Thoughts on the preface and introduction of The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, 20 June 2009 22:32.

by DanielJ

From the Preface to this work, Rieff quoting two historians’ summary of his work:

“If the dominant character type of the twentieth century is really what Rieff calls ‘psychological man,’ the consequences for western society are quite incalculable.”

This is certainly true. If man is a psychological creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity, ethnic solidarity, epistemology, etc. Simply concentrating on Van Tillian presuppositionalism will do no good when men are no longer motivated by philosophies, but by psychologies.

From the Introduction:

Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry [he quotes Yeats in the very beginning of the Intoduction] constitutes an elegiac farewell ... to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.

Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.

He goes on to state that the:

...long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended.

and that:

several systems of belief (are) competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.

Hence, the “culture war.” The “cult” is the cult of personality.

On the preservation of culture:

A culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood—with that understanding of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg… binding even the ignorants of a culture in a great chain of meaning.

This idea of Rieff’s, in my opinion, eventually germinated and sprouted into his idea that if a man is aware of his repressions, they aren’t. The iceberg itself isn’t cognizant of what is underneath itself under the water; it only sees its own reflection which is, in Rieff’s words the directed and outward projection “toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.”

A reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the interplay of which constitutes culture, transforming motive into conduct, is occurring throughout the West, particularly in the United States and England. It is to be expected that some instruments appropriate to our inherited organization of permissions and restraints upon action [monogamy, fidelity, obeying the spirit of the law, etc] will not survive the tension of fundamental reorganization. But, suppose the tension is driven deeper—so deep that all communications of ideals come under permanent and easy suspicion? The question is no longer as Dostoevsky put it: Can civilized men believe?” But rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?

Rieff goes on to state that restoration of a past faith will inevitably bring on the re-living of the nightmare of the first half of the twentieth century and that the great poets all wished for what those of us know is a radically un-Christian idea of a return to initial, or original innocence, which is a concept that is fundamentally at odds with our espoused Calvinism.

In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil.

I’m all for restoring the “sense of play” in acts of creation and invention at the loom, till, craft and trades in the Laschian sense, but Rieff seems to suggest something different here. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Rieff scandalously suggests that this inversion of the doctrines of Total Depravity and Original Sin is the longed for “centre” of Yeats and is capable of holding the self together in these psychologically trying times.

He recklessly, foolishly and Judaically abandons psychology to the express purpose of:

(reconstructing) culture so ... that faith - some compelling symbolic of self-integrating communal purpose - need no longer superintend the organization of personality.

I think perhaps this is at odds with some of his later work and ideas where he expressly calls for the re-imposition of a massive and constrictive super-ego that is essentially Calvinistic in outlook but lacks the Christ. He wants all the benefits of Christianity but none of the Christ!

Rieff takes a bit of a turn toward the fascistic elitism of the neo-Pagans and others here:

Never before has there been such a general shifting of sides as now among intellectuals in the United States and England. Many have gone over to the enemy ... and ... have become spokesmen for what Freud called the instinctual “mass”. Much of modern literature constitutes a symbolic act of going over to the side of the latest, and most original, individualist. This
represents the complete democratization of our culture.

It was in order to combat just such talented hostility to culture that Freud emphasized coercion and the renunciation of instinct as indispensable elements in all culture ... “It is just as impossible,” he writes, “to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization.” ... That such large numbers of the cultivated and intelligent have identified themselves deliberately with those who are supposed to have no love for instinctual renunciation, suggests to me the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged ... I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they naively danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose ... Confronted thus with a picture gallery as the new center of self-worship, civilized men must become again anti-art, in the hope of shifting attention toward modalities of worship wholly other than that of self.

He goes on to elaborate on what could be considered a healthy and properly conservative, cultural dynamic here:

Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands, images that mark the trail of each man’s memory; thus to distinguish right actions from wrong the inner ordinances are set, by which men are guided in their conduct so as to assure a mutual security of contact. Culture is, indeed, the higher learning, But, this higher learning is not acquired at universities; rather, it is assimilated continuously from earliest infancy when human beings first begin to trust in those familiar responses others make to their overtures. In every culture, there stands a censor, governing the opportunity of recognizing and responding to novel stimuli. That governor, inclined always to be censorious about novelty, we may call “faith.” Faith is the compulsive dynamic of culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority.

A strong and healthy conservative culture will fight against the injection of novelty into the social landscape instinctively and with great vigor. This is a basic principle articulated most thoroughly and most competently by many, but initially by men like de Maistre and Burke.

This is also a place where Hannah Arendt’s concept of historical “break” comes into play in my opinion. What we have now is an entirely new phenomenon under the sun, it is a group of cultural creators who are indifferent and they express this through the rigorous defense of pluralism, relativism and nihilism. They contradict all faith by contradicting the very idea of faith. Hence, the push to glorify homosexuals, pederasts, and all other forms of psychological and sexual perversion. They are the welcoming hosts of all things exotic and as Rieff stated before, the most eloquent defenders of the teeming mass of the diverse everyman; an everyman who is his own king, prophet, priest and lawyer completely atomized and disconnected from any greater fabric than that of the cloak of his own ego.

Hence the “No person is illegal” slogan. It reveals much more about the psyche of the individuals repeating this platitudinal mantra than they themselves realize since it is a moral judgment and not simply political sloganeering. They’ve internalized the “anti-culture” and are exporting it from the abundance of their hearts.

Rieff begins, at this point, to despair:

The culture to which I was first habituated grows progressively different in its symbolic nature and in its human product; that double difference and how ordained augments our ambivalence as professional mourners. There seems little likelihood of a great rebirth of the old corporate ideals. The “proletariat” was the most recent notable corporate identity, the latest failed god. style="font-weight: bold;">By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called, in the present volume, “therapeutic,” with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.

Dwell on that last sentence for a while. That is directly where erudite, Godless, idolatry leads.

Rieff finally lets on as to what the stone masons and architects of our Babylon are really undertaking to build:

What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten [or pan out at all, ever] the more immediate pleasures. The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world. It is a terrible error to see the West as conservative and the East as revolutionary. We are the true revolutionaries. The East is swiftly learning to act as we do, which is anti-conservative in a way non-Western peoples have only recently begun to fully to realize for themselves.

With what, at first glance, seems like stunning prescience and foresight, Rieff predicts the decade of the 70’s (although from the vantage point of the late 60’s, I’m not that impressed) with particular acumen as a response to hyper-critical elitism:

Each culture is its own order of therapy—a system of moralizing demand, including remissions that ease the pressures of communal purposes. Therapeutic elites before our own were predominately supportive rather than critical of cultures as a moral demand system. Admonitions were the expectable predicates of consolations; that is what is meant, nowadays, by “guilt” culture. Whenever therapeutic elites grow predominately critical then a cultural revolution may be said to be in progress. Ours is such a time. The Occident has long been such a place.

With a little luck, our counter-revolution may be underway, precipitated in our era by the election of Obama combined with rapid demographic transformation and the economic stagnation we are experiencing. People scapegoat. It is a theological necessity, inescapable concept and imperative inherent in the human psyche and soul, placed there as a part of the very image of God that He burned into our souls. We seek absolution through the death and destruction of substitutes. The current crop of hyper-critical elites scapegoat us poor and simple White folk without realizing that it is a two way street and without understanding the great power this process can stimulate in the masses.

