A few weeks ago, as I recovered from a bad cold, I posted a review, by Michael Anton, of the book Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). At the time I said:
The book is essentially a Nietzschean manifesto — though it describes itself not as a work of philosophy, but an “exhortation” — and it is above all a rousing paean to virility, hierarchy, and excellence, and a call to young men to shake off the bridling and feminizing narcotic of modernity. (You should read it, if you haven’t — take it from me, it’s really something.)
I’ll say it again: if you haven’t read Bronze Age Mindset, you should.
I was keenly interested to see Michael Anton reviewing this book. There is a small intellectual nexus that brackets what I consider the most interesting and fertile corners of the modern Right, and both BAP and Mr. Anton are part of it — along with a few others, including Curtis Yarvin and Thomas West. Between them they address, from different angles the most important political and philosophical questions of this moment in history: What is the place of the American Founding in the 21st century? Is the present crisis the result of inherent defects, or obsolescence, of the founding theory — meaning that we need to move on to something else — or is it that the founding principles remain sound, and that we must (and realistically can) find our way back to them? (In order to answer such questions about the theoretical principles of the Founding, it is necessary first to understand them, and this is why I — and Mr. Anton — think Thomas West’s recent book on the subject is important.) Are the essential American principles of natural law and natural rights sustainable in an era in which transcendent religion is dying? How can we awaken from our collective, hallucinatory fever before stubborn realities — Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” — with “wrath and slaughter return”?
If I had to boil it all down to the two questions that vex me the most, they are: How on earth did we come to such a crisis? What are we to do?
At any rate, the members of this little “nexus”, interestingly, all seem to be getting together. (It was Curtis Yarvin, for example, who gave Mr. Anton a copy of Bronze Age Mindset.) And now BAP himself has responded, over at The American Mind, to Mr. Anton’s review. You should read the review before the response; if you haven’t yet, it’s here.
Here are some excerpts from BAP’s reply:
The problem Anton or other conservatives must face isn’t that my audience, or the “youth” in question doesn’t accept the principles of the American Founding, but that the left and thereby a large part of the establishment rejected these principles long ago. The left has been saying exactly what they plan to do for decades. They want to destroy your country, instill a death wish in the white population, set majorities against market-dominant minorities, atomize everyone: the British plan in Malaysia and a few other places but now applied domestically within a country.
…The left completely abandoned Americanism in the 1960’s; at this point they’ve also abandoned biological reality. Vitalism is all that is left against their demented biological Leninism. Encouraging health, normality, and physical nobility against their celebration of deformity, obesity, and sexual catamitism must be one of the basic functions of conservatism in our time. It is one of the reasons my message is powerful among many who are fed up with the left’s gospel of wretchedness: what is your plan to take that on?
There is a point at which, if you believe in the reality of nature, you must be ready to talk about actual nature as it exists in the world and not just “Nature” as a safe abstraction. If indeed the religion of our time is the belief in unquestioned human equality, the revolution in the biological sciences, genetics, and population genetics currently taking place will soon completely cut off its legs, even in public. In large part this has already happened, and no one believes in any real biological human equality any longer.
…We are now faced with a left that has embraced a dialectic of racial and class destruction in a context where belief in absolute human equality is professed at the same time that no one believes in it anymore. I don’t see how the vision of the Founders, widely dismissed as white nationalism even by “conservatives” when presented with its reality, has more political potential in our situation than Bronze Age perversion would.
Read the whole thing here.
- American Fundamentals
- On The Founding: Questions From The Right Of The Right, Part 1
- Questions About The Founding, Part 2: A Reply From Michael Anton
- Questions About The Founding, Part 3: Jacques Replies to Michael Anton
- Questions About The Founding, Part 4
- Questions About The Founding, Part 5
- Bronze Age Pervert: Response To Michael Anton
- Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?
