in the end, any sustaining principle must be rooted in an intuitive myth rather than a cold hard fact.

This however is a political winner, at least in a democracy. As Sam Francis in his brilliant, From Household to Nation, observed, the average middle class person was nothing more than an affluent proletarian and therefore far more likely to be motivated by the "feels" rather than the facts. His essay is basically a statement on the importance, in a Democracy, of personal circumstances over ideology and he attributes the failure of the IR to the neglect of this fact.  What has driven the shift to the DR, in particular the Alt-Right is, that over the past decade, the circmstances of the middle class have started to decline with a subsequent rise in middle class anxiety. The Alt-Right caters for this anxiety in a way that the sheeple can grasp. It doesn't argue rationally it persuades emotively.

Years ago, the mainstream media control of information would pretty much shut down any legitimate access to the Alt-right, but given the internet, that control has been lost and groups such as Radix have been able to package themselves--somewhat--as identitarians and not as Nazi's who are able to slickly articulate the problems of the middle class. Furthermore, by providing "low brow" intuitive solutions to problems, their appeal is slowly growing and it is this segment, because of its socio-intellectual nature, has provided for the most explosive growth in the Dissident Right.

The other area where it owns the field is in the ideology of identity. Make no mistake, there is a crisis of national identity going on throughout the Western World, bough about by multiculturalism, which is being suppressed by political correctness yet which yearns to find expression and is yet another reason for the growth of the DR.  Other conservative movements simply do not come even come close to providing for coherent solutions to the problem, however its mistake is in placing the foundation of identity in biological race--with all of its Darwinian baggage and repulsive evolutionary "solutions"--instead of grounding identity in the natural biases of human nature. 

But make no mistake, the Alt-Right is still a "mass-man" movement and therefore is a spiritual heir of the French Revolution. It is anti-NRx. It's a democracy/socialism/authoritarian system where the franchise is based on color. And therefore, it brings with it all the problems to culture and society that democratic Mass-man society brings. Many forget that it was "white" democracy that bought us this current civilisational mess. Furthermore, no matter how you cut it, given its nationalist, identitarian and racial emphasis, it's intellectual underpinnings are shared with the Fascist movement. Now contrary to popular belief, Fascism was a broad "Church" ranging from the mildness of the Action Francaise to the murderous Nazi and Ustashe regimes. I'm not at all suggesting that Alt-Right are Nazi's but it needs to be remembered that even though all not all  fascists are Nazi's all Nazi's are fascists. All variants of Fascism share the same metaphyisics and what distinguishes them is in their different approaches to real world "solutions" to problems. Given this common metaphysic, the Alt-Right is a home where Identitarians and National Socialists can find common cause. As I see it, there is no corrective mechanism in the Alt-Right movement to prevent a virulent natsoc capture of it. Should this happen the movement would self destruct and drag any other associated movements down with it.

I'll deal with the "thinking" Right in my next post.

A Post Worth Mentioning.

 Permissive attitudes towards morally questionable behaviour pave the way for destruction of your culture, people, and society. 

The were several good posts written last year which I hoped to comment on. One, in particularly, was by Esoterictrad: It's the Degeneracy Stupid.  It's a well written post which pretty much aligns with this blog's philosophical position.  It also think it's one of the most important posts of the year since it succinctly illustrates the mindware contamination of NRx that has come about through Alt-Right entryism. This has been the most depressing development of 2015 but unfortunately, given the rise of the dissident Right, to be expected.

This seemingly obvious truth is in fact denied by what seems like increasingly large numbers of people who use the term ‘Alt-Right’ to describe themselves. Over the course of the last few years as the ‘Alt-Right’ has grown in popularity it has attracted more and more white men disaffected with how things are going. In such a liberal age many of these men are still largely sit within the Overton Window on many issues, it is only on a few where they have directly experienced the horrors of modernity that they branch out and explore.

and 

Some of those men end up going further and head towards Truth, but the vast majority are more likely to end up making a truce towards the rest of the liberal attitudes. The Reddit subreddit “The Red Pill” which is a Game/sexual strategy forum explicitly forbids discussion of morality. There is a mod post announcing people must keep their morals to themselves.

As Esoterictrad points out, there seems to be this notion that everything will be OK if you fix up an isolated act of degeneracy whilst wallowing in an ocean of it. Let me illustrate what I mean. For years I struggled to understand why fornication was wrong. Why should God be so opposed to the private act of affection between two consenting adults, especially if no harm was done by it? It's taken me years to realise my formulation of the question was based upon a failure to understand the "extrapersonal" dimension of the sexual act. Sex is not simply an act that can be isolated to two people, but its an act with much wider sociological implications. Compartmentalising it is simply a poor way of thinking about it.

Family stability is partly a function of the prevailing sexual mores.  Acceptable promiscuity facilitates family dissolution, it facilitates abortion, it facilitates the alpha harem and alpha widowhood with the subsequent negative effects of long term pair bonding. It disincentivises socially productive beta behaviour and promotes the dark triad of traits which undermine society. It moves the locus of control of sexuality towards the female instead of the male, undermining the intended sexual dynamic between sexes. Fornication, considered from a simply personal perspective, is probably not that bad, but when considered from a global one, it is a lethal poison. Getting people to grasp the global picture is very hard. Telling people to keep "your morals to yourself" keeps the focus on the local and not the global.

People seem to have a real problem grasping the "big picture" and instead focus on small issues all the will oblivious the larger problem which brings us to the Alt-Right. Esoterictrad on the subject:

The other area where people might run into the obvious lies of the left establishment is of course demographics and race. A great many people ‘wake up’ to the reality of race but never ‘wake up’ to anything else. They are essentially what should be known as the ‘Alt-Left’ – where everything is acceptable as long as it is a whites only society. Homosexuals of course have greatly appreciated this, because it means they do not have to face up to their sins. Here is a group of people willing to accept them because they shout about Niggers and Kikes just like them, but won’t actually suggest they change their behaviour.

Bingo. These people simply can't grasp the fact that a whites only society can also implode. They're so focused on "white oppression" that they miss the bigger picture. They're essentially social justice warriors for white people only. I would urge my readers to have a look a Richard Spencer's Political Theology and tell me how his "myths" differ from the "myths' of social justice warriors.  The common thread of both parties is a believe in the power of myth over truth; oppression by whites in the case of the Left SJW's and oppression by others in the case of the Right SJW's both parties are ambivalent when it comes to the matter of truth. Indeed, as Spencer so eloquently points out.

Indeed, knowing too much truth can be a problem.

The reason why the West is in such deep shit is because it doesn't realise just how bad things are.  It doesn't help that people are openly advocating closing their eyes to the facts. Commentators are worrying about the position of the deck chairs, ignoring the hole in the Titanic's side.  No one sees the bigger picture. The problem is one of faith and morals. In other words, it's the degeneracy, stupid.

2015: Raisins and Turds.

Another year has passed and I think it is worthwhile, from this vantage point, to take stock of the From from the perspective of this blog it's been a mixed year.