I will refrain from making a judgment about the actual level of Jewish culpability for the standard charges against them, but the typical historical European reaction against the Jews - whether completely justified or not - is a fitting and appropriate example of this phenomenon. Expulsion of the other, the placing of them outside the camp to symbolize their guilt.

Really, the process of cultural revolution, in my opinion, is a Christophony of sorts. The revolutionaries transfer their guilt onto their substitutes and are atoned. Once cleansed, they begin to rebuild the torn down temples of the guilty parties. This is why Christ goes alone to His death; we all killed Him and we repeat this “cyclically” in the Spenglerian sense throughout our history.

Rieff goes on to quote Max Scheler in describing what I think is a Scriptural definition of the underlying purpose for the Christian drive to denounce sin and repent:

Christian asceticism—at least so far as it was not influenced by decadent Hellenistic philosophy—had as its purpose not the suppression or even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization. It is positive, not negative, asceticism—aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives.

The real and ugly head of atheistic existentialism has finally reared itself violently upward, defiant and unwavering in its mission to be unruled and unorganized. Rieff again:

Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of
personality.

Indeed, Western men are learning how to use their internality to do battle against all. Bellum unus contra omnes!

This is the egalitarian fantasy unmasked.

It is every man woman and child for themselves in social warfare of epic proportions with no safe port, harbor, trench or fort. The home, the marriage, the school and the church have become a war zone. Rieff states that if this final cultural transformation takes root, if this

restructuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions of nature. With such a victory, culture, as previously understood, need suffer no further defeats. It is conceivable that millennial distinctions between inner and outer experience, private and public life, will become trivial. The individual heart need have no reasons of its own that the corporate head cannot understand and exploit for some augmentation of the individual’s sense of well-being. Thinking need not produce nausea or despair as its final answer to the assessment of communal purpose because men well have ceased to seek any salvation other than amplitude in living itself.

Rieff predicts the astonishingly brisk rise of reality television, social networking (i.e. Facebook, Myspace) and the internet persona:

There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.

Interestingly, LaVey believed that emotionally evocative psychodrama had a place within Satanism.

Finally, Rieff concludes the introduction thusly:

The wisdom of the next social order ... would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. The danger of politics lies more in the ancient straining to create those symbols or support those institutions that narrow the range of virtues or too narrowly define the sense of well-being; for the latter seems to be the real beatitude toward which men have always strained. Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.

Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system ... The rules of health indicate activity; psychologocial man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture. Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints. If “immoral” materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The “end” or “goal” is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.

I am aware that these speculations may be thought to contain some parodies of an apocalypse. But what apocalypse has ever been so kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt? Perhaps the elimination of the tragic sense—which is tantamount to the elimination of irreconcilable moral principles—is no tragedy. Civilization could be, for the first time in history, the expression of human contents rather than the consolatory control of discontents. Then and only then would the religious question receive a markedly different answer from those dominant until recently in our cultural history.

Tags: Political Philosophy

Comments:

Posted by Al Ross on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:52 | #

If today’s Christianity is a defence mechanism against non-White invasion of Euroman’s lands then I’m a baked hedgehog with mushroom sauce. Christianity, that ancient Hebrew heresy foisted upon White people by Jews and their proselytising, brainwashed catspaws, is the natural parent of multi-culturalism’s sponsor, Marxism. Of course, the supernatural element of Christianity’s arrant nonsense had to be excised in order for those foolishly egalitarian Whites who, at least, valued observed reality above blind, racially alien, Middle Eastern deity worship to accept the worthless religion’s new Communist guise.

Posted by danielj on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:13 | #

Christianity… ...is the natural parent of multi-culturalism’s sponsor, Marxism.

By your own logic, they are Jacob and Esau and not Jacob and Joseph.

Regardless, the point is that we must drive men out of the realm of psychology or fundamentally reorganize their psychology to further our communal end before those crazed Christo-Marxists beat us to the task.

Posted by Frank on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:20 | #

I’m wary of conservatives becoming “anti-art”, though I realise what’s meant is opposition to the pornographic/anything goes art we have today. However, art can obviously exist within a culture, and a living culture needs new, entertaining twists and additions that can surely remain exciting without breaching the set bounds.

Also, it’s said that individualised man will choose that religion which is most therapeutic, but just so Christianity and nationalism are quite therapeutic. And similarly, they can be sold over pornography because as the Stoics knew that type of thing doesn’t bring true happiness.

“Regardless, the point is that we must drive men out of the realm of psychology or fundamentally reorganize their psychology to further our communal end before those crazed Christo-Marxists beat us to the task.”

Yea, once a civilisation is undermined a vacuum exists begging for a new order to fill it. Either the West will restore itself, or it will be replaced by another.

Posted by Frank on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:25 | #

Rieff goes on to state that restoration of a past faith will inevitably bring on the re-living of the nightmare of the first half of the twentieth century and that the great poets all wished for what those of us know is a radically un-Christian idea of a return to initial, or original innocence, which is a concept that is fundamentally at odds with our espoused Calvinism.

I’m a fan of the pagan idea of a return to an original innocence in the sense of an original national character which has been enlightened by Christ.

It’s a pagan view surely that life is a progression from virtue to depravity, but this nevertheless well reflects the world we see today. Right or wrong, I’m attracted to the idea of using pagan ideas to achieve Christian ends, which ultimately culminate in the Christian faith. We live in a sharply anti-Christian environment, so I sense that this could be necessary. The Christians of old similarly used pagan tales, so my idea is in good company even if wrong.

Posted by Frank on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:50 | #

I’m reminded of this commentary on St. Bonaventure by George Boas (whom I’m not otherwise acquainted with):

This hierarchy of Being appears throughout the work of Saint Bonaventura,
though he did not derive it immediately from Plotinus. It had become a
medieval commonplace which few were willing to question. And yet he could
not accept the whole theory of emanation, since he was bound by his
religious faith to believe in actual creation out of nothing. The God of
Plotinus was The One from whom everything flowed like light; the God of
Saint Bonaventura was the personal God of Genesis. His metaphysical problem
was to accommodate one to the other. This accommodation appears most
clearly in the fifth chapter of the “Itinerarium.”

The second hierarchy which was fused with the logical hierarchy was that of
value. There is no purely logical reason why the general should be any
better than the particular, though there are good traditional grounds for
thinking so. Plato, Aristotle, the Neo-Platonists, and even the Stoics had
a tendency to confuse goodness with the ideal or the general. In ancient
Pagan thought, there was a standard belief that no particular was ever a
perfect exemplification of its class—no triangle made of matter being a
perfect geometrical triangle, no human being a perfectly rational animal,
no work of art a perfect realization of the artist’s idea. Arguing in this
way, one could see that no species would ever perfectly exemplify its
genus, no genus its higher order, and so on. Hence the process “downward”
from Being was degeneration. When one stops to think that the Christian
religion insisted upon man’s nature as having been vitiated by sin—sin
which, though committed by our primordial parents, was nevertheless
inherited by us—one can also see why, to a Christian, the fusion of the
logical and the value-hierarchy was natural enough. We still look in vain
for the perfect exemplification of animal and vegetable species, though we
are inclined to believe that the species is an ideal formed for
intellectual purposes, and not to be expected to exist in anything other
than scientific books and articles. But to a Christian thinker of the type
of Saint Bonaventura, the species and genera were the ideas of God in
accordance with which He had created the world. It is they which are
responsible for the orderliness of the universe; they are sometimes called
by the Stoic term, seminal reasons. In the nineteenth century, when men
were as impressed by the regularity of scientific laws as they had been in
the thirteenth, people like Lord Russell found a religious satisfaction in
contemplating them, the only difference being that Lord Russell did not use
the Stoic term; nor did he think of scientific laws as the ideas in the
mind of God. If permanence and invariability are marks of goodness, then
indeed the more general the law, or the more inclusive the idea, the
better. And since the most general and inclusive term is without question
the term “Being,” it would follow that “Being” was the best of all things.
In the sixth chapter of the “Itinerarium,” in which Saint Bonaventura
discusses “Good” as the name of God, the importance of this fusion appears
most clearly.

