Tuesday, March 31, 2020

The Plowman In The Library

 By Fullmoon Ancestry

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Plowman from Dance of Death, 1524-26.




I’ve spent the last 21 days in quarantine. To be honest, staying inside these last three weeks has been relatively easy for me. After all, I spent most of my time in college by myself reading books in the university library. Looking back at my experience in college, I think my real education came not from the lectures or assigned readings, but from the books I decided to read on my own out of interest and curiosity. One such book was a prose version of Piers Plowman, the 14th-century poem attributed to William Langland. In many ways, the themes of this poem reflect both my times in college and the last three weeks spent inside my home during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

When I was a teenager, I didn’t want to go to college. I didn’t really enjoy high school, but that was mostly because my high school seemed like a daycare for non-whites who would have otherwise been out in public committing crimes. And while I enjoyed writing stories and playing heavy metal music as a teenager, I may not have been mature or committed enough to go to a music school or a writing program. If I had any career plan as a teen, I remember wanting to become a car salesman after high school as it seemed interesting and I thought I would be good at it.

Naturally, my mom wanted the best for me, so she insisted that I go to college. She even helped me apply for scholarships and supported me for the four years it took to get a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t know what field I wanted to major in or study, so I just picked History as that seemed the most appealing to me. At the time, I thought that it didn’t matter what major I selected. I just thought that having any college degree would get me a fancy job after graduation.

The bright side was that I was able to find a state university where the student population was overwhelmingly white. Of course, being a metalhead and the son of a police officer who was well-versed on the differences in racial crime-statistics, I quickly realized that I didn’t have much in common with the typical, liberal-minded college student. I also started to become aware of the anti-white propaganda in many of the required courses, particularly the mandatory sociology, anthropology, and introductory history courses.

As much as I disliked high school, I now appreciate the fact that my high-school teachers were too busy disciplining the non-white students to spread much of the anti-white propaganda that is now part of the public educational curriculum. Looking back, my first two years of college were a mix of classes that talked about white privilege, white colonialism, and systemic racism. I also started to notice that most of the professors of these required courses were of a certain ethnic background. Not surprisingly, it was these certain professors that pushed the anti-white propaganda the most. I was very naïve during my first year, as I always tried to present crime statistics and historical nuance to the diatribes the professors spewed against European history, culture, and people.

It was my sociology professor in my freshman year that really gave me a rude awakening. After countering the professor’s claims that European settlers knowingly engaged in biological warfare by giving infected blankets to Native Americans, she told me after class that if I continued to question her “authority and knowledge” that I would be kicked out of the class and given a failing grade. From then on, I kept my mouth shut and wrote exactly what I was expected to write in all my essays and exams.

This is why for the longest time I have looked back in anger and resentment on my college experience. None of my teachers ever taught or encouraged me to think for myself or to think critically. The only critical thinking they encouraged was against “dead, racist white men.” They only wanted me to remember their theories and regurgitate them (preferably verbatim) on the following writing assignments or exams.

Yes, I know what you’re probably thinking. I shouldn’t have chosen a liberal arts major because that is simply how undergraduate, survey classes are set up and structured. Or perhaps you might be thinking, “if you didn’t like college, why didn’t you just leave?” To that, I would say that at the time, everyone like my mom and myself assumed that getting a college degree, even a bachelor’s, would allow any person to get a decent job. So for four years, in order to get a good job after college, I kept my mouth shut, my head down, and wrote and said everything my professor expected of me. Even if it meant repeating a lot of anti-white propaganda.

You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here.

Without any friends I could socialize or share my true thoughts and beliefs with, I spent most of my time in the library. Once I was finished with my assignments and studying, I decided that I would make the most of my college library and see if there were any books that I might find interesting. That’s when I started reading various works of European literature available in the library that were published by Penguin Classics.

Before changing their design a few years ago, Penguin Classics were color-coded on the spines of each book: purple being the works of Greek and Roman antiquity, yellow for the literature of the Middle Ages, and red for the works of the renaissance. What originally caught my eye were all the Icelandic Sagas, which were all coded in yellow. As I reached for Njal’s Saga, a book that was next to it fell to the ground. As I picked up the book and glanced at the cover it quickly caught my interest, so I sat down and started reading it. The book was Piers Plowman.

Piers Plowman is an epic poem written in the late 14th century by an obscure English cleric who historians believe to be William Langland. The poem is a mix of Christian allegory and social satire, which discusses the meaning of life in relation to fate and destiny. The main character and narrator, Will, represents the common man and the “will” of the human spirit. The story occurs in eight dreams. In each of the dreams, Will searches for three characters that will teach him how to live an ideal Christian life. These three characters are Dowel (do well), Dobet (do better), and Dobest (do best). In each of the dreams, Will often interacts with a plowman by the name of Piers, who is often at the center of events and represents different themes in each dream, from salvation and sacrifice to patience and penitence. While it is unknown whether the poem has an official ending or conclusion, the final dream has Will on a pilgrimage to find Piers the Plowman, only to run into the personifications of old age, pestilence, and death.

I always had a hard time understanding philosophy books and perhaps that is the reason that Piers Plowman made such an impact on me. It seems that many philosophers try to define what things the three allegorical characters in Piers Plowmanrepresent: namely, how to consistently do good, strive to be better, and remain motivated to be the best. I’ve often asked myself: did my years in college make me a person who does well, strives to be better, and has the motivation to be the best I can be?

During my college years, I read almost every work of European literature that I could find in the university library: ancient historians like Herodotus and Procopius, Scandinavian biographies like the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, and other epic poems like the Song of Roland. I enjoyed immersing myself in the great works of our history, our culture, and our people. In this regard, I made a commitment to read a certain amount of pages each day, try to read a little more and a little faster each day, while having the overall goal of reading all the classic works of European literature that caught my interest. So while we can debate whether college made me a more skilled person or not, I will say that having the time and access to reading so many great works of Western literature is something that has definitely enriched my life for the better.

I wouldn’t say that I am against education, but I will say that college is not for everyone and should not be for everyone. Higher education was designed for a small elite of each society who would both appreciate the education process while also having the aptitude to utilize and apply what they learned to better their societies. In our modern times, colleges have become an over-bloated industrial complex that cares more about racial quotas and creating debt than maintaining educational standards. And even though I hated the anti-white propaganda that was preached in my college days, my younger friends tell me that their current classes and professors are far worse. After hearing their horror stories, I think I got off easy.

As I have spent the last three weeks in quarantine, I have often been reminded of the many nights I spent reading books alone in the library during my college years. Of all the books I read, Piers Plowman is the book I’ve thought about the most. It was written during a period of plagues and revolts. During these uncertain times, it reminds me that if I can find inspiration in reading about a plowman in the library, we can find hope in the most unexpected places and things. I strive each day to be a positive influence in the Dissident Right, and improve the work I do as a nationalist while staying motivated in helping our people embrace white identity politics.

You don’t need a fancy degree to see that the future belongs to us. But my mom putting me through college definitely didn’t hurt.

The Gift Of Corona

                              By Jef Costello

                                     


I arrived at the gym the other night at 7:50 p.m. only to be told: “By the way, we’re closing in ten minutes.” The governor had ordered all gyms to close at 8:00 that night and to remain closed until further notice. I was the last guy to hear, apparently. This was the climax in a series of events that led to my finally recognizing the gift of Corona.