Firstly, the positives. As much as I deplore the rabble, any change in the zietgiest is only going to come about when a lot of people come on board. The "penetration" of Right memes has always been hampered by Cathedral control of public "idea space", and until recently, the Cathedral, through it's technological monopoly, has been able to keep control of the Overton Window. While its control over it has been gradually weakening, over the past year it seems to have taken a serious hit.  Conservative bloggers have always been since the inception of the internet,  but it appears that in the last year or so, the Alt-Right has achieved critical mass, especially in the U.S.,  as to be able to influence the tone of public debate. The emergence of the "cuckservative" meme an example in point. This is good.

Secondly, the amount of perversity, like morality, a society can abide with is limited by human nature. The extreme leftward push by the Cathedral and its operatives is finally starting to initiate some homeostatic mechanisms which are favourable to the Right wing ideas.  People like to live according to their natures, and one aspect of their nature is homophily.  Having a natural disposition toward homogeneous societies, no matter what they say to the contrary, the illegal immigration debacle in Europe--with its impotent response--has done more for the furtherance of Right wing ideas by activating some primordial response than any polemic or appeal to rationality by any Right-wing intellectual.  This is good.

Furthermore, most people have an intuitive dislike towards homosexuality and an intuitive sense of protection for children. Whilst the gay agenda was orientated toward securing sexual rights I don't think many cared to push back, on the other hand, the push for the legitimisation of marriage and access to children seems to have triggered the beginnings of an "intuitive"  counter-homosexual pushback in the community, particularly in France. This is good.

Furthermore, over the last few months I've also noticed comments popping up in unexpected places which seem to be negative with regard to the sexual revolution. People seem to be sick of the sexual degeneracy about them and there is a weariness about matters sexual. This is not to say that people want to turn the sexual revolution back, but there seems to be a growing awareness of the bigger picture of sex, especially with regard to relationship stability. This is good.

2015 Seems to be the year that mainstream "Conservatism" has died. Everywhere across the Western World there seems to be a fissuring and polarisation amongst the ranks in the Right. Merkel has effectively killed the CDU and what emerges is likely not to be very unpredictable.  This is good, as the current custodians of the mainstream Right have destroyed it.

The other great development is Victor Orban.

The other development is the rise of Trump.

From a meta level, it appears that 2015 has been a year which has resulted in rightward shift in the Overton window.  Especially in Europe. 

Now the turds.

It's been great to see the explosion of the Alt-Right presence on the social media and in the blogosphere and I think 2015 has been the year of Alt-Right achieved Critical mass. But, on the other hand, a significant portion of the is growth has come about from entryism of "naturalist " Right groups. I'm using naturalism in the sense the Michel Houellebecq has used it and I think the aptness of the french terminology is particularly important given the cultural position of the Right at the moment. These entryists  who are very active, seem to be pushing a racially aware form of progressivism. This is not good.

Following up of my reading of Houellebecq, I've spent the last couple of weeks chasing a rabbit warren of ideas by early 20th Century French authors, particularly Peguy and Blondel. What's quite eerie to note is just how much contemporary right wing thought resembles that of right wing thought in France prior to WW1. And if history is a guide, serves as a warning for what is to come.

At the end of the 19th Century, French Right wing thought was broadly divided into two main streams. There was the naturalist/Integralist steam which centered around the personality of Charles Maurras and there was a rabble of Christian humanists typified by men such as Peguy, Blondel and Claudel. Group one was a curious fusion of HBD positivism and Throne and Altar Traditionalism and called itself Action Francaise.  To be fair, it had some good ideas but in the end, the organisation betrayed France by bending over and enthusiastically supporting the German occupation of it. They were active in the  persecution of the French resistance, despite calling themselves the avowed patriots of France. When all is said an done, despite their religiosity and French patriotism they were simply racially conscious progressives. This version of the right shot itself in the head.

Group 2 on the other hand, fought the Germans, and inspired men like De Gaulle. They saw that setting the clock back wasn't going to work, neither were the mass-man ideologies of the time. They saw that Western Civilisation was in deep crisis, seeing the mass de-Christianisation that was occurring in Europe prior to Vatican Two. They diagnosed the problem as being that mainly of a crisis of faith, and a failure of traditional Western civilisation to recognise that modernity had changed the operating paradigms of society. To them the fundamental task was to respond to modernity in a Christian fashion and it was a question of how to deal with modernity successfully, not adapting it uncritically. This however was too much for Church leaders at the time who tacitly supported Group 1 and mildly persecuted Group 2. These guys were the spiritual fathers of John Paul II, Benedict and Francis.  The guys who persecuted them were the Traditionalists.

Why the French situation is important is because it is being mirrored today in contemporary Right wing "idea space" and what has really depressed me is the Naturalist bent the Alt-Right has taken. The history of the times should be studied simply to show that the Naturalist trajectory is bound to end in failure. I don't want to repeat the same mistake yet it seems to be the way we're going. This is bad.

The other tragedy of 2015 has been the Catholic Church. It's this blogs primary contention that the Crisis in Western Civilisation at the moment is primarily religious in origin and nothing gets fixed until this issue is sorted out. Europe will die if Christianity is not revived and hence the Church's current "impotence" at dealing with the spiritual failure is the pressing issue of the moment. ( I know a lot of you Positivists think I'm nuts. It would be so much easier to implement a policy solution than a cultural transformation, yet it is the latter that needs to be done.) Protestantism is dying and Orthodoxy is static, incapable of change. That leaves the Church.

Vatican Two was supposed to sort this mess out, but it hasn't, primarily because the Hierarchy reformed ineptly and inappropriately. I think Francis recognises this and his hoping for some Divine solution. I think he is aware of the problem though doesn't have any solutions of his own. I think he was hoping something would come out of the Family Synod but nothing appears to have happened. The Church's spinning of the wheels is regrettable. This is bad.


For me, the overall strategic picture looks remarkably similar to late 1920's early 30's.

2016 is going to be interesting.

Picture Du Jour.

More Houellebecq.

The Paris Review conducted an interview with Michael Houellebecq earlier this year upon the release of his book, Submission. The interview was quite interesting, given the nature of Houellebecq's previous novels and I thought as a follow up to the previous post  I would reprint some of the interview as I felt that Houellebecq's comments complemented my own view of the novel. Note,   I've not reprinted it in full, just some sections of it which I felt were pertinent.

...............

This is the world imagined by Michel Houellebecq in his sixth novel, Soumission (Submission), which will appear next week. Should it be read as a bad Op-Ed, as pulp fiction for an election year, or as the attempt of a great writer to air a social critique through farce? In an exclusive interview—the first he's given about this novel—Houellebecq explains what led him to write a book that has already created a scandal in France, even before its publication.

Why did you do it? 

For several reasons, I’d say. First of all, I think, it’s my job, though I don’t care for that word. I noticed some big changes when I moved back to France, though these changes are not specifically French, but rather Western [ED] As an exile you don’t take much of an interest in anything, really, neither your society of origin nor the place you live—and besides, Ireland is a slightly odd case. I think the second reason is that my atheism hasn’t quite survived all the deaths I’ve had to deal with. In fact, it came to seem unsustainable to me.

The death of your dog, of your parents?