Posted by the Narrator... on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:19 | #

Some interesting points there DanielJ.

One thing that never seems quite clear though in discussions on faith and lack there of, is the dividing line between theism and atheism. After all the Christian and the Pagan alike are theists, believing in the supernatural. And I would guess that around 98% of the world are theists.

Another side of the argument on the therapeutic culture and the scapegoat mentality is the influence Christianity has on those mindsets. After all, therapy requires a victim and the victim’s goal is to find comfort and absolution. The victim thus becomes the unjustly persecuted scapegoat and there is (in Christendom) no greater hero than the victim/scapegoat, aka Jesus Christ.

And based on Christian doctrine the act of repenting brings comfort and absolution from sins and guilt. “come to me all you who are heavy burdened”.

Is that not the genesis of the therapeutic culture in The West?

Men of The West have rather joyously taken on the role of scapegoat in recent times and nailed themselves to a cross.
An act that allows them the Christian-based therapeutic value of “admitting they’re sinners” as well as the glory of playing the hero, aka the scapegoat.

you write,

This is the egalitarian fantasy unmasked.

It is every man woman and child for themselves in social warfare of epic proportions with no safe port, harbor, trench or fort. The home, the marriage, the school and the church have become a war zone.

But did not Jesus say, “I bring a sword, not peace. To set father against son, mother against daughter, brother against brother” etc..

Does Christ not make a “new man” out of each person, leaving the old one in the dust? And is that new man not a “stranger” and a “pilgrim” in this earth with his ultimate goal being to become part of a generic collective, universalistic, body of believers who will find comfort/therapy for all eternity?

I’m not nitpicking, I’m just suggesting that Christian psychological influences on The West could be seen as part of the negative turn towards the very things you lament having happened.

After all, there are all kinds of inferences that can be made about a society that made a god out of a man who went passively to his death for “the greater good”.

...

Posted by danielj on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:32 | #

One thing that never seems quite clear though in discussions on faith and lack there of, is the dividing line between theism and atheism.

I’m going to address this subject at some point in the future in other posts.

Rieff, for his own part, removes the theos from the equation with his definition of faith.

In every culture, there stands a censor, governing the opportunity of recognizing and responding to novel stimuli. That governor, inclined always to be censorious about novelty, we may call “faith.” Faith is the compulsive dynamic of culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority.

Although I think he would disagree with this characterization since it is so Jungian, faith, for Rieff, becomes simply a guardian of the collective unconscious a custodian of the status quo.

Faith becomes more about submission to temporal authority and in this regard he becomes anti-Christian by violently wrenching what is eternal and universal out of context. Rieff, later in his life, begins to describe the purpose of culture as translating the Sacred Order into the Social Order which is a more “orthodox” heresy and one I’m willing to make accommodations for.

Nevertheless, we can all have this “faith.” A faith which requires only that we reject what is foreign, a faith that acts biologically as the stimulator of anti-bodies.

And I would guess that around 98% of the world are theists.

Third world theism—even the “Christianity” explosion that is Anglicanizing Africa—according to Rieff’s definition of faith, isn’t the same as first world theism. In their case, “faith” is revolutionary and is therefore the injection of novelty. Therefore, whether we are bringing socialist democracy or Jesus Christ and monogamy to the Africans, we are imperial interlopers.

Is that not the genesis of the therapeutic culture in The West?

Possibly. I also plan on addressing this in future posts on a different subject. If you are interested it will be excerpts and commentary on a book by Harold J. Berman titled Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition which is a history of the synthesis of the pre-Christian pagan law of Germany and the non-native Christianity that invaded and replaced—through—synthesis the ancient Germanic faith and began its long reign as the supreme cultural interdict.

Before Christianity, Germanic law was essentially “tit-for-tat,” petty and retributionary. The Germans were devoid of any conception of higher justice, capital punishment and the concept of weregild, which was pecuniary reparation only, was the driving socio-legal force.

Only after the influence of the Holy Roman Empire waxed was the idea of capital punishment popularized and the distinction drawn between murder and manslaughter. Law was merged with religion and perhaps the result was a form of society that began to address the psychological dimension of man in therapeutic fashion. We shall address it later.

And based on Christian doctrine the act of repenting brings comfort and absolution from sins and guilt.

Initially, what it brought was legal justification but Western man has managed to translate this into the psychologically comforting notion of forgiveness. Forgiveness to the Germano-Pagan meant a discharge of the “blood money” that one owed to almighty God. It was a revolutionary concept but it was one that was fundamentally legal rather than psychological and therapeutic.

As one sees the slow degeneration of even our legal system as it spirals downward into the realm of therapy one is struck by the irony.

I’m positive in my own faith that God’s universalism does not require the obliteration of distinction. We won’t be sublimated into some grand-unified, homogenized, therapeutic collective, but rather, what makes us distinct will become fully realized in the eschaton. The resurrection of the body is central to the Christian faith and this resurrection will inevitably bring the resurrection of a perfected race, perfected gender, etc.

The body of believers, although one, is still many. The error you are describing is really a creeping pantheism which the Christian should reject outright.

After all, there are all kinds of inferences that can be made about a society that made a god out of a man who went passively to his death for “the greater good”.

It was a knowing self-sacrifice which isn’t exactly “passive” but I definitely agree that it could be interpreted as such and has, in fact, between interpreted in exactly that manner.

Posted by Snori Snoreson on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:35 | #

Confronted thus with a picture gallery as the new center of self-worship, civilized men must become again anti-art, in the hope of shifting attention toward modalities of worship wholly other than that of self.

I think the Germans tried that in WWI—but then everyone whined about the destruction of precious Belgian architecture.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:56 | #

Until the religious and the secular find their proper places in the world, there will be no peace. To that end I think people miss the importance of honor as moral territory: There can be no ultimate separation of religion from territory for the simple reason that moral systems have consequences in ecologies: both natural and human ecologies.

Honor, as moral territory, is the key to understanding the dilemma.

If there is to be peace, therefore, it has to involve reallocation of territory to differing moral systems so that there is not continual conflict over things both inane and profound. If that territorial reallocation system is in place for individuals, allowing assortative migrations so that people consent to the moral systems under which they live—so that they may voluntarily submit their natural territory to that which they consider honorable—then it is in place for all.

All this pretense that “the theraputic” differs from religion is simply religion posing as pseudoscience.

Posted by the Narrator... on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:20 | #

according to Rieff’s definition of faith, isn’t the same as first world theism. In their case, “faith” is revolutionary and is therefore the injection of novelty.

Posted by danielj on June 21, 2009, 10:32 AM |

It may have a political tinge, but isn’t theism the belief in the supernatural?
And don’t most of the thirdworld and even post-Christian Westerners believe in some sort of “life force” that is supernatural in character?
That’s generally what I’ve understood to be theistic.

Before Christianity, Germanic law was essentially “tit-for-tat,” petty and retributionary.