I had been in a state of denial for a couple of weeks. I am still not convinced that the whole thing isn’t being massively overblown (as I argued here.) But I had thought I might be able to get through this crisis, as I had many other national crises, without being personally inconvenienced. The first clue that I was wrong came when I made the mistake of looking at my stock portfolio. Ouch. Then there was the trip to the grocery store, where half the shelves were empty. No meat, no milk, no eggs, practically no frozen dinners. And, of course, no toilet paper.

Then the conferences I was planning to attend in the next couple of months got canceled. The release of the new James Bond film was delayed until November (not a great disappointment, as I was awaiting this film with some trepidation; the rumor is that it’s “woke”). Then my workplace shut down, and I’m now working from home. My travel plans to Europe are on hold, due to Trump’s ban. My accountant called the other day saying he’s refusing to meet with anyone; I have to fax him all my tax stuff, or deliver it to his office. All the restaurants and bars have closed, and there’s talk the subways and busses could be shut down.

Nevertheless, through it all, I had taken consolation in the thought that I could still go to the gym and work out. I had planned to take hand sanitizer with me (yes, I have some — and I will entertain all reasonable offers). I also considered wearing latex gloves under my weightlifting gloves and wiping down all the equipment with disinfectant napkins (which the gym provides). Yes, I was willing to risk catching the Coronavirus by going to the gym four or five nights a week. Staying healthy is a priority. But a bigger priority is not losing my gains.

And so when I was turned away from the gym that night, I left in a kind of daze. The prospect of not being able to set foot there, conceivably for weeks or months, was a major downer. Yet as I drove home in silence (I didn’t even feel like turning on the radio), the airhead at the desk who had sent me away started to seem like an angel dispatched by the Almighty to deliver the message I needed to hear: You can’t control this. Your life is going to be affected, perhaps radically. You are facing the great unknown, and you have no idea what the future will bring.

You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here

Now, this goes entirely against the grain for me. I like to be in control — and I mean in control of everything. I like my routine, and I do not like surprises. For decades now, I have begun each year with an elaborate plan for improving my life. It has never been an exercise in futility; I did not keep doing this year after year because I failed to keep my promises to myself. In fact, I accomplish the majority of my goals and resolutions. The ones I don’t accomplish “come forward” (as my accountant likes to say) to the next year. This became a kind of addiction: the prospect of not having a “life plan” felt like that scene in Fight Club where Tyler takes his hands off the steering wheel and allows the car to cross into oncoming traffic, then over a barricade and into a ravine. So, despite having promised my readers I was swearing off “life planning” here, I continued.

For 2020, I pulled out all the stops. I resolved to make major changes in my life: breaking bad habits, writing more than ever, reading more, gaining more muscle than I’ve ever gained, thoroughly cleaning and re-arranging my apartment, etc. Everything was going swimmingly until a couple of weeks ago. “A couple of weeks ago.” My, how strange that sounds. For it feels like months, maybe years. Everything has changed dramatically in that short time, and nothing may ever be the same again. I sure as hell picked the wrong year to give up drinking. Yes, that actually was one of my resolutions, which I managed to keep until the real Corona hysteria set in two weeks ago and I felt my anxiety level rising to previously unscaled heights.

But another of my habits (one of the better ones) is a radical commitment to making lemonade out of lemons. This is coupled with a deep but admittedly irrational commitment to something like Providence. In other words, I am predisposed to think that things are happening for some reason or purpose, and that apparent crises or calamities may be opportunities dropped deliberately into my lap (by whom or what I do not know). I have a tendency to believe in “signs” and not to believe that there are such things as coincidences. So, on that melancholy drive home after being turned away at the gym, I began to ask myself what opportunities this Corona calamity might present for me. Was there an opportunity here for growth? Should I surrender to this situation and to the fact that I had no control over it? Should I take my hands off the steering wheel?

Arriving home, I mixed myself a Skinny Bitch(my favorite drink) and settled in to watch Tucker Carlson’s coverage of Coronavirus. Boy, was I in for it. Gloom, despair, and agony on me. Deep dark depression, excessive misery. Under normal circumstances, a major black pill. But as I watched and as I drank (sipping slowly) I became strangely exhilarated. All hell really seems to be breaking loose. But it’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? As Greg Johnson has argued, Coronavirus is going to change the world. Could this be the end of globalism and open borders? Could Corona usher in a new era of nationalism, protectionism, and xenophobia? The prospect is thrilling.

Not so thrilling is what Corona could do to me personally. It could wipe out my retirement money. It could seriously affect the industry I work in, and possibly put me out of a job. It could kill my beloved landlady (who is in one of the high-risk groups) and render me homeless. It could kill friends and family. And, lastly, it could kill me — though I’m not too worried about that, since I’m relatively young and healthy. For the first time in my cushy and privileged life, I am facing an uncertain and possibly grim future. I’ve never had it this bad. Everything I’ve ever counted on seems like it may be unraveling. Still, I am excited.

As Duke Leto says to Paul in Dune,  “A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.” It looks like I needed a killer virus to wake me up to the fact that I’m bored with my routine and with my complex plans for improving my life. The future does frighten me, but suddenly I feel more alive.

I’ve always had a good bit of difficulty justifying the having of “fun.” If it doesn’t somehow serve some important purpose, you’re not likely to convince me it’s a good use of my time. Yet suddenly now I find myself taking more pleasure in little things, like how food tastes. I haven’t actually sat down and just watched a movie for pleasure in a long time. Now I want to use my time in Corona isolation to do precisely that. I find myself thinking more about my friends, and appreciating them more. I want to get in touch with people I haven’t talked to in a long time. I think about the older folks I know, and worry about them. Oddly, I also feel cheerful. When out stocking up on groceries and toilet paper, I’ve been friendlier to people, smiling at them from behind my surgical mask. The mild depression I had been experiencing for several weeks seems to have abated. It was brought on by a few minor bad things that were just getting me down. I guess it took something really bad to snap me out of it. I am an odd duck, there is no question about it.

“Social distancing” isn’t that much of a problem for me; I’ve been practicing it for years. In fact, I could teach a master class on social distancing (though I would have to teach it remotely). You see, I don’t need that much of a social life, and I don’t mind staying home. Nevertheless, the idea that I must stay home rankles me. And now that the threat of Corona seems to have made me feel more alive, suddenly I’m itching to get out. Oddly enough, I want to go to the beach on a sunny day. This is very much out of character for me, and it’s still too cold here to go to the beach. I can now understand why some people in the Middle Ages responded to the Black Death by going on multi-day benders. When facing death, life tastes a lot sweeter. But you may rest assured that I am far too prudent to act on these impulses: for the foreseeable future, I am staying home, alone.

A part of me very different from the part that wants to go to the beach keeps saying “turn inward, turn inward”: use this isolation as a time for introspection and self-development. One of my new year’s resolutions was to “devote as much time and effort to the care of my soul as I do to the care of my body.” And with the gift of Corona, I can do that. My commute time has been completely eliminated. I can, therefore, do both a morning and an evening meditation. I can finally go through and practice all the spiritual exercises in Evola’s Introduction to Magic. Perhaps I’ll even have time for the exercises in Mastering Astral Projection, which I bought in 2018 and still haven’t read. I may be astrally visiting you in the wee hours, at some point in the near future. Perhaps you should do some tidying up.

