Majorityrights Central > Category: The Ontology Project

... on a recent thread at Spiked!, contesting with a certain John Piggott.  Ted is probably a middling academic at one of the Cal universities.  He has a very nasty dose of liberal disease.

The discussion began four days ago, following a thread comment by Ted which concluded thus:

If we want to honor Marx and Nietzsche, we should recognize that they were savvy enough to see the ideals of 17th century liberalism sliding into dotage, falling prey to the kind of technological tribalism we see in colonialism, class capitalism, and Orwellian nationalism. They lit a fire to show us how we’d strayed from the path, and if foolish and venal followers took that fire and burned down half the world, Marx and Nietzsche are no more to blame than Christ is for the brutalities done in his name.

Well, writing off nationalism in that blanket way is the proverbial red rag, so:

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 4 days ago
Equality has its conceptual origin in the requisite condition for the gentile to facilitate a declaration of the Messianic Age. It was never and can never be a real human possibility for the simple reason that Nature harbours no equality, rather as she harbours no straight lines. The attempt to concretise it as a socio-economic reality does violence to the proverbial crooked timber of human being.

And the exchange proceeded thus:

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Sibelius in his study at Ainola, the house he named after his wife.

Heidegger and his hut in Todtnauberg, Black Forest.

A long time ago, when I was a young man trying then, as now, to figure it all out, I happened to hear a broadcast of a piece of music which changed my musical awareness completely, putting my youthful enthusiasm for prog into context and introducing me to the practise of actually thinking about the sound I was hearing, and the ideas in it, rather than just consuming its vitality whole, like a delicious fruit.  That piece of music was the 7th Symphony in C Major by the Finnish composer and nationalist Jean Sibelius:

A performance by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted in1966 by Lorin Maazel – one Jewish conductor who continued to perform works by Sibelius despite attacks from the proponents of atonality.  I prefer the classicism and close attention to detail of the Colin Davis/Boston Symphony Orchestra recording from 1975, which I owned at the time, and which got everything about right, to my ear.  But that’s not on YouTube, I regret to say.

The 7th Symphony is a gift to any philosophically-minded person, comprising, as it does, an intimate, poetic journey of a life from birth to death concentrated in a single movement of some 20 to 22 minutes duration.  For what was essentially an orchestral shake down of the piece in 1924 Sibelius described it as a symphonic fantasy.  But, musically, it was always a life-commentary of unsurpassed seriousness, and no fantasy at all.  The motifs of the music are the motifs of your and my life.  While there is a nod to a three-movement structure in the build-ups to the thrice-repeated, climactic teloi on the horns, the unbroken singularity of the subject matter required a matching compositional logic.  Accordingly, the thematic elements and changing tempi flow uninterrupted and ever onward, truth on truth, to an appointment with the horns of crushing weight and finality, before the strings pick up again for the transition to an insistent, indeed strengthening B major, somehow going on, even now as darkness closes in.  That total fidelity to the light is Heidegger’s not-yet, the plea of existence itself, finishing (maybe, or maybe not, as religious hope) in a perfect cadence on C major.  And then that, too, at the peak of its agony of knowing, is cut down by the final wave of the baton.

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Before returning (in Part 3) to the compound structure of Being on which I concluded Part 1, I am going to introduce the beginnings of the identitarian exegesis to an otherwise ethnic nationalist essay.

Broadly, ethnic nationalism belongs to being and, therefore, to an ontological analysis.  Its cry of the heart is for “The Being of my people”, and it is therefore a cry for the freedom to subsist.  It is already a general organising principle of sorts, a pulse in the background of the life of all peoples.  But other than in times of extremis (Heidegger’s “Being towards death”), it is not a straightforward matter to bring it into the foreground as a positive, life-affirming force.  That was never more true than in our time, when the material comforts and alienations of our age, together with the gradual, indeed, generational unfolding of extremis, counsel for action another day … always another day … and make ethnic nationalism a less than reliable organising principle.

Add to that the ease with which our people’s many enemies, within and without, can de-legitimise any form of engagement with the race issue which is reactive and, therefore, negative, and the limitations of ethnic nationalist discourse become all too apparent.

Identitarianism, on the other hand, belongs to consciousness and, therefore, to a psychological analysis.  Its cry of the heart is or should be “This people is mine”, and it is a cry of a much more open kind, leading easily to the positive demand that, as “mine”, the people must freely and jointly destine.  Identitarianism, as they say, has legs in a way that ethnic nationalism does not.  Of course, we need both, to which end we shouldn’t be defeated by the idea that Being and Mind are contrary and exclusive ... or, indeed, that, notwithstanding Heidegger’s rejection of Descartes and Kant, ontology and psychology are such.  There is a coherence and compatibility, even if there is no perfect synthesis; and one of my basic aims in all these scribblings is to try to bring this out in a methodical way.

