Majorityrights Central > Category: Political Philosophy

Is there such a thing as “natural society”? The difference between the traditional and modernist outlook is that the former believes in it and the latter does not, at least if “nature” is taken to refer to anything substantial and not simply to content-free abstractions like freedom and equality. The traditional standpoint is that basic institutions like family, property, religion and ethnic affiliation are natural. Secondary features and particularities of line-drawing vary here and there, but the institutions themselves are tied to basic human realities that don’t change much and require social relations — if they are to function at all well — to settle into certain forms that follow a logic and order of their own. That natural logic and order are affected by circumstances to some extent, and they can be supported or disrupted, but for the most part they go their own way and we can’t make of them what we will.

Advanced modern thought of course rejects all that. Ethnicity is constructed, family is whatever we accept as family, religion has no content of its own, and property has a bad conscience even though it has turned out surprisingly hard to abolish or change as an institution. That outlook is held with extraordinary absolutist vehemence. To reject it, to think those basic social categories have to do with important realities that can’t be made into whatever people want, is not simply to hold a different view of things. It is to be racist, sexist, homophobic, fundamentalist, and a greedhead — the personification and agent of everything that is worst and most oppressive in humanity.

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I suppose the year must have been 1984 when I read not Orwell but Milan Kundera’s masterpiece of conflicted love and lust, fidelity and possessiveness.  I had come across a wildly approving review in one of the nationals written by a Tory MP which, what with the naked mirror-walking and Tomas’s other rutting male adventures, seemed a bit strange.  Then again, considering all the sleaze stories that appeared in the press during John Major’s time as PM, perhaps not.  Anyway, this was actually a book less about nookie than those debilitations of the soul inflicted by an interfering state.

Now, I never needed my view of eastern European communism to be confirmed.  That didn’t really interest me.  No, it was just the title of the book that caught my imagination.  For some years I had been railing within, as blow-hard right-wingers tend to, at the declining morality of the nation.  Of course, it’s one thing to bemoan standards of public morality which are sinking into the morass.  It’s another to formulate a socio-political path to redemption.

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These are momentous times in Flanders.  My friend, Johan Van Vlaams, blogs below on the new beginning for pro-Flemish politics.

Meanwhile, I want to look backwards at the Vlaams Blok model.  Does it have a wider applicability?  What if any lessons does it hold for the benighted natives of my own country.  For the avoidance of doubt and in deference to my Scots friends I will restrict my observations in this respect to my own band of raiders south of the border.

The Blok took its character and drew its determination not from anything so nebulous as political ideals - or, God help us, values - but from the Flemish people themselves.  They are children of the North Sea coastal lands of Europe, cut from much the same cloth as the Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans who, with the Celts of the fringe, constitute the indigenous peoples of Great Britain.

But unlike us, the Flemish have, even under the multicultural onslaught and in the maw of the Belgian Establishment, retained sufficient self-knowledge and self-respect to found a liberation movement on national identity.

National identity in a European people, no less than any other, ought always to be contiguous with the nation state.  A discreetly related people is the heart and soul of nationhood.  But that nationhood is not merely diminished by the artificial conjunction of differing peoples with differing interests, it is permanently disfigured by the inevitable contest and still more inevitable one-sided outcome.

But there is an upside to this, too.  Ancient rivalries do speak to public feeling.  A people who suffer injustice are likely to be as mindful of their identity as any single-malt nation.  All too clearly, being gripped in the Belgian maw has served just such a purpose for the Flemish.  The Blok was all about that.

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An article that may interest Majority Rights readers.  The Failure of the American Experiment published at Kuro5hin

In the 16 October Spectator, Roger Scruton tells us that the new claim-based rights are in danger of depriving Britons of their old procedural-based rights as enunciated in the 1689 Bill of Rights.  In fact, perhaps the word ‘procedure’ is more important than the word ‘right’ here.  According to Scruton: “Although the Bill of Rights declared some of the rights of the British subject, it was, in doing so, merely rehearsing established procedures of the common law, and re-affirming them against recent abuses.”

From gypsy squatter parks to the right to a proper education, Scruton sees examples of the new style of rights leading to irresoluble conflicts and a murky system of law where the courts have no choice but to decide matters as they see fit.  The new rights are not so much rights as claims – claims that must be enforced on everybody else.

If we compare the history of modern Britain under the common law with that of Europe under the civilian and Napoleonic jurisdictions that have prevailed there, we will surely be impressed by the fact that the jurisdiction which has so persistently refused to define our rights has also been the most assiduous in upholding them. This is because it recognises that rights define the limits of power, and that these limits must be enforced by the citizen himself, through the procedures of justice, rather than by the state, through some all-comprehending and in the event all-authorising doctrine.

The rights that have historically protected the citizens of liberal democracies are, in general, negotiated restraints on state power.  A right that must be enforced by the exercise of state power is something else entirely.