Yes, it was a lot in a short period of time. Part of it may be that, contrary to what I thought, I never was quite an atheist. I was an agnostic. Usually that word serves as a screen for atheism but not, I think, in my case. When, in the light of what I know, I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.
Whereas before you felt …

I thought I was an atheist, yes. Now I really don’t know. So those are the two reasons I wrote the book, the second reason probably outweighing the first [ED].

It's interesting to note, that from the outset, Houellebecq raises the issue of religion as an important thematic consideration for the novel. The lumpen-proletariat can't see past the Islamic "dressing" of the novel and assume it's all about an Islamic takeover.

But my project was very different at the beginning. It wasn’t meant to be called Soumission—the first title was La Conversion. And in my original project, the narrator converted, too, but to Catholicism. Which is to say, he followed in Huysmans’s footsteps a century later, leaving naturalism to become Catholic. And I wasn’t able to do it.

Why not?

It didn’t work. In my opinion, the key scene of the book is the one where the narrator takes one last look at the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, he feels a spiritual power, like waves, and all at once she fades into the past and he goes back to the parking lot, alone and basically in despair.

Houellebecq's power as a writer seems to lay in the fact that he is able to describe the everyday banality of life so well in a world soaked with physical pleasures. If his novel is to be taken as an act of social commentary, Submission, should frighten the hell out of Christian types, since what Houellebecq is saying that contemporary Christianity has failed even those who are looking for it. Unlike the atheists who would see this a triumph, he notes this fact with a sadness and a sense of mourning.

Where did you get the idea for a presidential election, in 2022, that came down to Marine Le Pen and the leader of a Muslim party?

Well, Marine Le Pen strikes me as a realistic candidate for 2022—even for 2017 … The Muslim party is more … That’s the heart of the matter, really. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever. It would be wrong to say that this religion has no political consequences—it does. So does Catholicism, for that matter, even if the Catholics have been more or less marginalized. For those reasons, it seems to me, a Muslim party makes a lot of sense.

......But we can reasonably assume that for every guy like that there are several dozen who convert and don’t go off to wage jihad in Syria, who don’t do anything of the kind. After all, one doesn’t wage jihad for the fun of it, that sort of thing only interests people who are strongly motivated by doing violence, which is to say, necessarily a minority.

You could also say that what really interests those people is going to Syria, rather than converting.

I disagree. I think there is a real need for God and that the return of religion is not a slogan but a reality, and that it is very much on the rise.

That hypothesis is central to the book, but we know that it has been discredited for many years by numerous researchers, who have shown that we are actually witnessing a progressive secularization of Islam, and that violence and radicalism should be understood as the death throes of Islamism. That is the argument made by Olivier Roy, and many other people who have worked on this question for more than twenty years.

This is not what I have observed, although in North and South America, Islam has benefited less than the evangelicals. This is not a French phenomenon, it’s almost global. I don’t know about Asia, but the case of Africa is interesting because there you have the two great religious powers on the rise—evangelical Christianity and Islam. I remain in many ways a Comtean, and I don’t believe that a society can survive without religion[ED]

Some of you may want to read up on Auguste Comte because Houellebecq seems to be basis his philosophical position upon some of Comte's. Comte was an atheist, whose understanding of human society led him to the conclusion that some form of religion was necessary. But while Houellebecq does endorse some of his views, he has been critical of Comte in the past so I don't think he is some kind of objective Comtean. I get the impression  that he's more a "reactive Comtean" seeing the necessity, particularly of the Christian religion by seeing the consequences of a world without it.

But why did you decide to tell these things in such a dramatically exaggerated way when even you acknowledge that the idea of a Muslim president in 2022 is unrealistic?

That must be my mass market side, my “thriller” side.

It's here where Houellebecq pretty much admits that "Islamic" component of the book was simply to generate sales. It says a lot about he professional commentariat--even self proclaimed "intellectuals"--who can see nothing else in this book except the Islamic component of it with the occasional reference to its sexual depictions.  This book is primarily about the religious failure of the West which is the novel does not celebrate but mourns.

To go back to the question of your unrealistic exaggerations, in your book you describe, in a very blurry and vague way, various world events, and yet the reader never knows quite what these are. This takes us into the realm of fantasy, doesn’t it, into the politics of fear.

Yes, perhaps. Yes, the book has a scary side. I use scare tactics.

Like imagining the prospect of Islam taking over the country?

Actually, it’s not clear what we are meant to be afraid of, nativists or Muslims. I leave that unresolved.

Very, Very interesting comment. As I said in my previous post, Houellebecq portrayal of the Right is very ambivalent.  Firstly, he recognises the existence of the cuckservative sort of conservative who would rather join with the socialists and allow Islam to win rather than unite with the Natrualists. But he certainly does not give the impression that the far Right is some kind of saviour of Europe. In fact, the man who finally convert Francoisto Islam is an apologist who had his origins in the french Far Right. Houellebecq's view of the "nativists" is not positive.  And I really got the impression reading this book that Houellebecq may have been familiar with some of the writings in Neoreaction, based upon his references to the Right and the "internet".

You rely on another dubious dichotomy, the opposition between anti-Semitism and racism, when actually we can point to many moments in history when those two things have gone hand in hand.

I think anti-Semitism has nothing to do with racism. I’ve spent time trying to understand anti-Semitism, as it happens. One’s first impulse is to connect it with racism. But what kind of racism is it when a person can’t say whether somebody is Jewish or not Jewish, because the difference can’t be seen? Racism is more elementary than that, it’s a different skin color …

No, because cultural racism has been with us for a long time.

But now you’re asking words to mean something they don’t. Racism is simply when you don’t like somebody because he belongs to another race, because he hasn’t got the same color skin that you do, or the same features, et cetera. You can’t stretch the word to give it some higher meaning.

Houellebecq is a wordsmith and his insistence for precision in language and concept is apparent here. He is quite insistent on using words in the correct context while the Cathedral Operative wants to use it in more expansive way to condemn him.

But since, from a biological point of view, “races” don’t exist, racism is necessarily cultural.

But racism exists, apparently, all around us. Obviously it has existed from the moment when races first began mixing … Be honest, Sylvain! You know very well that a racist is someone who doesn’t like somebody else because he has black skin or because he has an Arab face. That’s what racism is.

Or because his values or his culture are …

No, that’s a different problem, I’m sorry.

Because he is polygamous, for example.

Ah, well, one can be shocked by polygamy without being the least bit racist. That must be the case for lots of people who are not the least bit racist. But let’s go back to anti-Semitism, because we’ve gotten off topic. Seeing as how no one has ever been able to tell whether somebody is Jewish just by his appearance or even by his way of life, since by the time anti-Semitism really developed, very few Jews had a Jewish way of life, what could antisemitism really mean? It’s not a kind of racism. All you have to do is read the texts to realize that anti-Semitism is simply a conspiracy theory—there are hidden people who are responsible for all the unhappiness in the world, who are plotting against us, there’s an invader in our midst. If the world is going badly, it’s because of the Jews, because of Jewish banks … It’s a conspiracy theory.

Somehow I don't think he'd fit in with the Radix crowd.

