by Neil Vodavzny

New technologies will spawn new jobs in new industries that will be far more rewarding than those they displace

… says Gerald Warner (prev), and the question is what does he know, what secrets is he privy to? The answer is he’s saying what his ideology is telling him, namely that through investment in technique human life is made cosier. Thus does social capitalism trample everything underfoot in its pursuit of comfort. Unfortunately, the natural order is not built on comfort but on antagonism – predator-prey relationships, harvests, seasons. This is the world of action.

It’s worth pursuing this dichotomy. In comments to the recent piece on the new hostility evident in the Daily Telegraph editorial line, DanielS asks where are the true Right? (when you need them). Civilized living indeed is cosy, no more so than at royal courts. Prince Charles sometimes gets criticism for his eco-centric values for speaking from a life of privilege.  In that link to the Telegraph, they have in ‘parenthesis’ that William and Harry had returned from a wild boar hunt in Spain, implying some degree of contradiction.

Why? Because it’s not a comfortable or cosy thing to hunt down wild beasts (not quite Atten-bore). Prince Philip in a recent interview with Fiona Bruce, when asked why he was a conservationist but not a Green, referred to “fluffy bunny huggers”. He was clearly thinking game-keepers and grouse-shoots on Scottish heather. King Juan Carlos is in perpetual sin-mode for his hunting safaris – how sickening to slaughter such proud beasts (not the royals, the buffalo etc), que no?

Monarchy may be privileged for the reason they live a dichotomous life. It is comfortable, and also active on their country estates, riding, hunting, shooting, tree-felling. Their exposure to wildlife and the harsh realities of game-keeping seems to divest them of artificial sentiment. A type of stewardship with discipline inherent in the running of an estate.

Extrapolating from this, Is it possible that our lives of artificial comfort, divorced from nature, impinge on our mental attitudes more than we realize? Why is it often supposed that hunting whales is less proper than slaughtering livestock in factories? For the reason that one is an attitude that is typical of a right-wing state of mind, while the other is not. Ecologically-speaking, hunting is good when practised with discipline, and connects Man to those he kills.

Then there’s the associated discipline of tending to livestock, stabling, farriers etc. Horsewoman Zara Phillips is no stranger to mucking-out stables because that’s what the job’s about. Apart from the actual exercise of pitch-forking and so on, there are immuno-benefits to be had. People who live close to dirt, exposed to pathogens as was the usual case in hovels, develop immuno-responses. That’s essentially why royals have such robust good health – nothing to do with wealth. Which is better, health or wealth? Why not both? Does a market have to breed disease and a social-health service to match?

Such outdoorsy, self-reliant pursuits are every bit (pun unintentional) robust right-wing concerns that just wouldn’t occur normally, for the reason we live in an artificial comfort-zone (unless you’re ridiculously wealthy, or a cowboy). The significance of this is that ease of body affects ease – a sort of sloppy-thinking – of mind. OK, so where that takes us is that body affects mind – a typical right-wing non-Cartesian position. Nevertheless, we live in an artificial world and not the real world. Therefore, we cannot just assume that people’s minds are free-thinking, we have to deal with other issues, primarily rural, rustic areas, which people since time immemorial have inhabited.

We are Europeans, but Europe is a place and we have to think of geography, landscape, romance. That may be an ideal, but if that’s all it is then it’s impotent. We have to deal in signs (not facts) and these are most conspicuous in rural areas. The night sky (unblemished by flare), the crescent moon, red sky at night shepherd’s delight, red sky in the morning shepherd’s warning blah, blah, blah, and other such pastoral clichés. They may be of the same ilk, but each occupies a different microcosm of life’s grand scheme. What you call picturesque, the stuff of art galleries, but what’s the point of fighting for an ideal if it only exists on the wall?  See Schloss Rhazuns, where Swiss Christoph Blocher has made his home a picture-postcard medieval emblem.

I realize this may come as news to some, but it is possible to go too far in isolating the genetic prerogative. Have a look at this link to in-bred giraffes at Danish zoos.  It’s easy enough to follow this one – if the males are too genetically similar in a small population, one has to go. The closest human equivalent is the case of the Spanish Habsburgs. In both cases you can see DNA played a very powerful and decisive role in hereditary stock. There’s totally no doubt.  But to extrapolate from that to a universal dictum is basically rationalising (facts) and not paying due attention to the irrational (signs).

Royals are by their nature more hereditary than many, but they have the advantage of being exposed, not to a world of 24/7 facts, but to inheritance of landmark estates, the irrational landscape of microcosmic signs. Even from a Darwinian perspective, evolution and behaviour are mediated by a mixture of genes and environment – you can’t have one without the other (for health, fitness, appropriateness, survival). The most ludicrous example is Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene – I read somewhere that if it were so, we wouldn’t have evolved beyond primordial soup where genes could breed freely without undue hassle. Instead, we are upwardly striving (ie, we select for fitness).

We have to pay attention to the world we live in because it affects Mind and behaviour regardless of the hereditary .

For instance, I tend to think there’s something called “cultural in-breeding”, quite noticeable on social media where people share the same opinion. That’s the equivalent propensity to genes, but is not genetic – it’s cultural. We can’t assume free-thinking (ie race) when there are other phenomena which might mitigate that factor – know your enemy. Similarly, people of different races can share the same culture – genes aren’t an exclusive factor, they’re determinative but not definitive.

This is where the tribe of Children come-in (from Beyond Thunderdome). Yes, they’re indisputably of Europid heritage, but crucially they’re unbounded, unrestricted in their expressions. Consequently, they develop a rich Europid language of signs and portents . Savannah Nix as the storyteller is typically loquacious and quite florid in speech. You can imagine an Aborigine storyteller (the Dreaming Time) might be more imagist and abstract, even formal, whereas the Children have a sort of rough-and-ready desert patois. So that is a racial difference that crucially needs the environment for free-expression.

I saw some dismissive reviews which I thought missed that the whole plot is a sort of McGuffin. Max is chasing his friend the birdman, whom you catch glimpses of, and there are the usual tropes - bleak Aussie redscape, epic villains, and chase-sequences, Max sprawled in the dirt..The film is actually about the tribe of Children, descendants of mankind who live by signs and see Max as a saviour. This is the poetry that is missing from a world of rationalisers.

Speaking of poetry, two of my favourite artist/creators, Barry Windsor-Smith and Harlan Ellison (dark sci-fantasist) would call themselves liberal, yet to my certain knowledge their work is much more indicative of a right-wing sensibility. It’s a type of cultural programming, not even political, more to do with lifestyle (sub-cultural) and where they live (NY and LA) than anything else. One of my fave bands Jefferson Starship are old hippies who are equally tribal by instinct. All these guys are free-thinkers so it doesn’t matter how they choose to describe themselves. Such is not the case with politically-oriented discussions. The true Right don’t fit easily into the culture. Why does Christoph Blocher live in a fortified castle? He’s wealthy enough to do so, but it’s also a type of statement against the pillaging of traditional enclaves. We hold the line, as the Spartans said at Thermopylae.