Posted by danielj on June 21, 2009, 10:32 AM

Most justice systems past and present are retributionary. And I believe the Scandinavian peoples had a punishment system of full-outlawry where a person lost all social protection on their self and their property.

I never got the sense that it was chaotic and disorderly to the greater social order.

Forgiveness to the Germano-Pagan meant a discharge of the “blood money” that one owed to almighty God. It was a revolutionary concept but it was one that was fundamentally legal rather than psychological and therapeutic.

Posted by danielj on June 21, 2009, 10:32 AM

But the two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Having the acknowledgment of a misdeed made officially right by the larger community can be both psychologically stabilizing as well as therapeutic

I’m positive in my own faith that God’s universalism does not require the obliteration of distinction.

Posted by danielj on June 21, 2009, 10:32 AM

I was getting more at this statement,

Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.

The above seems similar to the Christian ideal of paradise. A place where the atomized (believer who has separated himself from family and community to join the new organization/body) individual finds resolution in the new collective psyche.

...

Posted by danielj on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:22 | #

I think the Germans tried that in WWI—but then everyone whined about the destruction of precious Belgian architecture.

You’ve missed the point.

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:14 | #

Interesting post. Just a few things to consider:

1. Christianity has been for a long time the religion of the West. As an empirical proposition, as Europe has dispensed with the old faith, it has been transmogrified into a bunch of non-reproducing, non-white-ass-kissing pansies and socialists. Correlation or causation?

2. Must Christianity lead to multiculturalism? I genuinely do not know (and neither do you - this is one of the most profound yet largely unexplored areas of intellectual concern). All patriots should avoid this easy inference, however, as it is not clear that multiculturalism is a latent outgrowth of “taking Christianity seriously”. At least as likely is the hypothesis that Christianity’s replacement, sentimental secular humanism, the aptly called Religion of Humanity, is what has directly lead to our modern hysterical denials of racial differences, and acceptance of race-replacement.

3. Another empirical proposition. Most conservatives generally, and most racial conservatives in particular (I don’t mean celebrity racialists, or extreme rightists - just the plain people who vote against immigration, affirmative action, etc) describe themselves as “conservative Christians”, at least here in America. There is, in other words, a much stronger correlation between Christian conservatism and racial conservatism, than between atheism and racial conservatism. Why this should be, or WHETHER this should be, intellectually, I don’t know. But this fact ought to influence political thinking about explorations of the intersection of Christianity and race-liberalism, especially when calls for a new paganism or similar nonsense start issuing forth.

4. I am sufficiently confident in my comparative theological knowledge to make this claim: the only philosophically and scientifically tenable alternatives to atheism are either some form of rational Christianity, or a deism as yet not fully articulated; that is, all existing non-Christian forms of supernaturalism, including various Christian sects, fail intellectually and scientifically. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is very strong, however. The more it is studied the more (intellectually) impressive it becomes. Paganism, however, whatever its former tribe-unifying merits, cannot be resurrected by the modern mind.

5. Even if all religion is, finally, empirically false, white nationalists may want to encourage a new efflorescence of traditional Christianity, if only for its healthy, life-affirming aspects. The old faith encouraged large families (biological reproduction). We need this now. For centuries, moreover, the old faith was not seen to be incompatible with anti-miscegenation laws, with ethnic expulsions, with ranks and hierarchies, and with anti-immigration statutes. Instead of jettisoning the faith because it has been racially corrupted, the easier as well as more politically prudent and fruitful course would be to recover and reapply the earlier, non-multiculturalist understanding of Christian obligation.

6. The Faith presided over great periods of Western (biological) expansion. It may have helped cause that expansion, directly and certainly indirectly. The Faith is therefore not necessarily inimical to the West; secular liberalism undeniably is. Oh, and the Faith may even be true ... racialists should adjust their thinking accordingly.

Posted by danielj on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:21 | #

I’ll get back to this next weekend and hopefully have another installment unless we get rain here in New England, in which case I won’t be able to work and I’ll have plenty of free time.

Posted by Frank on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:19 | #

All this pretense that “the theraputic” differs from religion is simply religion posing as pseudoscience.

There is an important difference. Religion provides a solid answer that everyone within the religious community can agree upon. What is right and wrong can be logically derived from the religion.

However, outside that man is guided by his emotions. At one point the desire to rape might surface, at another to steal, at another to stop someone from stealing because it “feels wrong”, etc. What’s to say such desires are wrong except the power balance of society (there will be consequences)? Outside of a religion to provide moral answers, sentiments rule.

Posted by Frank on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:47 | #

The revealed truth of Christianity isn’t the only form of religion. The pagans would pass on beliefs and superstitions which constitute religious values.

The difference is that increasingly now society doesn’t agree on what’s right and wrong. There’s no authority and no moral agreement among members of a community. We have some sense of what doesn’t harm others is fine, but this is a fuzzy and poorly founded value system. While we condemn those who harm others on the one hand, we can be made to secretly dream of indulging in various sins provided we get away with them (e.g. robbing a bank).

Unlike the German system mentioned, we don’t have a kin system to fall back on. The state has replaced kin as the protector, and yet it has no foundation for its own moral judgements, the rules can then be expected to change with the wind.

Posted by Dasein on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:26 | #

There is an important difference. Religion provides a solid answer that everyone within the religious community can agree upon. What is right and wrong can be logically derived from the religion.

The historical record contradicts you, even as we speak.

Posted by Fr. John on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:08 | #

“If man is a psychological creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity, ethnic solidarity, epistemology, etc. Simply concentrating on Van Tillian presuppositionalism will do no good when men are no longer motivated by philosophies, but by psychologies.”

Psychology was the invention of a Jew.

I don’t care for that.

Christianity is NOT a ‘Jewish’ religion.

Judaism, as it is known today, is TALMUDISM.

ALL comments that seek to find a similarity between Biblical HEBRAICISM, (and it’s fulfillment in Orthodox Christianity)
and the Talmudic Khazarian racial supremacist perversion that CALLS itself ‘jewish’ but is not, [Rev. 2:8,9] are as ignorant, as they are disingenuous.

I only wish the posters to this forum were as conversant in their own Christian heritage and history, as Europeans, as they are in their fiscal and demographic statistics.

Posted by Fr. John on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:18 | #

” will refrain from making a judgment about the actual level of Jewish culpability for the standard charges against them, but the typical historical European reaction against the Jews - whether completely justified or not - is a fitting and appropriate example of this phenomenon. Expulsion of the other, the placing of them outside the camp to symbolize their guilt.”

Nope,sorry. It was the JEWS that put THEMSELVES outside of the camp.

“His blood be on us, and ON OUR CHILDREN.” - New Testament

Thank God I am no longer an RC, in that I would have to swallow the lie that ‘we’ [sic] absolved them’ from the sin of deicide, just to ‘remain’ a ‘good Catholic.’

One cult cannot annul what the Church of the Ages has decreed is their [the Jews’] won conscious, purposeful, and WILLING decision. With the Williamson decision, it is clear that Rome is now the willing Whore of the Jews. Luther and the Reformers were correct. Rome is the Whore of Babylon

And the Jews remain deicides for eternity.

Posted by the Narrator... on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:19 | #

Nope,sorry. It was the JEWS that put THEMSELVES outside of the camp.

Posted by Fr. John on June 22, 2009, 01:18 PM

Probably has more to do with them (like gypsies) not being European.

...