You can buy Jef Costello’s The Importance of James Bond here

I can use Corona isolation to return to things I have neglected in life, and even to work on some of my other ambitious resolutions. I can get to work on cleaning my apartment, for example, and get back to studying Old Norse. The closure of my gym is still bothering me, but I can work out at home. I’ve got some dumbbells and kettlebells. I’ve got P90XRushfitYou Are Your Own Gym, etc. I used to do bodyweight exercises: pushups, situps, pullups. I can go back to all that. Maybe I won’t lose my gains (“just do more reps,” a friend full of bro wisdom advised me). But why think small? Maybe I could use this as an opportunity to get in even better shape. I could do a.m. cardio workouts and p.m. weight workouts. I could finally go through the program in that book that’s been gathering dust on my shelf for years, 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: I am by no means making light of the present crisis. I am well aware that I am one of the luckier ones. I am not in one of the high-risk groups, and I know there are many people with far more to worry about than shuttered gyms and ruined European vacation plans. Nevertheless, I have to confront this crisis from my own position in life, as the kind of person I am, for better or worse. And I have to find some way to deal with it and all the inconveniences, uncertainties, and fears that it produces. My way is to use it as an opportunity for personal growth — for self-overcoming.

For the last year or so, I thought about writing an essay called “Anarchy with Full Benefits.” I love the title, and the essay itself would have been a discussion of my desire to see the present system collapse, but without being personally inconvenienced when it does. It’s not an attitude I can defend rationally, but I also think that it is quite natural. I know I cannot have anarchy with full benefits. I know that if what we have all hoped for actually came to pass, it would mean the radical upheaval of every area of life, and every single person, myself included, would be dramatically affected. Over the years I have entertained many scenarios for how the globalist, multi-culturalist, open borders, PC hegemony might be mortally wounded. I just never thought a virus might do it. Then again, as I discussed in my last essay, history teaches us that often completely unexpected events are the ones that prove decisive for change.

But what would I do if the unthinkable happened? If I got sick or my friends started getting sick and dying? If I lost everything? If our society collapsed into lawlessness? Could I cope with this, or would I lose my grip? I haven’t a clue. But I may very well find out. I honestly don’t want to find out — but, on the other hand, never being tested isn’t a good thing either. And I know that that strange exhilaration I am feeling lately must be some deeper part of myself welcoming this terrible uncertainty — and both the political and personal opportunities it brings.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!

                        By James J. O'Meara

                                     


“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Pascal, Pensées 139


“Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10


To paraphrase that great statesman of an earlier national crisis, our long national nightmare has only just begun. Continuing the mood of political nostalgia, I find this latest “moral equivalent of war” leaves my withers (whatever they are) unwrung.

“Keep six feet away” has always been my motto, at least when dealing with Boobus Americanus. Bars closed? Great, I’ll no longer be tempted to pay a 600% markup. Restaurants? Just as Obama boasted of having a pen and a phone, I have a range and a refrigerator, thank you very much. Theaters closed? Oh, how will I get my shekels to the elite that hates me?

Speaking of shekels and hateful elites, the people who seem most worried are the political class. Desperate to save their phony-baloney jobs, they are caught between a rock and a hard place: if people go out, voters will die (not that that has ever been much of a problem for Democrats); if they stay home, the economy will collapse, and the run on water and toilet paper will be replaced by one on torches and pitchforks.

One aspect of this, however, triggered off another burst of nostalgia: the command to stay home if your job isn’t “essential”:

The morning after California laid out the most restrictive measures to combat the virus in the US, NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday laid out new measures for New York State to combat the coronavirus outbreak, imposing new restrictions like ordering “100% of the workforce” to stay home.

During this time, Cuomo is ordering all businesses in the state that aren’t deemed “essential” to close, and added that though public transit will remain open for people who need it to travel to their ‘essential’ jobs, and to get to places like hospitals and doctors’ offices and grocery stores and pharmacies, he urged New Yorkers to only take the trains if absolutely necessary. Cuomo also clarified that bank ATMs are an ‘essential’ service.

All non-essential businesses must close, Cuomo and NYC Mayor de Blasio have said that the state will find better ways to accommodate essential employees who need childcare or other things. But Cuomo threatened to fine businesses and individuals caught breaking the rules.

“These are not helpful hints. . . they will be enforced. There will be a civil fine and mandatory closure for any business that is not in compliance. Again, your actions can affect my health, that’s where we are. There is a social compact that we have. . . we must make society safe for everyone,” Cuomo said about the executive action that he’s preparing to sign.

Then, in a move sure to delight those on the Dissident Right who have condemned the obsession with n*ggerball:

When it comes to exercise, though gyms will be closed, Cuomo said New Yorkers can engage in ‘solitary’ activities like jogging, but said games of pickup basketball and team sports like that won’t be permitted.

We’ll get back to those “solitary activities” in a bit. For now, let me recall that during my time in what Taki calls “The Big Bagel,” there were about three occasions when mammoth snowstorms hit, leaving the city — or at least Manhattan — completely impassable. As with 9/11, and the pandemic today, the mayor would appear at numerous press conferences, making all kinds of “cover my ass” announcements — the outer boroughs smolder under the reasonable impression that they get the short end of any emergency, especially snow and garbage removal, which has ended more than one mayor’s tenure — including the demand that “non-essential” workers stay home.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book Green Nazis in Space! here.

When all was “normal” again I would point out in a move that likely did not endear me to employers or co-workers that the logic of the mayor’s tactic — reduce transit and energy usage to the minimum by only conducting “essential” work — surely implied that the vast majority of our jobs were, literally, useless. [1]

For some reason — just wait for it! — the idea just didn’t sit well, with either bosses or co-workers. And it still doesn’t, as we can see on a national — international! — scale today. Politicians, CEOs, and media hacks all seem either mildly censorious, outright condemnatory, or downright disgusted with the idea of paying people for not working; yet they must, [2] for otherwise — irony of ironies — the economy itself would implode.

And supplementing this, ingenuous or not, is the idea that they’re just looking out for the peoples’ best interests: the puritanical conservatives, libertarian or trad, mutter about “moral hazard” or smugly observe that “idle hands are the Devil’s playground,” while progs quote Stalin: “The worker is paid for his work, not his needs.” [3]

And the people, for their part, seem just as conflicted; rejoicing at first at the idea of endless snow days, yet terrified of facing them without sportsball, liquor, or full-strength Netflix.

It seems clear that worker and boss both see themselves as living in a world of work, a world of “total work.” Work is the default position, leavened and seasoned by a minimal amount of rest, leisure, “time off,” so as to tune-up the worker for further work.

Why and whence the angst over work, or rather, the lack thereof? Maybe the lockdown is just the time we need to stop and think — as we’ll see, two related concepts.

We can take our bearings from an earlier, perhaps analogous period. Writing in 1947 Europe — specifically, the former Germany — when reconstruction and getting back to business as usual were on everyone’s mind, and with the implicit victory of the American-style capitalist system over a formerly Classical/Christian Europe, Josef Pieper dared to question the world of “total work.” [4]

To call a worldview into question requires some kind of alternative, and Pieper has one ready to hand in what was, in fact, the traditional worldview of the Classical period and its continuation in the Catholic Middle Ages.

Since the modern view has reached the point of becoming totalitarian, conceiving of even knowledge as the province of an “intellectual worker,” Pieper starts from there, the extreme and most characteristic development.

In the traditional view knowledge involved both active reasoning (ratio) and passive contemplation (intellectus). For the modern, as we see perhaps first and most clearly in Kant, knowledge is solely the product of action, in fact, a struggle — it is hard work; and moreover, the hardness thereof is even a sign or guarantee of its validity. [5] In the third place, it is purely a social function, the “intellectual worker” is just another functionary, the value of his work derived purely from its usefulness to society.

