Beyond Left and Right: A Reply to Carlsbad 1819

A digression.

NTSS over at his blog Carlsbad 1819 has put up a rather good post, The left-right spectrum put in its proper meaning and context. Initially, I thought I would put up a comment over there but as it ended up being too long I thought I'd make a post of it.  I've got a lot of respect for Nulla and so the the following comments are made in the spirit of honest criticism.

How you frame a question in many ways predetermines the solutions to it.  How does the Left differ from the Right is, in my mind, the wrong question, as it tends forces the mind to concentrate on what are the differences between the two camps with the assumption that any difference between the two is meaningful. Choosing between International Socialism and National Socialism still leaves you with Socialism in the end.

I think that  one of the greatest advances in human anthropology has been the realisation that human rationality is more far more complicated than we first thought. Rationality, still relatively undifferentiated by philosophers,  has been demonstrated to have both an intuitive and deliberative component with intuitive rationality being the default mode of thinking for the majority, even the hi-IQ types.

One of the features of intuitive intelligence is that it tends to be associative in nature, and one of the results of this intuitive approach is the conflation of conservative with Right and liberal with Left. Once we start realise that right/conservative and left/radical catergorisations are associative conflations disentangling things makes things a lot clearer.

The first thing to realise is that conservative and liberal are primarily temperamental types with voting behaviour being strongly linked to personality type.  Numerous studies have show temperamental differences between conservatives and liberals. For example,  Conservatives are high on the neuroticism and purity temperamental traits while liberals are higher on openness and impurity elements. When you start analysing politics through this dual lenses of intuitive rationality and personality type a lot of politics becomes far easier to understand.

Suppose socialism becomes the flavour of the month. The conservative elements in the population are going to be advocating for a more structured, "pure" and orderly version of Socialism while the liberals will vote for its more open liberal variant. Fascism, is quite literally Socialism made for the Conservative temperament.

Likewise, when we talk about the conservative faction of the Communist party--what would superficially appear to be an oxymoron-- we're talking about the personality types that don't want any innovation with regard to communism and stick to the orthodoxy. It is not deliberative reason that's determining the position, it's the temperament. Orwell understood this phenomenon completely. He recognised that "bellyfeel" motivated political orientation more than rationality.

It's not as if this some kind of new insight. If we look at Oakeshott's famous definition of what it means to be Conservative:

"To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."

We see that it applies just as equally to political theory as it does to cheese. Anglo Conservatism--with its strong temperamental justification--is largely devoid of any ideological content. It is simply an aesthetic/preferential approach to things rather than an epistemological or metaphysical position. 

This type of conservatism is always going to fail and will drift (in any direction) over time for two reasons. Given it's conservative nature it's unable to initate direction, leaving the initiative to the non-conservative elements in society. Secondly, lacking any fixed ideological or epistemological positions it will eventually move given enough social pressure and habituation. As its own cognitive elements become habituated to the change it becomes to see it as part of "present"-- (Oakeshott was big on this)---and accepts it now as the new tradition.

Therefore it's vital to disentangle the liberal/conservative temperamental dispostional elements from the  epistimological/metaphysical dimension of the Left/Right divide.

Once we get rid of all the purity/hierarchy/preference for order stuff what exactly have we got: What does it mean to be "Right"?

 to this discussion. Once again the Left/Right distinction tends to obscure rather than clarify. Being anti-Left is of no virtue if the resulting positions and beliefs are not calibrated to reality. This is the real danger in defining the Right as the anti-Left, since the it frames the distinction primarily along the lines of the Left and not upon the relationship of its positions with reality: the thing that matters.

As far as I'm concerned the core distinction between Right and Left is where they sit on the realist/anti-realist spectrum. Overlaid upon this are the conservative and liberal temperaments which colour this distinction. What you end up is with the following matrix.

Once we strip the tempramental/dispositional elements from the analysis were left with how the Left and the Right relate to REALITY.

THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT IS THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO REALITY.

The Right believes in Truth the Left believes in Ideals, no matter how divorced from reality they are.

The thing to remember is that those of a conservative temperament are just as capable of believing in bullshit--i.e. being reality averse--as the most radical leftist and hence these people are also the enemy.  Calibration to reality is the defining feature of the Right, not a laundry list of "preference" options.

The thing is that in real life, given the reality that people are by and large System 1 driven,  people are going to align themselves with others of the same temperament.  Hence we find the strong historical association between trads/integralists/natsocs and libs/socialists/communists. Their union is based upon a superficial bellyfeel analysis rather than cool cognition.  The bulk of humanity, even the eggheads, run with their gut rather than their heads.

The other disadvantage of this doleful state of human affairs is that the intuitive conservatives have more sympathy for those who a conservatives in error rather than liberals in truth. What this means is that statistically Traditionalists are more likely than not to opt for error rather than truth when confronted with a novel situation.  Exhibition 1: Meriol Trevor writes of one of the poster boys of the Traditionalist Catholic Right, Pius X;

Even at the time the Holy Office was forced to examine the morality of the Action Francaise and after long delays reported to the Pope that the movement's moral principles were not compatible with the Catholic faith. In spite of this, Pius X decided not to publish the condemnation. Marc Sangnier, the faithful Catholic democrat, was disowned, but Charles Maurras, the avowed atheist, was allowed immunity. Seldom has political sympathy influenced more clearly a papal act, or refusal to act.

Let that sink in. This champion of Catholic "Orthodoxy" supported a atheist who thought of the Church with contempt while condemning a faithful believer.

This is one of the main reasons why I like to put the hurt on the Trads. I recognise that Traditionalism is a repository for  a lof of truth but what I realise is that for a variety of reasons tradition must be able to be modified or built up in light of the advance in human knowledge in a way that is compatible with the past. Traditionalists completely close this option off, and while liberals, by and large, promulgate error, traditionalists do not allow changes to be affected even if doctrinally or epistimologically sound.

Exhibition 2: Oh, and here's another howler I found just the other day which is quite appropriate given the inane utterances of some U.S. bishops regarding illegal immigration.

Here again de Lubac found himself in opposition to many of the neo-scholastics and members of the Action Francaise who supported Marshal Petain's Vichy government. Foremost among these was Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange who was of the view that support for the stance of General de Gaulle was not merely a case of backing the wrong team, politically or prudentially speaking, but was actually a mortal sin.

You can't make this stuff up. One of the leading Thomistic theologians of the 20th Century actually though it a mortal sin not to support a Nazi puppet state.  This is why its so important to disentagle conservatism from Rightism. Simply so as not to make these idiotic mistakes.

Some Thoughts on the Child Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church

I think one of the most important tasks facing the religious Dissident Right is trying to determine why Christianity has been unable to stop the assault of Modernism. In my mind there are many reasons for the failure however I think the main culprit is the Church hierarchy. There is something seriously wrong with the generalship.

Anyone with any exposure to the media cannot be unaware of the ongoing saga with regard to child sexual abuse which just seems to go on and on. Here in Australia, two weeks ago, one of the Australian archbishops was forced to step down after it was discovered that he covered up instances of child sexual abuse. Then there's Chile, where the entire Chilean Catholic leadership was forced to resigned as a result of their inept and criminal response to the sexual abuse of minors in their jurisdiction. Not only did they try to discredit the victims, but they seemed to have covered up some of the crimes and lied to the Pope.  In Ireland, the U.S., parts of Europe and Australia, a consistent pattern has emerged of a leadership that has been either inept in its dealings with the matter or outright criminal. 

Here in my home town, Melbourne, most of the crimes occurred during the reign of a liberal Church environment, while in Chile and Ireland, the crimes occurred within a conservative institutional framework: It's a problem that crosses factional lines. Furthermore, investigations into the abuse show that it has historically extended all the way back, well before Vatican Two, so it's not a problem, as some "conservatives" would like to say, of Church liberalisation, Many of the crimes occurred during the papacy of "conservative" Popes and during periods of  traditional orthodoxy. These statements are are not my opinions, they are statements of fact.

A lot of rubbish has been written about the issue but as I see it, the sexual abuse saga needs to be considered on two levels; that of the personal and of the institutional.