Posted by Frank on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:22 | #

“The historical record contradicts you, even as we speak. “

Well certainly religions can create disagreements. But at least within a single social unit rules can be established and generally agreed upon.

Part of what we have in the managerial state is we’re manipulated as serves those in power. But for the time we’re also still encouraged to question everything and so we find ourselves (or I did when young) asking “what’s fun? and what makes me look good? (what feels good?)” instead of “what’s right? (logic) and what have I been brought up to feel as right? (ethics)”

But eventually this vacuum will surely be replaced. The insane individualism we currently have is surely only a part of the fall. Liberalism is the suicide of the West. It will be replaced.

Posted by Frank on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:43 | #

While I do think Christianity is the truth, which can be seen in how one senses its teachings are the best of any religion, we don’t necessarily need a “revealed truth” religion.

Even having a philosophical community that teaches a fuzzy concept of truth and morality and god(s) provides some order and source of guidance. Over time a group of stories and works would be accumulated, and if nothing else these would serve as a source of guidance.

The assumption today is that we can have a firm revealed truth religion or nothing at all, but this is not the case at all. We can have some flexibility, even within Christianity (e.g. perhaps tolerating Catholics and Reformed) without falling into the abyss we have today where children are actually brought up to decide what’s right and wrong for themselves, whatever feels right is right.

Even if Aryans naturally find their moral code as some WN believe (I do not for the most part). They only do this through trial and error over time. During that trial and error, they have to sin in order to understand somewhat of why it is wrong. This isn’t the best way to learn these things. And the system itself is set up to serve those in power, so it punishes those who get in its way (including creating trouble with the electorate), but otherwise has no motive for interfering. And likewise those within the system have no motive for obeying - rather they’re encouraged to try to avoid the system’s eyes. Right and wrong then is but what one can get away with.

Some here might like Chamberlain’s thoughts on religion:

In one respect however the mental life of the Indo-Aryan stands unattainably high above ours: so far as that their philosophy was religion and religion philosophy. With us, our thinking and feeling, that once lay peacefully next to each other like twins in the lap of human consciousness, have ripened to a full-grown age and are now separated as two completely different natures; hostilely they face each other; every man with a capable and at the same time independent mind has to admit that.

Therefore the religion there is also the bearer of science, which cannot exist without freedom of thought. The achievements of the Indo-Aryans in the areas of mathematics, philology etc. are all interwoven with their epistemologic-religious conceptions. We can’t say the same thing of ourselves. With us all genuine science and all genuine philosophy was on war footing with religion ever since; if, at times, this was not the case, it was either because of a practical adjustment to existing conditions due to mutual fundamental slackness in thinking and acting, or purposeful, planned hypocrisy. It may be that some part of our people has religion, but God knows one would search in vain for a single spark of thought in this part; with our philosophers on the other hand, we find either no religion or a mask. Of the majority of the educated people we can say, without exaggeration, that they possess neither religion nor philosophy; they stand there like once winged creatures, of which one has cut off both their wings.

But this is not nihilism and individualised selection as we have today. Chamberlain’s concept is a very different organic growth.

Posted by apollonian2nd on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:11 | #

“1. Christianity has been for a long time the religion of the West. As an empirical proposition, as Europe has dispensed with the old faith, it has been transmogrified into a bunch of non-reproducing, non-white-ass-kissing pansies and socialists. Correlation or causation?” -Leon Haller on June 22, 2009, 12:14 AM

* * * * *

Transformation, Mystification Of Christianity Is Overthrow Of Objectivity In Cyclic Cultural Hubris
(Apollonian, 22 Jun 09)

“Leon,” u got it right, but u just don’t go far enough. Note according to Gosp. JOHN Christ is hero of TRUTH (14:6, 18:37) vs. Jew lies and conspiracy, theme of JOHN’s whole, entire story—which then gives framework for all the rest of New Testament (NT) which remember is first of all, LITERATURE (allegory).

Thus Christianity is actually a literary allegory for defense and foundation for human REASON (including science, logic, law, etc.). So what then could be only possible basis for TRUTH?—answer is obviously Aristotle’s OBJECTIVITY, this vs. subjectivity, basis of lies, thus Judaism (Talmudism).

So what’s happened, obviously, is Christianity has become mystified, this by means, for foremost example, of gross mis-understanding of word, “faith,” which properly means only LOYALTY—not any kind of alternative mentality to reason.

Thus present cultural-psychologic impetus for mystification of Christianity harkens fm Rousseau, Eng. Utilitarians, and esp. Immanuel Kant, who trump truth, reality, and objectivity by means of the “moral imperative,” an obsessive fixation of the mind which supposedly justifies consequent mystification, etc.

Thus the necessarily determined nature, reality, and causation is trumped by “imperative” of a perfectly “free” human will which thereby enables “good-evil” (Pelagian heresy, delusion, fallacy). Thus we observe rampant indulgence in “guilt” as indicator of “moral virtue,” esp. in guise of racism (mere loyalty, in accord w. 5th of original Ten Commandments, “Honor thy race” [parentage]) which affords then feeling sorry, by bored middle-class fools, for conquered races, etc.—ESPECIALLY Jews (Talmudic psychopaths, hysterics, and criminals) who were “liberated” by late Modernist French Rev., etc.

Anti-racism is literally TREASON to one’s people, and note the promoters are ALWAYS collaborators with Jews, naturally. Jews are soooooooo “persecuted,” u see—which is the obligatory “guilt” for which “good” Christians (actually “Judeo-Christians” [JCs]—see Whtt.org and TruthTellers.org for expo/ref.) must atone—for which they’re well-paid by Jew criminals and master-minds.

And this overthrow of reason, hence real Christianity and objectivity, simply accompanies the overthrow of rule-of-law by which the criminal enterprise of COUNTERFEITING, going by name of “banking” (“fractional-reserve” variety—see RealityZone.com, TheMoneyMasters.com, and JudenFrei.org for expo/ref.) now dominates and founds the present ZOG-Mammon empire-of-lies.

CONCLUSION: Note then, this overturning of the culture is actually natural, even predictable CYCLE of history, according to “Decline of the West,” by Oswald Spengler. Thus the success and prosperity of the culture is beginning of its demise as HUBRIS then ensues in form of aforementioned false “MORALISM,” etc., as we’ve seen over last two hundred yrs or so. Honest elections and death to the Fed. Apollonian

Posted by james on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:56 | #

I don’t understand why people here and others that talk about WN complaining about the social construct of a liberal democracy when its elements like multi-culturalism, gay rights, ZOG, etc are creation of white western mainly Jewish philosophies and social/political movements.
Muslim problem is only highlighted as an issue because the mass media as permitted it to be just like there other projects like Tibet, etc.
Europe was all to happy with the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of an Islamist state in Bosnia independence of Kosovo who have burnt down nearly all Christian church and is almost entirely Kosovar Albanian due to mass illegal immigration and western backed terrorism during the 90’s and media reporting of now debunked Serb atrocity stories.

I think western society has gotten to the stage where political, social and foreign policy are primarily driven by economic philosophy exemplified by Brezinski’s plan for Eurasia which will be fully implemented under the Obama puppet administration in his 97 book The Grand Chessboard.

http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard

I think there is alternative political movements in alien lands that aren’t Muslim in Asia like Alexander Dugins Eurasia movement which when I mentioned about contacting someone at the Eurasia movement for a Majority Rights interview I never got a response?