From this, we can distill the general characteristics of work: effort, sacrifice (the value of the difficult as such), and usefulness. Now, the traditional view of knowledge dissents from each of these factors: it is passive, receptive, like a gift, an opening up to reality; it is justified by its success in reaching the reality of things; and it is an end in itself — thus free (as in “liberal arts”), the knowledge of a gentleman rather than the training of a functionary; [6] even, dare one say it, useless. [7] From this, we can deduce that for the traditional view, the central concept is not work, but. . . leisure[8]

Now we’re talking! So what is this leisure, anyway?

Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being “busy,” but letting things happen.

Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as [sacrifice], leisure appears (secondly) in its character as an attitude of contemplative “celebration” . . . Leisure is possible only on the premise that man consents to his own true nature and abides in concord with the meaning of the universe. . .

And thirdly, leisure stands opposed to the exclusive ideal of work qua social function. A break in one’s work. . . is still part of the world of work. It is a link in the chain of utilitarian functions. The pause is made for the sake of work and in order to work, and a man is not only refreshed from work but for work. Leisure is an altogether different matter; it is no longer on the same plane; it runs at right angles to work — just as it could be said that intuition [the aforesaid intellectus] is not the prolongation or continuation, as it were, of the work of the ratio, but cuts right across it, vertically. [9]

In sum:

The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without a breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man — and that means that he should not be wholly absorbed in the clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function; the point is also that he should retain the faculty of grasping the world as a whole and realizing his full potentialities as an entity meant to reach Wholeness.

Because Wholeness is what man strives for, the power to achieve leisure is one of the fundamental powers of the human soul. Like the gift for contemplative absorption in the things that are, and like the capacity of the spirit to soar in festive celebration, the power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of the workaday world and reach out to superhuman, life-giving existential forces that refresh and renew us before we turn back to our daily work.

[The] truly human values are saved and preserved because leisure is the means whereby the sphere of the “specifically human” [the world of work] can, over and again, be left behind.

I hope that at last, the relevance of this discussion to our situation is coming into focus; leisure is that uniquely human faculty whereby one can remove oneself from the tedious world that is too much with us, and also (among other things) provide the perspective that allows it to be critiqued; in fact, leisure is itself that ideal, utopian, effectively superhuman state whose opposite is the workday world.

Perhaps the most direct connection of Pieper’s discussion to our current situation is in one of his most remarkable passages, where he distinguishes leisure from idleness; indeed, in the traditional understanding of the Deadly Sin of acedia, idleness is the inability to rest in, and give thanks for, what one is — and this inability to have leisure is the restlessness that is the root of both obsessive work and our frenetic “leisure activities” (a gross oxymoron that Pieper never had to deal with), both of which have been taken from us. [10]

Another neologism he might have appreciated, if not approved, of is “bugman,” and this description of the bugman shows how almost startlingly up to date Pieper’s account is:

While he may carry himself with an air of intellectual and moral superiority, the bugman has stopped asking the big questions. He can distantly recall the sense of awe he felt as a child, those times looking up at the stars and the moon; those times reflecting on his ancestry, where he came from, the history and traditions of mankind and the wild beauty of Earth. Now his mind is so distracted by pixelated inanity, trash culture and his ridiculous job that he cannot, for the love of God, simply sit and thinkHe can no longer be at peace or derive joy from nature and blissful simplicity. He feels frustration over his powerlessness to bring an end to the mysterious forces chipping away at his soul day by day, but does nothing about it. And so he remains, indefinitely and emphatically, a small-souled bugman. [11]

And just a few days ago Fenek Solèrediscussed Albert Camus’ novel The Plague(also 1947!) and quoted this description of the proper citizens of the “ugly and smug little port town” of Oran:

Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, “doing business.” Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible.

“Pieper’s message for us is plain,” wrote Allen Tate in his New York Times review, [12] and I hope I have conveyed some of that here as well; if not — and even if so — I urge you to read Pieper for yourself. He has a real gift for conveying the most rarified ideas of classical and medieval thought in everyday language (even if translated from German!). [13]

But as Pieper addresses the needs of a time of reconstruction, let us return to our current situation.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book The Eldritch Evolahere.

Counter-culture writers, along with most of the Dissident Right, are quick and insistent in pointing out how this plague is the result of globalization: open borders, immigration, diversity, outsourcing manufacturing (of masks or medicine), anti-racism (“Hug an Asian!”), etc.

But whether designed by them or not, our elites plan to use the plague as an excuse or cover for many of their least popular ideas, such as a cashless, all-digital economy (here in Stars Hollow, even food trucks no longer accept cash — filthy lucre!) The Democrats’ “Put a Bird on It” recovery proposal is stuffed with all their hobby horses and patent medicines — want a bailout? Freeze executive salaries and put a tranny on the board! Borders that couldn’t be closed to immigrants and refugees are being sealed against citizens leaving. The government “needs” access to everyone’s cell phone data to follow up on positive tests.

All of which is premised on the idea that people are so spooked and desperate as to be willing to accept anything that promises a return to “the way things were,” or at least a cleaned-up simulacrum thereof that’s “just as good, and even better, if you really think about it.” It assumes, in short, we are mired in idleness, incapable of having leisure, of being still, and desperate for the return of work and “leisure activities.”

Is there an alternative? A recent viral (sic venia verbo) video showed someone supposedly shouting “flatten the curve!” at fellow citizens daring to “violate” the lockdown. I say “supposedly” because, through several decades in the Big Bagel, I never heard — or heard of — anyone shouting demands from their windows; people only think it’s a thing because of the movie Network.

But Network may be suggestive here. [14]Though appearing in 1976, the message that drives those people to scream from their windows seems relevant today:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’

Howard Beale, the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” has a proposed solution, of an equally desperate sort:

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’

Well, Pieper would agree that we need to rediscover, accept, and reassert our God-given value as human beings. But for Pieper, this requires, and produces, quiet contemplation, stillness, and mutual celebration — whether religious ritual or family dinner. Ultimately, Beale’s solution — jumping up and shouting from the windows — is no solution, only more restless, frenetic activity. Ned Beatty’s Mr. Jensen, CEO, arrives, gives an even more Biblical speechabout the inevitable and irresistible and adorable nature of Globalism, and easily intimidates Beale into becoming a shill for the Establishment. [15]

Other solutions? By purest coincidence, I suppose, the beginning of this end occurs around the time of Ernst Jünger’s birthday (March 29). He had another solution: if the world of Total Work is inevitable, can it be détourned into a means for our transcendence? John Morgan has described Jünger’s 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker; only recently translated into English) as an attempt at proposing a way forward within the world of total work, thus:

He did not use the concept of “the Worker” in a Marxist, classist sense, but rather as an archetype: the Worker is man engaged in any sort of productive or creative endeavor. [One must imagine this “creative workers” being Pieper’s “intellectual worker.”] Jünger believed that the industrial processes which had shaped and supported the impersonal killing fields of the First World War were soon to be implemented across the world, in all fields, and that the individual was doomed to be swallowed up in the processes of collectivization. For Jünger, this would be a world dominated entirely by impersonal forces in which all traditional values would be destroyed in favor of the value of material goods: mass production and consumption. In short, it would be a world made up of nothing but numbers. However, Jünger did see a possible upside to this disturbing vision: he also predicted the rise of a new race of Worker-Titans, Faustian men who would use these new powers as a means of achieving superhuman aims. Humanity as we know it would be destroyed, but the Titans of the future might give rise to something new and more powerful, attaining god-like status.