With regard to the personal level, in any institution of any size there are always going to be members that are going to go bad. the Catholic Church is no exception.  The job of a priest is hard, temptation is constant and the selection criteria are going to favour either the holy or the weird.  Furthermore, priests are men and like all men, sinners: it's a fact of life that you're going to get a few bad eggs.  From the figures that I have seen,  it appears that roughly ten percent of priests were child sexual predators, a figure that appears to be less than that seen in the general community. 

I grew up in a working class migrant community and in my childhood stories of "bad priests" were a not infrequent thing; the issues involved usually implied illegitimate children, fraud and alcoholism. The thing is that most of the community could make a clear distinction between the actions of the an individual priest and the institution of the Church. Individual priest may have been bad but the Church as a institution was good.

It's my opinion that it is at this, institutional level, where the sexual abuse saga seems to have done the most damage. It's at this level where the Church has been undermined most grievously. It's widely acknowledged that sexual abuse saga was a significant factor in the dechristianisation of Ireland.

The church is in an unusual position because, given its moral nature, it must be seen as an exemplar of what it preaches. If it fails to do this it seen as a corrupt organisation with all the negative sociological and religious implications that entertains. When you espouse high moral standards yet turn a blind eye to the corruption in the ranks you're going to be seen as a hypocrite, which totally undermines your original moral position. The bottom line is that the church, as an institution, failed to adequately deal with the problem of sexual abuse at the institutional level. And now it is paying the consequences.

And this institutional failure needs to be seen in a broader context. While sexual abuse allegations are the salacious topic du jour, the financial shenanigans of the church have proven to be just as resistant to eradication as well. Theft does not generate as much moral disgust as the sexual abuse of children but it's a moral evil none the less, and it's an evil that's been extremely difficult to eradicate. A healthy institution would purge itself of these corrupt elements and yet it can't. Rather, it has taken secular outsiders, sometimes quite hostile to the Church, to expose and force change upon an institutional apparatus which seems blind to its own failings and responsibilities.*

A common theme which emerges from investigations into the matter is that a repeated motivation among many of the clergy for keeping the abuse quiet was the desire to avoid scandal. In other words, the clergy were more concerned with need for the church to appear to be good rather than it actually being good. I don't know how to phrase this less bluntly but this, dear readers, is Pharisiacism 101, all done with the most noble of intentions of preserving the the image of sanctity while turning a blind eye to corruption, and in the worst instances, persecuting those who exposed the crimes.

What's very interesting in this whole saga is that the laity seem to have had a greater grasp of the seriousness of situation than their clerical superiors, but given the monophoric structure of the Catholic Church, meant that their concerns went unheeded. Bishop Long, himself a victim of sexual abuse, highlighted this mentality in his testimony to the Royal Commission on Child Sexual Abuse here in Australia.

MS FURNESS: You've also heard evidence that clericalism has been described as a factor or playing a role in the abuse of children and the response to that abuse and the connection between the deference and power that is part of clericalism and the more traditional approach of some seminarians. Now, do you see it like that?

BISHOP LONG: I do, and I see the clericalism as a by-product of a certain model of Church informed or underpinned or sustained by a certain theology. I mean, it's no secret that we have been operating, at least under the two previous pontificates, from what I'd describe as a perfect society model where there is a neat, almost divinely inspired, pecking order, and that pecking order is heavily tilted towards the ordained. So you have the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, religious, consecrated men and women, and the laity right at the bottom of the pyramid.

I think we need to dismantle that model of Church. If I could use the biblical image of wineskins, it's old wineskins that are no longer relevant, no longer able to contain the new wine, if you like. I think we really need to examine seriously that kind of model of Church where it promotes the superiority of the ordained and it facilitates that power imbalance between the ordained and the non-ordained, which in turn facilitates that attitude of clericalism, if you like.

and

BISHOP LONG: Accountability in that perfect Church model only works upwards. You're accountable to the person above you. As long as the bishop has the backing of the Pope, he's safe. As long as the priest has the backing of his bishop, he's safe. There's no accountability that reaches outwards or downwards, and that's the critical problem, as far as I see. That discipleship of equals calls into question that upward accountability that is in operation as a result of that ecclesiastical model of a perfect society where everyone knows their place and the pecking order is strictly dictated by ordination.

I personally think that this is a superficial analysis but does illustrate the institutional mentality of the clergy and their hierarchy of "holiness". The problem with this institutional mentality is that it a fertile breeding ground for the Pharisaical mentality and it's a mentality that those of conservative temperament are particularly prone to.

What the child sexual abuse saga has illustrated is that there is something seriously wrong with the institutional governance of the Church, and while it does appear to be making some attempts to change church procedures in order to protect children it--as an institution--still seems clueless as to why the problems occurred in the first place. As I see it, the institutional cancer still remains.

Traditionalist interpretations with regard to the failure of Christianity in the 20th Century tend to see the issue as one of disobedience of the faithful to the hierarchy, i.e. a failure to respect authority. But clearly a obedient faithful which which knowingly kept quiet about the abuse--under the authority of a bishop-- would have been just as morally reprehensible as the hierarchy which turned a blind eye. The institutional church is much like a general blaming his troops for a battlefield loss, it never occurs to them that he problem may be with the quality of the generalship and the decisions made. It's this blindness which is the core of the problem and it's one of the reasons for the dechristinisation of the West.  I have this sneaking intuition that the clergy may have inadvertently set themselves against God.



*A long report commissioned by the Catholic Church into the nature and extent of the sexual abuse crisis.

The Age of the Empozzment

One of the reasons why I tend to focus on the religious aspect of the Dissident Right is because I believe that the collapse of religion in the West is THE primary cause of the Western decline.  The transformation in values that came about with the ditching of Christianity lead to the Age of the Empozzment with its current societal consequences.

For better or worse, until about the First World War Christianity was the underlying cultural foundation of the West. Since then its secular replacements have attempted to build a new and better world--with the body count as predicted by Neitzsche-- and while we are, admittedly, materially and technologically richer, it's pretty clear to any objective observer that Western civilisation is on a downhill spiral. It's the last round of drinks before the party ends.

I think that there are many even in Neoreactionary circles who would deny this view of Christianity and feel that a Western restoration can come about through some kind of secular program.  I wish that this was so since the task would be easier but I think it is impossible.  Even the best versions of secularism still run on the "fumes" of Christianity.  Equality, one of the foundation beliefs of the modern secular state is a credal belief  and not one that is supported by a rational appraisal of the evidence. Rationality in the absence of a creed will therefore, in the long run, push against the notion and once the Christian memory of the West is extinguished so will the notion that all men are equal. I know that there are those who will argue that humanistic notions can be derived from rational deliberations but they're on a fools errand. The Neocons, have a similar view, and quite openly advocate the notion that the modern world is purely a secular product. However, as Havers and Gottfried have shown there was nothing in the rationality of "Athens" which supports our current liberal beliefs.  As any good lawyer knows, with enough skill you can make a good argument for anything.

Nietzsche wasn't so stupid and he realised that a post Christian world was going to be was going to be different and not necessarily a world of hugs and kisses. If you want to know why your art is shit, the streets unsafe and degeneracy is advancing in society it has come about from the ditching of Christianity and the embrace of secular values. The "transvaluation of values" comes with consequences.

Recent events in Ireland demonstrate just how profoundly a change in religious attitude affects political outcomes. In what really is a tragedy of European civilisation, what was once a deeply Catholic country has now transformed itself into another secular state.  The legalisation of gay marriage for instance, would have been impossible in a country that believed in the Catholic faith. It's another example of politics being downstream from culture.

The process of secularisation does not necessarily have to lead to a kumbayah pozzed state, it could just as easily of lead to a Japanisation of society, where a culturally homogeneous and peaceful society gives rise to affluent herbivores jerking off to paedophillic anime at below replacement rate. Or it could have gone Natsoc and gotten nuked. Yeah, I know, just like all true believers assert, the next time it will be different, but the money is on it not being so: the road to perdition is wide.

Therefore any attempt to restore the world to one which had some semblance of continuity with world prior to the First World War is going to have to involve the rechristianisation of the West. The problem is that, except for the most deludedly optimistic, Christianity has not been able to mount an effective pushback against the pozz.

