Category Archives: The Modern Condition

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Testing Among the Far Right’s Theories

A guest post by commenter Bill:

Various strands of the far right are divided on both normative matters (what is the good) and positive matters (what is happening/ how does the world work). Consider specifically positive theories of US elite behavior. Why does our evil elite behave as it does?

Furthermore, consider not proximal, instrumental causes but distal, more final causes. Saying “people talk and do nonsense about gay marriage, sluts, secular materialism, etc because it is high status to do so” is true. But it’s like saying “that wall exists because a carpenter cut, positioned, and drove nails into two-by-fours in just such a way.” And, let us tease out predictions, so that one can test among theories.

The more respectable part of the far right sees its conflict with modernity as a conflict of ideas within an ethno-cultural space which is not essentially contested. Modernity is what HBD types might call a meme disease or mind virus. Bad ideas have leaked into the Western elite mind, taken it over, and ruthlessly replicated themselves. That these ideas have differential effects on different sub-populations is incidental. Interesting, perhaps; relevant, perhaps, but not central. The ideas are central.

The less respectable part of the far right sees its conflict with modernity as a conflict with people/cultures. The world is made up of ethno-cultural groupings who are inevitably in a struggle with one another. Modernity, meaning the ideas of modernity, is, for this strain of the right, just a weapon which the currently ascendant ethno-cultural group happens to be using to great effect against the currently subjugated ethno-cultural groups.

I can’t resist quoting the Illinois Nazis from the Blues Brothers: “The Jew is using the Black … against you!!” Not all people-centric rightists believe this exact thing, but this is the kind of thing they believe. Contrast this with the idea-centric rightist view that progressives are caught in a delusional thought-pattern called “liberal creationism.”

On to our prediction-generating question: Whither progressives’ solicitous attitudes towards blacks as progressives’ power continues to grow?

On the idea-centric view of progressivism, we should see these attitudes harden, expand, and be promoted more forcefully as progressives’ power waxes. These ideas are, evidently, central for them. Furthermore, the rebellion of non-elite whites has been the big impediment to their expression—the courts’ giving up on school busing, for example, was synchronous with Reagan’s victory in the early 80s. As non-elite whites lose power, so progressives gain the ability to put these ideas more into force.

On the people-centric view of progressivism, we should see these attitudes end. Blacks have been a useful hammer for destroying two rival ethno-cultural groupings: Southern whites and urban Catholics. As rigor mortis settles in to those groupings and as they additionally become irrelevant in electoral calculus, hitting them becomes pointless and costly. Even better, there is now a much more congenial brown hammer which can be deployed. So, the black hammer gets put down.

So, when the day comes when progressives are so powerful that they will never again need big black turnout to win in FL and the rust belt, we shall see which prediction is bourn out. What year? 2030 maybe? By 2050 for sure.

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Must a Traditional Man Accept Modern Marriage?

A guest post by Dalrock.

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Alan Roebuck recently asked Can Man Live Traditionally?

Alan answered yes, and went so far as to argue that a man has an obligation to marry even though this means marrying in a legal and social regime which has done all it can to eradicate traditional marriage, and even if this means marrying a woman who wouldn’t have been considered appropriate to marry by tradition minded men of past generations.

As a member of what I have dubbed the traditional marriage group within the manosphere, I asked Alan if he would be interested in me providing a response as a guest post. Alan very graciously accepted. I suggested this because while I differ in some important aspects with Alan’s position on the topic, I was impressed with his willingness to go against the grain of our thoroughly feminised culture and acknowledge the unpopular truths regarding what our society has transformed marriage into. While I think it is unlikely that opinions will be changed on either side, my hope with this exchange is that each of us will better understand the positions of the other. Continue reading →

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A Girardian Commentary on John the Baptist

For those who take an interest, Angel Millar has published my essay on Gustave Flaubert’s “Herodias,” a tale of John the Baptist, and one of the Three Tales (1877), at his People of Shambhala website.  We think of Flaubert as the consummate social novelist (Madame Bovary [1856] and A Sentimental Education [1869]), but he was also, despite not being much of a believer, a powerful religious thinker (Salammbo [1862] and The Temptation of Saint Anthony [1874]).