In other words, ride the tiger to new glory! (Julius Evola, in fact, devoted a whole big book, as yet untranslated, to Der Arbeiter). Jünger’s Worker seems pretty popular among the Nouvelle Droiters, especially Venner andDe Benoist (who might even be described as obsessed with it for a time); but Heidegger dismissed it as no better than the nihilism it purported to supplant. [16]

Personally, I — and I think most people — have heard quite enough of the whole “rice of super pipple” talk, [17] from Nietzsche to Transhumanists, for a while now; like most postwar Germans, Josef Pieper certainly had heard enough. Jünger’s Worker, in fact, is cited by Pieper at the start as the kind of “conception of ‘man’” or “archetype,” as Morgan says, that he will be examining; later his notion of “seeing as ‘an act of aggression’” will be compared unfavorably to the traditional valorizing of contemplation; yet again, even his prose style will be derided as part of the problem, not the solution. [18]Jünger is, for Pieper, a very Bad Hombre.

But to get back to Beale; perhaps getting mad is the solution, after all. But a different kind of madness, a different kind of expression than shouting: the madness that Plato characterized as philosophy. In the accompanying essay, “The Philosophical Act,” a meditation on the “divine madness” Plato discerned in both poetry and philosophy, Pieper asks:

But all the same, just try to imagine that all of a sudden, among the myriad voices in the factories and on the market square (Where can we get this, that or the other?) — that all of a sudden among those familiar voices and questions another voice were to be raised, asking: “Why, after all, should there be such a thing as being? Why not just nothing?”– the age-old, philosophical cry of wonder that Heidegger calls the basic metaphysical question! [19] Is it really necessary to emphasize how incommensurable philosophical inquiry and the world of work are? Anyone who asked that question without warning in the company of people whose minds hinge on necessities and material success would most likely be regarded as crazy[20]

What we need to do is the use this time — no work, no school, no sports, no bars and restaurants (even those lovely ethnic ones) — for our own purposes; to turn away from the workaday world, the dream world of news, weather, and sports, and regain that contemplative approach to the world that alone makes us fully, or really, human, and on that basis able to mount an effective resistance.

Maybe the Spring Break covidiots aren’t entirely crazy. [21]

Notes


[1] An idea later canonized as “Bullshit Jobs.” Ironically, critics have pointed out that the viral original article, subsequently blown up into the inevitable book, is mostly just a bunch of anecdotes; thus, it is itself, bullshit.

[2] Ro-Man: I cannot – yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do “must” and “cannot” meet? Yet I must – but I cannotRobot Monster (Phil Tucker, 1953).

[3] For conservatives, this is what Greg Johnson calls the “Republican dad script;” see his “How Coronavirus Will Change the World.”

[4] Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture(Pantheon, 1948); new translation by Gerald Malsbary with an Introduction by Roger Scruton (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998). I’m quoting from the original 1948 translation, not only because it’s the one I have from school, but in a stroke of technological irony, it’s the one available on Kindle, hence easier to cite here.

[5] On the Dissident Right, we see this in the IQ fetishists and HBD nerds. Looking at the dangerous disarray of academia, they attribute this to “soft” liberal arts and counsel turning things over to “hard” STEM graduates. They actually despise the liberal arts, supposedly because they require less IQ. That this is exactly what produced the corruption of the liberal arts and social sciences seems to escape them, as does the contradiction involved in believing that “only hard sciences matter” while bemoaning the effects on society of the Frankfurted academia. It’s morbidly amusing to seem them squeal as diversity and wokeness are gradually imposed on their STEM faculties (James Watson, for example). The same mentality is found among wignats who welcome immigrants as long as they are “high IQ” STEM students and workers. Pieper’s discussion of the essential role of the liberal arts (whose very name, artes liberales, derives from this traditional concept of knowledge), is worth study on its own.

[6] Chapter 3 of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (also 1948), “Fragmentation and Obsession,” gives an excellent account of the original notion of a liberal education — what Cardinal Newman called “the education of a gentleman” — and would be a useful prolegomenon to Pieper; see my review here.

[7] Although it may be true, as Aquinas says, that it is good for society that some devote themselves to contemplation, that is not the goal of contemplation.

[8] As Pieper notes right at the start, the Greeks and Romans knew not work and leisure but leisure and “not-leisure” (a-skoliafrom skolia [hence, as we’ve seen, “school”) and negotium).

[9] One might call it a kind of “madness,” as we’ll see.

[10] In the linguistic terms we just saw, there is leisure and non-leisure; the latter encompasses both “work” and restless activities that we fill our “non-working” hours with.

[11] Ex Ignum Sapientiae, The Alt-Right-Hand Path (Kindle, 2018); see my review here. Of course, this similarity is not surprising, as Pieper is a prominent and frequently quoted source of Sap’s doctrines.

[12] Back in the days when real scholars reviewed real books in the Times, rather than woke scholars riding the latest diversity hobbyhorses.

[13] As I’ve mentioned before, Pieper’s little book was the sole text in my Introduction to Philosophy class, taught by a Thomist Texan, the rather Peter O’Toolish John Underwood Lewis. A search on Academia.edu shows that even now it shows up as a text in similar classes at similar small, provincial colleges, although they likely do not have Prof. Lewis’s luxury — due to the eccentric organization of Canadian higher learning at the time — of devoting two entire semesters to it. Prof. Lewis even refused to join a faculty strike, on the Pieperian grounds that “I’m not a working man.”

[14] See Trevor Lynch’s appreciation here; reprinted in Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies; edited by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

[15]

Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU. . . WILL. . . ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that. . . perfect world. . . in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

[16] “In advocating a techno-economic mobilization against the bourgeois order for the sake of overcoming its atomizing differentiations, Martin Heidegger, for one, thought Der Arbeiter’s technological orientation was just another example of the nihilism that had issued from World War I. Venner, by contrast, argues that the book can be read as a defiance of nihilism, to the degree it sought to turn nihilism’s technological arms against itself.” Michael O’Meara, “Another European Destiny: Dominique Venner’s Ernst Jünger: Un autre destin européen.”

[17] A pet peeve of Mike Nelson, from MST3k’s 1993 take on Lugosi’s original (Bride of the Monster) to the Rifftrax version of Island of Dr. Moreau in 2006 (for more on Brando’s performance, see my review of The Color Out of Space).

[18] “[The] characteristically precise style and thought of Ernst Jünger, with his fanaticism for the truth — who really seems to tear the mystery out of a thing, coldly and boldly, and then lay it out, neatly dissected, all ready to view. His passion for tidy formulae ‘is surely the very reverse of contemplative, and yet there is something idle in it, idleness concealed within the sublime exactitude of thought – as opposed to the true idleness which lets God and the world and things go, and gives them time. . .!’” (Quoting Konrad Weiss, the poet).

[19] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, tran. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1. “This question of Being is admittedly an impossible one: In the hundred volumes of Heidegger’s collected work, he never actually answers it.” Michael O’Meara, “Liberalism as the Ideology of Consummate Meaninglessness, Part 1.”

[20] In a similar vein, “Hollywood lets dangerous truths appear on screen, but only in the mouths of monsters.” Trevor Lynch, reviewing The Dark Knight; reprinted in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies; Foreword by Kevin MacDonald; edited by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).

[21] Actually, they are. Not intended as medical advice.

The Purgative Fantasy

        By William De Vere

Albertus Pictor, Death Playing Chess, 1480-90.




There is something sinister in the springtime this year. Rather than a serving as a yearly reminder of rebirth and natural beauty, the blooming trees and emergent grasses wear the face of some ancient enemy, awoken from its long slumber. The spreading pestilence makes one long for the dormancy and stasis of winter.