15 Comments
Funny, I literally just wrote this:
I’m sure you’ll get to it eventually Malcolm , but I thought I’d reference Bronze Age Pervert’s response to Michael Anton’s review of “Bronze Age Mentality” in the American Mind, https://americanmind.org/essays/americas-delusional-elite-is-done/. BAP makes some valuable points, notably his astute description of the altright as in many ways a negative response of especially young people to the mindless shiboleths and soft totalitarianism of contemporary liberalism (as it is expressed not merely by the Left but by the Right as well). Yet there are many problems also with his philopsophy and rhetoric, in my view, which is often excessive and lacks self-knowledge (for instance, BAP is just wrong when he asserts that 2019 America is more authoritarian than more “liberal” Communist regimes of the seventies and eighties like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia). And really, isn’t the cure he proposes worse than the disease? Do we want a bunch of Nietzscheans running amock, followers of a prophet who did, after all, go mad as a result of his Weltanschauung and killed himself?
Hi Jason,
Thanks as always for commenting. I do have some points of disagreement.
Authoritarianism in the modern West takes a different form than it did in the Soviet satellites of the 1980s, but as it deepens I am less and less sure that it is any less pernicious. In 2012 I wrote:
To be sure, in America today you won’t end up being beaten in a dungeon for heterodox opinions, but you might be beaten on the street (and in the rest of the West, you can indeed go to jail for expressing forbidden beliefs). But all that’s needed for successful authoritarianism is for there to be sufficient deterrence to frighten dissidents into silence — and loss of livelihood, along with public shaming, already do this very well. Any heretic who sticks up in public view can count on being “doxxed”, and on having every aspect of his or her past subjected to minute and adversarial scrutiny — and in a world shrunk to zero size by social media, the hostile and synoptic attention of the whole society can be focused on the thought criminal with incandescent heat. Lives are vaporized in an instant.
So is the cure worse than the disease? The disease is pretty bad, and it’s getting worse by the day. I don’t really see any other cures on offer.
Finally, it was syphilis, not his ideas, that drove Nietzsche mad, and finally killed him.
I don’t think the malaise of contemporary America is that hard to explain. Human beings are tribal animals, primates, who need tangible things to live by, namely a communal identity based on shared kinship, heritage and faith. This has been true at all times and places. These were present to a large degree in the infant American republic. Nevertheless, the break with Britain and the legitimacy of the new order were justified by the idealism of universalist propositions. The more these statements became the mythos of the American republic, the further it moved away from traditional customs and hierarchies and the closer to a world of pure of abstractions. Well, you can’t live in abstractions; you’ll go insane. Putting it another way, the US managed to function tolerably well so long as it didn’t take its BS too rigorously.
Finally, it was syphilis, not his ideas, that drove Nietzsche mad…
Telegraph – 4 May 2003
Thanks for your corrections on Nietzsche Malcolm and chedolf. I’ll confess I feel rather foolish being guilty of such a wopper as thinking the good German committed suicide. A lesson there, to not rely on second-hand sources and to get historical facts right.
To be sure, “doxxing” is an utterly contemptuous practice, a foreshadowing I’m afraid of where technology might lead us. As the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt put it in his apposite way: “The sudden change from democracy will no longer result in the rule of an individual–but in the rule of a military corporation. And by it, methods will perhaps be used for which even the most terrible despot would not have the heart.” Alas, it’s where we’re at right now, so how to we respond to the dilemma?
My sense is BAP provides two such “cures” for such a “disease” in his American Mind essay and twitter account (I’ve haven’t read his book), one noble and the other a temptation. The former is the argument in his last paragraph, where he simply calls on individuals to embrace reality. I quite agree, that much of the task of “civilizationists” is just to tell the truth and not be intimidated by the mobs. Needless to say, such resistance comes with a hefty price tag, where more brave souls will have to imitate, say, Amy Wax’s example as well as experience her travail. Sometimes the only way out is through.
The danger is that BAP, and those within and without the alt-right sympathetic to his ideas, will take the easy way out and embrace the authoritarian solution over time. You don’t need a secret decoder ring while perusing his twitter account to see that the guy genuinely admires not merely “physical” strongmen: Franco and Bolsonaro, not great democrats like Pericles or Lincoln, are the sort of prominent figures feaured. And this aligns with what again many young people believe today, wont as they are to jettison free speech and embrace anti-liberals as studies today show. The call will increasingly be heralded to infringe on the First Amendment in order to clamp on disruptive and clamourous rhetoric as that emenating especially from progressives, something that’s straight out of the dictator’s playbook.