One of the aims of this blog is to understand why Christianity failed. Like many Trads, I too believed that "relaxation of discipline" which came about in the 1960's, especially with regard to Catholicism was responsible for the decline, but the more I look into this matter the less satisfied I am with this explanation. Robust systems can take a lot of punishment, it's the weak systems which collapse suddenly. The sudden collapse in the 60's can only lead to the conclusion that despite appearances to the contrary religion in the West was in a very parlous state. The smart guys like Blondel and Troelstch saw years ahead what was happening but no one listened.

And I want to make a distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism. As my thinking stands at the moment, I feel that that each was attacked by a different method.  Protestantism was effectively destroyed by Modernism directly whereas Catholicism was destroyed a "spiritual failure" largely mediated by clericalism which arose in response to the battle against Modernism. Features which both respective religions regard as their strengths have also been responsible for their inability to  mount an effective response to the secular world.

It is my belief that Protestantism, taken as a whole, is beyond reform. I don't say this triumphantly it's just that institutional Protestantism is so thoroughly pozzed that it is unable to recover the critical mass of adherents necessary for societal change.  Small elements of Protestantism are probably quite doctrinally sound it's just that they're going to remain on the margins, Christian witnesses unable to do much.  On the other hand Catholicism still has enough "mass" to effect social change but unless it reforms, essentially by incorporating some of the 'best bits of Protestantism" it's going to ossify into irrelevancy, with tragic consequences for the West.

Rodney Dangerfield in the role of Aquinas

The ideal vs the real.




On a related note: On finance, the Vatican can still do better.

A Religious Dissident Right

Rod Dreher--who I don't agree with very much--put up an interesting article which I felt deserved far more comment in this corner of the Web.

What's the Matter with Orthodox Countries?

Rod opines on why Orthodox countries have relatively poorer economic performance than that of the West. Now, I don't really want to get into that debate now but wish to simply to show just how powerful an influence religion has in other areas not traditionally associated with it. Weber said the same thing with his work on the relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism.

From my perspective, religion is the structure upon which a culture is built.  Our current religion is Secularism with its essential belief in the irrelevancy of supernatural faith, and the pursuit through reason of health, wealth, pleasure and popularity. Our "slouch to Gomorrah" is primarily as a result of our ditching Christianity for Secularism.

I think it's a truism that politics is downstream from culture. Crappy culture pretty much ensures crappy politics and no matter how you rearrange the political structure it's always going to be a reflection of the prevailing culture. The U.S. founding fathers understood this in a way that Moldbug doesn't. Virtue matters.

This doesn't mean that Secularists can't be virtuous, whatever that means in a secular scheme, it just that virtue, as a Christian would recognise it is a statistical outlier, while in Christianity it is the statistical norm.

What this means that any restoration of the West--if it is going to have any continuity with the past--is going to have to rely on a restoration of Christianity.

The problem is that Christianity has been totally sideswiped by Modernism and has been unable to mount an effective offense against it.  Measures which aimed at "liberalising" the Churches so that they would become more "relevant" have proven to be self destructive failure. On the other hand "Traditionalist" doubling down has produced a few defiant outposts but no real growth. Religious capture of state power hasn't worked out in the long term. The "Benedict Option" so favoured by Dreher, works only under the assumption that the rest of society will leave you alone. Unfortunately militant secularism doesn't work like that. Defence does not win wars.

That 's why I think a revival of popular religion is the only long term solution. However a revival of the "old" religion is unlikely to be of any benefit since the old religion, even when it was popular and strong, proved unable to handle the onslaught of Modernism. What will be needed is something "new". And by "new", I don't mean some new or foreign religion to the West. Rather, it will be the old Christianity, practiced differently and with different emphasis.

Personally, I think this new religion is going to develop among the laity, since I feel that in the Catholic Church at least, the clergy are polarized into their respective ideological camps by temperament rather than reason, one group wanting novelty without intellectual rigor and other stuck with the fear that any change is error: whimsy and paralysis. What will unite both of them will be a an opposition to a religious Dissident Right.  The liberals will hate it for its attack on Kumbaya Christianity while the Trads will hate it for proposing any change at all.

If this group can reform Christianity we have a chance otherwise I don't see any way out at all.

Neoplatonism, Thomism and Modernism

I thought I would just follow up with a few more thoughts on the subject of Neoplatonism in the Church.

I can't say that I'm a scholar of Church history but what's apparent in a brief survey of it is just how often the spirit/body duality pops up as a heresy. A brief review of Church history shows the the Manichee's, Gnostics, Albeginians, Bogomils and  Jansenists.  As Chesterton remarked:

What is called the Manichean philosophy has had many forms; indeed it has attacked what is immortal and immutable with a very curious kind of immortal mutability [ED]. It is like the legend of the magician who turns himselfinto a snake or a cloud; and the whole has that nameless note of irresponsibility, which belongs to much of the metaphysics and morals of Asia, from which the Manichean mystery came. But it is always in one way or another a notion that nature is evil; or that evil is at least rooted in nature. The essential point is that as evil has roots in nature, so it has rights in nature. Wrong has as much right to exist as right. As already stated this notion took many forms. Sometimes it was a dualism, which made evil an equal partner with good; so that neither could be called an usurper. More often it was a general idea that demons had made the material world, and if there were any good spirits, they were concerned only with the spiritual world. Later, again, it took the form of Calvinism, which held that God had indeed made the world, but in a special sense, made the evil as well as the good: had made an evil will as well as an evil world.

We'll get to the immutable immortality a bit later but the important thing to recognise that it is a persistently recurring heresy one that the Church has never really been able to stamp out completely. But it's important to understand that just because the Church has actively fought against the error it in the past does not mean that there isn't a well of sympathy within it.

This error then had many forms; but especially, like nearly every error, it had two forms, a fiercer one which was outside the Church and attacking the Church, and a subtler one, which was inside the Church and corrupting the Church. There has never been a time when the Church was not torn between that invasion and that treason.

It's the treason that I'm interested in.

Let me illustrate what exactly I mean with this passage on the subject of Caritas by Pope Benedict.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice.[1] Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn't the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life?

and;

Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity.

and:

In philosophical and theological debate, these distinctions have often been radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them: descending, oblative love—agape—would be typically Christian, while on the other hand ascending, possessive or covetous love —eros—would be typical of non-Christian, and particularly Greek culture. Were this antithesis to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life. Yet eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).

Superficially, it's typical Catholic teaching and would appear to benign, but if you think about it for a minute, the implications of what Benedict is saying is that without the benefit of Agape, Eros is bad. i.e the natural human proclivity for procreation is a bad thing. Let me illustrate the implications of this by way of analogy. Imagine the human passions as being like horses tied to a chariot, with Eros being a particularly wild steed. What Benedict is saying is that Eros, on its own, is a bad horse because he is so randy all the time that he loses his way. The addition of Agape makes for a more docile horse. What a Thomist would say, on the other hand, is that a randy horse is a good horse, he just needs to be kept firmly in the reigns. What you get with Benedict's vision is a gelding what you get with Thomas's vision is a wild stallion. It's subtle neoplatonism but its there. Nietzsche is vindicated.

"Christian" Eros after the Neoplatonic treatment, gets "transformed" from something bad into something better, beocmeing something of "consideration of the other" and "respect", and draining it of its passion and abandon. Passion are abandon, features inherent in intense erotic love are suspect, it can never be "mere" sex but must have some agape dimension to it as well.  Even within a chaste marriage, mere sex need to be expunged, its no wonder that sin is where all the fun is at.  Sex becomes a passionless affair because the Neoplatonist thinks that sex should be a passionless affair. Instead of recognising Eros as it is, he constructs Eros as it should be.

Now Benedict explicitly reaffirms the hylomophic conception of man in his encyclical but the problem is that it's not how he treats the subject. Similar things were going on during the Albigensian heresy.

 Anyhow, it is historically important to see that Platonic love did somewhat distort both human and divine love, in the theory of the early theologians. Many medieval men, who would indignantly deny the Albigensian doctrine of sterility, were yet in an emotional mood to abandon the body in despair; and some of them to abandon everything in despair.

As Chesterton says the Platonic approach to love distorts it. The point about Christian Neoplatonism is that it seeks to transform human nature, instead of accepting it as it is, since the originial version is "deficient" i.e. bad  In that way, Christian Neoplatonism is very much like Blank Slatism which rejects man as he is and seeks to transform into a "New Man". The analogies are clearly there.

