Majorityrights Central > Category: Political Philosophy

Daedalus - he of The Phora, Friedrich’s Civic Platform, the soon to be Phora blog and possibly more besides - made some interesting historical comments about Conservatism in America on JJR’s “Stomp Israel” post.  In consideration of those comments I thought it might be interesting to (somewhat briefly) explore the metapolitics expressed by modern America and to contrast these with the essence of the most necessary alternative.

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I have enjoyed John Ray’s recent posts about his cultural outings in Brissie with his lady friend.

What interested me most, though, was something he wrote in the comments section of one of these posts. In response to GW he said of the religious impulse that,

Yes.  It is an instinctive thing.  Either you have it or not.  I of course feel much richer for having it.  I am slightly surprised that you do not as there is a modest positive correlation between ethnic sentiment and religious sentiment.  I think my ethnic sentiments are similar to yours but I no more let that dictate my conclusions than I allow my religious instincts to make me a believer.  So I do FEEL similarly about the two areas.  Not to be impulse-driven is of course a marker of both civilization and modernity.  But I at least still enjoy feeling as I do.

So John feels personally enriched by a positive sense of ethnic identity and by a sympathy for his own religious tradition. However, intellectually he cannot accept the validity of either.

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I don’t suppose fires will be set yet again in the hallways of Academia, or Leeds University anyway, over the speech crime of Classics professor, Malcolm Heath.  But you never know.

Poor Prof Heath appears to have miscalculated somewhat in seeking to explain away Aristotle’s wonderfully offensive thoughts on slaves.  It isn’t an easy job.  This, in part, is what the old boy said (in Poetics, Book 1, chapters 3 and 7):-

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

... But among barbarians [that’s us - Ed] no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. Wherefore the poets say, “It is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians” as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one.

Now, some may give Aristotle the benefit of the doubt on racial supremacism and accuse him merely of being the worst kind of snob, if not a tad sexist.  But Prof Heath appears to have grasped the Nazi nettle eagerly and with both hands:-

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The estimable Troy Southgate has circulated the philosophical cogniscenti of the New Right - and me - with the URL for his revamped Synthesis website.  There is a lot of interesting material there, not too much of it overly conventional.

This is how the site bills itself:-

... an irregularly-published intellectual and cultural journal devoted to Anarchy (the preservation of the Anarch [or Sovereign Individual] in all aspects of life and the possibility of multi-level realities), Occulture (the appreciation and understanding of the Esoteric nature of Life and Culture), and Metapolitics (a rejection of trivial party politics and an interest in global aims, as well as a political belief in grand plans and projects with an anti-Humanist streak). Our aim is to explore key figures such as Ernst Juenger, Michael Bakunin, Julius Evola, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Jean Parvulesco, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, Otto Strasser, Miguel Serrano, Ernst Niekisch, Jean-Francois Thiriart, R.A. Schwaller de Lubitz, Sergei Nechayev, Savitri Devi, Austin Osman Spare, Richard Walther Darre, Alexander Dugin, Karl Haushofer, Arthur Machen, Rene Guenon, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Francis Parker Yockey, H.P. Lovecraft, and Friederich Hielscher.

Troy also organises regular meetings of the New Right in London, only one of which I have been able to attend.  The idea is to generate some interest and excitement around the lost generation of nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers from the right, whose ideas were submerged by the triumph in Europe of communism and liberal democracy in 1945.  Troy’s meetings usually feature four of five speakers on diverse philosophical issues, Aleksandr Dugin being the biggest name to speak so far.

By contrast with all this I am a centrist pussy cat, of course - but one, I hope, with a fairly open and curious mind.  It is necessary if one intends to plant those black roses.

It is still strange to my ears to hear how the British economy - three decades ago the “sick man of Europe” – is spoken of as a model the rest of the continent should emulate.  It is doubly strange, in fact, since just about any degree of confidence in modern Britain flies in the face of our general experience of daily, abject cultural defeatism.  If it isn’t the anguish of Anglican liberals we have to endure, it’s another crazy anti-racism campaign.  Or we are bleeding with guilt after a crazed axe murder.  Or we are binge drinking into the middle of the night while Old Father Thames is brained on crack.  Or record numbers of children are growing up without a father, whilst marriage has become just too tiresome for the modern couple …

The list is long.

Still, when British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stands up in Strasbourg to tell the European Parliament that “Without significant changes I see little prospect of a deal”, one has to raise a couple of patriotic cheers, however weakly.  One has also to acknowledge that, actually, this is nothing knew.  Straw is simply sounding the latest charge across some very old battle lines.  Our liberalising economic agenda for the EU is all of a piece with Napoleon Bonaparte’s supposed observation that, “L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.”

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Some months ago I received a manuscript in the mail bearing the return address of an old friend.  This friend later denied any knowledge of the thing.  The postmark and stamps were unremarkable, and I have never been able to discover the identities of the sender, the two correspondents in the remarkable, fragmentary dialogue, or the author of the commentary, one “Johannes Climacus”.

I have been reluctant to publish this material, fearing that it might meet a hostile reception even from those who stand most to gain from an understanding of it.  But finally, overcoming these scruples, I determined to cast it like bread upon the bitter waters of MR, where readers may carp at it at their leisure.

Dialogue Conducted In Anticipation of the End of History

LYCOPHRON:  I suppose that one question (there are several that I won’t raise) is:  given the Eurasian characteristics of Dugin’s perspective (naturally, given where he is), his relationship to his own traditions and to globalization, etc. makes a certain sense.  But how would, say, an American in sympathy with these ideas situate himself?  I don’t necessarily mean practically, but close enough—do you move to Russia and pray for a reversion of North America to primeval forest?  That’s not meant derisively, but it raises an important question, which is: clearly someone in his context can be for something, but can someone in our context appropriate these ideas and be for anything?

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Opinion polls usually show that most people oppose high levels of foreign immigration. Yet John Ray frequently claims that it has popular consent. I presume that his logic runs as follows: such immigration is a public policy, we live in democracies in which the majority rules, therefore such immigration must have majority support.

I think John’s fault is to accept the second part of this argument: that in a democracy there is majority rule. I used to accept this idea too, but I came to realise that this is not really a feature of modern democracy. In modern Western democracies the majority is allowed to determine every few years which party of an established political class will rule. And that is where majority rule stops.

Now, before John replies that I cut a lonely figure in making such an argument, let me quote some support for this view. In the June Spectator there’s a review by Jonathan Sumption of a book Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy by John Dunn.

It is Jonathan Sumption’s view that “modern democracies might be described as oligarchies tempered by elections” in which a barrier to popular power is created “by vesting the power of decision in an elected political class united by a body of shared values often at odds with popular sentiment.”

Mr Sumption writes that democracy “confers no rights on the electorate apart from the right to dismiss the oligarchy of the moment every few years, and replace it by another, generally of much the same kind.”

These claims, I think, are not far off the mark. They explain why a liberal political class has been able to advance its agenda despite the presence of a largely conservative electorate.

This post is an attempt to place Western civilization at the current time among the seven stages of a civilization’s rise, expansion, decay and collapse as articulated by historian and philosopher Dr. Carroll Quigley in his 1961 book,

“The Evolution of Civilizations.”  It also examines what role the recent legalization of abortion in western countries (but mostly in America) has had in our civilization’s recent development.  Was Roe vs. Wade a cause or a symptom of our civilization’s decline? 

First, however, a brief summary of Quigley’s thesis:-

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