Are you going to interview Norman Lowell again in the future anytime soon?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:23 | #

“I am no longer an RC” (—Fr. John)

I’ve thought about leaving Catholicism but for the moment am still an RC: specifically, I am a Catholic Sedevacantist who also follows Bishop Richard Williamson’s teachings — I combine Sedevacantism and Williamsonism. If I’m the only person in the world to do that, so be it: I belong to a Catholic sect one member strong, consisting of me alone.

Bishop Williamson, probably the greatest Catholic priest alive and no Sedevacantist (as far as I understand him), is the only Catholic cleric I’m aware of who recognizes the significance and proper role of race in this mortal life. When I encountered his views I immediately understood I didn’t have to leave Catholicism. I understood there was a place for me. And I understood for the first time the true depth and filth of the immorality, criminality, and insanity which today’s Catholic establishment is sunken in. Today’s Catholic establishment is, at best, on the moral level of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, on the moral level of the criminals who engineered World War II, and on the moral level of the genocidal Marxist totalitarians who run the E.U. That’s “at best.” Words don’t exist to describe what the Catholic establishment is at worst. There aren’t words strong enough. Words adequate to convey it haven’t been invented.

Posted by The Monitor on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00 | #

I belong to a Catholic sect one member strong, consisting of me alone.

I guess that beats being a member of the cult of absolute genetic determinism that some here follow.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:22 | #

from Bishop Richard Williamson’s blog:

On the assumption that the Second Vatican Council established within the Catholic Church a serious split between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority, “Eleison Comments” three weeks ago (“Flat Contradiction”) divided today’s Catholics between those who cling to Truth and have problems with Catholic Authority, and those who cling to Catholic Authority and have problems with Catholic Truth or doctrine, for instance on religious liberty.

Setting up such a parallel between “Conciliarists” following Vatican II and “Traditionalists” following the age-old doctrine and liturgy, may well shock numbers of both, for the reasons evoked above, but let us appeal to the realities in the Church around us. Do we not observe that as Traditionalists who wholly reject present Church authorities risk losing their Catholic sense, so too Conciliarists who wholly scorn present Traditionalists (as do most German bishops) risk ceasing to be Catholics for lack of any sense of doctrinal truth?

However, the parallel only goes so far. For while outright “sedevacantism” and outright neo-modernism are in this logical respect comparable, they are by no means equivalent, because Truth is higher than Authority, which only exists to serve Truth. If all Authority disappeared, Truth would still be there (“My words will not pass away”, says Our Lord—Mk.XIII, 31). But if all Truth were smothered in lies, as is happening today, we would see, as we are seeing, all Authority discredited with it, and being replaced by brute force. Truth and its ensuing Justice are the life-blood of Authority. Authority is merely the servant and protector of Truth and Justice.

This is why Traditionalists clinging to Truth are, as such, repeat, as such, better Catholics than Conciliarists clinging to Authority - judge by the fruits! And while Truth, by its nature of corresponding to the object and not to the subject, cannot bend to Authority, on the contrary the Church authorities, Popes and Cardinals and Bishops, must one day bend back to the Truth, and the sooner the better. Nor is saying so remotely an arrogant claim on the part of Traditionalists, as Cardinal Ratzinger once opined, because Traditionalists never invented Tradition, Tradition was a given, from being merely faithful to which they got their name. Archbishop Lefebvre had engraved on his tombstone St. Paul’s “Tradidi quod et accepi” (I Cor.XI, 23) because he was the very first to maintain that he had done no more than hand on what had been handed down to him.

This fundamental primacy of Truth over Authority applies inside and outside the Catholic Church, inside and outside any part of the Church. But modern souls have lost almost all grip on Truth. Here is the drama.

Kyrie eleison.

London, England

( http://dinoscopus.blogspot.com/2009/05/eleison-comments-xcix-just-claims.html )

Posted by danielj on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:05 | #

I guess that beats being a member of the cult of absolute genetic determinism that some here follow.

Why, of all the posts you could post this ridiculous comment on, would you choose the one post that least proves your case? Seriously? It is a genuine interest of mine to understand your thought process here.

Posted by The Monitor on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:03 | #

Why, of all the posts you could post this ridiculous comment on…

I’ve hashed this out before here and don’t have time to do so again. Simply put:

Many here believe that human existence is the random product of time, change, matter and genetics. Our existence is a physical phenomenon that expires forever upon physical death. This being the case, they still claim I ought to sacrifice myself on behalf of a proposed future ethnostate that I will never see. If the materialist worldview is true, why should I care? It makes no sense.

Posted by Tanstaafl on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:43 | #

It makes no sense.

Well duh. That realization would make a thinking person reconsider their premises.

Posted by Frank on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:24 | #

“I guess that beats being a member of the cult of absolute genetic determinism that some here follow. “

To some extent certainly this is true, but your point is that there’s a nongenetic part that naturally is a part of society too.

Before Christianity we’d have ancestral customs, regional traditions, stories, legal traditions, etc. that would guide us often without any sort of foundation - the laws are as they are because they’re there, because of precedent.

I’m not proposing paganism, but I am saying that paganism is preferred to the individualist nihilism we have today that prevents any sort of societal moral order from developing.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:37 | #

Speaking of Christianity, Dutch Christians are defecting from their traditional Dutch Christian political parties to vote for Geert Wilders’ party, the Netherlands Freedom Party:

http://www.islamineurope.net/2009/06/strong-support-for-freedom-party.html .

Official Jewry in Europe denounces this and calls on the E.U. to outlaw parties like Wilders’ party:

http://www.islamineurope.net/2009/06/european-jewish-congress-frets.html .

Official Jewry is openly, brazenly, and outrageously setting itself up as a mortal enemy of the European races by adamantly, aggressively, viciously, libelously, and slanderously opposing any efforts on the part of Euro race peoples to 1) prevent Europe’s complete Islamization, and 2) prevent the genocide-by-race-replacement-immigration of the Euro-race peoples in their own ancient homelands.

Given this official stance by European Jewry, a clear stance in favor of the annihilation of Europe and the European races, support for Israel by European peoples, or support for anything beneficial to Jewry, is sheer insanity. The proper attitude for Euro-race peoples to take in regard to Israel is to flatly refuse to support it, in retaliation for official Jewry’s support for Euro annihilation.

Period. Full stop. End of story.

Posted by Jon Ben on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:04 | #

I agree. That’s why I support Israe: It’s a place to deport the Jews to when we come to power. And after we deport the Jews to Israel, we should reverse our position and support Iran and Syria. And then nuke the kikes out of existence.

Posted by the Narrator... on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:17 | #

Many here believe that human existence is the random product of time, change, matter and genetics. Our existence is a physical phenomenon that expires forever upon physical death. This being the case, they still claim I ought to sacrifice myself on behalf of a proposed future ethnostate that I will never see. If the materialist worldview is true, why should I care? It makes no sense.

Posted by The Monitor on June 23, 2009, 01:03 AM

On the other hand believing that you have an eternal soul and that you’re just passing through this life and that God will finally judge all and right the wrongs irregardless of whether the White races survives or not inspires you to sacrifice yourself for a proposed physical, temporal, future ethnostate that you will never see?

Posted by The Monitor on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:37 | #

God will finally judge all and right the wrongs irregardless of whether the White races survives

First, nobody has any guarantee that the White race will survive. For all you know, it is a momentary plateau in evolutionary development. White people have not always existed and may not exist someday. I hope that doesn’t happen anytime soon.