An this stuff doesn't just affect the domain of Eros, but it spreads over to other areas where human nature plays a prominent role. Take parochialism for example. Civil and ethic strife exists all over the world because one mob feels that certain limits have been crossed by another. It's a fact of life, present across different cultures and times.  But the tendency, particularly post WW2, has to be regard this aspect of human nature as morally suspect. Christian Churches, in particular, have been at the forefront of pushing global migration on the grounds of charitable love of the poor, labeling anyone who opposes the notion as being sinful. Once again, human nature is seen as problematic. ( The secular analogies are eerie)

The interesting question to ask is, what would St Thomas do?

Being speculative here, I imagine he would start off by saying that the parochialism that human beings are born with is good, however God also commands us to be charitable to our neighbors and those in need. Can we find a solution which accommodates both?  Let us keep people where they are as we want to avoid inter-racial strife, if possible,  and ensure their safety and prosperity where they are. This train of thought is not even entered into by the modern Church men, instead man's natural love of "blood and soil"--Patria--  is immediately denounced as anti-Christian.

As a Christian, I believe in the Devil, and it's becoming apparent to me as to how the game is being played.

1) Firstly, promote doctrinaire religious aesthetes within the hierarchy of the Church who practically, if not explicitly, shape the Church thinking along Neoplatonist lines.

2) Declare normal things sinful or change the norms in such a way to denature their vitality.

3) Encourage the reshaping of the person--"transformation in Christ"--by encouraging the person to shape their personality according to aesthetic ideals with constant negative reference/no reference to reality of our natures. i.e. promote practical Neoplatonism.

4) Set up alternative organisations outside the Church  which embrace normality but tie them to some other pathology.  i.e. Natsoc, Patria+ murderous hatred of the other. Providing them with a psychic escape, drawing people away from the Church and leading them to sin.

5) Stifle any attempt at reform by appealing to Tradition, making sure that the status quo remains.

Now, the reason why I'm harping on about all this stuff is because I've been trying to understand why the Christian religion has been unable to mount a viable defence against Modernity. In my opinion, the reason is because the motor of modernity is part and parcel of the Neoplatonic tradition of the the Church. Attacking Modernity, it attacks the Neoplatonism within itself, and any successful assault on Modernity is going to rely on shift within Church culture which affirms "pragmatically" the implication of Thomistic teaching.

When commentator Goldenye asked in a previous post,

In my musings as to why we're in this mess, I realized that modernity only appears to come from Western Christianity. Eastern Christianity doesn't appear to have modernity unless it's imported in from the West. What part or parts of Western Christianity cause modernity?

I think the answer lays in the fact Neoplatonism is a tendency rather than explicity declared doctrine, with the doctrine mitigating the Neoplatonic tradition. Thomism gained enough traction to make the scientific revolution ultimately possible but it did it against institutional resistance.

Let me give you an example. The whole Gallileo saga illustrates that battle between Neoplatonism and Thomism in the Church. The Neoplatonists said the Bible says this, the Thomists said but my eyes see that. The Thomistic view eventually won but the Church had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the accept of the reality acknowledged by the Thomistic view. It's quite probable, had Thomism not won, that Christianity would be dead now and that we'd probably be living in some form of fifteenth century hovel.

Modern Trads like to blame the Enlightenment on all our troubles but that's a simplistic view. The Enlightenment was a broad thing, and something I'm generally in favour of. However two malignant strands came out of it. The least malignant of them was Positivism, the more dangerous one was Rousseauean Idealism, and guess where Rousseau got a lot of his ideas from.  Interestingly, the expulsion of James Watson from polite society should be seen as a secular version of the Gallileo controversy.  Secular idealism trumps scientific fact.

On a final note. Chesterton made the comment that Platonism seems to be a heresy that continually reappears, though in different forms. I agree but disagree with his understanding. I personally believe that this heresy is a consequence of the nature of human cognition and the tendency for cognitive miserliness. Hence, it's continual manifestations across a variety of cultures and times, though with various local modifications. It's very easy to imaging a spirit flesh duality, it's intuitive: Hylomorphism is hard.

I don't think that there are Churchmen secretly squirreling away copies of Plato and worshiping him on clandstine altars, rather Plato was the most explicit exponent of the spirit/flesh duality and people trying to understand the phenomenon of Neoplatonism try to undestand it within the model of human rationality, not recognising that it is a type of System 1 misattribution error.  Neoplatonism is a type of cognitive error, and the philosophy comes after the fact.



*Chesterton's quotes are taken from his book on St Thomas Aquinas.

Reps for Jesus

 The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung upon a gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs of something that was more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it. 

(G.K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas)

While on Twitter the other day, this particular tweet thread caught my eye;

Now, I've got to admit that excesses of any kind are a sign of mental imbalance but the overall tone of that comment, and later ones, suggested that author was disparaging the idea of a "muscular Christianity".  Now the point of this post is not to rag on the author of those comments but to point towards what I think is a persistent tendency in Christian thought and one that has caused a lot of untold harm especially with regard to the Christian understanding of man.

Machialvelli, when it came to institutions, was fond of making a distinction between the "formal" and the "real".  The formal being that which was publicly expressed and the real was what actually happened.  Now Christian, especially Catholic theology, tends to be a formal acknowledgement of the goodness of the created world but in practice there tends to be strong suspicion of it.  The Christian "tradition" itself, tends to have a strong Platonic bent to it, emphasising a the flesh/spirit duality, with this duality having an implicit hierarchical aspect to it: the spirit being "higher" than the flesh.  Giving weight to this view are certain oft quoted texts in the Bible. So when JG states that a disparaging of the body is one of its strengths he is certainly justified by "tradition" for his view.

Certainly the Bible cautions about following the ways of the flesh, but I really can't find an endorsement of neglecting it entirely or pretending that it doesn't matter. Much like the rider of horse, the role of the spirit is to guide the flesh and not let the horse lead the way. Platonism certainly doesn't dispute this, however the way it approaches the subject it's as if the well being of the horse doesn't matter at all. In fact, especially among the religious ascetics, there seems to be a certain notion that treating the horse badly or neglecting is a virtue. Chesterton recognised this as well;

This Platonic influence could be seen particularly in the fact that "the earlier school of Augustine and even of Anselm had [treated] the soul as the only necessary treasure, wrapped for a time in a negligible napkin." Chesterton even detects in the Greek theological tradition "a sort of dried-up Platonism" that translated into "the last indeed noble abstractions," but too far removed from the concrete world, the consequence being that the Logos of the Byzantine Greeks "was the Word, but not the Word made Flesh." As a result, "the earlier Christian ages had been excessively anti-corporeal and too near the danger line of Manichaean mysticism."

and;

The truth is that the historical Catholic Church began by being Platonist; by being rather too Platonist. Platonism was in that golden Greek air that was breathed by the first great Greek theologians. The Christian Fathers were much more like the Neo-Platonists than were the scholars of the Renaissance; who were only Neo-Neo-Platonists. For Chrysostom or Basil it was as ordinary and normal to think in terms of the Logos, or the Wisdom which is the aim of philosophers, as it is to any men of any religion today to talk about social problems or progress or the economic crisis throughout the world. St. Augustine followed a natural mental evolution when he was a Platonist before he was a Manichean, and a Manichean before he was a Christian. And it was exactly in that last association that the first faint hint, of the danger of being too Platonist, may be seen.

This Platonic tradition had caused serious problems in the Church that there was a serious danger of incursion of Islamic philosphy into Christiandom (I don't want to go into to this now for the sake of brevity). Theologically, the real blow to this NeoPlatonistic view of the person was dealt by the work of St Thomas Aquinas who was able to reconcile Aritistolean hylomorphism with Christianity. i.e  the Man was both spirit and flesh. Again, quoting Chesterton,

In a word, St. Thomas was making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian. This is not a paradox but a plain truism, which can only be missed by those who may know what is meant by an Aristotelian, but have simply forgotten what is meant by a Christian. As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.

I really want to emphasise this point, Christianity emphasises that sanctity and matter are conjoined.  The view espoused by JB is explicitly rejected by Aquinas. This is why actions of the flesh impact upon the spirit, it's because you dealing with one thing possessing two different qualities rather than two separate discrete things. What we do with our bodies affects our souls. Matter has some dignity.