I guess some would object here that the authoritarian temptation may not actually be such a bad way to go, all things considering. In the interest of honesty then, if I were to put on my money on where it might actually work probably Visegrad countries like Orban’s Hungary would be the way to bet, nations which at their best had a healthy symbiosis of liberalism and traditionalism in the past which can now be drawn upon. (Actually, BAP in his most recent podcast advocates a neo-Habsburg federation, although “the faggots in the EU are opposed!” Usually I don’t care for that sort of talk, but I’ll admit I smiled.) Perhaps this is a kind of protype you believe in yourself Malcolm, although could it really be applied to the U.S., with our Protestant, liberal, democratic heritage?
Anyway, I’ll follow up on your advice and put “Mindset” on my booklist.
Personally, I am struggling with BAM, even after first reading the Review by Anton. If I had not read the review first, well, I would have taken Dorothy Parker’s advice to ‘not cast this book aside lightly, but to throw it with great force’. The book is not really addressed to my 73 year old mind I know, but I do know a couple of twenty somethings who could be candidates…providing they have a clue about the names and places mentioned within the pages. I have found it helpful to ‘cheat’ a bit and read a few of the final pages while I am reading from the first.
chedolf,
That’s news to me. I’ll have to review that.
My main gripe with the alt right is their repeated insistence that, when the Framers said “all men are created equal”, that they meant equal in intelligence, capacities, and so on. They most clearly meant “equal before God and the law, possesed of equal natural rights.” This erroneous assertion by alt-righters is central to their dependent assertion that the central tenets which form the basis of the current Constituion must be abandoned.
It woukd not be too much work to find plenty of evidence that the Framers were well cognizant of the differences in human capabilities.
SWRichmond, Murray and Hernnstein discuss that matter of the Founders and different forms of equality near the end of their Bell Curve.
My main gripe with the alt right is their repeated insistence that, when the Framers said “all men are created equal”, that they meant equal in intelligence, capacities, and so on.
BAP doesn’t make that mistake: “I’m aware that the doctrine…of the Founders, or even of classical liberalism, doesn’t promote an idea of absolute biological human equality… But the ideology of the present regime does, in rhetoric if not in practice, and claims that any outcome that leads to group stratification is not organic but must be the result of convoluted conspiracies…”
If y’all really want to know what it was like then, the Constitution is not the place to look. It only has 17 or 23, depending on how you read it, things that the fedgov does. No, and all of this work has already been done by the way, look at the Virginia and Massachusetts pre-revolutionary war codes and laws, and then again at these post war states around say 1810, and then again around say 1825. Virginia and Massachusetts’ codes and laws during those time-frames will give you an excellent picture of the morality and justice in early America. The Constitution was always only framework, a legal framework and nothing more.
OBTW, just about everything that the post boomers on the right are tick’ed about was illegal and everything to which they seem to aspire was not only the law but custom in post war America.
At any rate, nobody can really go backwards. So, what is the goal? A moral and just society? Power for us and no other? Something else? The commies have a goal, step by step breakdown of how to get there, and sub-steps under each and they work on it relentlessly over generations. What is the goal of the right, I remain unable to figure that out based upon my reading and internet sites. Maybe the thing to do is fight the war and figure that stuff out afterward, not losing being the needful thing. Lot’s of amoral and pitiful societies have been born this way but hey, the winners didn’t lose.
Fred,
Right: I think that when war is upon you, that’s all you can do.
And it’s getting mighty hot around here.
SWRichmond,
I know the “alt-right” better than most, and I’d say that very few who would identify as such would make that mistake about the Founders’ idea of equality. (The Left is another story.)
In the natural-rights political theory of the Founding, “equality” really goes no farther than the idea that no man has by nature the right to rule another.
Here’s a link to a pdf of the analysis of Nietzche’s illness. It’s very persuasive that it was not syphilis, but a brain tumor.
http://www.leonardsax.com/Nietzsche.pdf
Sigdrifr, thanks for that.