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The following is less another of my interminable epigonic offerings for the purpose of advancing the Ontology Project than it is an attempt to resolve the unsatisfactory state of intellectual affairs which exists between myself and Daniel on the relevance and utility of sociology.  As such, it proposes a more politically vital form of the promising but, as of now, still new and hardly intellectualised, general concept of “Being of” (which is itself a response to, and development of, Martin Heidegger’s “Being with”).  My intention in doing so is to explicate the unique and holistic, radically revolutionary nature of ethnic nationalism, as I apprehend the meaning of that term.

The essay is long - for which I apologise here and now – so it will be presented in three parts.  Some readers may find it too technical at times or too intellectually unruly, and to both sets of critics I would plead for a visit to my third and final part, when it is posted.

So, to begin ...

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A few weeks ago I posted a piece here about the limits of incremental change.  Its goal was to explore how far political reaction not guided by nationalists … the kind of political reaction which is emerging all across the West … can really go before it encounters the immoveable object of Establishment interests, Money Power interests, Jewish interests; at which point only an authentic nationalism can push on.  This article today will also address the problem of limits.  But this time those will be the limits in commonplace nationalist advocacy which do not necessarily preference “pushing on”.

This short article will also serve as a response to Daniel’s reliance, stated over his most recent posts, on social critique.

Readers may be familiar with my criticism of American White Nationalism as a reactionary but non-revolutionary ideology greatly compromised by the unacknowledged, vestigial liberalism of its advocates.  I touched upon the radical nature of what it is NOT … systemic nationalism … at the opening of Part 3 of the What it means to be human series:

In what struggle are nationalists truly engaged?  Well, yes, the struggle for the future of our people: a struggle for survival, a struggle for autonomy, a struggle for homeland, a struggle to live unburdened by the racial Other.  That is clear.  A process of deliverance, of salvation, then.  But also deliverance and salvation from the entire political, social, and economic form of the modern world, meaning from its economism, its egalitarianism, its “liberty” and “progress”, its “tolerance” and universalism … even, for some, its democratism because that, too, is a modernist massifying ideology.

Yet nationalism’s struggle is not confined to the getting of power and the re-making of the polity, a bit like re-making a bed.  It is more revolutionary and totalistic than that, requiring a change at an extra-political level that completely sweeps away the liberal order in the West, bed and all, and with it the life it generates and the very Mind in which that is even possible.  Nationalism’s radicalism leaves nothing but Nature itself undisturbed.  It seeks not a simple answer but a complete answer.  This is so whether it is a self-exultant, heroic progressivism like the fascisms, or a reactionary, Evolian conservatism, or something more Volkish and identitarian ... or even existentialist and Heideggerian.

And so on.

The point is that the mass of WNs, along with a probable majority of self-described European nationalists, are not willing to think through the consequences of such radicalism.  They may claim to be 100% AltRight or National Socialist or even white left (a contested term, it seems).  But as reactionaries they have a conservative civilisational vision.  In most cases it has little more ambition than for a return to where we were, ethnically speaking, two or three generations ago.  Minus the Jews and blacks, of course, and the bad political choices, the bad life-style choices (especially the “mudsharking”).  Bolt on a few useful ancillaries like race-realism, no more brother-wars, and maybe some bits of honour code, and that’s rebirth, right … that’s whites living and working and voting for and by their own collective interests, governed by men and women who understand that and are faithful to it.  Isn’t this all that white America really needs?  Oh, and the personal liberty, of course.  Got a constitutional right to that.  What free man wants government pushing him around?  Oh, and there’s Christianity.  Believers are always gonna believe.  Can’t stop that.  Shouldn’t even try.  And then there’s guns.  Didn’t the guy behind the bar just say that a well-armed populace is the best defence against tyranny?  Of course, the tyranny has tanks and aircraft.  And electronic warfare.  And the FEMA camps.  And your address.  But, hey, if you think your 9mm mail order popgun will help, we’re cool with that.  Just kindly point it somewhere else.

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The application of what are called human rights by what, these days, is adjudged to be the human rights industry is roundly and rightly deprecated by nationalists.  This isn’t news.  But it is not only us.  It’s fair to say that the white man in the street tends to much the same view.  By natural instinct alone he understands that none of the silvered words of the great panjandrums, those politico-corporate whores and criminals who wallow in their own faux-virtue at the UN and all the international conferences, and in the TV studios … none of their gracious, corrupt schtick is meant to benefit him.  He is not one of their designated victims.  He knows elitism when he sees it, and it isn’t deference he feels toward it.  Ask him about the Human Rights Act (or, if you like, dress it up as the European Convention on Human Rights) and he will tell you about some Pakistani hate preacher or African multiple rapist who says and does what he wants but, somehow, never gets deported.  Ask him about the human rights lawyers who work the courts and win these verdicts, and he’ll narrow his eyes and tell you he’d like to ship the lot of them off to Somalia for a little life-education.  It is the stubborn, abiding dissent of the sturdy yeoman, and it comes straight out of who he is, defiant and unabashed.

