As I’ve mentioned before, I hang around Troy Southgate’s New Right Forum a fair bit, shooting up the clouds when there’s nothing else to do.  By and large I am a rather disruptive presence, I think, behaving particularly badly towards a white American Moslem (who’s never done anything to upset me!) and one or two other “creatures of the right”.  But tonight I got my chance to put up (a proper argument) or shut up.  I put up, of course, and now wait to be attacked ... or ignored.  If it isn’t the latter I’ll update the following accordingly.

The thread was about a new post on revisionism at Welf Herfurth’s New Right Australia/New Zealand blog.  Welf is in the habit of announcing new posts, which are usually very long (not as long as this, though) and often interesting, on Troy’s Forum.  On this occasion he added some afterthoughts, amongst which was this:-

The problem is that the mainstream and even Nationalists think that liberalism means freedom, to be liberal, tolerant and open minded. That is not the case, as we all know. Liberalism is a political agenda that has limitations. It is thinking and acting inside a cage; whoever violates the limitations of the cage is a radical, either left or right. Liberalism depends on labels – AND that is what we Nationalists should not be copying.

I don’t think that it is possible to emulate the revisionists; they deal in what they think is hard evidence. We on the political site deal in theory. Much harder to sell! There is plenty of good writers out there who write since hundred of years how a social system should run. Most Nationalists run on emotion – I love my country, race, people, ect. They are not open to intellectual debate, because they are too dumb to understand it.

So in a way the we are fighting three battle fronts a) the liberals, b) the emotional Nationalists, and c) the mainstream that couldn’t give a shit and wants to be lead as long as it is in the right direction.

Being a bit of an emotional Blood ‘n Soil type myself, I thought I’d fire something back thus (and thus) ...

GW wrote:

In my experience, no German is free of “baggage”. A great deal of what passes for nationalist thinking by Germans is rehabilitatory, hence the heavy emphasis on a somewhat attenuated spiritual renewal.

In post-Enlightenment Europe there are, to be clear, two - and only two - political zeitgeists that Western Man has devised. They are Conservatism and liberalism. Their lodestars are stability and the unfettered will respectively. Under Conservatism, these are not polar opposites and not mutually exclusive. Individual freedom is a product of social stability, and cannot be obtained in its absence. However, stability is anathema to liberalism and, insofar as stability seeks at every moment to establish its natural suzereignty in our lives, it must be constantly attacked.

Incidentally, I reject Nationalism as a prospective third political zeitgeist because its lodestar - ethnic interest - is normative for Conservatism, and Nationalism cannot develop in a healthy Conservative society. It can only develop in reaction to the depredations of liberalism.

This is not to say that Fascism and NS have no value as “fuse” ideologies. But I strongly suspect that both would, if sustained, mature into a Conservative zeitgeist.

In its own origins Conservatism, however, was a work of generations.  In Britain, the Conservative zeitgeist lasted little more than 50 years from Pitt to Liverpool, but Conservatism as such had its beginnings with the Tudor crown in 1485. It failed in 1832 because its moral authority was undercut by the popular demand for suffrage.  It was re-interpreted as liberalism by Disraeli.

Much of the difficulty racial loyalists have in theorising a way out of this damned liberal mess lies in the fact that so little understanding of Conservatism exists ... literally none in America, and none among the conventionalists of the modern zeitgeist. As a result they [the racial loyalists - Ed] reject it out of hand, labelling it according to their preconceptions. The opportunity to connect with real politics is thereby never pursued.

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Welf wrote (regarding “baggage”):

Agree.

But at the same time whoever we are and wherever we come from - we are not free of “baggage”. That is history - present – and the future!!!!

It just depends how we deal with it …

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revonati wrote:

You might like to know that Oswald Spengler suggested in The Hour of Decision that fascist movements would evolve into more mature forms approximating the “conservative zeitgeist” you have mentioned.

It is also noteworthy that the socialist authors G. D. H. Cole and Karl Polanyi contended that fascism sought to restore organic communities at the expense of freedom. They shared your view that fascism could “only develop in reaction to the depredations of liberalism.”

I’m interested in your comments on conservatism, and I’d like you to elaborate upon them.

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GW wrote:

Revonati,

Those are extremely interesting observations. I don’t particularly want to intrude on Troy’s goodwill, and blather away endlessly about my understanding of Conservatism, unshared as it probably is by a single living soul. Conservatism as the only alternative habitable planet is, I fear, far too reactionary in its rejection of intellectualism and its reification of the organic to interest anyone here. I’d only wind up trying to prove that they were all unconscious liberals or worse, and get myself thrown off the list.

If you would like to mail me on .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) I will be very pleased to kick the subject around off-list.