This atmosphere of dread has infected every dimension of our lives. One encounters it in the endless news coverage, the overheard conversations and suspicious glances of coworkers and passersby, the twinge of fear every time someone coughs in our presence. Whether or not this panic is an overreaction is something only time can tell, but the extreme response is certainly without precedent in recent memory.

While no one seems to believe that this plague will bring about the literal end of mankind, the recent confluence of economic and natural disaster does seem to have pushed people into a more apocalyptic frame of mind — if the recent return of a 32-year-old song to the chart is any indication.

There could be some benefits to this. Wars, plagues, and other social upheavals can lead people to rethink their priorities, and perhaps eliminate some of the dross from their lives. A renewed sense of our own mortality (providentially, perhaps, arising during the penitential season of Lent) might motivate us to focus on our families, our people, our mission, and our own souls rather than the ephemera that occupy so much of our lives. On the other hand, some people are just as likely to embrace an attitude of nihilistic hedonism. This appears to be the sentiment motivating certain populations who have refused to suspend their debauchery in the face of a public health crisis.

Michael Wolgemut, Dance of Death, 1493.

Likewise, on a sociopolitical level, the quarantines have temporarily led to cleaner air and water, a reduction in frivolous consumption, curtailed immigration, more family time, and fewer visible instances of social degeneracy. The dominion of employers, bankers, and landlords over our lives has likewise been temporary abrogated. Of course, it is entirely possible, indeed likely, that after this blows over people will go on living exactly as they were before, even if it is within a radically changed political and economic climate. There is simply no way to know at this point.

Whatever the case, this unexpected resurgence of apocalyptic mood does lead one to reflect on the deeper reasons for mankind’s perennial obsession with the collapse of civilization. From The Walking Dead all the way back to ancient Babylon, humans have displayed a morbid curiosity about the end of their terrestrial empire. What forms does this take among the political Right, and might any of them be put to productive use?


The Purgative Fantasy

This morbid curiosity about the end of mankind might be attributed, in part, to a subconscious fascination with and longing for death, not just individual but on a mass scale — akin to Freud’s “death instinct” or Thanatos. Longing for the silence and stillness of the deserted battlefield, the abandoned town, the ruined city, the atomic crater. This is both a retreat from the complexities and impurities of human life as well as an expression of misanthropic disgust for the perceived viciousness and pettiness of our species.

Verdun, 1916

This instinct takes many forms, and has been ably explained by Arthur SchopenhauerEmile Cioran, and Rust Cohle. One of the most prominent expressions nowadays is the “human extinction movement” and “anti-natalism,” which has significant overlap with certain schools of radical environmentalism. One of the most thoroughgoing theorists in this line of thought was the Norwegian mountaineer and philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. He theorized, in “The Last Messiah” (1933), that mankind is a unique product of evolution whose abilities and desires exceed its niche, and is therefore doomed to be destructive and unhappy:

“Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily — by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being.”

His solution went to the root of the problem: “Be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.” With mankind’s disappearance, the world might be cleansed of this blot on its stark beauty.

Dresden, 1945

A rather different perspective, more in line with the values of the Right, was promoted by the French “esoteric Hitlerist” and political propagandist Savitri Devi. She also welcomed the prospect of cataclysm and human extinction, but unlike the typically nihilistic and left-leaning anti-natalist, Savitri very strongly upheld the value of life and certain life-forms: the aristocrats of the natural world, whether they be lions, tigers, majestic oak trees, or Aryan man. Faced with a future where the triumph of the Allied powers and the overpopulation of the globe would lead to the extinction of these higher types, Savitri contemplated to the end of the present cycle with eager anticipation: “A world without man is, and by far, preferable to a world in which no human élite will rule anymore. The roaring of the lion will again be heard everywhere, in the middle of the night, under a sky resplendent with moonlight or dark and full of stars.”

Savitri appeared to hold some hope that the end of the Kali Yuga would usher in another Golden Age where cosmic order would be restored. But whether this happened or not, she seemed to view mass extinction as the just outcome for a world that had abandoned all higher values and actively oppressed its noblest forms of life.

French Hydrogen Bomb test, Licorne, 1970.

I confess that in my younger years I sympathized with this mindset, born out of a sense that humankind is a kind of cosmic aberration, alien to the rest of earthly life, destroyer of both itself and the natural world. For some years this made me question the morality of parenthood. To bring more life into this thresher, this self-made hell where humans are, as Schopenhauer once wrote, “both the tormented souls and the devils tormenting them,” seemed a supremely selfish and unconscionable act. In time my priorities changed, but there is still a vague nihilism, a fundamental question mark, that lurks at the foundation of my worldview. No amount of stoicism, Catholicism, amor fati, Anglo-American pride, or fatherhood has ever been able to entirely dispel it. Moreover, I have never been among those who could simply dismiss such a view as “immature,” the late night blathering of chain-smoking undergraduates.

However, while there is an iron logic at the heart of this purgative fantasy, for most it will be an inadequate spur to action. For one, such a purgation is likely to be an act of God, and something that is beyond mankind’s power to control. Moreover, this view is unremittingly nihilistic. It is a creed that cannot be lived or sincerely lauded, since the only way to live in authentic accordance with it would be suicide (preceded, potentially, by mass murder). It is incompatible with the desire to preserve one’s culture, one’s people, or one’s ancestral line. Finally, it is also profoundly inhumane. It is indiscriminate in its misanthropy, and in whatever form it applauds the destruction of good and evil alike, the innocent and the noble along with the wicked. Nor is it simply a matter of snapping one’s fingers and ending human existence, like some kind of Infinity Gauntlet; horror and misery would rule the earth as people and animals suffered brutal and prolonged deaths.

I admit that I used to dream of some magical means by which to purge the earth of some of its excess humanity, purify it, restore balance to nature. As I grew older I realized there is no such magic. Only bullets, fire, famine. And plague.

“Burial of Plague Victims,” miniature from The Chronicles of Gilles li Muisis, 1272–1352.


The Great Reset

In addition to this general longing for human extinction, there is another motivation for applauding the end of civilization as we know it. This is the “accelerationist” response, which is sometimes expressed on the extremes of both Left and Right. The belief, simply put, is that “worse is better” and that the collapse of the current system will hasten the achievement of the group’s goals. On the radical environmental Left, this is the collapse of the industrial state and a massive reduction in human population; on the libertarian Right, this is the downfall of the managerial state and return to a natural state of tribalism; on the socialist Left, this is the overcoming of capitalism and ushering in a communist utopia; on the White Nationalist Right, it is the end of the current dysfunctional multiethnic liberal state and the institution of the ethnostate; etc.

Whatever one’s preferred outcome, the logic of this belief is predicated upon the assumption that the changes brought about by worsening social conditions will, by creating disruptions and exposing the hollowness of the contemporary system, necessarily be for the better. However, this is by no means guaranteed. For the socialist, the collapse of the neoliberal order may appear to be a positive under any circumstances; but even the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat will not usher in an age of freedom from necessity, but an iron dictatorship in which certain pigs are more equal than others. The odds of our ambitious communists actually becoming commissars are quite slim.

Fresco in the former Abbey of Saint-André-de-Lavaudieu, France, depicting the plague personified as a woman, ca. 14th century.