Second, if we believe that a race is a big extended family, then there’s no reason not to see loyalty to kith and kin as part of religion vocation. I at least have some promise that my works are not in vain. If I really thought life was a blip before an endless void, why would it be rational to care about anything more than self-interest?

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:10 | #

What if evolution is irrational and your protests maladaptive, then natural selection will not favour you.

Posted by the Narrator... on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:34 | #

First, nobody has any guarantee that the White race will survive.

Posted by The Monitor on June 23, 2009, 05:37 AM

Which is why we must work to ensure that it does.

For all you know, it is a momentary plateau in evolutionary development. White people have not always existed and may not exist someday.

Posted by The Monitor on June 23, 2009, 05:37 AM

And for all both of us know an asteroid might hit the earth next week and wipe out all life everywhere. So why go to work tomorrow, right?

That’s like protesting work to build a dam to keep the town from flooding by saying, “yeah but what if lightning hits it ten years from now and it burns down. What good will all your sandbags be then!”

Second, if we believe that a race is a big extended family, then there’s no reason not to see loyalty to kith and kin as part of religion vocation. *I* at least have some promise that *my* works are not in vain. If *I* really thought life was a blip before an endless void, why would it be rational to care about anything more than self-interest?
Posted by The Monitor on June 23, 2009, 05:37 AM

So your entire belief system is wrapped up in appealing to your own personal self-interest in perpetual existence, yet you’re telling us that it offers a more selfless ground upon which to sacrifice for the continued existence of our kith and kin?

...

Posted by danielj on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:09 | #

Many here believe that human existence is the random product of time, change, matter and genetics.

Many, many of us don’t and we seem to be concentrated even, here, commenting on this very post.

Posted by Leon Haller on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:20 | #

Please note: I did not say whether I in fact believe or disbelieve in God. I merely pointed out the instrumental value of (traditional) Christianity from a white preservationist standpoint.

Posted by Dasein on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:50 | #

Many here believe that human existence is the random product of time, change, matter and genetics.

The dispute seems to be about the process, not the end result. Those who do not believe in purpose merely express their own mean faith.

I like Carl Woese’s definition of the organism:

Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow.

The disagreement between religionists and materialists arises from whether myth is a valid descriptor of that energy flow and pattern formation.

Posted by Polly Weiner on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:16 | #

The comparison between the golden calf and art is troublesome. The golden calf was considered a celestial being, one all-powerful being that replaces God, which is why Moses stopped the children from dancing around the golden calf. Art is a form of expression, not worshipped, not treated as a superior celestial being; rather, it is admired and used as an inspiration. That is much different from worship and so I have a problem with this anti-art thing. It makes me feel iffy.

Posted by james on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:09 | #

Western tradition iis Jewish. Its development and governing bodies are influences by Jewish books, philosphy and teachings like the Kabbalah.

To go against it is cultural suicide.

How come when I metiioned about contacting someone at the Eurasia movement for a Majority Rights interview I never got a responce?

Are you going to interview Norman Lowell again in the future anytime soon?

Posted by Prozium on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:43 | #

Re: Leon Haller

1.) Correlation. The decline in birthrates is a worldwide phenomena. It can be seen in European and non-European societies, Christian and non-Christian cultures. Westerners (and Japanese) have fewer children in the 21C because they live in wealthier, healthier, industrialized, urbanized, non-agrarian societies.

2.) Review Ch.7 “Cosmopolitan Clerics: The Role of Ecumenical Protestantism” in Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.

3.) About 10% of white Americans still cling to traditional racial attitudes. They are typically older, male, Protestant, Republican Southerners - a shrinking demographic. These people are not racial activists in the sense that WNs are; just ordinary citizens with politically incorrect racial views. They aren’t going to provide the leadership for a resurgent racialist movement.

4.) I don’t see paganism going anywhere either.

5.) Traditional Christianity is aracial or anti-racist. The extraordinary level of white racial consciousness in the United States was the exception, not the rule. It has far more to do with America’s colonial origins than Christianity.

6.) The Vatican is an outspoken enemy of “white racism.”

Posted by Frank on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:29 | #

4.) I don’t see paganism going anywhere either.

What is meant by paganism? That word can mean different things.

What is the unspoken alternative then? Folks here reject Christianity and all other value systems? No of course not. Anyone who believes in perfect individualism wouldn’t be here, right?

Posted by Frank on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:50 | #

Fans of Star Trek have for years embraced the religious values found therein. However, it is called “secular” and “fantasy”, so no one would admit the obvious: that it’s religious - similarly with most of the popular entertainment we have today. It’s not only pure valueless nihilism and individualism either.

Most of us here at the least believe man has a soul and thus value - that’s certainly religious. As C.S. Lewis said, there’s a “Tao” of man - there are a set of values that people throughout the world strive for. Lewis thought Christianity was the truth they were searching for, but even if this is rejected surely some values won’t be.

When we reject clear values like this, we open ourselves to manipulation. Within a Christian society, the preachers and everyone else believe in the same thing, or at least respect the same things and everyone understands what is valued, and thus act for the honest benefit of all. Within a fuzzy managerial state though, elites manipulates for whatever their desire, including the desire to “do good” as well as to seek pleasure, etc.

Posted by the Narrator... on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:54 | #

Most of us here at the least believe man has a soul and thus value

Posted by Frank on June 23, 2009, 07:50 PM

If, by soul, you are referring to the conscientiousness of a living person, I suppose so. But if you are referring to a mystical magical “spirit” then I would disagree.

And value is a broad, multi-layered, quality which requires various considerations in its assessment.

As C.S. Lewis said, there’s a “Tao” of man - there are a set of values that people throughout the world strive for.

Posted by Frank on June 23, 2009, 07:50 PM

That Lewis said that shows how dishonest and reckless he was, as all available evidence points towards the opposite conclusion.

Lewis was fundamentally a man of the left. Reading his works I get the impression that all he found unpleasant in Marxism was a lack of good bed time stories.

...

Posted by Frank on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:32 | #

“That Lewis said that shows how dishonest and reckless he was, as all available evidence points towards the opposite conclusion.”

His Abolition is where he talks about the Tao. He points out some similarities, but he doesn’t try to construct a universal faith or anything as is attempted today.

Here he defines the Tao as objective truth, which can obviously vary in theory as much as the imagination allows… However in practice there are a lot of commonalities, even if only because of our common genetics and common needs for survival. No liberal society would survive a serious threat for example, and it’s natural to value kin and bravery etc. and to sicken at murder and suffering - these are things genetically programmed but they lead to values and value systems regardless.

And similarly a society that acts a certain way, say the Jews who seem to have an extreme dual morality, will tend to enrage other societies. So, it then becomes natural for such behavior to be seen as immoral.

So, with societies these values come about as a balance of power as well as with environmental and genetic differences. But it’s at least unnatural to have a society with no objective values.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.

Perhaps rather than attempting a mystical “true/natural value” approach, I should just retreat and warn that we need some value system and might as well build on what’s been handed down to us. Life is pleasant and we all have attachments we wish to protect, and we need order which a value system and other traditions provide to continue this.

“And value is a broad, multi-layered, quality which requires various considerations in its assessment. “

Morality is complex, but I wonder if you could pin point these values of yours or if they aren’t intentionally fuzzy and subject to influence. It’s easy to tear down another’s value system if not revealing one’s own.

Posted by Frank on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:56 | #

I’m aware there are some strange views and societies recorded, but these seem like corruptions or imperfections rather than “alternative truths”.