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Troy Southgate wrote:

On the contrary, David, please go ahead. Revolutionary Conservatism, at least, is one of the areas in which the New Right has an interest.

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GW wrote:

Alright Troy, I accept the invitation. Since you used the term, let’s just “do” Revolutionary Conservatism, as it appears to me.

I think it is necessary for the sanity of all to avoid submersion in the pereniallist gloom in any extrapolative sense. There is no politics but liberalism to be got from that, and indeed by my reckoning one could broadly divide the liberal from the Conservative in terms of reaching for the firmament on the one hand and planting one’s feet in Nature on the other. It is not a coincidence that Locke gave us the blank slate and Rousseau the noble savage, or that self-authorship is the desire of all liberal hearts, or that postmodern liberals still struggle, after all these years, to assimilate Darwinism into their creeds.

In an entirely non-political sense, I have been a poor student for more than thirty years of what I suppose we might as well call, despite its semitic connotations, the esoteric. One clear lesson I have taken from this compartment of my life is another semitic one: give unto Caesar ... In contemplating the ordinary life, the sleeping life, in all its adaptive and maladaptive, unexamined forms it is advisable to ascribe to it nothing very grand or uplifting. We are not God’s children. We are not going to heaven when we die.  There is no reward from above for good. There is, instead, evolution ... the natural dynamic ... life’s interest in continuity. If we are not of the sacred life this is all there is.

We are not of the sacred, not in the way we ordinarily live, be it as individuals or group-members. We are, of course, aware of inner qualities such as will, unity, consciousness, freedom, and in our misapprehension both of them and of ourselves we fancy we know what they mean. We fancy we can and even do possess them. In the West, clever men construct noumenal topographies - entire philosophies - that they expect to lead to these things (most of these people, annoyingly, seem to be Jewish, but anyone sufficiently in excess of the minimum processing capacity requisite for abstract thought can do it - it’s only IQ 124).

This is how all the byways of liberal thought come about, this mistake of assuming the fruits of the sacred life are available to if not the profane exactly, then certainly the prosaic. Such ambitions do not befit the Conservative. Conservatism is not speculative in this sense. It is not spiritual or, indeed, rooted in a traditionalism that expresses something of the spirit. It is ontological, sociobiological. It is a product of evolutionary adaptiveness. It is even somewhat determined.

Being so profoundly earth-bound, and devoid of teleology does not render Conservatism a complete stranger to our dreams of higher things. But they are confined to the personal sphere of our own foolishness. That foolishness, however, is constrained by the heavy emphasis Conservatism places upon the healthy and vivifying (this, at least, should be recognisable ground for all Traditionalists).

Perhaps the kind of freedom that emerges from Conservative stability is only an expression of the masculine pursuit of status. It is, basically, mate competition! Obviously not as heady as liberalism’s promise of freedom: the power to be whatever one wills oneself to be.  But Conservatism’s freedom is real. The liberal version, being a misreading of the possession and perfectionment of the sacred self, is not real. A politic for sleeping people doesn’t deliver that kind of result. The result is, as we all know only too well, more social pathology - in Darwinian terms, more maladaptiveness.

It doesn’t matter. We are living in a wholly liberal zeitgeist and, like sharks, its dogmas have no reverse gear. The question for dissidents is not simply how to turn these fish around. It’s how to change the seawater to freshwater, in which sharks cannot swim. This is the sense in which I understand political revolution. It is a revolution of zeitgeists (and of the elites they foster). And here’s the problem for nationalists that I referred to earlier: a competitive zeitgeist to liberalism cannot be founded on more vast and lofty ideas (there are none bigger than the unfettered will anyway). The competitor has to offer health and normalcy once more, and do so in accordance with our particular European Natures, evolved as they are, or it will fail.

In England we have been here before, in the years of the three Civil Wars - out of which carnage came Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Hume et al. But also there was Charles II, of whom Lord Halifax wrote, “If he loved to lie upon his Down-bed of ease, his subjects had the Pleasure, during his reign, of lolling and stretching on theirs.”

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Matthew Gordon wrote:

I think it’s a good point that liberalism brings metaphysics down to earth - hence the similarities between Christianity and Liberal Humanism, and more so between Millennial Orthodoxy and Buddhism with Communism/Fascism - but I reject that Traditionalism/Revolutionary Conservatism are therefore akin to this. The very point is that modernists consciously or unconsciously materialise metaphysics, whereas Trad-ism is very clear in wanting to keep God in heaven and keep the apocalypse for the non-historical end of time, i.e. each of our own deaths, so the Sacred can then be the very ordinary, family-centred, yet culturally rich life that Conservatism provides. The Whites and the Reds were both fighting for the sake of distant horizons it is true, but the latter’s horizon was both infinitely more distant and immediately closer. Something that rejects all teleology could end up being very cynical and dehumanising indeed.