Similarly, for the rightist libertarian or anarcho-primitivist, the chances of social collapse returning us to a “state of nature” or resurgent tribalism is equally unlikely. If this is a slow-motion crisis, as a pandemic naturally would be, we should expect to see a significant strengthening of the security state, martial law, and increasingly draconian restrictions on behavior, association, and speech (as is already happening throughout the world). The fact that the Left holds power over practically every country in the West means that, despite our hopes to the contrary, it is entirely possible that their narrative and goals will remain paramount throughout this process. They will use any crisis as an opportunity to strengthen their stranglehold on speech and association in the name of public safety, to suspend political processes in the name of stability, to arrange more payoffs for their client class in the name of economic recovery and relief, and use their devilish sophistry to somehow blame this crisis on white Christian patriarchs and structural racism. Thus we could end up with a stronger Leftist regime in which even more checks on its power have been removed. It does not have to happen this way, but the changing demographics throughout the West are cause for pessimism.

Moreover, it is unlikely that this collapse would happen at the same time all over the globe. The weakening of America will simply open us up to domination by more vigorous powers, less hindered by Western compunctions concerning human rights and political correctness, and less schizophrenic in their political goals. From what they’re telling us, China is already experiencing a lullin the virus after two months of effective action against it. Given that they kept this under wraps for months in order to avoid compromising their economic position, it is difficult to believe that this mass infection of the West was not a part of their plan, or at least an unexpected silver lining. Our weakness is their strength, and in the long run might put us at their mercy. Despite the Right’s fondness for authoritarianism, China is not our friend and their domination over the West would be a tragedy of immense proportions.

And even if the collapse of global civilization were to occur overnight, this would not return us to an era of wholesome tribalism and rugged individualism. It would, rather, institute a reign of totally brutal anarchism, in which ragtag bands of survivors would be governed by psychopathic warlords and live by theft, rapine, and cannibalism. And while this outcome might be lauded by the Conan the Barbarian Right, it is again quite unlikely that its acolytes would end up being the Negan or Governor in that scenario; and it would doubtless be a far worse situation for the women, children, and lesser men. People who are actually the flower of their race — those motivated by nobility, honor, chivalry; men of genius and soul; beautiful women and innocent children — these would all be utterly stamped out in such a world.

Peter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1652.

Both black-pilled nihilism and accelerationism therefore appear to be insufficient responses to contemporary crises, whether pandemics or other potentially catastrophic events.


Apocalypse Viewed from the Right

The significance of these observations for the contemporary Rightist or reactionary is that, as many have noted, there is absolutely no guarantee that things will go our way. The purgative fantasy is just that: a fantasy, beyond acts of God that exceed the human power for destruction; and it is in no way desirable from the perspective of social, cultural, environmental, or racial preservation. Likewise, many groups who place their hopes in the “reset” or acceleration are likely to be disappointed by the outcome.

Given that this crisis is, in and of itself, unlikely to usher in a return of monarchism, ethnic homogeneity, or an American Renaissance, what is the most reasonable response for Men of the Right?

The only reasonable reaction is, on a personal level, to preserve our ancestral values and ensure that these are transmitted to our children, and to adopt a less decadent style of living — more Spartan, more austere, more frugal, more self-sufficient. Culturally, it is important to preserve our memory, our art, music, and history, and most significantly our people. Politically it is absolutely vital that we promote our explanation for this crisis — the only true explanation — that it is a crisis of globalism and neoliberal economics. We must vigorously and publicly confront the lies that have been and will be promulgated on this point, using whatever outlets are available to us.

You can buy Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sunhere.

We might hope, with Ra’s al-Ghul, that these periodic disasters will have a purgative effect, but it is vital that we do all that is within our power to oppose the other likely outcome: a doubling down on the tyranny of the New World Order.

Our inclination towards despair is one of the greatest obstacles to action on behalf of our people, our country, and our God. It infects this movement, as it does all genuinely counter-cultural movements, and no one is immune to it. For my part, over the last few weeks current events have propelled me into a state of morbid brooding, no doubt exacerbated by the perpetual rains and overcast skies in my part of the country.

But on the first day of spring, I awoke to a cold but sunny morning, frost on the ground, trees and daffodils and pansies in bloom. I took my children to a nearby forest, where we were totally alone beneath the ancient boughs, and the serenity of the scene combined with my young children’s innocent wonder at all that we saw helped, for a time, dispel such despair from my mind. It was a reminder that there is a beauty and order in this world that transcends us, and that our highest duty is to preserve it, for ourselves and those that come after us.

Despite the great influence of the perennial philosophy and Traditionalist School on my thought, I cannot claim to have any certainty regarding traditional teachings concerning cosmic cycles and the Kali Yuga. Nevertheless, I leave you with this passage from Rene Guenon, which is instructive for anyone who feels themselves to be living in a time of decay, trouble, and strife.

“The world of disorder and error will be destroyed, and by the purifying and regenerative power of Agni all things will be reestablished and restored in the wholeness of their original state, the end of the present cycle being also the beginning of the future cycle. Those who know that it must be so cannot, even at the heart of the worst confusion, lose their immutable serenity. However irksome it be to live in an epoch of trouble and almost general obscurity, they cannot be affected by it deep in themselves, and it is here that we find the strength of the true elite. Undoubtedly, if the darkness should continue to spread more and more, this elite could, even in the East, become reduced to a very small number. But it is enough that some preserve integrally the true knowledge to be ready, when the ages are completed, to save all that can still be saved from the present world and become the seed of the future world.”

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Melting Crackpot: E. Michael Jones On Sam Francis

                           By Robert Hampton

                                      


The Catholic writer E. Michael Jones is currently one of the most popular thinkers on the Dissident Right, owing to disaffected nationalists turning to Catholicism in the wake of Charlottesville. In their desperate search for a based Catholic thinker, these young right-wingers settled upon Jones. Jones’s many tirades against Jews and willingness to associate with the Dissident Right make him an appealing figure to aspiring Catholic reactionaries.

But many of his ideas are silly and wrong. Identitarians should stop seeing him as a serious thinker. Jones himself makes this case better than anyone in a December essay on Sam Francis and the “Triple Melting Pot.” Jones infamously delivered the keynote address at a 2005 memorial event for Francis. Instead of honoring the late paleoconservative, Jones decided to criticize Francis and rant about the Jews. The December essay is intended to defend the speech and reaffirm one of Jones’ many silly ideas. The self-appointed Church doctor argues Americans are not divided by race. We are instead divided by religion, and faith defines our ethnic differences. He criticizes Francis — who he refers to as “Sam” to convey the impression they were friends — for failing to grasp this dynamic.

The essay on Francis exposes many of Jones’s unserious arguments and claims. He insists religious identity defends you from leftist attacks and elaborates on his odd Triple Melting Pot claim.

Jones expresses how amazing it was for him to participate in a Shi’a march in Dearborn, Michigan. Jones contrasts this march with Charlottesville and says it proves “religious identity is the only bulwark against the identity politics of the Great Satan”:

The Arbaeen March in Dearborn in which thousands of Shi’a Muslims marched unhindered to Henry Ford Park shouting “Long Live Hussein” is one example of what I’m talking about. If Antifa had showed up at this rally, they would have had to field thousands of demonstrators to contest the Muslims’ right to assemble. We’re dealing with hypotheticals here, but judging from the size and composition of the crowd, Antifa would not have come out unscathed from this encounter.

Why on Earth would Antifa protest a Muslim gathering? Antifa wants more Muslims and encourages them to defiantly express their culture. If anything, Antifa would cheer on the march. You might as well say the Right should don pink pussy hats because no Antifa tried to stop the Women’s March. There are no similarities between a minority religious festival and a political demonstration in support of white identity.