The essay is also a meditation on the function of the Holy Spirit.  Here is the link: http://peopleofshambhala.com/herodias-of-flaubert/

The essay explores additional themes such as the relation of mimesis and crisis and the relation of text and conscience.

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Can Man Live Traditionally?

The problem with TradCons is that it [sic] proposes men behave according to traditional behaviours while the underlying rules that supported that behavior doesn’t [sic] exist.

- A commenter at Oz Conservative

…traditionalism is a collectivist ideology.

The problem is tradcon thinking and language has been completely taken over by feminism.

-An individual calling himself “Pro-male/Anti-feminist Tech,” at his blog

It is said by many (not just the individuals quoted above) that since the traditional rules of traditional society have been overthrown, a person cannot live traditionally without incurring a severe penalty.

In response, we traditionalists say that indeed, man must always make some accommodations to his environment. But to be properly virtuous, a man or woman must not live just for himself. He must also live a life that contributes to his family, his people, his religion, and his nation.  And this can only be done by living, to a greater or lesser extent, traditionally.

The topic is large, and this post will only respond directly to one of its manifestations: It is said by some in the Manosphere that we traditionalist conservatives are betraying men by urging them to act according to traditional rules of chivalry towards women, with the result that women have the advantage over men. In brief, they say we traditionalists urge men to submit to women. Continue reading →

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It Will Take More Than Evangelism

From the popular, influential, and usually-right-on-the-money conservative Protestant blog “Pyromaniacs” comes a post that illustrates an important gap in understanding. The post is correct and important, but something is missing.

Here are some quotes:

One of the greatest dangers of the political activism of the so-called “religious right” is this: It fosters a tendency to make enemies out of people who are supposed to be our mission-field, even while we’re forming political alliances with Pharisees and false teachers.

To hear some Christians today talk, you might think that rampant sins like homosexuality and abortion in America could be solved by legislation. A hundred years ago, the pet issue was prohibition, and mainstream evangelicalism embraced the notion that outlawing liquor would solve the problem of drunkenness forever in America. It was a waste of time and energy, and it was an unhealthy diversion for evangelicals and fundamentalists during an era when the truth was under siege within the church. Lobbying for laws to change the behavior of worldly people was the last project evangelicals needed to make their prime mission in the early 20th century. Just like today. Remember Galatians 2:21: “If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.” And Galatians 3:21: “If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.” Continue reading →

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Kermit Gosnell, high priest of the American civil religion

The Kermit Gosnell case is very interesting to me. On the one hand, most people seem rightly horrified at the prospect of plunging a scalpel into a baby’s spine because mom wants to backpack across Europe next summer (or whatever). On the other hand… hello, this just is what abortion is like, as anyone can see who isn’t being medicated futilely for something. Gosnell wasn’t lying when he said that “that’s how it was supposed to go.” That’s how it goes every single time. The right’s affectation of disproportionate horror over Gosnell is more or less a tacit concession of the leftist conceit that it doesn’t really “count” as murder if the baby is on the wrong side of the birth canal.

This case is indeed a horror show, not because it’s so exceptional but because it’s so banal for us, so utterly routine.

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Esoterica in science

A guest post by commenter Bill:

Over the last century or so and especially over the last fifty years, Western elites have adopted a number of bizarre positions. These positions are held not because any evidence suggests them to be true, but, evidently, for reasons emotional, ideological, and self-interested. This, by itself, is not especially comment-worthy: people are like that.

They also, however, adhere with similar intensity to older positions: to modern philosophy, to a kind of Whiggish history, and to the machine—to the Mechanical Philosophy and the scientific program it lionizes. To themselves they are hard-headed, empirical rationalists; guardians, seekers, and producers of truth. Naturally enough, rationalists, realists, and truth-tellers deserve to be high, while spiritualists, super-naturalists, and fantasists deserve to be low. The Logos must rule.