Now while Christianity, Catholicism in particular, may affirm the teaching of St Thomas, the manichean Neoplatonist tendency is still strong in the Church. Historically, the Church has been quietly supportive of mortification of the flesh in the pursuit of sanctity but has remained rather silent or very hostile on the subject of the perfection of the flesh in pursuit of sanctity. Fasting for Jesus is good but doing reps for Jesus is suspect. But why is fatness less an evil than fornication? Why is the prudent pursuit of physical perfection a morally suspect thing?

Even in the understanding of evil, the tradition of the Church still operates on Neoplatonist lines. The sin of gluttony is "abstracted" into the broader sin of excessive sensuality. Maybe I've not read a lot but I've never seen gluttony pointed out as an offence against the body, a mutilating sin. For a Neoplatonist it doesn't matter since the body is not important. And that's the problem with Neoplatonism it neglects realities for theories. The idea is more important than the substance.

And yet the logical consequence of a Thomistic theology is that prudent perfection of the body should be spiritually beneficial.  If the object of Caritas is to perfect the form of the thing considered then its operation on the flesh is to perfect it. Now, for the spergs out there, I'm not advocating bodily perfection at the expense of the all the other facets of life a man must attend to, rather there needs to be a prudent balance, with the recognition that the neglect of the body is a sin. Doing a few reps for Jesus is a corrective.

Rules of the Club

He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth.

(Matthew 12:30)

As I've said before, any restoration of the West is going to have to involve a recongition of the importance of Christianity in the formation of Western identity. Our "slouch to Gomorrah" has primarily come about from Western society's rejection and, in some instance, perversion of its Christian faith. It follows therefore that any restorative movement is going to have to acknowledge the role of Christianity in any reinvigoration of the West.

So where does it leave the others, who neither have faith or a Christian heritage.

It may surprise many of you that I have a very strong sympathy with regard to honest Atheism. My own predilections are strongly empirical and I can understand how a man looking at the universe around him sees no God.  The apparently inert response of a supposedly loving and active God in a world of so much injustice and evil is a very strong argument against his existence. Looking at the world around me, the empirical data, superficially, is powerful evidence against His existence and it's sometimes only the gift of Faith that lets you see God when the rest of your senses are telling you He is not there.

Christian theology affirms that faith is a supernatural gift doled out to those whom it pleases Him. And why God chooses to dole it out to some rather that others is a mystery. I certainly didn't warrant it and I know plenty of other better people than myself who don't believe.

Now this poses a problem. As a Christian, how can I expect the non believers to believe in the things that God has chosen to withhold from them? How can I, in good faith, expect them to believe in stuff that I wouldn't believe if I hadn't been given faith? The answer is, I can't.

Expecting an atheist to believe in God is like expecting me to deny him, a violation of conscience. Furthermore, it's contra Caritas, which protects conscience.

So given the hugely influential presence of Christianity on European identity can an Atheist or Jew be part of the European Right?

As I've said before, the fundamental criteria of Rightism is commitment to the Truth.  But as God seems to dole out the supernatural gift of Faith to whomever he pleases and he withholds from some, I don't see any obligation for non believers to uphold the articles of Christian faith which from their perspective, they don't believe to be true.  However, I do expect them to be honest in all other things.

In fact, some of the writers that have been most acknowledging of the Christian tradition, have been atheists such as Theodore Dalrymple and John Gray.  Gray, particularly, recently savaged Steven Pinkier's book and exposed it for the  propaganda polemic it was. One doesn't have to believe in the Christian religion to acknowledge its role and social utility in the formation of the West. But what characterises these atheists, as opposed to the New Atheists, is their honesty.

As I see it criteria for non Christian inclusion in the European right are;

a) Honesty with regard to the facts of European history and empirical observation.
b) A goodwill towards Christianity, which at its bare minimum is a tolerance of it.

Exorcism

What unites the Left, the "Alt- Right" and Neoconservatism is a contempt of Christianity.  For the Left,  Christianity, with it's regressive morality, is seen as an instrument of exclusion, creating minorities that are unable to achieve full acceptance and equality within the Christian schema. For the Right, Christianity "is cucked" especially with regard to the racial question and is seen as a source of civilisational weakness. For the Neocons, Christianity is problematic, since its civilisational triumph poses a direct challenge to the concept of man as espoused by Atheism, Islam, and Judaism.  The Left and Right directly challenge Christianity, Neoconservatism tries to explain it away.

However, at a deeper level, what unites all three is a fundamental dishonesty with regard to historical fact which aims to either misrepresent Christianity or downplay its role in Western civilisation. It's not that these movements haven't any valid critique of Christianity, rather, their fundamental understanding of Christianity can be rebutted by a cursory perusal of the facts. These movements are ultimately built on lies.

By accepting the de facto framing of our current civilisational battle as being one of Right vs Left, without actually defining what these terms mean, has resulted in the Right being composed of Christian and anti-Christian elements, fundamentally crippling any resistance to the Left.  For the Christian, the problem is that he has to fight not only the anti-Christian on the left but also the anti-Christian on the  right. The net result is that the Left wins most of the time while anti-Christianity wins all of the time. Meanwhile the West slouches towards Gomorrah.

As I've attempted to show on this blog before, Fascism and all the other incarnations of Right modernism have more in common with the Left than the Christian Right. They are the enemy within.

Recent events have demonstrated just how destructive the modernist Right can be.  The Alternate Right initially started off as viable alternative to mainstream conservatism, slowly gaining cultural traction until the movement was co-opted by the Spencer types. The resulting farce crippled the movement and politically alienated it. We're back to square one.

The reason why Spencer and his ilk were able to co-opt and infiltrate is because the nascent alt-Right did not have "purity tests" i.e. ideological standards by which to expel them. Being anti-Left and anti-GOP were not enough since it left  the door open for degenerates anti-Christian Modernists. Is it any surprise then that Milo ended up being the mouthpiece of the Alt-Right.

Once again the Left won and the Christians lost. It's almost as if it were planned.

Any fair assessment of Western identity cannot ignore the pivotal influence of Christianity on it.  Attempts to deny or explain away the Christian component of Western Civilisation are quite simply lies, and incompatible with the Western conception of man or the facts of history. Sure, there were other influences which were non-Christian and there were places where Christianity stumbled but to deny its formative influence on Western Civilisation is proof of malice.

As I see it, any future Dissident Right needs to police its membership to prevent subversion by Right Modernists. The "purity tests" to be used are;

a) A commitment to the Truth.
b) A recognition of the formative role of Christianity in Western Identity.
c) A commitment to Christian social morals-if not necessarily belief.

As I see it, these three tests are our garlic, holy water and crucifix that we use to exorcise the modernists from any re-emergent Dissident Right movement.

Thoughts

In case anyone is interested there is an interesting lecture given by George Hawley: Is the Alt-Right Collapsing.  Hawley's academic specialisation is in the non-mainstream Right. I've read his book, The Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism and, like his lecture, thought it a fair and balanced work.

I don't think Hawley gets everything right, but his main contention, that the Alt-Right is dying, is in my opinion correct.  Hawley lays the blame for the failure of the movement on several factors, the principle ones being its explicit white nationalism and it National Socialist "Optics" which worked to drive the normies away.

Hawley's done a fair amount of work on the Alt-Right, and though it really wasn't mentioned much at all in this talk--though he's spoken about it in other places considerably--is the explicit anti-Christian bias inherent to it. For Christian people like myself, Anti-Christian Modernism v2.0 is just as repellent as Anti-Christian Modernism v1.0.  For the Christian, there's not really much difference between being Gulaged by a Commie or Auschwitzed by a Nazi. The Alt-Right was really the same turd in a different package.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the whole Spenceresque co-option of the non-mainstream-Right was how many non-Natsocs were sympathetic to them. I honestly felt I was a voice in the wilderness at times and it's one of the reasons I've really lost much of my urge to blog. What's the point when so many are so easily led astray.  A healthy Right would have purged Spencer and his ilk immediately on the grounds that their ideology was incompatible with that of the Right.

It has always been this blog's contention that the foundational stone of European civilisation was Christianity and any restorative movement which ignores this pillar, or one that advocates doctrines which are contrary to it, is merely another version of error. For the Rightist, the key issue is not one of Right or Left but one of right or wrong. Sure, there are contingencies such as race, geography and history which impacted upon European civilisational development but these factors on their own do not explain the European phenomenon.