Jones points to Antifa not disrupting SSPX processions in Post Falls, Idaho as further proof the Left cowers when faced with religious identity. He also touts how the Bishop of South Bend ignored a request to condemn him. Jones cites this as proof the Catholic Church will defend intellectual heretics and implies God will protect him from Antifa:

[U]nlike “conservatism” or “whiteness” or any other confected identity, Catholicism confers an identity through baptism which cannot be taken away from its members by the self-appointed popes who, as recipients of oligarchic money, police the precincts of identity politics. Sam Francis was excommunicated from the synagogue known as conservatism by William F. Buckley, who with the help of Jewish money, had had himself named pope of that sect. The fact that the same thing didn’t happen to me at the hands of [left-wing reporter] Dexter van Zile is proof of my contention that the Catholic faith is a category which exists in the mind of God. As such, it cannot be contradicted by men. It guarantees protection from the predations of Satan and his synagogue on earth that no other identity can provide.

Humble is the man who thinks God stands between him and cancel culture.

In reality, the Catholic Church has a long history of condemning Catholic nationalists. Pope Pius XI formally condemned the Catholic nationalist Action Francaise in the 1920s and excommunicated its leading members. Many church leaders today denounce Matteo Salvini and other European nationalists who dare say no to more immigration.

This reasoning also ignores that Jones is a fringe figure on the Catholic intellectual right. First Things isn’t going to publish or defend Jones. Many writers condemn his anti-Semitism as un-Christian. Most reactionary Catholic writers stress their philo-Semitism to a comical degree. Leading integralist Sohrab Ahmari wrote a whole article about how much he loves Jews.

Jones is not representative of the broader Catholic Right. One bishop ignoring a random journalist’s request does not indicate much.

Leftists react more violently to white identity than to religious identity because they see the former as a serious threat. They do not feel threatened by Catholic traditionalists living in far-away rural America. There would be violent demonstrations against religious processions if the Left felt religious identity threatened the power structure. But Religious identity does not challenge the powers that be. Elites certainly don’t like conservative Christians, yet they realize that people embrace such faiths in response to a loss of power. Smart leftists realize religious identity can at times be a safety valve, the original opiate of the masses before the Sackler family came along.

Evangelical Christianity became more popular after the Civil War and had a revival after the civil rights revolution. White Southerners turned to God to cope with their subjugation. Similarly, young nationalists disenchanted with the failures of the alt-right turn to traditional Catholicism as a coping mechanism. Many of them, but not all, feel it’s better to retreat to religion than to try to change the world.

Jones supports this development. He does not care about demographics or preserving European identity; it’s all a distraction from furthering the Catholic faith. Jones argues white identity is a trap and identitarians “play into the hands of their largely Jewish oppressors.” The real solution is to hope the Church turns everything around.

Jones’s contention that America is divided between three ethnic groups makes no sense in contemporary America. The Triple Melting Pot theory comes from Will Herberg’s 1954 book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Herberg asserted these three categories separate Americans and define who they are: “Unless one is either a Protestant, or a Catholic, or a Jew, one is a ‘nothing’; to be a ‘something,’ to have a name, one must identify oneself to oneself, and be identified by others, as belonging to one or another of the three great religious communities in which the American people are divided.”

This is nonsense and no longer applicable to modern America. Even in Herberg’s day, it was silly. It assumes white Protestant segregationists and black Protestants were in the same ethnic group. Jones counters this by saying blacks were mere tools of Jews during integration. The civil rights revolution was actually an ethnic battle!

You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here.

The gist of my talk at the Sam Francis memorial was that the culture wars are simply not understandable in racial terms. The different sides in the culture wars may have used race as a pretext, but the identity of the antagonists was ethnic, not racial in the sense commonly portrayed in the media. In applying the ethnic calculus to this period of history, we discover that the blacks, even if they were the most visible player in the civil rights phase of the culture wars of the ‘60s, were ultimately the pawn of other groups, which were just as white as the groups they attacked.

Jones, by the way, believes integration was anti-Catholic ethnic cleansing engineered by Protestants and Jews. According to this thesis, blacks were also victims of this scheme.

Jones dismisses a more reasonable ethnic paradigm of black, Jew, and white Gentile because Jews are the only group who proudly celebrate their identity. The others don’t see themselves as white or black, apparently.

The Triple Melting Pot is anachronistic in modern America. Ethnic enclaves are, for the most part, a thing of the past. Most whites grow up in mixed religious communities and interfaith marriage is at an all-time high. Jones claims that people stay with their faith most of their life. In reality, most American Christians change denominationsthroughout their lives. The only people who insist on the fundamental differences between Catholics and Protestants are LARPy Catholic intellectuals and hardcore evangelicals. Most whites today don’t see any real differences in the faiths, and they don’t base their identity around religion. Many whites are secular and rarely attend. The parish is no longer at the center of American life.

Ever since the first settlers encountered the Indians, race has shaped American life. Whites were always likely to take the side of their fellow whites against non-whites. The chief differences in early America were white, red, and black. America was founded by Protestants who saw their faith as a foundational component to America, but white Catholics were always included within the body politic. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was the Catholic Charles Carroll.

The animosity between Catholics and Protestants primarily erupted with mass Catholic immigration in the mid-19th century and was a major factor in American life for the next 100 years. However, the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and the disappearance of ethnic enclaves has largely put this animosity to pasture. White Catholics and Protestants are not divided by separate communities or cultures. Religious differences don’t matter to the vast majority of Americans.

America also has a plethora of other religions now thanks to mass immigration. Jones notes this, but insists we have to stick to the Triple Melting Pot for unknown reasons. Trust the random Herberg book!

The essay veers awkwardly from one argument to the next, but the overall purpose is to insult Francis. He castigates the paleocon as a materialist who failed to understand logos. Jones also hilariously claims that Francis conjured up “revolutionary fantasies based on phantasms of the mind which had only a tenuous connection to reality.” This comes from a man who believes the sun revolves around the Earth.

If the cheap shots weren’t enough, Jones makes sure to celebrate his insulting speech at Francis’s memorial as a heroic fusillade against philo-Semitic racists. At the 2005 memorial in Francis’s honor, Jones decided to ignore remembering the deceased writer. Instead, he ranted about the stupidity of race realism and how bad Jews are. Francis’s family and friends were rightfully appalled by this lack of decorum.

In Jones’s telling, he was a brave Cassandra warning the evil racists of the perils in their thinking. The evil racists — who are also cowards! — couldn’t face his bold truth-telling at an event to honor a dead friend, not Jones’s narcissism. Jones self-righteously says his warnings went unheard and this led to Charlottesville:

Sam Francis, with the help of Paul Gottfried, inspired Richard Spencer to hand out spears to the white boys and point them in the direction of the legal machine gun nest in Charlottesville, where they all got mowed down.

Jones builds his essay around appealing to identitarians. He says the war on whites is real and mass immigration hurts America. But his goal is to tell you these things don’t matter; all that matters is that you join the Catholic Church. It’s clear that Jones wants to subvert the Dissident Right and direct it into his own niche project. His aims have nothing to do with preserving our civilization. Then again, Jones believes race isn’t a real concept. Maybe that should be expected of a thinker who doesn’t even believe in heliocentrism.

There are many great Catholic writers for young nationalists to turn to. De Maistre, Chateaubriand, Bonald, etc. All of these thinkers offer valuable insight into life and faith.

E. Michael Jones only offers insight into his own ego.