Tensions arise when the new beliefs come into conflict with truths produced by the machine, to which they are committed by the old beliefs. The tensions are not merely internal to the heads of Liberals, either. These two belief-sets are not equally strong in all Liberals, some of them lean heavily towards the machine and some of them lean heavily towards progressivism. Since progressivism is increasingly ascendant, the machinists retreat. One way they retreat, reminiscent of the way their predecessors the alchemists retreated before them, is into esoterica. That is they retreat into producing texts whose exoteric, open meaning is false and progressive but whose esoteric, hidden meaning is true and anti-progressive.

The most accessible example of this is race denial. The renowned Stanford geneticist (and cowardly machinist), Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, in the introduction to and again in chapter 1 of his 2001 book, Genes, Peoples, and Languages says explicitly and in almost these words that human “racial” differences are unimportant and are only skin deep. The remainder of the book is a detailed refutation of these claims, which refutation, however, never notices itself as such. By two pages from the denial in chapter 1, you know that race is at least blood deep. By the end, you know it is bone deep, gene deep. Exoterically, he never admits that race exists, that it is biological, or that it is important. Esoterically, the book is almost about showing the truth of these things. Cavalli-Sforza is famous enough that his behavior has provoked learned commentary. There is a fine series of blog posts on this by the anthropologist Peter Frost beginning here, continuing here and culminating in an informative seven part series (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven).

A funny example of this came to my attention the other day over at West Hunter, the blog of the physicist-turned-anthropologist Gregory Cochran. In the linked post, Cochran talks about the work of Dan Freedman with newborns. As it turns out, newborn babies display some of the stereotypical behavior of their respective races. Newborns display large differences in their willingness to accept externally imposed discomfort. Babies rank, from most to least accepting: Navaho, Chinese, Japanese, White, Black. As it turns out, you can buy a DVD of data from the experiment, a DVD entitled Cross-Cultural Differences in Newborn Behavior. Look at the word between “cross” and “differences.”

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Say “No” to Same-Sex Pseudo-Marriage

The officially-mandated legitimization of same-sex pseudo marriage is absurd, contemptible and even evil. So naturally our ruling elite are enthusiastic about it, and the regular people are increasingly falling into line.

It therefore seems likely that homosexual pseudo-marriage will soon be enshrined into law throughout the United States. Our nation—at least most of our leadership class—is eager to defy God, nature and human tradition.

As traditionalists, we of the Orthosphere know that the legitimization of homosexuality—currently the most popular of the destructive leftist fads—is a great wrong. Let us therefore summarize the reasons why it is wrong so that those capable of acknowledging reality can at least have the satisfaction of a clear statement on this important topic.

We will not, of course, convince our opponents. And so we will not try, that is, we will not attempt to dot every “i” and cross every “t.”When someone is wrong about something as obvious as the superiority of heterosexuality to homosexuality he is not wrong because of inadequate reasoning. He is wrong either because he dares not defy the spirit of the age, or because his spirit rebels against God.

So we will simply make a series of true assertions, and not attempt to rebut every pseudo-objection raised by the other side. Continue reading →

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Forgive them, Father

… For they know not what they do.

How many of our secular interlocutors have really heard the Gospel? Very few, I wager. If they had really been praught the Gospel, had learned what the Christian religion actually teaches, then they could never think that “if all things need to be caused, what caused God?” was a serious argument. Yet they routinely trot out just such nonsense as if it were absolutely unanswerable. They have no clue that they are not even talking about the same things we are; no clue that they are engaging in mere malapropism.

But this is hardly surprising, given the post-war collapse in Christian philosophical morale. With the very officers and professors of the churches running about for the last few decades demythologizing everything they can lay hands on – a wave of iconoclasm far more radical and dangerous than we have ever seen, that has in many churches overturned even the Creeds and the Scriptures – how could anyone be serious about catechesis, or preaching the Gospel, or evangelizing?

Continue reading →