Category Archives: The Reactionary’s Situation

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The Eye of Sauron

The Behemoth Prism program, under which the Federal NSA snoops on essentially all the phone calls and web activity of all Americans, is operated for the ostensible purpose of protecting us from Moslem terrorist plots developing on American soil. We do indeed need to counter the threat of terrorism within our borders. But there would be no such terrorism in the first place – or, at least, very little – if there were no Moslems in North America. What it amounts to, then, is that our governors are keeping track of everything Americans say electronically *so that* they can keep welcoming Moslems to this country with open arms – and keep alive the threat of Moslem terrorism. The program is needed so that the program can be kept needful.

Would the Prism program exist if there were no Moslems in North America, or therefore any Moslem terrorism? Of course. It’s just that in that case our overseers would be forced to trot out some other rationale for its existence; war with EastAsia, perhaps, rather than with NearEastAsia.

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The Beat Goes On

I’ve followed up my piece at Crisis Magazine  about the New Dunciad that was linked here with suggestions for how to smarten up. Like the first piece, it was inspired by discussions at the New York Orthosphere meetup group. Basically, I say we need more of a sense of authority and the transcendent, and also a stronger element of learning through apprenticeship.

I’ve also supplemented my handwringing at Catholic World Report about What Are Catholics to Do? with part II and part III on the same topic.

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Russell Shaw on the collapse of American Catholic identity

If you haven’t heard, Russell Shaw has recently published a book, American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America, describing the remarkable collapse of Catholic identity in America over the last 50 years. I haven’t read the book yet (it’s on my list), but there’s a fascinating interview with Shaw at The Catholic World Report touching on many of the themes in his book.

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The Great Courses

A guest post by commenter Bill:

Often, it seems, traditionalists only figure out that they are traditionalists well after their youth. Certainly that is the case for me. If you realize late that the default history you know and the default reality you inhabit bear little relationship to what happened and what is happening, respectively, then what do you do?

But it is worse. Knowing little about history, art, philosophy, music and a lot about economics and statistics once seemed not just reasonable but desirable. Adam Smith’s pin factory and the benefits of specialization and all that. But now knowing little of these subjects seems absolutely intolerable. Furthermore, burdened with obligations of career and family, it’s not as if I can go back to college. And where would I go anyway? What to do?

“Read books” is fine advice. But time constraints mean that it will take a long time. Converting time spent behind a steering wheel to productive use seems wise. So, I have spent a lot of time over the last few years listening to courses from The Great Courses. Here is a list of courses I found both high quality and conflicting with consensus reality in the US:

World of Byzantium

Philosophy of Science

After the New Testament

History of Science to 1700

History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts

I have three questions for readers. First, what other courses from this or another provider are similarly both 1) good and 2) strong where consensus reality is weak? Second, I came across this specifically Catholic competitor to The Great Courses. It looks unpromising to me, but does anyone have experience with it? Third, does anyone have further general suggestions for post-formal-education autodidacticism?

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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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Where we are, and where we’re going

At the heart of the liberal enterprise is the cult of the free and equal new man, totally liberated from all bonds of authority, tradition, morality, culture, civility, and God: self-defining, self-actualizing, and self-ruling.

This anthropology of the superman is necessarily deranged, tending, as it does, toward a psychotic refusal to deal with reality on its own terms. Hence it gives us the pervert who mutilates his genitals, slips on a sundress, and calls himself a woman. The project is sinful in conception and mad in its end, and therefore doomed to failure.

But this same anthropology can never admit to the possibility of failure precisely because it cannot admit to being constrained by reality. It can only understand its failures as the result of opposition by others, and therefore it implicitly acknowledges the presence of the untermensch — literally, the low man whose captivity to the same bonds which the superman abhors makes him an impediment to the flourishing of the free and equal new man.

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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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Picking our battles

Some dogmas of the modern world are evil, and some are merely stupid.  A few might actually be true.  As reactionaries, we often face the choice of how widely to spread our quarrel.  Do we fight all the beliefs of the Leftist establishment with which we disagree, or only the evil ones?  The answer depends both on the extent of a given reactionary’s passions and also his current social status.  Is it a case of saving one’s ostracism for that one issue closest to one’s heart, or a case of already feeling so cut off from one’s fellow men that one might as well let loose on everything?

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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?

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Interest, delusion, and parrots

A guest post by commenter Bill:

Perhaps Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch  is their most iconic work. A customer brings a dead parrot back to the store from which it was bought, claiming that it was dead upon purchase. The clerk/owner responds, persistently, that the parrot is not dead. Hilarity ensues.

There is something compelling about watching parrot mongers at work: asserting the sky’s pinkness, insinuating the evil of pink-sky-deniers, frothing and threatening. It’s not just for comedy sketches. Parrot-mongers are rife. Get the parents of an ugly, stupid, clumsy, and nasty child talking. Ask, in the Art History Department, about the value of a BFA. Ask an investment banker about the value of “financial innovation.”

Parrot-mongers look foolish. Somehow, they know they look foolish. Thus, they must have a reason for their parrot-mongering. Often, as in the examples above, it is soothing their pride or resolving the dissonance between what is actually true and which truth would be in their interest. While this is not benign, one sympathizes.

When this straightforward explanation is lacking, though, what is going on? Behind the Iron Curtain, the populace generally sold parrots for the Communist elite. As Havel, Solzhenitsyn and others explain, one sold the regime’s parrots, at one level, to avoid punishment and, at another, to reassure the elite that they remained in power. Still, though, this was about interest—the regime’s interest in resolving the conflict between the elite’s mismanagement of the country and, well, their desire to remain the elite. Furthermore, it remains very easy to see the connection between the lies, the people telling the lies, the elite mandating the lies, and the elite’s interest motivating the lies.

Putting the Communists to shame, the US is overrun with parrot mongers. But, in our case, the connection back to the interest of the elite motivating this is much less apparent. Whose interests are served by the race denial parrot? By the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming parrot? By the war between religion and science parrot? By the blank slate and gender equality parrots?

Commenters on the right, whether secular or religious and whether neo or paleo, have tended to take as our task refutation of the parrot-mongers. We have decided to be John Cleese. While this has value, pace the Asch conformity experiment, it seems overdone. It seems as if we, like John Cleese as consumer or like Charlie Brown as placekicker, are taking our tormenters at their word where their word is clearly not good.

If treating the parrot-mongers as honestly deluded is mistaken, then treating them as dishonestly interested in fooling us is better. But, then, what’s their program? Cui bono? And what is the right countermove?