I dunno - when I first read Abolition I was pretty green. Now that I think about it, the common Tao idea doesn’t seem as true now as it did then… It certainly makes things easier to think it’s true, but I’m not so sure now that reflects reality.

Posted by the Narrator... on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:48 | #

His Abolition is where he talks about the Tao. He points out some similarities, but he doesn’t try to construct a universal faith or anything as is attempted today.

Posted by Frank on June 24, 2009, 09:32 AM

But his motivation for his position was to try to sell his faith as The Faith. And he felt he could hardly make that claim unless he could demonstrate a universal morality against which to show the universality of his God’s relationship to ALL men.

He had a belief first, then he constructed an philosophical/moral argument to back it up. So his assertions were not necessarily fact-based and were of the BROADLY general type of interpretation of commonalities.

Morality is complex, but I wonder if you could pin point these values of yours or if they aren’t intentionally fuzzy and subject to influence.

Posted by Frank on June 24, 2009, 09:32 AM

It would take a long time to pin down the values of which I spoke of which is why I wrote that value, “is a broad, multi-layered, quality which requires various considerations in its assessment.”

Value is a quality whose pro’s and con’s are not similarly reflective among various peoples.

So called “honor” killings are seen as a positive good and morally righteous act among some peoples of the east.
As a Westerner I find that act revolting, but that is because I am a Westerner, by race, by blood.

The list of such examples is long. There are obvious historical and contemporary examples of how different peoples have had dramatically different value systems.

...

Posted by Frank on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:15 | #

We might value life more than other races (due possibly to our higher resource parenting), but honor killings are rejected in the West most strongly because it’s been Christianised.

If I can find it, I’ll post a pagan example I’m thinking of where the women are expected to kill themselves after the husbands die, otherwise the husband’s family is dishonoured. Though of course recorded stories like that aren’t as reliable as actual examples - it could be mere fantasy or hearsay.

Posted by Frank on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:23 | #

Also, when living in a harsh environment, it’s expected that harsher customs will arise. Honor killings are understandable in that a family that spends resources raising a child doesn’t want those resources lost or that similarly doesn’t want its family reputation damaged.

We in the West live in a plentiful environment, so we don’t tolerate such harsh customs atm. Also of course Christianity wouldn’t allow them.

Posted by the Narrator... on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:17 | #

We might value life more than other races (due possibly to our higher resource parenting), but honor killings are rejected in the West most strongly because it’s been Christianised.

Posted by Frank on June 24, 2009, 10:15 PM

Yeah, we just do abortions.

.
.
.

Also, when living in a harsh environment, it’s expected that harsher customs will arise.

Posted by Frank on June 24, 2009, 10:15 PM

Northern Europe was about the most harsh environment to survive in throughout the long ages. That harshness is what is thought to have given rise to European Altruism and the Family Unit.

By comparison the middle-east and Africa were much easier places for humans to survive. That’s why the family (as we in The West know it; Father, Mother, Children) was/is uncommon in those places. The family portrait provided in the Old Testament is alien to Western (past and present) standards.
Polygamy was the standard in the middle-east and fatherless families the standard in Africa.

As for religious influence it might be more accurate to say that Christianity was Europeanized rather than the other way around.

...

Posted by Frank on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:50 | #

The genetic impact would be long term though. The impact on customs would be shorter term. We’ve currently grown soft in the West I think because of the easy environment we have right now, and as a result we don’t tolerate anything approaching honor killings, which is good but I think it would take a very hard, warrior society to support such a thing.

Anyway, I need to put in a lot more hours of serious study, especially on early Christianity.

Posted by the Narrator... on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:06 | #

The genetic impact would be long term though. The impact on customs would be shorter term. We’ve currently grown soft in the West I think because of the easy environment we have right now, and as a result we don’t tolerate anything approaching honor killings, which is good but I think it would take a very hard, warrior society to support such a thing.

Posted by Frank on June 25, 2009, 05:50 AM

Actually I was arguing the opposite. The West was a hard, warrior society without honor killings. The near-east was less of a hard, warrior society and they developed honor killings.

As The West has grown accommodated to softer standards and indifferent to considerations of what makes them Westerners, things like abortion and euthanasia have developed into more socially acceptable behaviors.

Survival in most of the east and Africa required a minimum amount of effort. The peoples that evolved in those regions are thus inclined to a more lackadaisical work ethic and a lower IQ. Casual violence, then, is a given in those societies.

...

Posted by Frank on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:18 | #

“Actually I was arguing the opposite”

I was pointing out two opposite effects. The genetic in the long term making Europeans more empathetic and the cultural in the short term making a people harder or softer.

Our society values pleasure not life, though at the same time it does largely reject the death penalty. We have abortion and euthanasia, but we also have domestic welfare benefits and foreign aid.

We’re too soft to stand on what’s right, so instead we stand on what feels good.

Honor killings, though wrong, require a willingness to make an unpleasant action (to kill). We in the West couldn’t do that sort of thing right now even if we wanted to, though we could have in the past. Taking into account the other factor, the genetic factor, it’s additionally more difficult for us to kill because we value life more since for us life is more difficult to sustain.

The Near East could never maintain a Sparta, but we couldn’t do so unless we grew hard.

I’m not trying to bicker. Perhaps I should drop this. Apologies if I posted too much earlier this week, but I was going through some incredibly boring material and seeking distraction.

Posted by Frank on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:48 | #

Muslims do go too far with their punishments. They mutilate and murder when we’d shun and use peer pressure.

And this is because we’re impacted more strongly by peer pressure, and we’re more empathetic.

But regardless it requires a hard man to carry something out like that in a situation where it seems justified and for the greater good. Maybe that clears up what I meant, or maybe it continues the confusion.

A hard man would be able to kill, say, a serial murderer. Whereas a soft man might allow his emotions to get the better of him and let the man go.

We have more of certain emotions than the Near East, but I think we’re also more capable of self-discipline and listening to our head when necessary.

Posted by Dasein on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:59 | #

Muslims do go too far with their punishments. They mutilate and murder when we’d shun and use peer pressure.

Brutal religious practices will appeal to certain races. Violent races will graft brutal elements to their religion.

Are these Christians, Muslims, anamists?

(please be warned that this video shows graphic violence)

http://www.wntube.net/play.php?vid=2785

Officially they were Kenyan Christians. A religion cannot be separated from the race that practices it. There is no such thing as Christianity. There are Whites who practice a White version of Christianity.

Frank, I think you would enjoy Russel’s ‘The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity’.

Posted by Dasein on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:01 | #

Sorry, that’s Russell. James Russell (he’s on the editorial board of TOQ).

Posted by Frank on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:09 | #

We also burnt witches though, even as Christians here in the US. I realise the blacks seem to do that kind of thing far more readily though.

That looks like a wonderful book - available at amazon too.

Posted by danielj on Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:20 | #

I realise the blacks seem to do that kind of thing far more readily though.

They generally worship witches or are amazed and dumbfounded by their “powers.”

I’m still working on the follow-up to this essay.

Posted by danielj on Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:45 | #

We also burnt witches though, even as Christians here in the US

Also, we didn’t burn them, but rather, pressed them to death.

It should be noted that the trials were essentially precipitated by an Irish, Roman Catholic Slave from Barbados. So it was essentially a genetic and cultural other that started the whole mania off.

Comments:

Post a comment:

Existential Issues

DNA Nations

Categories

Contributors

Links

MR Central & News

Comments