He’s probably far from alone, too.  I imagine that even in these neo-Marxised times there are plenty of perfectly liberal-minded lawyers operating in other, less rarified areas of the legal system who also have some mixed feelings on the subject.  They might say of their HR colleagues, “Good luck to them if there’s money in it”.  But classically liberal-minded lawyers and judges will care about the integrity and political neutrality of the law.  The judiciary, after all, is its custodian and interpreter.  Judges, if they have not grown political themselves, should tend to discomfort with any politicisation of the justice system.  The overt campaigning fervour for social justice which typifies HR progressives ... indeed, the whole idea of an intrusive hyper-egalitarian, internationalist political bandwagon really ought to offend against their professional principles.

That said, this essay is not one about signs of light in the darkness.  This essay is about the fundamentals of the life which our history has vouchsafed us, and which has brought us to the pass in which we now labour.  It is about a history of serial anti-identitarian developments, of which human rights and the universalism which underpins them are but a sign and a sadness.  My apologies for the length.  I hope it will prove interesting and informative.

Rights, but how human?

For our part, we nationalists are bound to ask how, in practise, that seminally Christian ideal of an overriding and overarching love of one’s fellow man, and compassion for his suffering, degenerated into an instrument of global political activism undertaken for the purpose of solidising and advancing a new technocratic elite whose priestly function is to stand over the world and make moral distinctions between “the rich north” and “the poor south”, or “privileged whites” and “oppressed non-whites”, or “narrow-minded, xenophobic racists” and “suffering refugees”, etcetera.  The answer, of course, is that love has absolutely nothing to do with it.  Indeed, these men and women who affect to love everyone love no one but themselves.  Their self-interested political activism is the inevitable precondition for regulating and maintaining a panoply of positive rights which are, without exception, contingent upon other values and sensibilities about what is just and fair.  Even the perfectly understandable claim in Article 3 of the 1948 UN Declaration, that “everyone has the right to life”, is not actually natural in kind (something I will come to later).  It, like the other twenty-eight articles, is grounded in Western presumptions and preoccupations, and interpretations which are quotidian, fluid and highly susceptible to political fashion.  Consider Article 22, which states:

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This essay must serve as my reply to Daniel’s recent critique.  Down the years I have been attacked for word or deed by a fair few here.  Generally I will not respond.  We have all observed how pulling apart instead of pulling together seems to be a characteristic, perhaps the defining characteristic, of the renegade kind which, because it alone can withstand the relentless moral attack from every direction, is left to uphold the true interests of our race and peoples today.  There is quite enough ideological schism and personal in-fighting in our movement without creating more.

So in this case, rather than respond directly to Daniel’s comments I will respond to some criticism levelled against the Ontology Project by James Bowery four long years ago in an unresolved thread discussion about the mathematician Gian Carlo Rota’s conclusion that, ultimately, all ontological investigation is made folly by the sheer indeterminacy of being.  It might not seem a very fair or logical way to respond to the criticisms of my friend Daniel.  But dig a little, and the logic might become clearer.

James’s own summation of his argument was stated thus:

Just as measurement is the raw material of science—its “ground” if you will, so philosophy’s “ground” is in the ineffability of Being—ineffability giving rise to necessary precision in the expressions and even thoughts.  Just as the rigor of science is to ruthlessly dethrone theory with measurement, so the rigor of philosophy is to ruthlessly dethrone mere expression and even mere thought with ineffable Being.

Ostensibly, James was demanding that this ineffable slipperiness be dispelled by an unremitting (but, in the event, not bowreyesque) intellectual rigour.  It is, of course, disappointing that he did not hurl himself into the creative fray and resolve the matter for us.  But I don’t think his interest in it extended beyond criticism.  What he was really saying was: In its lack of a properly expressible, qualitatively certain foundation, none of this (ie, the pursuit of an existentialist and identitarian philosophy of Man and nation) has enough solidity to stand in the world.

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This essay, which is long (sorry about that) and quite detailed, picks up certain themes that were first introduced at MR five years ago.  It is, more or less, a summation of my present understanding, as someone pondering the crisis of identity, power, and existence which we Europeans are facing everywhere in the West today.  But it is also a contribution to MR’s Ontology Project.  As such, it is a modest step towards a firm proposal for a politics for the true European life.

One of the beautiful characteristics of existentialist thought is that an investigation of specific phenomena in the mind or in the lived life can begin with anything, and profitably so.  This is because relatedness is inherent to it.  All things, even opposites, are related, whereas fracture is the natural estate of non-existential thought.  This is a particular theme of this post, in which I am trying to cohere the freedom, unity and Life which should, in my opinion, be the very meaning of nationalism in its 21st century struggle.  Let us, then, take as our beginning this idea of struggle, and work from there.

In what struggle are nationalists truly engaged?  Well, yes, the struggle for the future of our people: a struggle for survival, a struggle for autonomy, a struggle for homeland, a struggle to live unburdened by the racial Other.  That is clear.  A process of deliverance, of salvation, then.  But also deliverance and salvation from the entire political, social, and economic form of the modern world, meaning from its economism, its egalitarianism, its “liberty” and “progress”, its “tolerance” and universalism … even, for some, its democratism because that, too, is a modernist massifying ideology.

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