I don’t see it. On the contrary, the same people are often militant antiracists and fervent defenders of secularism, with both ways of thinking rooted in the Enlightenment.

Look, the Enlightenment is dead, may it rest in peace [ED]. A striking example? The left wing candidate on Olivier Besancenot’s ticket who wore the veil, there’s a contradiction for you. But only the Muslims are in an actually schizophrenic situation. On the level of what we customarily call values, Muslims have more in common with the extreme right than with the left. There is a more fundamental opposition between a Muslim and an atheist than between a Muslim and a Catholic. That seems obvious to me.

Agree with him here. It also explains why he disparages Naturalism, because it ultimately shares the same metaphysics of the Left and therefore makes it hostile to religion as well. An atheist Right is simply the Left dressing in right wing drag. What I also find interesting here is his view that he thinks the Enlightenment is dead. I agree. The Left has long since left the discipline for rationality and is now motivated as much by sentiment as the traditional Right.  The enlightenment was not the enemy of Religion, strict Positivism was. But at least the positivists made some demand on rationality, whereas the modern Left is nothing more than another Romantic movement. Romantic, in the the sense that it is driven by feelings and intuition more than rational thought.

How would you place this novel in relation to your other books?

You might say I did several things that I’d wanted to do for a long time, things I’d never done before. Like having a very important character whom one never sees, namely Ben Abbes. I also think it’s the saddest ending to a love plot that I’ve ever written, because it’s the most banal—out of sight, out of mind. They had feelings. In general, there is a much stronger feeling of entropy than in my other books. It has a somber, crepuscular side, which accounts for the sadness of its tone. For example, if Catholicism doesn’t work, that’s because it’s already run its course[ED], it seems to belong to the past, it has defeated itself. Islam is an image of the future. Why has the idea of the Nation stalled out? Because it’s been abused too long.

Houellebecq, here, explains his novel. Catholicism has failed and there is a vacuum that needs to be filled, hence the appeal of Islam.  It's not Islam's strength that is causing it to occupy Europe, but Europe's spiritual weakness. It's interesting to note that the alternative to lslam is the HBD "naturalism" of the New Right. The ideals of both the Enlightenment and Catholicism have failed. In many ways he portrays a situation reminiscent of the late 1920's.

There is no trace of romanticism here, much less lyricism. We’ve moved on to decadence. 

That’s true. The fact that I started with Huysmans must have something to do with this. Huysmans couldn’t go back to romanticism, but for him it was still possible to convert to Catholicism. The clearest point of connection with my other books is the idea that religion, of some kind, is necessary[ED]. That idea is there in many of my books. In this one, too, only now it’s an existing religion.

In Submission, Francois lover, Miriam--who is nominally Jewish--decides to emigrate to Israel to escape what she sees will be the upcoming persecution of the Jews. She asks that Francois accompany her, but he finds the prospect of living in Israel unappealing and declines. Francois envies Miriam because she has a place to go to,a refuge, a home. As he contemplates his own state, he realises his essential isolation and mourns the fact that "There is no Israel for me."

I think the interview is a good guide to understanding this book what the and what unites it with his others. These are spiritual books for a decadent age, and a lament for the loss of the "Old Christian Europe" by portraying, so vividly, what an empty place the modern wold has become.

Houellebecq's Submission

All intellectual debate in the twentieth century can be summed up as the battle between Communism-- that is, "hard" humanism-- and liberal democracy, the soft version.

 (Michel Houellebecq)

This is a powerful book, though too many people won't see it's depth and with few exceptions, most of the professional commentariat don't have a clue about what this book is about.

For the literate moron, this book is about the Islamic take over of France. For the Puritan, its about the puerile expression of Sex. For the feminist it is about misogyny. But for the Christian reactionary, this book is deep.

Really deep.

Houellebecq begins his novel citing a passage by J. K Huysmans ;

A noise recalled him to Saint-Sulpice; the choir was leaving; the church was about to close. 'I should have tried to pray,' he thought. 'It would have been better than sitting here in the empty church, dreaming in my chair — but pray? I have no desire to pray. I am haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax. I hover on its outskirts, moved to tears by its prayers, touched to the very marrow by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, I am sick of myself but so far from changing my ways! And yet . . . and yet . . . if I am troubled in these chapels, as soon as I leave them I become unmoved and dry. 'In the end', he told himself, as he rose and followed the last ones out, shepherded by the Swiss guard, 'in the end, my heart is hardened and smoked dry by dissipation. I am good for nothing.'

As alluded to in my previous post, a superficial social analyst focuses on the symptoms, a more serious one, the disease itself, and it here where Houellebecq demonstrates his skills as a diagnostician. Much as in Orwell's 1984, which showed Socialism triumphant over the human spirit, The central theme of the book is the death of Christian Europe and the victory of materialism. The books relationship relationship with Islam is quite incidental and quite plausibly have been set in the 1940's with fascism emerging triumphant.

Houellebecq tells his story though the lens of Francois, a middle aged professor of literature at the Sorbonne. Whilst Francois is an educated professional, he is, once out of his professional milleu, a French everyman. He likes fucking young women, he finds old women repulsive, he has problems with his parents and finances, he eats cheap microwave meals, and, as he ages, he can feel his body give up on him. Houellebecq's writing style brilliantly conveys the sense of tedium and emptiness in Francois life. When Francois attempts to have anal sex with a pair of hired prostitutes, his failure at climax has a deeper meaning than first appears. It's not just that he failed at sex--something which youth would not allow--rather it was evidence of his decay and corruption. If a full human life implied the the capacity to enjoy all possible pleasures, his failure at sex meant that his potential capacity as a human being was being constrained by the aging process. He was losing both his "humanity" and his reason to live.

Nagging at Francois is a sense of emptiness. Francois literary expertise is on the subject of Joris Karl Huysmans, a fin-de-siecle author, who is not just the subject of Francois studies, but a sort of kindred spirit, debauched in sensuality, yet thirsting too, from an emptiness. Huysmans finally found his emptiness filled in the embrace of religion, something Francois tries to emulate without success.

I stayed until the reading ended, but once it was over I realised that, despite the great beauty of the text, I'd have preferred to spend my last visit alone. What this severe statue expressed was not attachment to a homeland, to a country; not some celebration of the soldier's manly courage; not even a child's desire for his mother. It was something mysterious, priestly and royal that surpassed Peguy's understanding, to say nothing of Huysmans'. The next morning, after I filled up my car and paid at the hotel, I went back to the Chapel of Our Lady, which now was deserted. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and timeless. She had sovereignty, she had power, but little by little I felt myself losing touch, I felt her moving away from me in space and across the centuries while I sat there in my pew, shriveled and puny. After half an hour, I got up, fully deserted by the Spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body, and I sadly descended the stairs that led to the car park

This I think is the pivotal point of the book. Here, where Francois was actively reaching out for God, God failed him. Despite wanting to and seeing the need for it Francois simply cannot invoke the religious impulse. Christianity is dead. And, as the Christian God is, in Francois' eyes, intrinsically tied to the idea of European civilisation so is it. It is this central premise which provides the understanding as to why Islam achieves a victory in France and makes strides into Northern Europe as well. Houellebecq's realises that Islam does not need to conquer by force, all it needs to do is fill the vacuum as the ability to resist it has gone. His genius lays is in portraying the leader of the Muslims as a technically competent, yet skillfully moderate politician, who is able to unite all through the the strength of his personality. Making the transition easier is the fact that the new regime initially interferes very little in the day to day running of the country and actually improves the running of it. What they do insist upon though, is control of the culture, by which they very slowly apply the thumbscrews. France doesn't fight back simply because it has no sense of identity which it feels is being challenged.  Houellebecq describes the transition, with a few exceptions, as being rather orderly.