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GW wrote:

Matthew,

Did the fathers of Traditionalism not consider that Tradition itself was divine in origin? Were they not seeking to disinterr divine knowledge and set it, like a jewel, at the centre of a new social order?

Let us be clear. That jewel, if it exists, requires the institution of religion, as it has always required it, in order to transmit itself down the generations. The Traditionalists’ idea of taking it into the morrow not within a religious vehicle but within society as a whole, and then somehow constraining the jewel from sanctifying society but, on the contrary, renewing it with some sort of secular Conservatism ... that idea is frankly ridiculous.

It would be ridiculous even without the feebleness we all know Man exhibits. But as it is one can only wonder how distant and detached must have been the great men who thought such thoughts.

I am no great man, nobody at all. But I do understand a little psychology and a little science. In consequence, I do not believe that teleology has a place in politics, except that men must strive because they are selected by Nature to do so, and the striving itself may take unlikely (but never ambiguous) forms.

As it happens, Pittite Conservatism allowed for that, without fetishising it beyond a preference for personal liberty and an emphasis on the individual. I am not aware that this proved particularly “cynical” or “dehumanising”. On the contrary, the half-decade of extraordinary creativity which followed produced - whatever one may think of them in retrospect - the Industrial Revolution and Empire.

The proper place for the sacred is between I and me. Let men and women who have no use for it live happy and healthy, productive lives.

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revonati wrote:

I notice that you base your conservatism on sociobiological grounds. It is interesting that Professor Revilo P. Oliver expressed regret in several of his writings that American conservatives in the 1920s allied themselves with Christianity rather than such thinkers as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Correa Moylan Walsh, on which a rational basis for conservatism could have been based.

You might agree with what John Gray wrote:

“Given the scale of the conflicts engendered by the quickening advance of science, what is most needed is not the perpetual ranting uplift of secular hope. It is the willingness to act resolutely without the hope of any final success. Rather than seeking solutions for the dilemmas created by the advance of knowledge, we should accept them as framing the world in which we must live.

“The conflicts that wrack the world today would not have surprised the pagans of classical antiquity. For them, no `indissoluble chain’ bound knowledge, virtue and happiness together. In the plays of Euripides, knowledge cannot undo the workings of fate; virtue gives no protection against disaster. The most that humans can do is to be brave and resourceful, and expect to achieve little. Very likely we cannot recapture this pagan view of things; but perhaps we can learn from it how to limit our hopes.” (Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, New York: The New Press, 2003, p. 115.)

On an even more pessimistic note, Oliver wrote, in a passage which somehow reminds me of the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft:

“Gabble about a `better world’ is mere drivel, a verbal residue of Christian illusions. The most that we can hope for - if there is hope - is a better life for ourselves, for the tribe to which we belong by biological necessity. Rational men can concern themselves only with their own nation and race, and hope that in the only area that is their legitimate or reasonable concern, that nation and race may somehow avert the known causes that produce inevitable results.

“Human suffering is as much a permanent phenomenon on our planet as the tides and the polar ice caps, and from this little satellite of our dwindling sun endless wails of woe and terror always have, and always will, come from the ululant throats of suffering humanity, whose lamentations and screams forever rise upward into the unheeding atmosphere and die away in the cold infinity beneath the pitiless stars.” (“Another American Triumph,” Liberty Bell, vol. 16, no. 2, October 1988, p. 10.)

I think that an unsentimental and realistic worldview of this kind must inform a genuine conservatism. But it is probably true that most people in Western societies today have no sense of the tragic character of life.

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GW wrote:

Revonati,

I don’t think I do base my Conservatism on sociobiology, any more than the ferns and brambles that roil up in my woodland base themselves on the soil.  My politics are just as unruly and disobedient, and care nothing for the tender intellectual inventions I have, down the years, tried to plant.  What I am left with as I look around me is a certain reality that it does me no good to deny.  This reality is that, in our aggregated existence, what we might wish to think comes from our collective will or from the divine actually comes from our genes.

In the battle, therefore, between the dreamers - the liberals, the Church, the Traditionalists - and the unsentimental dealers in fact, I am wholeheartedly with the latter.  I disavow all suggestion that there is a duality in and between Oliver’s defence of race, the organic substratum as it were, and the European nationalist’s defence of culture and tradition.  Culture and tradition, along with the specifics of Western religion as morality and as faith, spring from European loins as social codifiers of the adaptive.  Heaven sends down not a drop of rain upon us.

Such a view, as Oliver’s gloomy prognosis confirms, renders an appeal to a life lived for glory somewhat hollow.  In mythic terms we are with Er watching Odysseus seize upon the life of a private man.  In our long European history the lessons of emerging from chaos have already been learned many times, and forgotten the same number.  We will have to learn them again.