That's why any movement which denies it ain't worth shit and is simply modernism or paganism in another package. The defining event which initiated European civilisational decline has been de-Christianisation.  Our secular culture is at the peak of its technical prowess and probably has the most educated population in history yet were are in a civilisational death spiral which increases in velocity in proportion to the decline of religious observance. You don't have to believe it but the correlation is very, very good.

But to be charitable to the Alt-Right--I'm Christian, remember--some of their criticisms of Christianity may have some validity. The depopulation of the Christian Churches may not just simply be due to the disobedience of an ungrateful people, rather, it could be due to the repulsion at being fed an adulterated product. The Kumbaya Christianity being fed to flock today seems a adulterated and watered down version of the faith of the past. That does not mean that return to the past is an antidote to the ills of today. After all, it was the problems of the past that gave birth to the monster of modernity. Change is not the problem, change in the wrong direction is.

If politics is downstream from culture then problem is to fix culture before you can fix politics. The American founding fathers knew that no constitution would restrain a corrupt people, virtue was needed. And you ain't going to build virtue without religion. The common man as a utilitarian philosopher is pie-in-the-sky bullshit.  Men need rules to live by.

That's why any restorative project for the West has to be based on the Christian religion.

Otherwise it's a waste of time.

Merry Christmas

Firstly, I'd like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

It's been a year of mixed blessings and I must admit that some of them have put me in a bit of a funk. Over here in Australia, the country overwhelmingly voted in favor of the legal recognition of Same Sex Marriage. The Euthanasia Laws were passed in my home state and the lack of any coherent response by the "Right" reinforced its impotence. Right "victories" were non existent.

Globally, the war in Syria seems to have taken a turn for the better with the intervention of Putin, but on the other hand there wasn't much else. Trump hasn't really been doing much "winning", the U.K. still hasn't left the EU. Poland is being hassled by Germany the EU, Europe's demographic disaster continues. North Korea continues to develop its nukes with China's covert blessing and a showdown there is eventually going to happen. As for the the economy of the West...tick, tick, tick.

Culturally, the Dissident Right seems to have lost some of its steam with neoreaction going particularly quiet. From my perspective the Dissident Right seems to be aimless and drifting at the moment. On the bright side,  the cabal sympathetic to Richard Spencer seems to have lost a lot of its clout and presence on the dissident forums. This is a good thing.

I'm all for slogging things out when the going is hard but the lack of meaningful victories is demoralising and I suspect that this may have contributed to my chronic writer's block. Though I haven't written, I've tried to be productive in my reading. I've particularly gained an appreciation of the Protestant author Grant Havers and his concept of Political Charity, more on this in later posts. I'm also really enjoying Eugene Weber's histories late 19th C.  France, especially the process of its "Modernisation". They've changed my thinking with regard to the nature of the Managerial State...it's not going away. And I've just started Corelli Barnett's, The Collapse of British Power and its seems very, very good.

Correlli Barnett's, Audit of War was hugely influential in my thinking and its surprising to myself that I've not read more of his work. Barnett is not Aspergy and is not looking for the "one thing" that explains it all, recognising that other factors are important. Still, something things are more important than others and its surprising that a military historian such as Barnett lays most of the blame of Britain's collapse ultimately at Evangelical Protestantism, and its atheist offspring, Enlightened Humanism:

It follows that a study of the decay of British power between 1918 and 1940 and of its collapse between 1940 and 1945 cannot be adequately conducted within the confines of military history, nor, for that matter, of political or economic history. This book therefore ranges from religion to technology; from education to foreign policy; from literature to grand strategy. Yet throughout the narrative the standpoint remains the single one of strategy — not, however, strategy in the limited sense, but total strategy: strategy, that is, conceived as encompassing all the factors relevant to preserving or extending the power of a human group in the face of rivalry from other human groups. From this standpoint, a topic like religion, for example, appears in a perhaps surprising light as a strategic factor of no less significance than first-line air strength.

The Collapse of British Power.

Barnett is onto something much bigger than just the collapse of British Power and provides a diagnosis that can be applied to much of the West.

I think that many people on the Dissident Right have been reluctant to acknowledge this angle explaining the Western decline primarily because of their own hostility to religion but I'm sensing a vibe in some of the more intelligent blogs that a restoration of religion is going to have to be entertained as a purely political or technocratic solution is not enough. How this is going to happen or how to implement it on a nation wide scale I don't know. However, I hope to do my own bit, and after I finish this post, I'm going to head off to Midnight Mass and bend my knee to the infant babe. I suggest you do the same.

Once again, Merry Christmas to you all and I hope that 2018 brings a few victories to the table.

Postmodernism

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." 

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

A while ago I got a chance to read Stephen Hicks's, Explaining Postmodernism, after Jordan Peterson tweeted out its praise. I thought it was good and for those seeking a brief introduction to the subject it's definitely worth a read.  For those who are interested, here is a review that I think is quite good.
I'm not really interested in providing a critique of the book but am more interested it's subject matter and in the implications it has on the wider culture.

At it's most basic, Postmodernism rejects the notion of an objective truth and insists on the notion that truth is socially "constructed". Right from the outset we can see that Postmodernism is opposed to Rightism, whose metaphysical fundamental premise is the existence of an objective truth. Furthermore, the way that Postmodernism sees the "truth" is as relative view point, used to assert and maintain power by the Right. Postmodernists may deny the reality of the truth but implicitly they affirm the reality of power, and their aim is to assert it on their terms.

I don't think that many Rightists fully grasp the malignancy of this concept, especially when debating the Left within the current cultural context. Whenever the Left presents some outlandish idea, there is no doubt some Rightist who sets about trying to prove them wrong, but what the Rightist fails to understand is the game he is playing and the game they are playing are totally different. Proof is irrelevant when there is no truth. Arguing against the Left using empirical facts and reason is pointless when your opponent denies the legitimacy of these things.  Which brings us to the subject of free speech.

Our current notions of free speech, based as they are on the classical liberal tradition, are premised primarily on the notion that there IS an objective truth.  They are also premised on the notions that people, especially those in power, may have erroneous ideas, and that reality calibration is only possible through the free exchange of ideas sifted through the mechanism of honest rationality, considered from a variety of viewpoints. The other implicit assumption going on here is the power is expected to yield to the truth when shown to be wrong. In other words, the classical liberal advocacy of freedom of speech was premised on several prior assumptions with regard to ontology, reason, and the rights of power and truth. The other premise is that your opponent was meant to argue in good faith. How do you argue with a person who denies these fundamental premises? More importantly, what's the point when Postmodernism asserts that is no such thing a "right opinion" or argument in the first place.

Academic freedom is likewise premised on the notion that academics should be free to pursue their studies in whatever direction they wish in the search for truth. However this concept gets turned around on its head when it comes to Postmodernism with its assertion that there is no truth.  Postmodernism effectively undermines the whole Western academic apparatus. As Chesterton said it is the thought that destroys all thinking.

Our reflexive and unthinking advocacy of freedom of speech and academic freedom has given a milieu for Postmodernism to thrive. It has advocated the very undermining of the institutions whose protection it seeks whenever it is challenged. Ultimately postmodernism about power, particularly its own, and it spreads it in an environment that that it has sworn to to destroy. I'm normally loathe to put any restrictions on the freedom of speech or academic inquiry but when I comes to Postmodernism I quite happy to provide an enthusiastic exception. The old Church fathers would have recognised it for what it was, a poisonous heresy and would have stamped it out.

I'm all for doing the same.

Leo Strauss: Inside Every Gook

Strauss's attempt to muscle out Christianity as a formative principle of Western Civilisation led him to posit an alternative.  For Strauss, that alternative was Athenian Philosophy.

Philosophy, as Strauss asserted, was categorically different to revealed faith and two could be considered as operating in separate domains: influential, but not binding on each other. While the faith could inspire or challenge, it was the role of philosophy to determine what was the correct way to live. Furthermore, Strauss asserted that there was difference between the philosophy of the "ancients" as opposed to the "moderns". The poisons of modern philosophy, according to Strauss,  found their origin in the radical reaction to the Christian synthesis of faith and reason, resulting in reason being taken  to the extremes.  Strauss saw modern philosophy--with all of its ills--as a sort of Hegelian "reactionary anti-Christianity" rather than an separate thing in itself. Ancient Greek philosophy, on the other hand,  was uncontaminated by the Christian faith and represented a purer and more universal philosophy that could stand alone outside the Hegelian Christian/Anti-Christian dialectic.