It just sort of happens.

The Sorbonne becomes Islamicised with teaching positions being reserved exclusively for those of the Islamic faith. Francois, initially resists but does eventually convert. However a consideration of the conversion as portrayed by Houellebecq does nothing to honour Islam, and in fact, presents it as just another form of materialism, a back-handed insult. Although Francois hears all the arguments as to why Islam is better than Christianity, none of them really seem to move him. What finally seals the deal is the fact that he will get his old job back, at a very much higher pay rate, with a chance to have sex with younger students through organised Islamic marriage. Islam is essentially a religion which is reconciled with the world. It's a submission to hedonism.

Houellebecq is subtle and very, very good. He's not giving Islam a free pass.

It's also important to realise that Islam is essentially an irrelevancy in this book. Had the book been written in the 1930's, Houellebecq may have used the Fascists, and the 1940's the Communists. The point being that anything can invade into the cultural vacuum of modern Europe. ( Houellebecq pretty much admitted that he used Islam in this role since it would generate controversy and promote book sales.  The book needed to be a "thriller"--- Hey, a man's gotta make a living.)

The book therefore is very similar to Orwell's 1984 and another French reviewer has recognised the similarity. However, unlike in 1984, where Orwell so devastatingly demonstrates the the triumph of the party over human will, without any sense of grief, I got the impression that Houellebecq wanted to the leave the option open to the reader that a European rebirth was possible.

In the novel, the opposition-Right sort of recedes into the background without being destroyed. Furthermore, when the subject of the Right is discussed, Houellebecq seems dismissive of the HBD type Right--the "naturalists"-- whilst portraying the religious Right--except for the clergy--in a positive light. Something I found odd, given his previous writing and something I suspect reflects a change in his thinking.

What led me to this conclusion was the prominence of another literary figure, Charles Peguy,  who makes an appearances in the book which I did not feel was "organic" to the story, unless Houellebecq's aim was to somehow to draw attention to him.

Peguy is an interesting figure and I'm still not sure what to make of him except that he appeared to be a force of nature. He was a socialist who became Catholic but his was the socialism St Francis, not the socialism of Karl Marx and thus he alienated himself for the champagne-Left of his time.  He hated the capitalists for exploiting the workers but he also admonished the workers for trying to exploit the capitalists though shoddy work. He ran a bookshop and published a literary magazine and always seemed to be on the verge of financial ruin. Interestingly one of the early subscribers to this limited run magazine was a young, recently graduated, army lieutenant, Charles De Gaulle.  De Gaulle later remarked that Peguy was his most formative intellectual influence. 

Peguy was quite prophetic in that  he recognised that Christianity was in deep trouble at the turn of the 20th Century. Amongst serious Catholic thinkers, Peguy is held in awe and I'm quite surprised that Houellebecq bothered to put him in one of his novels. But I have a suspicision.

Peguy's Christianity was not of the "fluffy unicorn" variety, rather it rejoiced in soldiering and brotherly solidarity and native identity.  His was a Christianity of the "blood and soil."

Happy are they who died in great battles,
Who were laid upon the earth in the sight of God.
Happy are they who died on the last rampart
With all the trappings of great funerals.

Happy are they who died for the carnal cities,
For those are the body of the city of God.
Happy are they who died for their hearths and fires
And the meagre honours of their native homes.

For those are the image and the seed
And the body and the first taste of the house of God.
Happy are they who died in this embrace 
Bound by honour and their earthly vows.

He was killed when a bullet went through his forehead just before the first battle of the Marne. His last words were purportedly, "For God's Sake, Push on."

So "manly" was his Christianity that the Fascists claimed him as one of their own, something he would have been horrified with. Peguy was a fierce Catholic and the calculating materialism of fascism was outside of his metaphysics. I suspect the reason why Houellebecq placed him in his book was to point toward an example of a Right which did not degenerate into a form of Le Pen-ism which France has had the unfortunate experience of in the past. Could it be that Houellebecq is hoping for a "Manly Christianity" which will fight for the identity of France and Europe? It's interesting to note that Chesterton and Belloc also get a mention in the book. Reactionaries take note.

There is a lot in this book that a reactionary would like. From the descriptions of the failing erotic capital of aging women to the ugliness of Church architecture. Houllebecq seems to be cut from the same cloth as most neoreactionairies and the character of Francois seems to be personifaction of the aphorism attributed to Chesterton;

A man knocking on the Brothel door is looking for God.

Peguy, Huysmans, Chesterton and Belloc. Houellebecq has been hanging around strange intellectual circles. I haven't read enough literature to know if this is a masterpiece but it sure as hell is a good book. I would recommend it to the intelligent with trigger warnings for everyone else.

Five stars.

Nial Ferguson's Article.

Back in the early 80's, before the AID's virus was discovered, doctors became slowly aware that something was afoot by the fact that opportunistic diseases, which were previously rare, were being diagnosed with an increasing frequency. For those of you who aren't familiar with medicine, opportunistic diseases are diseases which only affect the body when it's immunity is impaired. In essence what the doctors soon realised was that the increasing frequency of oppurtinistic disease was a sign of something more serious going on and commenced their search for the AID's virus. In a few years the causative agent was discovered.

Now the important point of this little vignette is to recognise that the increasing frequency and severity of previously trivial problems is to the astute eye a sign of a more significant systemic malaise. Focusing solely on the opportunistic disease without asking why it's cropping up with increasing frequency is a sure way to miss the underlying systemic pathogen.  It's unfortunate, for society, that the best and brightest usually end up in Medicine and do not major in History. Therefore the West gets good medicine and bad History.

Which leads me to Niall Ferguson. I like him. I like him a lot. I would quite recommend his book--with caveats--The Great Degeneration.  However unlike Correlli Barnett, who is a superb historian, he just doesn't make the grade.

Ferguson penned this article, in response to the Paris Attacks, which seems to be have been syndicated to various papers.   These two paragraphs caught my eye:

But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire[ED]

It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving ­communities.

Here's a few interesting speculations.. How many terrorist attacks occurred in monotheistic France in 1850?  Why is it easy for a violent minority to attack "avowedly peaceloving communities". Why is monotheism a problem for secular societies? It's not like the Anglicans are blowing things up and killing people.

Ferguson paints his response in the the context of Peter Heather's book, The Fall of the Roman Empire, which argues that foreign immigration and overextension presaged Rome's downfall, however this argument misses the point. Why didn't Rome choose to shrink into easily manageable borders and expel the immigrants. It's not like the Romans couldn't be ruthless.

Gibbons analysis is still the best, it was the moral corruption of Rome which rendered it impotent to new challenges. And just as in modern France, the rot was the inside. Foreign hordes only become an issue when either they invade by force or you let them in.

France's fundamental problem is a moral one. It's anti-islamophobic ideal fails to take into account, that Islam is hostile to secularism by its very nature. Good Muslims, who eschew violence, are still going to vote in a way that reflects Muslim ideals, and will try to achieve in the long run, peacefully, what Isis is trying to do by violent overthrow. What differentiates the two groups is the sense of urgency, not aim. (Though there is a wide variety of opinion in Islam as to what constitutes its true Nature. Not every Muslim is a ISIL fanatic.) A culture that that values non-judgementalism, even towards cultures that are hostile to THAT notion is one that will be soon eaten by the latter. Despite all the military hardware in the world.

Comments on Dampier's Posts.

Henry Dampier put up two posts last week which I heartily endorse.

Vulgar Racialism.
Visit California and Enjoy White Power.

If you haven't had a chance to do so, I recommended reading them. Furthermore, there are quite a few "nuggets" in the comments section of both posts which are worth expanding on.

One of the problems with "White Nationalism" is with regard to its understanding of social pathology. Just as Socialists tend to blame everything on exploitation of it victim base, Supremacists tend to see social pathology as a problem of racial contamination. But then, how to explain this;

Blacks didn’t ban the confederate flag: white liberals did. This is the big confusion that undermines this project — suicidal white liberals outnumber the people who want to vote for collective interests by an order of magnitude. The prospective coalition contains people who consider white separatism the worst moral crime.

If White= Good and Black= Bad, how to explain the above?  Some commentators whom I have sparred with have suggested that the liberal whites are "race traitors", but this generates another problem: How can you be a traitor to your genes if your genes determine if you're a traitor or not? If White is good then how come there are "bad" whites. It's a logical contradiction, though cognitive misers wouldn't notice.

The smarter supremacists would perhaps put forth the argument that yes, there are many race traitors but just because look white they're not really "white". Perhaps they're some kind of mischling or the like.  "Whiteness" being whoever agrees with my definition of it. You can see where the logic of this goes-"Whiteness" becomes a conditional social construct. If you are white and agree with me- then you are white, if not, then even though you look white you are not really white. Whiteness becomes white people who agree with me and since "purity" is what we're striving for it means "ridding" ourselves from the impure.  The Germans were quite happy to bomb those pseudo whites in Rotterdam.

This is the problem with racial theories of goodness, they're front loaded with modernist metaphysics which deny human free will and reduce everything to mechanical determinism. Furthermore, they're a  rejection of nearly two millennia of European history and therefore profoundly ant-European.

Racialism and its relatively recent variant, White nationalism, tends to reduce all political matters of importance down to whether or not a government is racially exclusive. The definition of ‘race’ also tends to be dumbed-down and diluted to the point to which it really is a social construct — a political fiction — rather than something with real genetic, cultural, and political salience.

Racialism is a recent thing, the word only making it's appearance in English in the 1870's, curiously corresponding the emergence of vulgar mass-man (i.e. cognitive misers) onto the cultural and political scene. One of the "Whitest" of all Germans, Wilhelm Ropke understood where this idiotic sentiment came from. Speaking of the recent Nazi electoral victory;

Ropke finished his Frankfurt speech by declaring that the current regimen was, far from being a national rebirth, merely the latest manifestation of Ortega y Gasset's "revolt of the masses." Ropke saw the popular support for the Nazi movement as a spasm of resentment on the part of the the huddled millions who had been deprived of their traditional livelihoods, uprooted from the land, concentrated in cities and put to work in factories, subjected to the vagaries of invisible economic forces, then regaled from Left to Right with propaganda that attributed all their troubles to capitalism and conspiracy. The mass, he predicted, is about to trample down the garden of European civilization, ruthlessly and unomprehendingly

( Zmirak, Wilhelm Ropke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist)

And Ropke was right.  The mob is inherently racist and attributes virtue to themselves and vice to others, thus racist theories are always going to gain traction amongst the cognitive lite. It's an ideology that preys on human cognitive weakness. It is a vulgar political and cultural phenomenon.

Another Great comment;

What plagiarist WN propagandists usually do is take the products of Christian (often Catholic) and Greco-Roman civilizations, and then declare those to be “white” rather than the particular result of what they believed and fought for.

This given formation that we have in the US is a bit like the response of those kinds of prison gangs. “White” is in opposition to the other kinds of ethnic gangs, because the host civilization is now too weak and self-hating to exterminate all the brutes, which was our SOP until recently.

So all right-thinking Americans now believe that the bad White people are responsible for all of history being a march of evil actions, and the way to be a good White person is to campaign for the displacement and destruction of the bad palefaces.

The problem is much less the Africans and the Turks — it is the liberals who empower them and use them as proxies. And the bulk of those liberals are awfully pale. In that, the WN peacenik tendency and desire to seek out scapegoats for what is an internal problem is entirely counter-productive.

Correct. This is an internal problem. White genes have not stopped White people from embracing a path of self destruction. The problem is one of morals and metaphysics. The decline is correlated with an abandonment of God.

Facial Aesthetics: Implications for Art.

Now a break from battling Natsoc entryists.

An important scientific paper with regard to aesthetics was published the other day which received widespread mainstream press.

Individual Aesthetic Preferences for Faces are Shaped Mostly by Environments, Not Genes.

The media spin put on this paper was to the effect that the perceptions of attraction were largely an effect of the environment and not genetics. I thought the paper interesting and managed to find a free copy of it from one of the authors' website which appears to be publicly available. It's a very well constructed study, and certainly don't want to argue with the data obtained, though I feel that the authors may have erred on interpretation of the data.

I've reproduced one of the tables below (On fair use grounds) and want to delve into the data presented a bit further.

If we look at B and C we see that there is a remarkable consistency between men and women with regard to rating the attractiveness of faces.  Women who are rated a "5" on the scale by men are very likely to rate a "5" on the scale by other women. This finding confirms previous research--(Google Scholar is your friend)--and strongly suggests that there is a genetic mechanism which rates facial attractiveness in part.

The study showed that 48% of our assessment of facial attractiveness is under genetic control, the remain 52% being attributable-by the authors--to environment.  The authors therefore conclude, on the basis of mathematical weighting that the environment is a more important determinant in the assessment of attractiveness. Logically, that is a perfectly sensible conclusion and yet it is not.

The really interesting data from this study are represented by the graphs D and E which show the individual variations in the assessment of facial attractiveness compared to the mean. What's interesting here, is that even your typical low agreement participant demonstrates a rating schema that is reasonably correlated with the mean ratings. Whist the variation is large the direction is still the same. Attractive faces as still more likely to be rated attractively than unattractive ones regardless of environment consideration. (Table E) In other words, that 48% is exerting a lot of influence.

What appears to be happening is that genetics seem to automatically rank faces in terms of attractiveness and that environment-or other factors-shift people in either direction from that ranking. In other words, that 48% determines where you sit on the rankings in the first place with other factors modifying that initial assessment.  A face that has a mean rating of "1" is not going to be turned into a "7" even though environment has a greater "mathematical" influence.

What I find fascinating is the fact that the mind has a "hard wired" aesthetic response to facial stimulus. In other words, ideals of facial beauty are already hard coded into our DNA. And it appears that there other aesthetic preferences hard coded as well. The point of this is that these current findings point us towards looking at the subject of aesthetics from an empirical perspective as opposed to a philosophical one. What is beautiful becomes not a question of philosophical speculation but rather observing what the brain does in response to a stimulus. Beauty becomes a stimulus which is capable of exciting the appropriate neural circuitry.

One of the reasons why this shift in approach is important is because a large amount of modern artistic and architectural rubbish is justified on the assumption that beauty is purely subjective. What modern neuroaesthetics is discovering is that there is a fair amount of hard wired responses to visual stimuli and that these responses are objective.  The ugliness of most modern art is not a subjective experience but an observable physiological response.  Judging art by this metric changes the grounds of debate and undercuts many of the principals of modernism and modern art.

Compromised

Long time readers of this blog will acknowledge that I have sparred with Zippy Catholic on the many theological issues that divide us. However I've got to commend him for two posts that he put up;

How "no enemies to the Right" perpetuates the mind trap.

and,

HBD on its own really is Nazi.

Some explanatory comments, since many readers seem to engage in Serial Associative Cognition and impute to me positions that I don't hold.

Firstly,  It's a mistake to assume that ontological axis has, as it's opposite poles, right and left. It needs to be stressed that the ontological axis is ordered towards right and wrong and error can exist to the right and left of it and a man can stray of the narrow path in both directions.  The Master alludes to this when he says;

Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat.

If you're like me, and believe in the existence of the Devil then you'll realise he doesn't care if you enter Hell through the Liberal door on the left or the Nazi door on the right, the only thing that matters to him is that you get there, preferably without any warning.  Indeed, one of the best ways to ignore your own errors is to be so focused on the errors of your target that situational awareness becomes lost.

I'm quite worried that this is happening to NRx at the moment. NRx is, quite rightly, hostile to the ideas of the multiculturalism, but it I don't think it has taken a critical enough stance with regard to the entryist racial supremacists who have assumed greater prominence and who hide under the moniker of HBD and identitarianism. In its battle against the left, at least on the issue of multiculturalism NRx seems to think that there are no enemies to the right.

I differ from Zippy in that I think that HBD, on its own, is morally neutral. But just as the Left engage in the semantic shifting of words, some of the more malignant Right do the same, and when they use HBD it comes with associated  metaphysical baggage as well.

Words are meant to convey a particular semantic meaning. This is recognised by the intelligent but amongst cognitive misers they words trigger an association response, much like the ringing of Pavlov's bell, and term HBD amongst this latter class of individuals is an implicit association of ideas which are linked by the focal point of race. Amongst the idiotic left, the word race triggers associations of concentration camps, discrimination and evil white men. Amongst the idiotic right, it triggers ideas of  Nordicism, racial purity, supremacism and the Darwinian struggle.

The fact that words can be used in this bimodal manner gives the Darwinian Supremacists the opportunity for plausible deniability and thus quasi respectability. When challenged about their racial supremacist stance the word is used in its semantically specific manner but when used amongst friends it is used in its associative manner.*

As I said before, HBD when used in its specific sense is metaphysically neutral and therefore not a problem for NRx. It's not even a problem, when used in this sense, for Christianity. Christianity has long acknowledged the difference between peoples whilst maintaining that they are all "one in Christ". It's current promotion of multiculturalism is due to an almost criminal lack of prudence, not a desire to eliminate differences.

Until the arrival of these entryists NRx seemed fairly agnostic on the subject of religion. However, with their arrival there's been a definite shift which I feel is going to precipitate a split. The real problem for NRx is the metaphysical one, it's about how NRx understands reality, and the entryists have shifted the balance in favour of the Modernists Darwinians. The beast now lodges in our home and NRx is being undermined from the inside.

I want to stress again that the problem is not in the recognition of the differences between races rather the associated metaphysical baggage they bring.

The problem is that metaphysics of Darwin are incompatible with the metaphysics of Christianity.  Darwinian metaphysics views man simply in material terms whilst Christian metaphysics is rooted in the hyelomorphic conception of man. The problem of Evil in Darwinian metaphysics is a material one, in Christianity a spiritual one.   From these two views come different solutions to societal problems and how to best tackle them. Zippy spells it out.

The fact that there are basic and intractable differences between the races is as obvious as it is politically incorrect.  One only has to look at the ethnic makeup of a professional sports team and a successful technology company to get the point.  The notion that these differences only exist because of oppression by evil white racists, and that the terrible affront of substantive racial differences can be remedied if we get even more aggressive with even more comprehensive programs of mandatory tolerance, is well past its sell-by date.

Liberalism only functions at all because it implicitly divides humanity into the übermensch and the üntermensch: the free and equal superman, self-created through reason and will, and the subhuman oppressor that is interfering with the emergence of the free and equal new man.  The free and equal new man is supposed to be politically emancipated from the chains of history, tradition, aristocracy, hierarchy, unchosen obligations, nature, and nature’s God.  But things keep getting in his way, and that requires a Solution.

If you take liberalism and force it to acknowledge the truth that racial differences are real and intractable, the Solution necessarily takes on a racial dimension.  It has to be a eugenic Solution; a Final Solution.

Anybody who has studied the Third Reich will see that the Germans did not start out wanting to liquidate the Jews, simply to rid themselves of them,  but the metaphysics of the Darwin and circumstances, forced a "logic onto them" which led to the inevitable conclusion. Behind all the smoke and mirrors class enemies and the untermensch are really just the same thing and the material concept of man leads to the same conclusion.  These entryists, whilst clothed in the language of the Right are advocating the metaphysics of Leftism.  They are nothing more than Stalin in drag.

NRx is compromised.



*Stanovich's book IS important.

Brown noses and Brownshirts.

I've noted that that the racist right has been cheering Victor Orban and his actions in stopping the Muslim invasion of Europe. It's true, Viktor Orban is  the Right's man of the moment and his closing of the borders is to be lauded.  His assertion and defence of both an ethnic Hungarian identity and European one is at odds with that of the Euro-weenies of Brussels who have given Orban the predictable sobriquet of racist.  It's no surprise then that the cognitive misers of the Right, looking for  a legitimate champion of "white identity" would choose to see him as their a fellow traveler in spirit.  However,  it must of been a bit of a surprise to these intellectual giants that when they chose to have a conference on his turf he banned them on the grounds that they were racists. You see, Orban is a proud Hungarian Nationalist but he is not one of them. The racialists had committed an intellectual error. They assumed that just because Orban was implementing the same policies they were advocating, Orban was doing it for the same reasons they were doing so.  They were wrong.

Where Orban and the racialists is differ is with respect to their metaphysics. Orban is a Christian and his worldview is made from this perspective.  Unlike the materialistic HBD crowd, there is only one class of human beings and membership of it is not contingent on genetic rank.  Membership of the human race is recognised as being of the fact that man is the image of God. This being an article of faith. From this flows the notion that all men should be treated with dignity and humanity.

Christianity does not deny the existence of races, or of their differences, rather it insists that human dignity--and the duties thereby owed--is not contingent upon genetic structure or phenotype. This differs from the racialists who infer the quality of man is based upon his genetic structure. Whiteness is not just a marker of identity for these men but is also a marker of "distinguishing quality". Furthermore, many of the racialists embrace a materialistic metaphysic which reduces man to a simple material substance.

One of the real world problems with the strictly biological understandings of the human person is that the dangers of racial supremacism and Darwinian competition are always lurking to rear their ugly head. The manifestly obvious fact, of the association between "Whiteness" and technological and cultural achievement,  puts forth a justifiably assertive claim for the superiority of the White people over all the other races. The argument for the superiority of Whites is so easily made and so easily grasped that it's only a small, and cognitively easy step, to start thinking in terms of Unter and Ubermensch and of "practical" solutions to intractable social problems.

This is why racialists have always been hostile to Christianity, since it puts a brake on this these final steps.  Asserting, contrary to apparent fact, that no matter how savage, offensive or ignorant a man is, of whatever race,  he is still to be treated like a equal human being. It's this insistence of treating the other as human that stops a Christian from turning into an arsehole. Christianity asserts that there are certain minimal standards we owe everybody. Orban belongs to this view and rejects the notion that some men are better than others because of their genetics.

What surprises me is just how many Christians--especially in NRx--have given a sympathetic ear to the racialists when the their underlying metaphysic is hostile to Christianity itself. It's a sort of pact with the Devil which a bit of sober reflection shows will not end well. The last time Christians formally did this they got right and royally screwed.  But then again that's the nature of the Christian Right, it's pretty dumb.

Perhaps one of the reasons why the Christian right is so easily seduced by racialists is because Christianity itself lacks a "theology of the flesh".  I've argued before on this blog, that the "decarnalisation" of the human person has led to cultural fault lines which have been exploited by different kinds of diabolical error. Chivalric love is a love without reference to Eros, and the current embrace of multiculturalism is an attempt to build society without reference to human homphily. The Christian conception of man seems to be one without reference to his flesh.

The Christian Left, on the other hand, seems to operate with the blessing of the Church, at least with regard to mutliculturalism since it's theology is in many ways in synch with Marxist ideology which teaches that race,  (i.e. flesh) does not matter.

The thing for the intelligent Christian is that he has to walk a fine line between those who think that the flesh doesn't matter and those who think it is all that there is. He has to walk a fine line between the brown-noses and the brown shirts.

Cucks and C..nt's

Recent events, and their commentary, have caused me some concern and I must admit that the direction Neoreaction has been taking in the past few months has left me profoundly depressed.

On one hand, one of the most positive developments in the Neoreaction has been the rise of the Cuckservative meme as it quite accurately monikers a certain type of the "Right" who has led it to defeat throughout the 20th Century,  However, the success of this meme has come with a more depressing development, namely the co-opting of it by the other element of the pseudo-right, particularly those of a crypto- Nazi disposition.  For this second group, the axis by which all things are judged is according to their position on the purity of race.

It's also strange to note that the Left  has played into this frame promoting a  definition of cuckservative which synchs with the racial emphasis that the Natsoc types wish it to have. Strange bedfellows, No?

What we're seeing is the entryist invasion of Neoreaction with a attempt to semantically shift the meme.  Other bloggers have noticed this as well.  For the sake of distinction I call these entryists Cuntservatives, and just like cucks they're not the real thing.

The success of these entryists has come about because the Right has always valued Identity, whether it be in the individual or groups. Identity taking into account matters such family, kin, nation and race. But the right has understood that identity is not the sole defining feature of man. Indeed, the Right has always though that identities are subsets of an overall humanity which in turn was subordinate to the Law of God. It's interesting to see that racially motivated politics became an issue with the rise of democracies and a collapse of the faith. The subsequent cognitive simplification that came about as a result of these developments mad it a perfect ideology for the cognitive miser: Mass-man.

Race is a reality, but it is a reality which needs to be seen in the context of other realities, however the racial supremacists elevate it as the ultimate standard but this conceptualisation ultimately puts it at odds with Christian civilisation. One of the things these genetic Calvinists fail to take account of is that Western Civilisation until recently was a Christian one and it's whiteness was coincidental. Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe, as Belloc said, and their hostile attitude to Christianity means that their ideology is just is another variant anti-Christianity and therefore outside the European tradition.

Some of them, acknowledging their hostility to Christianity grope about for inspiration in Ancient Greece or Rome. But what these dumb bastards fail to recognise is that Rome and Athens were failing cultures which Christianity supplanted, ensuring that the best traditions of the past were kept alive.  By the way, despite the intellectually feeble attempts at Aryanist revisionism,  it was the latin wogs that produced these cultures.

By reducing everything to the racial axis they are theologically set against the foundation stone of European culture which is Christianity. This blog is premised on the truth of Christianity. Christ died for the sins of all men, that includes niggers, kikes, slopes, gumleaves, wops, dagos, chimps and slitty eyed gooks. They are all the children of God, and therefore conferred with a certain God given dignity.  Hence, there are certain minimum standards we owe the rest of humanity by virtue of the Christian ethos irrespective of our natural repugnance towards them. In the eyes of God no race assumes a superiority and a Right that defines itself primarily along racial lines is a Right that is outside of the European tradition. It's simply not Conservative.

However, given the human dignity that is conferred by Christ on all men, it does not mean that because every man is my brother in Christ he gets to live in my house, or gets a place in the lifeboat. Or that he has the right to enter my country. Furthermore, if he is a risk to the stabilty of my country or has duties at home he should be performing I have a duty in Charity not to let him in. Christianity compels me to love but it does not compel me to be stupid.  The virtue of Prudence, not racial superiority, is enough. As for being Catholic, Papal comments on immigration are beyond his brief.

The whole racial superiority angle serves to divide conservatives in other cultures from ourselves, multiplying our enemies and keeping our house divided.   Now who do you think would benefit from that?

Furthermore, racial supremicism seems to attract a certain type of arsehole. A few days ago, in my Twitter feed, I got an image of the young drowned Syrian boy, captioned "One Down".

Now, I can understand the revulsion by all of pseudo refugees claiming asylum in countries which they are culturally opposed to,  but it's one thing to argue against the uncontrolled influx of economic migrants, quite another to cheer the death of a child who was not responsible for the circumstances he was found in. The mainstream left may be guilty of malign stupidity, but these Cuntservatives are psychopathic. There is something profoundly wrong in a man if he can't feel pity even for the most helpless simply because the other person is of a different race. And this psychopathy is profoundly repugnant to potential converts who are intelling to the reactionary right. Yet the current political debate in the West driven by the heartless and the bleeding hearts. It's a tug of war between dumb and nasty.

It's my opinion that these entryists are the greatest threat to Neoreaction at the moment, and if left unchecked will take it down.