As I understand it, Strauss saw the classical world as being more moderate and prudent when it came to rationalisation and reason. The ancient world never made the mistake of the Christian West, of trying to harmonise faith and reason, nor did it make the mistake of the radical Enlightenment, in trying to eliminate the faith.  The "reasonableness' of the ancients was a sort of "check and balance" on rationality and helped stop philosophy/reason  from becoming too extreme. Strauss felt that by adopting this approach a moderate secularism could be achieved, and hence his call for a "return to the ancients."

However, if you think about this for a bit, the terms "excess", "prudence" and "radicalisation" are all relative terms which are subjectively contingent, and what Strauss was advocating in his depictions of Classical philosophy was a "moderate" or dispositionaly conservative, secularism,  i.e. "go slow secularism". Strauss may not have admired Burke but he was effectively advocating a secularism along Burkean lines; a prudent, cautious secularism which didn't push things too far. And I think that  his advocacy of a "moderate" secularism is what gave Strauss his appeal among the "feelz" based "Right" who found the radical secularism of the Left intuitively repugnant.

As mentioned in the previous post, Straussian conservatism's acknowledgement of the importance of religion, without any definite obligation to it, bought the allegiance of the cognitively-lite religious crowds. Taking Strauss at his word, it does seem that Strauss thought that religion was important, but its role seemed to be "influence' and "challenge" reason without reason having obligation to respond.  Straussian paeans to the faith reassure the relgious lambs who felt that they could lay next to the secular lions under the Straussian tent.

Perceptive readers who have suffered this blog will see that there is an automatic metaphysical tension built in the Straussian hermeneutic between it and the  Christian one. Gottfried lays it out;

Christians may appropriate for themselves bits and pieces of the Straussian method but they would be wrong to imagine that the corresponding belief system is congruent with Christian truths or with any other form of revealed religion. If devout Christians find nothing objectionable about the Straussian hermeneutic, then they should be willing to reconsider their position. They should recognize the fit between the the two worldviews is more problematic than they have been willing to admit. This reassessment may be all the more necessary give the still widespread appeal among Catholic traditionalists.

In the battle between Athenian philosophy and Christian revelation, Athens always wins. Furthermore, the practical application of Straussianism in the multi-faith environment that is America--or the Anglosphere--everyone's faith gets "respected" but no one's faith gets to put the brakes on Athenian philosophy. The end result is the relentless push of secularism, albeit at a pace slower than that advocated by the radical Left.

Furthermore, as Athenian philosophy was an exercise in abstract "reason" and "sound judgement", its cognitive operations were not really contigent upon local circumstances, tradition, or identity, something Strauss dismissed as Historicism. Being abstract and purely rational, "above" time and place, the conclusions of Athenian philosophy were transnational and trans-historical, in essence universal. Just as "one plus one equals two" is universally valid, according to Strauss, anyone, thinking like a "sound" Athenian philosopher, be they Arabic, Hindu or Japanese would come to the same conclusions as to what was the "philosophically" right way to live.  Implicit in Straussian conservatism is a universalism in its applicability. i.e. it was globalist in scope.

According to Strauss, when Greek philosophy was put to the task of politics, the "best possible" political system that resulted was Anglo-American democracy. Although I may be expressing it impolitely, it's not far off the mark to say that Straussians believe that within every Gook, Chink, Sand nigger, Wop, etc., there is an American waiting to get out.

There's a couple of important points here;

Firstly, As Strauss attempts to write out Christianity from the political history of the West, he redefines Western as being equivalent to its secular liberal manifestation. By this logic, countries like South Korea, Japan and Israel are Western. The West ceases to be a particular time, person, or place. Anyone can be part of the West provided they achieve "Athenian" illumination and embrace secular democracy.

Secondly, there is an implicit tension between the utopia of secular democracy and the forces which impede it. For the Straussian conservative,  a Christianity which imposed limits on secular democracy would be just as objectionable as a Confucianism or Islam which did the same. The uncoupling of religion, as expressed though culture, if not theocracy, means that Straussian "Conservatism" relentlessly  pushes Left, the limits only being what "reasonable" Athenian rationality deems reasonable.

Take "Gay Marriage" for instance. A Catholic, sound Protestant, or Orthodox religious culture would prohibit the political realisation of the concept, no matter how well argued a case in support of it.  The prohibition would be moral and binding. A Straussian, on the other hand,  would argue that religion is a "challenge" to our conceptions of marriage but for the good of the "polis" it may be necessary to be be flexible and magnanimous to those under the spell of the "Helenic Eros." They talk the religious talk but walk the secular walk.

Thirdly, Straussianism had its gestation in the Wiemar republic and the Cold war period, where there were real threats to the existence of secular liberal democracy. Straussian conservatism sees the aggressive defense and expansion of this type of democracy as an inherent good. The consequence being that there is an implicit expansionary dynamic in the ideology. War is a feature, and not a bug, of the system.  Making the world safe for democracy means getting rid of the threats to democracy, be they political, cultural or local. Anyone who is not with the program is a potential threat.

Fourthly, many of the factors which prevent a particular country from achieving the utopia of modern secular democracy are precisely local and historical. Straussian conservatism is inherently oppositional to them. Straussian conservatism therefore acts as a homogenising social force by hostility to the local insofar as it impedes the universal, implicitly pushing towards a global monoculture and is a facilitating factor of the current globalist agenda.

Strauss and Cthulhu

Equally disturbing to the conservative mind is Strauss's inattention to the pivotal role of Christianity in shaping the Anglo-American tradition. This lacuna in Strauss's hermeneutic has always perplexed me.

(Havers. Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique)

One of the reasons why I harp on so much about the Nazis is because a philosophical understanding of their position goes a long way towards understanding what is wrong with the Right and why it has been on a losing streak for the last century. One of my contentions is that the Right continually gets co-opted by other pseudo Right ideologies which ultimately subvert it and push the Overton window left. While this blog has elaborated on Nazism as an ideology with these features it isn't the only psuedo-Right ideology out there and it's worth turning our attention to the Neoconservative movement, of which Strauss was its premier theoretician.

As I've  mentioned previously on this blog, what differentiates the Rightist from his pseudo variants i.e. Conservatives, Traditionalists, Natsocs and Neocons is a commitment to reality calibration. Therefore the understanding of the nature of reality is fundamental to any conception or definition of the Right. For Western man, until recently, reality was considered to consist of both a physical and "spiritual" dimension.  This spiritual dimension was understood though the framework of Christian biblical revelation. It was this understanding which laid the foundation of Christian (Western) civilisation.

Implicit in this understanding of reality was the relationship between faith and reason. Aquinas was able to demonstrate that the unity of the two through the prior concept of truth. As faith was true, and reason aimed at the truth, there was a synergy between the two. In fact, the two worked together, purifying each from error. If reason led to a conclusion was contrary to the faith, then either our understanding of the faith was wrong or our reasoning was faulty. In the Christian conception of realty, faith and reason were intermeshed and constrained each other.

Christian civilisation developed upon this foundation with accretions from historical and local contingencies. Although the currents were there long before, the great turning point in Western Civilisation comes with the French Revolution, this is where the Jacobins ditch Christian understanding and go it alone with reason. While the disease first starts in France, by the end of the First World War, it has spread everywhere across European civilisation.

I think one of the great accidental disservices of Burke was to interpret the Revolution along temperamental lines. The Left being seen as innovators, imprudent and champions of novelties while the Right, their opposite. The real action was at the metaphysical level. The triumph of the Jacobins was the triumph of the secular over the Christian worldview. And what the Burkean interpretation has resulted in is the association of the Right and Left with temperamental qualities, whereas a more correct interpretation of it would be between Christian and Secular world views. The temperamental interpretation has also resulted in a conflation of Christian with Right and Secular with Left, whereas in reality, both Christian and Secular world views can have their Right and Left dispositional variants. With the near collapse of Christianity in the West and the rise of mass man politics, secularism is the only show in town, and choice for the "informed citizen" is between Right or Left secularism. If you want to know why Cthulhu always swims left it's because Cthulhu is secular.

Enter Strauss.

Nevertheless, Strauss's unhappiness with the Left in the Cold War period is not tantamount to a categorical rejection of all leftist or modern thought per se. As I argue for the remainder of this chapter, Strauss and his students largely agree with the traditional leftist dismissal of Christianity as an irrational influence on the political philosophy of the West. This fundamental consensus between Strauss and the Left, which has been neglected in most of the literature on Strauss, gravely affects their understanding of Anglo-American political thought. For Strauss was compelled to read out of this tradition any sign of a serious indebtedness to Christianity. Unlike the anti-democratic Far Right, which often faults Christianity for its universalist morality (e.g. charity) that made modern democracy possible, Strauss is ultimately critical of Christianity as a foundation for Anglo-American democracy because it is not sufficiently universalist (that is, intelligible to all human beings): it is sheer historicism to hold up one faith as the principal foundation of the West. As as result of this hermeneutical rationale, the very tradition that Strauss and his students wish to preserve as a  repository of rational accessible "eternal principles" is reinvented as a secular liberal artifice

Neoconservative thought is ultimately based on the notion that Christianity does not matter. In fact, Strauss's understanding of European civilisation rejects the notion, first given express formulation by Aquinas, that there is no incompatibility between the Christian faith and reason. For Strauss, faith and reason were incompatible, yet influential upon each other. Whatever Strauss's view of religion, it is clear that he felt that it had no obligatory right on reason: it existed in a separate domain. Sure, religion may be an influence, an inspiration, a tradition, etc.,  but if reason came to a conclusion separate to religion, reason had to be given its "latitude." At its best, Straussian Neoconservatism is a secularism that is "respectful" towards religion, at worst, it plays cynical lip service to it.

Indeed, Strauss's separation of faith and reason is contra to the Christian understanding of the two. Strauss may not have said much against Christianity, but the system he espouses is inherently incompatible with Christianity. In fact the lip service given to Christianity by the Neoconservative moment disguises the fact that that the secular agenda is still given primacy, and while attacks by an openly hostile Left may be easy to spot, the undermining of the Right goes unnoticed by an agent which talks about the importance of  "Athens and Jerusalem", while pushing the metaphysics of the Left.  Havers, and Gottfried clearly recognise the danger;

The importance of the dualistic hermeneutic in Strauss's thought is hard to overstate, since it makes any significant attempt to spy rationality in faith almost impossible. It also throws into question Strauss's respect for the tradition of Anglo-American democracy, whose main defenders, I shall argue, mightily attempted to distinguish "true religion" from superstitious dogma. If Strauss believes that no distinction is possible, does the religious basis for this civilization fall by the wayside? And, if this is the case, does the irreligious Left score the ultimate victory over the Right?

Bingo!  Athenian Secularism, Jacobin Secularism, Managerial Secularism, Socialist Secularism, Natsoc Secularism, Right secularism, Left secularism.......secularist market specialisation is still secularism. Cthulhu swims left because Cthulhu is a secularist.

Havers and Gottfried on Strauss

Strauss and the Straussians have succeeded in doing the opposite of German historian Ernst Nolte and, before him, Marxists credited the fascists with having produced in interwar Europe: "a counterrevolutionary imitation of the Left."  The Straussians have pulled of an equally enterprising feat by assuming a certain right-wing style without expressing a right-wing worldview.

Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.

While I was on holidays I had a chance to catch up with some reading and two books which I think are worth a mention are Paul Gottfried's, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, and Grant Havers's, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique. Both are very good and I think it is safe to say that both try to be scrupulously fair to their subject.

For those of us trying to understand why the Right failed in the 20th Century, it's important to understand the various movements that were able to co-opt the Right and subvert it from the inside. In Europe, Fascism was an example of a superficially Right wing ideology that was built on a modernist ideology. However in America where because of cultural factors Fascism really couldn't get a grip, the pseudo Right ideology that subverted the native Right took the form of Neoconservatism.

One of the impressions I'm continually left with after reading Sam Francis and the other "Paleocons" is that while they recognised the malice of Neoconservatism, they really weren't able to pin down, philosophically, the source of its malignancy. These books help clarify the issue. Of the two, I was particularly fond of Havers' book, since I felt that Haver's approach to the subject more clearly raised the issue of what it means to be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition.

In my opinion, it's important to know and understand Strauss since he was the main intellectual influence on the Neocon movement. As a consequence, the legacy of his ideas have also influenced the political Right in the U.S. and contemporary history through the application of U.S. economic and military power.

As both books attest, Strauss is unfairly blamed for a lot of things, and the slant that is given to his ideology more often than not reflects the intellectual weaknesses of his detractors rather than something Strauss is actually guilty of. In both books, the authors try to avoid this error and are scrupulously fair to Strauss, attributing to him only what he actually advocated. In their biographies, Strauss comes across as a highly intelligent man of conservative disposition,  but both authors recognise that his conservatism ends there.

Both authors do a good job describing the development of his ideas and for the purposes of this blog it is the ideas that matter. Strauss's big idea's can be summarised as follows:

1.  That there is an categorical incompatibility between reason and faith. Or as Strauss would say, "a conflict between Athens and Jerusalem"  This incompatibility arises from the fact that faith is not determined or validated by reason and therefore is not "reasonable", but something different to reason. Unlike modern Positivists, he does not actually denigrate religion for not being a product of reason, rather he sees Religion as belonging to a separate category  that is inspirational and socially utilitarian.

2.  Classical civilisation understood the world in this schema, as do Judaism and Islam to a certain degree.

3.  According to Strauss, Western Civilisation was the result of the tug of war between Athens (Reason) and Jerusalem(Faith).

4.  Christianity limited philosophy by subordinating it to faith.

5.  Modernism was a violent reaction to the Christian limitations of Reason--i.e. a reaction of reason being shackled to the faith.

6.  The solution to the crisis of Modernism was to go back to pre-Christian time, to Athenian Philosophy. Unlike the modern revolt of Reason which denied religion outright, Athenian reason was more "reasonable" and took consideration of Religion in its judgements.

7.  Philosophy helps us discern "timeless values" which while not being able to produce a perfect world may at least help us achieve the best possible one.

8.  The timeless nature of the ideals of philosophy makes philosophical insights applicable to everyone.

9.  The modern Anglo Liberal Democracy--particularly in its U.S. incarnation--is the best possible world. It is important to understand that best possible doesn't mean what Strauss would like or what would be a perfect world, it simply means the best possible given current contingencies.

Strauss's approach to the subject had enormous appeal, especially in Post WW2 America, where  a disunited Right, fearful of Communism, found an ideology which crossed sectarian divisions. By grounding Conservatism with the tradition of classical political rationalism, Straussian conservatism was open to anyone who would buy into it. Strauss's conservatism was very inclusive being global in its scope. Furthermore, Strauss's vigorous defence of liberal democracy--something which the Right was never particularly fond of-- came at at time when the free world was terrified by by the specter of Soviet totalitarianism. Strauss was literally, in the right place, at the right time, with the right product.

The problem with Strauss's approach, is that while it superficially appeared conservative, through the emphasis on the Greek Classics, Religion and Reason, anti-Communism, etc, it was anything but and a study of where Strauss goes wrong can serve as an important source of instruction or what it means to be Right and how to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Nevertheless, Strauss's unhappiness with the Left in the Cold War period is not tantamount to a categorical rejection of all leftist or modern thought per se. As I argue for the remainder of this chapter, Strauss and his students largely agree with the traditional leftist dismissal of Christianity as an irrational influence on the political philosophy of the West. This fundamental consensus between Strauss and the Left, which has been neglected in most of the literature on Strauss, gravely affects their understanding of Anglo-American political thought. For Strauss was compelled to read out of this tradition any signs of a serious indebtedness to Christianity. Unlike the anti-democratic Far Right which often faults Christianity for its universal morality (e.g. Charity) that made democracy possible, Strauss is ultimately critical of Christianity as a foundation of Anglo-American democracy because it is not sufficiently universalist. (that is, intelligible to all human beings): it is sheer historicism to hold up one faith as a principle foundation of the West. As a result of this hermeneutical rationale, that very tradition that Strauss and his students wish to preserve as a repository of rationally accessible "eternal principles" is reinvented as a secular liberal artifice whose main inspiration is Athens, not Jerusalem.

Grant Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique