Tomorrow, just as the reverberations of today’s election begin to ripple around the globe, the lovely Nina and I are heading off to the Eternal City for a long-postponed visit. I might find time to post something or other, but if not, I should be back in harness here in about ten days.
(As for the election: not going to lie here, I really hope we win. But if we do, it isn’t going to sit well with a lot of powerful people, and their myrmidons in the streets. Be careful out there.)
By now you’ve probably heard about the sad end of P’Nut the Squirrel, who, during his brief time on Earth, lived in happy and playful companionship with a fellow named Mark Longo (who had rescued the wee rodent after its mother had been squashed by a car). As their relationship blossomed, Mr. Longo had made P’Nut a beloved celebrity on social media.
But last week New York State, which has no patience for unsanctioned human-sciurine liaisons, got wind of these star-crossed lovers, and fell upon them in its wrath. The hapless P’Nut, wrested from his savior’s arms, was dragged away and put to death. (You can read about it, and see a picture of this winsome ex-squirrel, here.)
Outrage ensued, and rightly so. In no time at all, the martyrdom of poor little P’Nut became a cause célèbre all over social media.
I weighed in briefly myself on X (I’m trying not to call it “Twitter” any more):
A small thing, really — smaller even, say, than Jenkin’s Ear. But it is things like this, things that create outrage at the most personal, granular, commonly relatable level, that often end up having the most vastly outsized effects on the course of history.
But then along came the actor James Woods, one of the sturdiest conservative voices on any social platform these days, with this fantastic tweet (or post, or whatever they’re called nowadays):
Physicists in 1900 basically accepted the Newtonian model of the universe. The only troubling anomaly was that Mercury, as it came into view in its journey around the sun, appeared to be in the “wrong” place. How was this possible? After much discussion brilliant scientists concluded that it “appeared” to be closer to the sun because the sun’s gravity was bending light rays reflecting off of Mercury on their way to earth. This defied all the “settled science” embraced by classical physicists. It was to them heresy essentially, because by implication it would mean that energy and matter were interchangeable. Indeed a young physicist named Albert Einstein created the most famous equation in history, formulating that exact relationship: e=mc(squared). The longwinded point I’m trying to make is that throughout history the most minor anomalies are often windows into a completely different understanding of the world.
Which brings me to my point.
This event where armed officers took a pet squirrel from an individual in New York opens a Pandora’s box of the horrors of leftist tyranny. The facts of the incident are disturbing enough: an anonymous instigator over 1000 miles away reported a humble man who had rescued a wounded squirrel and made a pet of him for years. The informer’s motives in doing so can only be guessed, but the owner of the pet had made the horrific mistake in today’s America of supporting conservative thought. A cadre of armed officials got a search warrant, rummaged through the man’s property for five hours, illegally questioned his wife about her immigrant status, ultimately seizing the pet and killing it without giving the owner any recourse to save its life. Now let’s take a look at the universe in which this macabre horrid little leftist “comedy” took place. In a nation overrun by tens of millions of illegal aliens, crushed by rampant crime and gang warfare, enduring a $35 trillion deficit, soul-crushing inflation, a culture of infanticide and child mutilation, sexual dysphoria, and insanity, and waging illegal lawfare against candidates of another party, New York State spent a full day killing a squirrel, that had been a harmless pet cherished by its owner for literally years.
The event in and of itself was just an act of petty cruelty. As a window into a larger universe, however, it is a fissure in the mantle of our world, signaling a cataclysmic eruption that may well end this nation. The tsunami of rage coming from ordinary and loving individuals was quite frankly astonishing.
Has America in the hands of the lunatic left become a powder keg about to explode? Will the power-hungry Democrats and their media minions spew enough hatred that even the most gentile among us will finally say ENOUGH? Does 87,000 newly minted and armed IRS agents offer you comfort or fill you with terror?
Are you sick of this yet?
Are we “sick of this yet?” Yes, Mr. Woods — yes indeed, sir, millions and millions and millions of us most certainly are. And even if the outrageous destruction of little P’Nut isn’t the spark that ignites this powder-keg, I have a feeling that, before long, something is going to be.
I have been presenting for years, in these pages, a charge against the Enlightenment: namely that it enshrined, with religious fervor, a radical skepticism that acted as a kind of “universal acid” that no tradition or social order could contain.
In 2022, for example, I referred to:
…the radical skepsis of the Enlightenment, which simultaneously raised Man to the throne of Creation while throwing him back onto his own meager resources. The shearing away of all but “scientific method” as a means of understanding the Universe, and our place in it, meant that the Universe itself had to be put on a kind of Procrustean Bed, upon which all the features of the cosmos that aren’t accessible by those tools and methodology had simply to be cut away, and believed not even to exist. (This fatally narrowing effect, by the way, is a good example of why Pride is considered the deadliest of sins.)
I’ve been making this case for much longer, though. Here’s an excerpt from a post called This Is Your Civilization On Acid, from 2015:
Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ‘memetic’ — an aggregation of concepts, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle. Moreover, the less a nation depends upon tangible factors such as territory and ethnic homogeneity for its stability, the more vulnerable it is to this hazard — and the modern, rapidly diversifying United States, which describes itself more and more as little more than “an idea” — is most vulnerable of all.
Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”: given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind only a desiccated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.
Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse.
Also from 2015:
The modern attitude places the burden of proof upon every aspect of traditional life. All is disposable unless proven necessary, including even the axioms upon which such proof depends.
And so on. (See also this post and its internal links, including links to a discussion we had in 2018 with Michael Anton on the topic of natural law.)
The reason that I am mentioning all this today is that I have just read an outstanding essay at City Journal making this same indictment of the Enlightenment. (The author, Martin Gurri, even uses a term — “The Endarkenment” — that we NRx types were kicking around fifteen years ago.)
The whole thing is so good that I won’t bother posting any excerpts. You should just go read the whole thing yourselves, here.
“As a child, learn good manners,
As a young man, control the passions,
In middle age, be just,
In old age, give good advice,
Then die, without regret.”
– Inscription found in the Bactrian city of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan. Attributed to Clearchus of Soli, a student of Aristotle
Over the past few years, prominent members of our ruling Democrat oligarchy have declared those of us not aligned with “progressivism” to be racists, sexists, white supremacists, bitter clingers to guns and religion, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis, and Fascists. Last night, we learned, also, that our sitting President thinks of us as “garbage”.
That’s at least half the country, folks: scores of millions of patriotic American citizens who would prefer to secure our borders, reduce our imperialistic military and economic commitments overseas, lower the cost of living, restore civic and moral virtue to public life, make politics more local, push back against rampant crime, prevent the aggressive sexualization (and trans-sexualization) of our children in schools and culture, preserve freedom of speech and dissent, return to domestic production of energy and vital manufactured goods, and restore a healthy reverence for the American nation and its history.
“Garbage”.
It looks now as if, barring corruption and theft even more audacious than that of 2020, Donald Trump is set to win next week’s election. How likely is it, though, that our political enemies — and it should be clear to all by now that that is what they are: not opponents or rivals, but enemies — will consent to be ruled by “garbage”?
We are headed for some serious turbulence just ahead. Election Day will only be the beginning.
The problem with the way our era looks at history is that all it wants is to barge in and speak to the manager.
The following is a repost of an essay I published at American Greatness in October 2020. Four years on, I think it holds up fairly well, but its closing remarks about the Constitution need, I’m afraid, some further qualifications, which I have added at the bottom of the post.
Not a day goes by lately without some politician, pundit, or other panjandrum calling out a political enemy, or some idea they don’t like, as “a threat to our democracy”. We see also an intensifying fever on the Left to abolish key institutions of our constitutional order — for example, the Electoral College, and the representational structure of the Senate — on the grounds that they are not “democratic” enough. Meanwhile, others, including the young-adult website Vox, have even been calling to give children the vote. Why? Because Democracy is now, apparently, understood to be such a Good Thing, in and of itself, that more of it can only be better.
Is your society falling apart? Is factional strife tearing your nation to pieces? Is myopic political unwisdom leading to one ruinous unintended consequence after another? The answer, always, seems to be: more democracy!
It was not always so. Once upon a time, not so long ago, democracy was not an end in itself; it was simply one of many possible means to a much higher aim: good government. It was well understood, moreover, that democracy, over the course of thousands of years, had a track-record that was anything but encouraging. Clearly, despite its natural appeal, democracy had dangerous liabilities — and it had inevtably, throughout the centuries, descended into bitter faction, mob rule, and tyranny. As far back as the third century B.C., the Greek historian Polybius had identified a cycle by which this happens — and at the time of the American Founding, two thousand years later, it had happened reliably ever since.
Democracy, then, is nothing more than one form of government: one of the possible engineering solutions by which political arrangements can be constructed. (Think of bridges: arch, suspension, cantilever, and truss designs all work fine; the choice of which to build is just a question of terrain, available materials, cost, navigation, and so on.) Now, however, democracy has become something much more than that — and the understanding that forms of government are not ends in themselves, but are merely possible solutions to a higher-level problem, seems to have been almost completely forgotten. The democratic form of government has been elevated to sacred status, while all others have been, in the minds of most Westerners, harshly and irrevocably deprecated. It is as if we had decided that the box-girder bridge is now the only sort of bridge any decent person should ever consider building, and that we should, moreover, build as many of them as we possibly can.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about all of this is that, under any system of government, sovereignty lies somewhere. (It’s like the bubble under the contact-paper: you can move it around, but it’s always there.) In a monarchy, it lies with the king. A democracy, on the other hand, is just an inverted monarchy: the people are sovereign. The inversion is obvious if you look at the behavior of politicians and courtiers seeking access to the source of power: under monarchies, they flatter and cosset the king, while in democracies they court and fawn on the people. It’s all the same game, though: to gain personal power, cozy up to the sovereign.
There are important differences, nevertheless: unlike the unitary nature of monarchy, in which the sovereignty rests with a single will, the sovereign of a democracy is a diffuse mass, subject to faction and internal strife. Where is the “will” of a congeries of millions of individual citizens?
The American Founders, who knew their history, ancient and modern, understood all of this. They had no reverence for democracy itself, and were keenly aware of its inherent liabilities — but the natural-law premises of their political philosophy offered no basis for vesting sovereignty, merely by birth, in any individual. (As Jefferson wrote at the end of his life, it wasn’t as if some men are born “booted and spurred”, and others “with saddles on their backs”.) Somehow, the people had to find a way to govern themselves, without collapsing into faction, mob rule, and tyranny.
The Framers, then, as they gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to produce a new Constitution, had before them a specification: stable self-government by the consent of the people. To construct it, they had a toolbox containing all the forms of government that had so far been attempted. Finally, they had a specific stock of material to build with: the historically particular people who had settled themselves in the thirteen colonies. The problem of the Founding was, in other words, an engineering problem. And it was as engineers that they set about designing a solution.
Engineers know several important things. First, they know that there is rarely a perfect solution to any problem. They know also that everything is a tradeoff, and that good solutions are often hybrids of various techniques. They know, moreover, that every type of construction material has its own strengths and weaknesses. And all good engineers know in their bones that the real world, unlike the laboratory, is infinitely mischievous, and will find unforeseen ways to test — and to break — your design.
The questions facing the Constitutional Convention were stubborn and difficult. Could they design a framework of government that would break Polybius’s great cycle? Was it possible to create some sort of hybrid system that would be stable enough to avoid both mob-rule and tyranny? How was it possible to satisfy the natural-law requirements of consent and self-government, which implied democracy, while avoiding the pitfalls of the divided will of the people, and protecting the natural rights of the minority against the predation of the majority? How could the “general will” of the people express itself in the making and execution of law and policy, without being paralyzed by the antagonisms of faction, or rendered hopelessly incoherent and inefficient by the diffusion of a multitude of opinions? How could they knit together thirteen independent nations — for that is what the colonies had become at that point — into a unified whole, despite their broadly divergent cultures, interests, and folkways?
This and much more confronted the delegates to Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787. What emerged from their deliberations was a hybrid design, full of tradeoffs and compromises. A pure democracy obviously would not do; it would immediately become, in a quote attributed to Franklin, ‘two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.” This problem affected not only numerical minorities in the population, but also the states themselves: small states would quickly be overwhelmed by big ones. Monarchy wouldn’t do: a key specification for the new government was that sovereignty must rest, somehow, with the people. The new federal government needed to have enough power to carry out its mandates, and to present the new, stitched-together Union to the rest of the world as a coherent whole that other nations could confidently do business with, while reserving for the individual states all powers that were not clearly required for managing the common interests of the collective.
The constitution that emerged at Philadelphia made a careful and complex balance of all of these competing requirements. Knowing that sovereignty is a zero-sum affair, the Framers divided it into what were intended to be non-overlapping parts, with all power reserved to the states other than what they had explicitly granted to the new Republic. Because the new arrangement was both a compact between the states and an establishment of the people themselves, both were to be represented in separate and distinct ways.
Because raw democracy was dangerously volatile, and a poor guarantor of natural rights, it had to be leashed and brought to heel. Of the three branches of government, only one half of a single branch — the House of Representatives — was to be directly appointed by popular vote. Because the more populous states could easily overwhelm the smaller ones, the states themselves were to be represented as coequal individuals in the Senate. The President, too, in order to execute the nation’s laws in such a way as to protect the interests of all the members of this new compact, had to be above the fray as well, and so the Electoral College ensured that the individual states, and not just the great clusters of population, would have their say in his election.
The Constitution itself, meanwhile, needed to be defended from the labile passions of the masses. If it were subject to casual revision by popular whim, it could be of no enduring value. The amendment process, therefore, was made so difficult that any change would have to represent the overwhelming majority of the general will. The Framers made certain here, too, that not just the federal legislature, but a large majority of the states themselves, would have to approve any changes.
Finally, after the great ratification debates of 1787 and 1788, it became clear that, even with all the protections written into the original Constitution, certain fundamental rights had to be put beyond the reach of the shifting moods of popular majorities. These protections were enumerated in the first ten amendments: the Bill of Rights.
This Constitution, then, like all engineered solutions to complex, real-world problems, is a “best effort” construction that sought to address requirements and stubborn realities that often pulled in opposite directions. The final result was not exactly what any of the delegates wanted; indeed three of them, Mason and Randolph of Virginia, and Gerry of Massachusetts, refused to sign it. What it most certainly was not, however, was an instrument of Democracy. Had it made pure democracy its priority, it is safe to say the United States of America would have torn itself to pieces, and ceased to exist, long ago. It was, rather, an attempt to design a system whereby a particular sort of people — a proudly self-reliant, moral, and industrious polity, steeped in centuries of British common law, European philosophy, and Judeo-Christian ethical and religious tradition — could govern themselves under ordered liberty, so as to preserve and protect their inalienable natural rights. The form they settled on was that of a confederation of states under a limited, representative republic, granting strictly enumerated portions of their sovereignty to a central authority. Democracy was nothing more than one part of that design — a part whose structural role was itself carefully limited.
Yet here we are, nearly two-and-a-half centuries later. Something is, very clearly, going terribly wrong. The great edifice that the Framers erected in Philadelphia seems on the verge of collapse. All around us we hear that the design itself is to blame: that the problem with the Constitution is that it isn’t democratic enough. The great challenges that faced the delegates in 1787, and the lessons of history and enduring truths of human nature that informed their deliberations, are now understood only by a few — but what everyone now seems to know with unreflective certainty is that Democracy itself is sacred: no longer a means, but an end.
What we seem to forget is a thing that the Founders knew all too well: that anything we build is only as sturdy as the material it’s made of, and that the durability of the new nation would therefore depend upon the quality of its people.
Ask anyone you know why democracy is the only acceptable form of government, and they will be quick to explain: it’s because other forms provide no remedy for corrupt or tyrannical rulers. But as we have seen, in the inverted monarchy we call democracy, the king’s sovereignty rests, instead, with the people. What remedy, then, do democratic systems provide for a corrupt and tyrannical people? What bulwark do we have against that?
The answer is: nothing — nothing at all — but the Constitution. It is only words on paper, but for two hundred and forty-two years it has, nevertheless, been the bedrock of our public liberty. Beneath it, there is only the abyss.
In these darkening times, then, we should remember the words of Patrick Henry:
“Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.”
Update: I should not have ended this essay so abruptly. While it is certainly true that the fraying Constitution is all that the nation currently hangs by, the article leaves the reader with the hopeful impression that, if we guard it against further decay, that document can still support the load.
This overlooks, though, that the Constitution of 1787 was, as noted above, “an attempt to design a system whereby a particular sort of people — a proudly self-reliant, moral, and industrious polity, steeped in centuries of British common law, European philosophy, and Judeo-Christian ethical and religious tradition — could govern themselves under ordered liberty, so as to preserve and protect their inalienable natural rights.” In Aristotelian terms, it was a form that was only suited to a particular kind of matter.
And that’s the thing about constitutions. We like to imagine that they perform an act of creation — that they bring into existence, by some magic, a society formed according to their written specifications, and that in virtue of their magical power they can shape any people (any “matter”) into any sort of society whatsoever.
But this has it backwards. What exists a priori is the society, which in turn is an organic expression of the nature of the people. A constitution, to be effective, can only come into being as a kind of “gene expression“, as a codification and clarification of what the people already are.
This means that, for a coherent, harmoniously integrated, and naturally self-governing people, constitutions are almost superfluous, and their binding authority is worn loosely and feels almost weightless. It also means that for a fractious, selfish, unruly, and divided polity, the magic disappears: if the constitution is no longer an organic expression of the qualities of the people themselves, it will be disrespected, resented, ignored, and soon discarded. (As we see.)
With all due respect to Patrick Henry, then, we must acknowledge that no amount of defending the Constitution will do us any good once the polity that gave it expression no longer exists, the form no longer suits the matter, and the magic is gone.
Are we there yet? I certainly hope not, and lately there are heartening signs that the old American nation still has some life left in it, but the rot has gone very deep. The next weeks and months will be critical.
Prior to the takeover of U.S. foreign policy by Progressive world-savers, American statecraft followed the wise course plotted by George Washington and John Quincy Adams: to refrain from meddling in the internal affairs of foreign nations, and to avoid being drawn into their external quarrels, whether by treaty or simple ambition.
Adams (who was arguably the most intelligent and cultured man, and surely the greatest diplomat, ever to hold the office of President), put it thus:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
Adams knew that the duty of American statesmen was to the nation and people whom they served, and to no other. But he also knew that alliances and treaties tend to embroil nations in war far more often than they act as prophylactics against it, and understood that the domestic and international prospects of the United States would best be served by frankness about our national interests, by friendly cooperation with other nations to the extent that our interests allowed or favored, and by honest conversations with foreign nations to seek to bring our interests and theirs into alignment.
Briefly put: to the extent that any two nations’ interests are aligned, treaties are unnecessary. To the extent that their interests diverge, treaties are worthless.
Even more briefly put: words are wind. And this is especially true for democracies and democratic republics, in which the mercurial moods of the mob, and the inconstancy of sovereign power, make it impossible to guarantee that long-term promises will be kept.
Until the beginning of the 20th century “America First” was such a self-evident axiom of American statecraft that it hardly needed mentioning; to imagine any other basis for foreign policy would have been an obvious absurdity. Now, though, the phrase is used by our Progressive elites as a bludgeon for “deplorables”, and for the Right more generally.
Lest it seem that i’m just an old geezer yearning here to roll back the clock to a time when the world was a simpler place, I’ll offer you this passage from Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn:
The true rightist is not a man who wants to return to this or that institution for the sake of return; he wants to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to return or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, brand new, or ultramodern. Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found.
– Leftism Revisited, p. 26
The world may have changed since John Quincy Adams’ time, but the truths of human nature, and of war and diplomacy, are no different than they were in remotest antiquity. We ignore them at our peril, and to our shame. We used to know better.
Eric Hoffer:
A minority is in a precarious position, however protected it be by law or force. The frustration engendered by the unavoidable sense of insecurity is less intense in a minority intent on preserving its identity than in one bent upon dissolving in and blending with the majority. A minority which preserves its identity is inevitably a compact whole which shelters the individual, gives him a sense of belonging and immunizes him against frustration. On the other hand, in a minority bent on assimilation, the individual stands alone, pitted against prejudice and discrimination. He is also burdened with the sense of guilt, however vague, of a renegade. The orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.
Again, within a minority bent on assimilation, the least and most successful (economically and culturally) are likely to be more frustrated than those in between. The man who fails sees himself as an outsider; and, in the case of a member of a minority group who wants to blend with the majority, failure intensifies the feeling of not belonging. A similar feeling crops up at the other end of the economic or cultural scale. Those of a minority who attain fortune and fame often find it difficult to gain entrance into the exclusive circles of the majority. They are thus made conscious of their foreignness. Furthermore, having evidence of their individual superiority, they resent the admission of inferiority implied in the process of assimilation. Thus it is to be expected that the least and most successful of a minority bent on assimilation should be the most responsive to the appeal of a proselytizing mass movement. The least and most successful among the Italian Americans were the most ardent admirers of Mussolini’s revolution; the least and most successful among the Irish Americans were the most responsive to De Valera’s call; the least and most successful among the Jews are the most responsive to Zionism; the least and most successful among the Blacks are the most race conscious.
– The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics) (Kindle Locations 708-723). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
In a pair of posts at Substack and his own website, Bill Vallicella revisits a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago about the shrinkage of circles of moral inclusion in periods of deep political strife.
I had commented on this passage of his:
…haven’t the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all?
This question touches on the deepest moral issues. It asks us to choose between the universal moral inclusion that we, as modern citizens of a (residually, at least) Christian civilization are drawn to see as axiomatic, and the practical realities of survival and conflict in a fallen world. Are we right to extend moral inclusion to those who would not extend it to us? Should we “turn the other cheek” if it means not only our personal destruction, but the destruction of all that we cherish, and perhaps even the triumph of objective evil? (And yes, before you ask: I do believe that objective evil exists.)
Thus framed, the answer would seem to be “no” — but choosing that answer brings with it the responsibility for determining where that line is to be drawn: when to give up on the power of love and the hope of redemption and reconciliation, and irreversibly to harden our hearts and “hoist the black flag“. To choose wrongly would be the profoundest of moral errors, and so we, as decent people, will naturally err on the side of caution — even when that error might well be fatal.
These questions confront us with clamant urgency in our current political climate. In the comment-thread at his website, Bill mentions Carl Schmitt’s observation that the essence of the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, Schmitt first presented this analysis in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political:
A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories. In contrast to the various relatively independent endeavors of human thought and action, particularly the moral, aesthetic, and economic, the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way. The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced. Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself.
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
– Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (pp. 25-26).
Bill and I have had some conversations about Schmitt over the past year or so, but I think he has been somewhat reluctant really to “grasp the nettle” that Schmitt offers. His recent comment, though, makes me think that we have somewhat different understandings of what Schmitt is saying, which I hope to clear up.
Bill’s comment was this:
Carl Schmitt maintained that the Freund-Feind, friend-foe, distinction is the essence of the political.
I don’t go that far. My position is that, at the present time, in the USA, we are locked in a existential battle with our political enemies, the cadre Dems. So it is Us versus Them, here and now as a contingent matter of fact.
We differ with our politcal enemies on values and on facts. For example, truth is not leftist value for the Left. For us it is. For the Left, math is racist, which is worse than false: it doesn’t even make sense.
And so on down the line.
To this I replied:
I understand Schmitt’s position to be that the essence of the political is that it always holds the potential for becoming actual friend-enemy combat. It is not not that it will come to that at all times, but rather that it is the essence of the political to create sides that will fight and die if, by contingency, they must.
That we soon may find ourselves fighting with “our political enemies, the cadre Dems” is, I think, perfectly consistent with Schmitt’s analysis.
Bill expertly clarified:
You may well be right about that. Do you have some references for me? Or better yet, a quotation (with a reference)? The difference is between:
A) Necessarily, in every political arrangement there is the potential for existential conflict, friend-enemy combat, a potential that may or may not become actual
and
B) Necessarily, in every political arrangement there will be existential conflict, friend-enemy combat.
(A) is much more plausible than (B), and more charitable an interpretation of Schmitt. On the other hand, it is a much weaker claim, bordering as it does on the obvious.
That we soon may find ourselves fighting with our political enemies, not just verbally and politically (in the usual sense of the term) but also extra-politically (which includes such horrors as regular assasinations, sabotage, concentration camps, etc.) is consistent with both (A) and (B).
This is exactly right — although I think Schmitt’s is neither a weak claim, nor one that borders on the obvious (in our era, at least), because we have lived so long in a well-functioning republic built on such deep commonality that the essential characteristic of the political — namely its intrinsic and unalienable potential for genuinely existential violence — is all but forgotten.
Bill asked me for a passage in support of my interpretation of Schmitt (the one that he marks as option A just above). I’ll offer this one (my emphasis):
The antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on. In any event it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these. If the antithesis of good and evil is not simply identical with that of beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable, and cannot be directly reduced to the others, then the antithesis of friend and enemy must even less be confused with or mistaken for the others. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.
Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support.
– Ibid, (pp. 26-27).
What sets this characteristic of the political apart from the other distinctions Schmitt compares it to is its capacity for promotion to the genuinely (and practically) existential. Although it resembles, for example, the competitive opposition we see in business or sport, those rivalries are circumscribed by formal rules — rules of the game, or of law. But in modern, secular societies, with transcendent law entirely out of the picture, politics is prior to rules — it is the exclusive source and foundation of the rules themselves — and so, when comity and commonality break down, as they are doing today, the political can present a truly existential threat. In good times, we imagine — as Schmitt also described at length in his 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (PDF here) — that we have, in modern societies, eliminated the most dangerous aspects of the political by a process of legalistic proceduralization. This is mistaken, however, because no formalized political procedure can survive the stresses of unforseen and exceptional crises, or of a breakdown of commonality that erodes shared faith in the axioms that usable political theorems must rest upon.
To sum up: my reading of Schmitt’s points here is that his purpose is to make us aware that the chief feature of the political is not only its necessary division into friends and enemies, but also its ineradicable potential, because of its access to the very foundations of our societies (and therefore our lives), to amplify that distinction into sanguinary, or even mortal, conflict. That this potential may lie unrealized for long years diminishes its importance not at all.
This leaves us, still, with the question that Bill started with: how do we know, in darkening times, where we stand, morally, with regard to the political enemy? Schmitt explains that “in the extreme case, conflicts are possible”, and that “Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.”
Are we there yet?
Yesterday I sat at a dinner event with some members of our ruling overclass, including a wealthy and powerful septuagenarian Washington lawyer and her husband, a D.C.-area doctor and hospital administrator. (I will not name names, but we are talking about the very highest levels of swamp creatures here. If I had been carrying an elven-blade, it would have been glowing blue.)
I was struck, especially, by the lawyer’s lofty disdain for the Dirt People scurrying like ants so far beneath her; the aura of high-caste entitlement and contempt for the sans-culottes was perceptible from the moment she began to speak, and never wavered throughout the evening. I heard about the garden parties she and her husband had given, that were attended by members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices. I learned what a capital — saintly! — fellow their friend Anthony Fauci is, and how bravely he endures the wholly undeserved contumely of yahoos, rubes, and fascists. I was told how unlikely it would be ever to see anyone really notable in Wellfleet, as everybody who is anybody is, of course, in Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. I was advised that the recent problems with our little town’s management stem from the fact that it is run by the low-born types whose families have lived here for centuries, rather than letting the wealthy and better-credentialed retirees who have come here more recently take over. I also heard — at barely endurable length — about the special wonderfulness of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D).
A bit later, there was general agreement that, if Donald Trump wins this election, we had better “blow the bridges”.
The experience, as you can imagine, was pungent. (I still have a whiff of sulfur in my nostrils.)
We have a problem, and as far as I can see, it isn’t going away; indeed, I expect it will get sharply worse in the wake of next month’s election. The problem, simply put, is that although the bedrock principle of the American political formula is “consent of the governed”, we have now reached the point where whichever faction comes to power will govern entirely without the consent of half the population.
This was not always the case. Once upon a time — within my own memory — there was enough commonality on social, political, and moral axioms that those out of power would subordinate their dissatisfaction to the importance of playing the game, and would look at political setbacks as little more than a bad year for the home team. “Next season” was never too far off, and meanwhile we could live with the opposition temporarily in power because we knew that, despite some differences about policy, we more or less agreed on the fundamental axioms of American life.
Now, things are different. For the losers in the next election (whichever side that is), being governed by the victors isn’t going to feel like like losing a round; it will feel like being subjugated. It’s going to be like having their homeland pillaged and their altars desecrated by a despised and unholy enemy before whom they will be made to kneel. And that is going to get worse, not better, as time goes by.
The two factions, the Cloud People and the Dirt People, each have power, but very different kinds of power (the power of the latter is still mostly latent and unorganized, but it is real). Clearly, we can’t live together, and neither is willing to be ruled by the other — but we can’t get away from each other, either.
I know Nothing Ever Happens™, but this is unsustainable, and I believe we are approaching a crisis. Something has to give.
There was a time when human capabilities formed a continuous landscape. Rising from the plain were such towering prominences such as language, art, reason, literature, musical composition, science, mathematics, and so on. Now, however, artificial intelligence is like a rising tide, inundating the terrain. Even now, with AI only in its infancy, the lower elevations of the continent are almost submerged; what we see all around us is already mostly sea and islands.
What peaks still rise above the flood? One, we might have thought, is philosophical debate, especially about the deepest questions of existence and metaphysics.
Perhaps not. Have a look at this:
We see here many of the old familiar arguments, on both sides of this ancient question. But, as noted, AI is still a baby in diapers. What will this simulated debate produce five, or ten, or twenty years from now? Will it still be the same old stalemate, or will it shock us with arguments or insights we’ve never imagined? Is there some reason for us to believe, in principle, that it cannot?
This is what we’re up against, folks. (You can almost smell the sulfur.)
Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes… A handful!"@JDVance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?"
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 13, 2024
No matter how much you think you hate “journalists”, you don’t hate them enough.
P.S. Here’s the remarkable Mr. Vance once again. I’m beginning to wish we could flip the ticket.
What JD Vance does to this Times reporter is illegal in some states. A masterclass in deconstructing a false premise. pic.twitter.com/Nlstsu1zmB
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) October 12, 2024
I’ve just finished an excellent book by Auron MacIntyre, an up-and-coming voice on the Right. It’s called The Total State, and it is well worth your time.
MacIntyre is emerging as an influential political analyst and public intellectual, with a job at The Blaze and a regular output of podcasts and videos. (His YouTube channel is here.) His book, which is a remarkably concise summary (not an easy thing to do) of the political theory of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Carl Schmitt, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Curtis Yarvin, James Burnham, and others, examines the growth and consolidation of power in expanding polities, with particular attention to the effects of scale on the growth of managerial bureaucracies.
There is no substitute for reading and understanding the primary sources that MacIntyre draws on for this book, but this relatively slim volume is, for the uninitiated, an excellent digest of what you need to learn to begin to understand the laws of power that shape the cycles of political history, ancient and modern (and to understand why we’re in the mess we’re in). I’m very impressed indeed by how much meaty and accurate analysis Macintyre has managed to provide in his succinct overview of these complex ideas.
The book is more descriptive than prescriptive; the final chapter, entitled “The Only Way Out Is Through”, correctly explains that the ratchet that centralizes and bureaucratizes State power is not reversible except through inevitable collapse. (This appears to be well underway.) But it’s important, at the very least, to understand why, in order to think clearly about what we might do to survive the deluge.
You can buy MacIntyre’s book here. He’s doing good work, and he deserves our support.
A quick review of my comment policy:
WordPress, the software I use, provides a comment-moderation feature that blocks all incoming comments until they are approved by me. I’ve never switched it on; I’ve been fortunate, over the decades, never to have felt the need. After 6,766 posts, and 28,888 comments, I’ve only ever removed a couple of dozen.
That said, this is a personal website, and I am its absolute despot, ruling entirely by whim. I am under no obligation to provide publication to anyone.
Oscar Wilde once said: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” I have no problem with commenters who present contrary opinions, or who seek to correct me on some point of fact; indeed I welcome them, and have even had my opinions changed by them on several occasions. But if you are vulgar, or abusive, or excessively long-winded, or incivil, or present yourself in some other way that makes engaging with you unpleasant, and more trouble than it’s worth — or if it’s obvious that you’re just here to be a blowhard on a soapbox, and that no amount of conversation with you will offer the slightest chance of any give-and-take — then I will show you the door.
All I ask, really, is this: be charming. Don’t be tedious.
Last weekend we went to Chicago for a wedding. We flew round-trip from Boston, on American Airlines.
Our departing flight was scheduled for 2:13 p.m. on Friday. We checked a bag and went to the gate, but just before we were to board, we were told that our aircraft, a Boeing 737, was having some sort of problem with its engines, and that the maintenance crew were taking a look. The flight was delayed for an hour, then for another hour, and then again. The gate agent reserved us tickets for a flight early the next morning, but the airline offered us no voucher for overnight accommodations, because we live in Cape Cod, two hours away by car. (A room at the nearby Hilton would have cost us about $600.) We worried that sooner or later the flight was likely to just be canceled, but weren’t sure whether we ought to wait and see if it was eventually going to go, or try to get on another Friday flight (and sort out refunds, etc. later).
After waiting a bit longer, we spoke to a different AA agent at the service desk — a fat and sullen fellow — who told us that we had in fact actually been taken off the original flight, that our bag had been removed from the aircraft, and that in order to retrieve it we’d have to leave the security area and go to the baggage claim. When we got there, we were told that our bag hadn’t been removed at all, and so we’d have to request it. I waited by the baggage claim for 30 minutes or so, where it finally appeared.
We then learned that the flight we were originally booked on still hadn’t been canceled, and that we were still booked on it. So we re-checked the bag, and went back through security, and back to the gate, where the flight was now listed as departing at 9 p.m., using a different plane. It did indeed get going (at around 9:30 or so, as I recall), and we finally made it to our hotel in Chicago at about half-past midnight.
Our flight back on Monday was scheduled for 4:48 p.m. — another American Airlines 737. At 4:15, again just before boarding, we were told that the aircraft was having some maintenance issue, and would be delayed. We boarded a little over an hour later, then sat in the plane at the gate for another 45 minutes or so, at which point the pilot explained that the problem was with the system that pressurizes the toilets. We had two choices, he said: we could wait for a new plane, or take advantage of the fact that above 16,000 feet, the differential between the cabin pressure and the ambient pressure makes it possible to flush the toilets without the onboard pressurization system. (This would mean locking the lavatories for a while at the beginning and end of the flight. By unanimous voice-vote, we opted to fly, and so we did.
So: two American Airlines flights, two Boeing 737s, two mechanical issues, two inconvenient delays — a small sample, admittedly, but a 100% failure-rate. The previous time I flew, a couple of months ago, I was delayed by a software failure that affected flights nationwide. When our son came to visit over the summer, his flight to Cape Cod from NY was delayed for seven hours due to mechanical problems, and when he flew home a week later, his flight was delayed for hours and finally canceled, and he ended up taking a bus from Hyannis to Boston, and then a late-night bus back to New York.
I’m old enough to remember when we used to be pretty good at this stuff, with far more primitive technology. I’d ask “what the hell is going on??”, but really I guess I know the answer, and I suppose you do too.
By now you have probably heard that Eric Adams, the glabrous black ex-cop who is (for now) Mayor of New York, is under multiple indictments for various acts of political corruption involving bribery and foreign influence, the culmination of a probe that has over the past couple of months swept up a number of his cronies and subordinates.
“But wait — Adams is a Democrat, and a POC to boot! How can this be happening?”
If we draw Ockham’s Razor from its sheath to slice the question open, the simplest answer readily appears: with his recent and voluble criticism of the Party’s immigration policy — which, he rightly pointed out, is wrecking New York — he had got dangerously out of line. Lawfare ensued. His political career is likely to come to an end, and perhaps even his personal liberty as well — pour encourager les autres.
“Well, if he’s guilty, what’s the problem?”
I would hardly imagine that he isn’t guilty. (Given the crimes he’s accused of, it would be no surprise at all.) But that isn’t the point. No, the problem is that others — a certain family out of Delaware comes to mind — have been flamboyantly, ostentatiously guilty of the same things for ages, entirely without consequences, even as political opponents of the Democrats have been punished with the harshest severity for the mildest of offenses (and often for crimes that didn’t exist at all).
The charges against Hizzoner go back a long way — some of them even predate his reign as Mayor — but he was a “made man”, so they were kept on ice. But now, having disrespected the Family, he is dead to them, and he will sleep with the fishes.
As Lavrentiy Beria once said: “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime”.
As are all of our days. (Woody Allen once asked why they should be numbered, and not lettered.)
Today, though, as it happens — on September 23rd, 2024 — the number of my days is a nice round one: exactly 25,000.
It’s been a bit of a slog at times, and I’m well out of warranty at this point, but I’m glad I’m still buggering on. Better to be over the hill than under it!
Here are the results of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service:
Seventeen percent (17%) of voters believe America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed in last week’s attempted assassination.
That figure includes 28% of Democrats who say that America would have been better off if Trump had been assassinated. Another 24% of Democrats were not sure. Fewer than half (48%) of Democrats could bring themselves to say that America would not be better off if the opposing party’s candidate for president had been assassinated.
Let that, as they say, sink in: “Fewer than half (48%) of Democrats could bring themselves to say that America would not be better off if the opposing party’s candidate for president had been assassinated.”
I know I’ve been mentioning Carl Schmitt a lot recently, but for anyone familiar with his work it is impossible not to see current political events through a Schmittian lens. Here’s a relevant passage (my emphasis):
The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not the foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. The ever present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind. If one wants to speak of politics in the context of the primacy of internal politics, then this conflict no longer refers to war between organized nations but to civil war.
For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat. All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology. War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit. A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter. The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.
– Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (p. 33). The University of Chicago Press.
Politics and war are not different things; they are a continuum. The very concept of the political necessarily includes the distinction between “us” and “them”, the possibility of escalation, and the willingness to fight.
Where are we on that continuum today? What will happen in November?
Another day, another insane violent leftist bent on partisan violence. (I refer, of course, to today’s foiled attempt to assassinate Donald Trump — the second in two months.)
Say what you like about Carl Schmitt, but the man had a keen eye for the truths of human nature. I’ve posted this quote before, but it seems apt to do so again:
Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
The Concept of the Political (1932), p. 26
Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.
Ibid, p. 37
That’s from a post I wrote back in April, prompted by a neighbor who referred to me as a “Trumper” (which is slightly more neighborly than “MAGAt”, I suppose, but in a Schmittian sense, hardly at all).
An excerpt:
In healthy and cohesive societies, with high homogeneity and trust, and the commonalities of culture, heritage, language, folkways, philosophical axioms, and moral principles that bind mobs into nations, the realm of the political can remain relatively small, confining itself to questions about which policies will most effectively implement generally agreed-upon goals. When, however, these commonalities break down, the sphere of the political expands to include almost every aspect of life, especially in large, managerial states, such as the United States has become, in which power once largely distributed to local communities has mostly been surrendered to the central government.
This has two important consequences. First, because decisions that affect everyone are now administered by the central State, control of that governing apparatus matters far more than it does in more subsidiarian societies. Second, as more and more of civic life is forced into the realm of the political, the essential characteristic of the political — the “friend-enemy distinction” — comes increasingly to the fore, and those with whom you might once have simply disagreed about, say, highway-budget priorities or zoning bylaws now become your enemy.
This in turn has further consequences. It’s in the nature of how we think about enemies that we seek to simplify them, to reduce them, to boil off their human complexities in order to avoid the natural tendency, in decent human beings, to have qualms about wishing others harm and ill-fortune.
So, this is where we are. It seems apt, also, to quote Clausewitz’s best-known passage:
War is a mere continuation of policy by other means… War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.
As I’ve said elsewhere, nobody should hope for civil war. But since the shooting has started anyway, I guess we’ll just have to see where it goes from there, and hope for the best. But remember:
“Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I’ll be voting for the guy these people keep trying to kill.
Steve Sailer’s latest over at Substack is a look at why Haiti is so stubbornly dysfunctional.
Steve mentions in passing a thing that is surely an important factor, rarely mentioned over here in discussions of U.S. immigration policy: when a place falls below comfortable levels of safety and prosperity, those who are able to — the best and brightest — emigrate to nicer places where their prospects are better, taking their virtues (and genomes) with them. This steady “boiling off” leaves behind an increasingly inspissated, incapable residue, further increasing the incentive to leave. We see this happening both in places like Haiti and in our own inner cities (which were far healthier places when social mobility was more difficult).
I have taken down yesterday’s item — a thing I’ve only ever done once or twice in the twenty-year history of this blog — about the effect of a rapid influx of Haitians to the small town of Springfield, Ohio. Although I stand by the gist of the post, which was that mass immigration from profoundly alien (and often dysfunctional) cultures, as deliberately encouraged and promoted by our current administration, is suicidal folly for any nation, and often terribly destructive for local communities subject to overwhelming influxes of needy migrants, my language, as commenter “Martin” angrily pointed out, was careless and intemperate, and perhaps even somewhat loose with facts — though his comment, it should be said, was also larded with some of the same. I’ll admit, though, that the post was not one of my best, and so rather than edit it in place, I’ve removed it, perhaps to rewrite it sometime soon. (Or not.)
Meanwhile, I will refer readers once again to this post, from 2013, about the corrosive and irreversible effects of reckless (or, in the present case, willfully malevolent) immigration policy.
This, folks, is moral clarity. Good commentary also by the Tweeter, @orenbarsky.
This clip of @DouglasKMurray on @PiersUncensored
has been circulating online, and I imagine many of you
have seen it by now (if not, it’s worth watching).For this reason, I won’t address his comments directly,
but rather focus on a hidden meaning within his words
that… pic.twitter.com/onfL76w57d— Oren Barsky ?? (@orenbarsky) September 7, 2024
Well, August is over, Labor Day has come and gone (and with it the annual four-day gathering and concert series of the Shoal Survivors, the musical collective I’ve been a member of for a decade now), and I really should try to get this blog up and running again. I’ve been in a slump for too long now, and enough is enough. For today, I’ll link to two items that I think will be of interest.
The first is a fine essay by professor J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere, on seeing one’s nation through “alien eyes”. In this post he writes about an essay by “a Japanese gentleman who visited Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, and who was curious about Western civilization because his own civilization had undertaken to Westernize itself. He was an old man, a philosopher and student of history, and the Westernization of Japan filled his mind with doubt and dark foreboding.” This gentleman, in what today would be the darkest of heresies in the epicene and self-loathing West, writes about his dread of the accelerating Westernization of Japan, for the reason that cultures are not one-size-fits-all garments that any nation can simply slip on or off, but are, rather the natural expression of a people’s distinct and essential natures. One might say, as I argued here exactly nine years ago, that cultures are what Richard Dawkins called “extended phenotypes”, and that “the fashionable notion that “race is a social construct” probably has things exactly backwards.”
The second is a response at Substack by my friend, the philosopher William Vallicella, to a letter I had sent him a while back suggesting (as I have done many times in these pages) that the Enlightenment’s enshrinement of doubt as a supreme guiding principle has led us, centuries later, to cultural and civilizational disaster.
You can read Bill’s post here. I will be posting a response of my own, but not before I give it some thought.
Back soon.
I note with sorrow and anger that Letitia James’ brutal and villainous campaign of lawfare against VDare has succeeded at last, with Peter and Lydia Brimelow, despite mounting a heroic effort that cost them millions, now having suspended the patriotic website’s operations.
It should be increasingly obvious to all by now — given the suspicious assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the intra-party coup against Joe Biden to install the flamboyantly incompetent imbecile Harris (and the astonishing, Orwellian, all-hands-on-deck propaganda blitzkrieg and wholesale memory-holing that followed), the demonic opening ceremony of the Olympics, and a thousand other indications — that we are in a struggle for the very soul of America and the West, a great contest not only between political factions and ideologies, but between good and evil.
Do not despair! — but do not underestimate the gravity of these times.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” – Lenin
As I write, Joe Biden has yet to be seen in public following his fishy letter of abdication. Rumors are spreading that he may be dying, or even already dead. As Moldbug remarked in a post today:
There is simply no good reason for the President not to be able to talk to the press. Especially if he is staying President! But.. there are… plenty of weird reasons…
If they are ready to lie about his Parkinson’s, or whatever—could it become—long Covid? Could the President—die of Covid? People die of Covid… Could the President… die? Take a sudden turn for the worse? A tragedy! The thing is—people already feel a little… misinformed… about his health—why not be hanged for an ox? Weirder and weirder. Scalia’s pillow is already hanging on Chekhov’s wall…
Meanwhile, Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has been doing a very poor job today on Capitol Hill answering questions about the failed attempt on Donald Trump’s life a few days back (an attack about which we have an awful lot of good reasons to be deeply suspicious).
As Moldbug says in the linked post, what’s happening right now is history — reality — leaking into the little movie we’ve been living in. Great forces are at war for Power. And you, dear Voter, are nothing.
How’s that Democracy going, friends? Are you still feeling “sovereign”?
In light of today’s events it seems timely to repost this item from January.
Still almost half of 2024 to go, folks, and the caldera is rising.
P.S. Having now seen footage of Mr. Trump’s female Secret Service detail dithering in panicky confusion (and seemingly unable, in their agitation, even to holster their weapons properly), I am reposting this item as well, from ten years ago.
I know I said I wasn’t likely to be posting for a bit, but this clip of Tucker Carlson tossing and goring Australian media soldiers was too good not to share.
Meet the Australian media. pic.twitter.com/IyiEqihPkb
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 26, 2024
Note: I’ve just edited this post; what I’d written here yesterday was way too dark.
It’s probably going to be very slow here at the blog for the next few weeks. I’ve got kids and grandkids about to arrive who will be with us through July, and I won’t have much time for brooding and writing.
I’ll get back to posting later in the summer (or whenever something comes to mind that I really feel the need to write down), but for now I think I’ll just give it a rest, and focus on things closer to home. Thanks to all of you as always.
Pressure is building as we head into the summer and fall. I wonder what’s coming. Some possibilities:
1) Despite Joe Biden’s now-undeniable caducity and incapacity, the people running the show keep him on, and do what’s necessary to claim a victory in November. (We know they will do whatever they think they can get away with.)
2) Biden is dropped, and replaced by… Michelle Obama? Josh Shapiro? Gretchen Whitmer?
3) Trump is sentenced to prison.
4) Trump is “taken out” in some other way.
5) A new pandemic, such as H5N1, creates an emergency that overrides everything, including the election.
6) Some other “Black Swan” event: a world war, a terror attack, a technological failure, or something even harder to imagine.
I think #2 is highly likely (though there might be complications as regards Michelle Obama). I expect #3 to happen. (I certainly hope #4 doesn’t, but as noted above, they will do anything they think they can get away with.)
I give #5 a 50/50 chance; maybe higher. Same for #6.
In his “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940 — eighty-four years and two days ago — Winston Churchill warned of “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
With news now appearing of the widening spread of the deadly H5N1 virus, there’s a timely article at The Blaze about the remorseless, decades-long perversion of science by a man who, it seems increasingly apparent, may well be this new century’s avatar of “Death, destroyer of worlds”.
Read it here.
Happy Fathers’ Day to all you dads out there.
The question often comes up: “what is best in life?” When Conan the Cimmerian was asked this, he gave what is certainly a plausible answer:
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
While perfectly reasonable, this is a young man’s outlook. If someone were to ask me, however, as an older and wiser man, on a lovely morning in June, I think my own answer would be “a leisurely breakfast”.
Anyway: enjoy the day, as you see best.
The Muse is silent for the moment, I’m afraid. (There’s plenty to comment on — this outrage, for example — but I’d have little to add but splenetic grumbling, so I won’t bother.)
Back soon. I’ve been digesting some substantial reading lately, and expect I’ll have something to say about all of that.
Fans of Western civilization got a bit of heartening news today: huge electoral wins all over Europe for “far-right” parties. (In case you aren’t familiar with the lingo, “far-right” means, among other things, “in favor of preserving the ancient cultures of Europe against the mass invasion of their homelands”.)
In particular, Macron and Scholz took a serious licking.
It may well be too little, too late — demographic replacement is very far advanced in many of these places, and much of Europe is already a “cut flower” at this point — but it’s good to see some signs of an immune response (and vestiges of vertebrae) in what had seemed to be nothing more than a tottering corpse.
Perhaps we can even show a little backbone over here in the months ahead. You never know.
In a recent essay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains Yuri Bezmenov’s theory of subversion, and calls our attention to how advanced the disease is here in the West. (Hat-tip to BV.)
I expect Bezmenov’s analysis, and the diagnosis given in this essay, will be old news to most of my readers, but it’s a good essay, and worth sharing. Read it here.
I see in the news today that New Jersey is now certifying businesses owned by gay and transsexual people, in order to privilege them for grants of taxpayer money, give them favored status for state contracts, and bestow other preferences. (The same thing is also routinely done for non-whites, as well as females, in most jurisdictions these days.)
Leaving aside the question of what one must demonstrate in order to acquire “LGBTQ+” certification, I should imagine that historically literate white males seeking advancement in the workplace these days, or those trying to run a business, must be finding it hard not to be reminded of the treatment of the dhimmi: a term that refers to those infidels, mostly Christians and Jews, who were tolerated to live as second-class inhabitants of areas under Muslim rule (the dar-al-Islam). They were not killed, expelled, or forced to convert, but they were compelled to pay a special tax to the state, a tribute called the jizya.
(The comparison, by the way, is not a favorable one: at least the dhimmi weren’t forced to bow to the Muslim faith itself, which is arguably more than one can say regarding the modern-day religion of the West.)
Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, I’ve expressed in several comment-threads my increasing lack of enthusiasm for democracy — a disaffection that has increased in proportion to the fetishization of “Our Democracy!” in political discourse and propaganda.
To listen to it all, you’d think that Democracy is somehow an end in itself, the founding principle of the United States, and the basis of all that can possibly be good and decent in public affairs. Democracy properly understood, however, is none of those things. It is a mechanism of government, and nothing more; indeed we might more accurately say that it is simply a kind of frame into which various systems of government can be placed, including the severest forms of tyranny. It is also a mechanism that can be used, and commonly has been used, to destroy itself (as, for example, in the rise of the Nazis). It guarantees neither liberty nor order, and in particular it makes no guarantee of good government; indeed, in its purer forms, at national scale, it virtually guarantees the opposite of all those things.
H.L. Mencken described democracy as “a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Benjamin Franklin described it as “two wolves and a lamb deciding on what’s for dinner.” The Founders, educated men who understood both history and human nature, knew that democracy had been, again and again, a buttered slide to tyranny, and sought desperately to find a way to find a way to implement a strictly limited version of it that would allow Americans to attempt some kind of self-government without the experiment immediately going completely off the rails, and descending into bitter and lawless chaos. (And they succeeded surprisingly well: as things worked out, it took over two hundred years for America’s experiment in self-government to go completely off the rails and descend into bitter and lawless chaos — with only a single civil war along the way.)
I understand the attraction of the idea, however illusory, that we somehow rule ourselves, rather than being ruled. But before going any further, let me put my cards on the table: I don’t give a hoot about democracy as an end in itself, and its perils and liabilities are so overwhelmingly obvious that I think we should all be wary of it.
I think the right way to look at governance is as an engineering problem, in which you start by imagining what your specs are — and to do that, we should ask why we want government in the first place, and only then start thinking about what kind of solution we might build.
So: what do we want from a government? Presumably, above all, we want a good one, and not a bad one. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say we want the very best government we can have, one that does all the things we want it to, and does them as well as possible, and doesn’t do any of the things we don’t want it to do. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it, really, and I have no prejudices about what kind of system — what kind of engineering — we should apply. If it maximizes what we want a government to do, and it minimizes what we don’t want, then that’s the system I want.
Well, what are those things? What do we want our government to do? Here are some of the things I’d put in the spec-sheet:
1) We want it to safeguard basic liberties. Among those are freedoms of political opinion, of movement, of religious belief, of association, of peaceable assembly, of self-defense, the pursuit of happiness, and various others.
2) We want it to provide security for property, for national borders, for personal and civic safety, for the enforcement of contracts, etc.
3) We want it to maintain public order.
4) We want it to provide stability, and to consider long timeframes. (What I mean by that is that I want it to guarantee that the rate of change will be damped sufficiently to enable confident investment in the future and to incentivize “low time-preference”, which is the bedrock of civilization.)
5) We want it to put the interests of its citizens above those of other people and places.
6) We want it to provide a system of law that is as small, consistent and comprehensible as possible, to be administered as transparently and justly as possible.
7) We want it to be as local and subsidiarian as possible, with each higher level of government addressing only those tasks and duties that can’t be administered closer to home.
8) We want it to provide reliable means of exchange, and consistent weights and measures.
That’s a brief list; I’m sure it can be expanded, but you get the idea. We should also ask: what do we not want our government to do? Here are some thoughts:
1) We want it not to arrogate powers that it doesn’t need for the list above.
2) We want it not to waste our resources, seize our property, tax us unnecessarily, or interfere with us any more than necessary.
3) We want it not to engage in foreign adventurism.
And so on.
As with any engineering problem, you have to consider what tools and materials you have at hand. In particular, for this problem, we must ask: what sort of people are we? How much do we have in common? How tribal or fractious are we? How virtuous? How capable are we of the individual self-discipline that is what makes lighter external government possible? What are our metaphysics? What beliefs and customs do we share? How much do we care about each other, and trust each other? Different answers to all of these questions make a critical difference to what sort of government is required. A small and homogeneous population, with high public trust and shared traditions and values, will be amenable to a lighter form of government, while a congeries of rival tribes and factions with nothing in common can only be held together by an iron hand.
My opinion, then, is that whatever system of government optimizes our spec-sheet within the constraints and conditions of our particular place and people is what I want. No form of government is best in itself, because no form of government exists in an ideal, abstract space.
In our last interaction, Bill asked me the following, in defense of democracy:
My question is a question in political philosophy.”The question is whether a just form of gov’t can exist that allows the governed no say in their governance.”
I say No. I am trying to get you to concede a very obvious point. Abe Lincoln: a just govt’ is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Now focus on “for the people.” Will you concede that a just gov’t exists for the benefit of the governed, and not for the benefit of the governors — except insofar as they too are part of the governed?
I replied:
If I understand you correctly … you are separating the philosophical question of justice in government from the messy practicalities of real-world politics. But shouldn’t any useful political philosophy include in its premises the actualities — the “crooked timber” — of human nature? (The political philosophy of the Founders certainly did.)
I will, of course, agree that a just government exists for the benefit of the governed. What I’m trying to get at is that the benefit to the governed is what ought to be maximized, and whatever form accomplishes that is arguably what is most just.
“Of the people”: yes, of course. “For the people”: yes, that should be paramount. But “by the people” is where it gets tricky, because “by the people” can (and often does) end up flushing “for the people” down the loo.
Earlier in that thread I had said:
I agree that “just” is nice, but it’s not so easy to pin down exactly what that word means, when it comes to government. Is it “just” to give imbeciles a say who will bring the whole thing crashing down on everyone’s head, including their own?
Regarding democracy, then: given the eight-point list of desiderata above, how are things looking these days? Is our government getting closer to achieving them, as we relentlessly expand the franchise, or farther away? Is it really such a good idea to connect the fulminating and mercurial passions of the mob directly to the drive-train of government?
In Leftism Revisited (page 144), Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn quotes Jules Romains:
“Hitler and Mussolini … are despots belonging to the age of democracy. They fully profit from the doubtful service which democracy has rendered to man in our society by initiating him into politics, by getting him used to that intoxicant, by making him believe that the domain of catastrophes is his concern, that history calls for him, consults him, needs him every moment.”
Also, from another exchange with Bill V.:
It seems that there is a “solution” to the game of democracy, a consistent winning strategy (described persuasively by Bertrand de Jouvenel) in which the high (the oligarchy that exists unavoidably in any form of government) buys off the low to expropriate the middle. The power of the resulting coalition is unstoppable.
The key to this is a constantly expanding franchise that is easily persuaded to vote for redistributed largesse. (Do we not see this happening before our eyes?)
This appears to be a permanent, exploitable vulnerability in the nature of democracy itself. The Founders were well aware of it, which is why they did whatever they could to limit the franchise. (And once you get the pathologically altruistic cat-ladies and spinster aunts of the middle-class itself to join the cause, it’s “game over”.)
This is getting long (and rambling), so I’ll leave it there for now. But at this point, you might well ask: “OK, then, after all that, what does an ideal system for the current-day United States actually look like? How do we get there from here?”
My answer: I’m not sure that the United States, as it now is, can be well-governed under any imaginable system. It is too big, too diverse, too dumbed-down, too polarized, to corrupt, too divorced from any stabilizing metaphysics, and generally just too sick and broken. But this I do know: the bloated, fly-blown corpse of the system the Founders put in place for the American people of their long-gone era is utterly, hopelessly insufficient for the governance of what America has since become. I think some kind of collapse and breakup is almost inevitable, after which something new might arise, hopefully carrying forward some of the best of what we had. But if that doesn’t happen, then I believe we’re looking at a long, sad epoch in which everything just … rots.
Comments welcome.
I’m away for the weekend – a recording session and live gig with the Shoal Survivors. Back soon.
Insane. Sickening.
Buckle up, folks. The earth is shaking. The rest of this year is going to be very lively indeed.
Also: this is a carefully calculated provocation. They’ve done this flamboyantly, daringly, pugnaciously, right before our eyes, as if to say “well, what are you going to do about it?” Any jacquerie that results will be further justification for stern measures.
This is a fraught and dangerous moment. America today is a tinder-box, and summer’s just starting.
The comment-thread to my recent post about Joe Biden’s fawning tribute to the deceased thug George Floyd turned in some interesting directions.
Among them was the observation that Christianity was no longer able to serve as the scaffolding that once built, and braced up, Western civilization. Was this a failing of Christianity itself?
I remarked that I was not convinced of this:
Was Richard Coeur de Lion weakened by Christianity? Was Charlemagne? Was Martel? Was Joan of Arc? Was Eisenhower? Were they fighting for what Nietzsche called a “slave morality”?
What I see is the late stage of a corrosive process, beginning in the Enlightenment (or perhaps even with the early Nominalists), of a radicalization of doubt that slowly became a “universal acid” that has now eaten away all belief in any transcendent metaphysics and objectively existing order. Every tradition, every moral intuition, any natural understanding of category and hierarchy, now must be hauled into the dock to justify its existence. This is a thing that cannot be done; it is an endless, regressive quest to prove, not our theorems, but our axioms themselves.
Christianity with its axioms removed turns the great civilization of the West into nothing more than a rotting “skin suit”, worn by savages who have nothing else to clothe themselves with. The stench of its decomposition reeks in our nostrils.
Our friend and commenter “Jacques” then joined in with a penetrating question of his own:
I agree that we’re in a late stage of a corrosive process, but there’s something else going too. The corrosive doubt is close to universal but not fully. And, in some weird way, it’s accompanied by a perverse creativity. A new system of fanatically held beliefs has been developing. They’re never doubted. It’s basically illegal to doubt them.
Take the example of Biden’s disgusting little sermon about “George Floyd”. The message is that the most obviously worthless and evil people in society are not only entirely blameless victims of oppression, but positively angelic; they’re the most noble, beautiful, inspiring people. Whatever they do (including the worst violent crimes) is acceptable or even good because they do it. And behind that message is the axiomatic belief in some lunatic concept of “equality”. Since Floyd is a thoroughly despicable person, we have to now believe that despicable things are good, or no worse than good things. (Otherwise, we’d have to think that some people are inferior to others.)
We’ve now reached the point where our sick commitment to “equality” leads to an explicit celebration of obvious evil and degeneracy and condemnation of virtue and decency. (We can’t level up but we can always level down.) In effect, Biden is telling us to accept murder, assault, theft and arson so as to avoid drawing any unflattering conclusions about certain special groups of people.
I don’t really understand it but this seems to be part of what’s happening. For some reason, the universal acid has no effect on the “equality” axiom. Everything else dissolves, but this one belief is never questioned or even acknowledged. And that one axiom, unconstrained by any others, seems to be a big factor in the corrosive process. Every sane belief is eventually denied because it conflicts somehow with the belief in “equality”.
But why is that? Why didn’t the Enlightenment destroy the belief in “equality”?
It might have something to do with Christianity. Or maybe “equality” is just a very useful meme in the high-low coalition you describe.
This is a terrifically important question, and I thank you, Jacques, for putting it to us. Why indeed? Here are some thoughts:
Yes, the axiom of “equality” is a powerful tool for powerful “wire-pullers“, who have no real illusions about equality, to use to gather up the masses, and the useful idiots, in their Bioleninist coalition-building. Those who seek to mobilize the mass of men in all ages of history have always known how to use envy as a weapon, and the mob is easily persuaded that they’re just as good as anybody else and nobody deserves to have it better than them.
It can also be argued that there was a radical egalitarian backlash in all Western institutions after the horrors of World War Two; a backlash that spread very deeply and rapidly.
It’s also in the nature of liberalism (as Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn has pointed out in his writings) to see the specter of illiberalism (i.e., intolerance) in any form of strong affirmation of particularity, of specific convictions, of natural discrimination or hierarchy. We can see already that anyone who expresses such things, from an NFL player expressing support for traditional sex-roles, to people who “notice” stubborn differences between human groups, is quickly attacked as a “Fascist” or a “Nazi.”
Finally, it could be that there is some sort of “conservation principle” at work here regarding human nature: something that simply makes it impossible for us to live without fundamental axioms, and means that when we drive the old ones out, new ones necessarily tumble in to take their place. If this is so, and I rather think that it is, then given the points above — the usefulness of egalitarianism in manipulating mass movements, the post-Holocaust backlash against the eugenic ideas that dominated the intellectual life of the progressive prewar West, liberalism’s aversion to hierarchy and qualitative discrimination, and the destruction of transcendent metaphysics by the acid of post-Enlightenment rationalistic skepsis, — then it would make sense, perhaps, for a deracinated civilization wearing the hollowed-out “skin-suit” of Christianity to seize on a familiar, but now misshapen, fossil of Christian egalitarianism and make that the tent-pole of its new and shabby “church”.
I’ll leave it there for tonight. As always, civil and thoughtful comments are welcome. Jacques?
P.S. Another, perhaps the simplest and best, explanation is this: if the fundamental principle of your worldview is radical doubt, and the obliteration of all objective categories and criteria for discrimination, then of course everything must be equal to everything else, because any inequality presupposes the existence (and use) of some objective standard by which it is to be measured, which our worldview forbids. (As I’ve said elsewhere, leftism is entropy.)
Here’s a splendid little video (found on X) on how energy moves through and around an electrical circuit.
5 minute clip explaining that energy does not flow through wires it flows around the wires through free space based on electric & magnetic fields
How have I never known this?? pic.twitter.com/rgK5WjF8DI
— JessicaGenetics (@JessicaGenetics) May 26, 2024
Today the White House posted this audacious tweet:
George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more.
Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death.
He changed the world.
Now, let's act in his memory. pic.twitter.com/uPSCkxFMRs
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 25, 2024
A few minor corrections:
— George Floyd did not “deserve better”. He was a brute, a drug addict, and career criminal who, among other things, beat a pregnant woman while robbing her, and pointed his gun at her belly to threaten her unborn child.
— George Floyd was not murdered. He died of a massive, self-induced drug overdose while resisting arrest. The police who subdued him were acting according to Minneapolis Police Department guidelines. His death was nether tragic nor unjust; indeed, it was entirely the opposite.
— The “civil rights movement he inspired” was nothing more a nationwide spree of looting and arson, egged on by a corrupt cabal of Marxist grifters and race-baiters calling themselves “Black Lives Matter”, abetted by Democrat oligarchs at all levels of local, state, and federal government. That orgiastic summer of riots, which caused billions in property damage and countless injuries to civilians and police, took place while everyone else was ordered, by the arbitrary power of mayors and governors, to stay home, to give up their livelihoods, not to go to school or church, and even to forgo their final farewells to dying loved-ones.
I’m pretty jaded at this point in my life, and very little in the way of corruption, degradation of principles, and naked power-grubbing surprises me any longer. But even to me, this tweet is shocking: not because Biden’s handlers would try it, but because there is still anyone out there — that is, anyone capable of critical thinking and moral judgment — who would buy it. I know there is a sullen and resentful mass out there, the fat end of the dumbbell-shaped “high-low coalition”, whose easily bought votes and flammable emotions are being whipped up here. But I know also that there are a great many college-“educated” white, left-leaning voters who will be taken in by this as well, and the idea that we are to be ruled by such idiots is perhaps the strongest of all possible arguments against universal suffrage, and perhaps more generally against democracy itself.
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
“And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.”
— John Locke, Second Treatise on Government
Comments welcome.
Today I learned that the Biden administration has been holding secret talks with Iran to discuss how to bring Israel to heel, starting with toppling Israel’s government.
To my many left-leaning Jewish friends: have you seen enough yet? Are you still voting Democrat?
Bill Vallicella has just published a sharp, brief post about the confusion that atheists and many leftists (a Venn diagram with a large intersection) share about the nature of religion, and the nature of the human need for it — which ultimately cannot be satisfied by material or social goods.
We read:
Leftists, and atheists generally, typically have a cartoon-like (mis)understanding of religion.
No higher religion is about providing natural goodies by supernatural means, goodies that cannot be had by natural means. Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can think only in material terms and believe only in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament in which we find ourselves in this life. What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives. It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.
We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder. We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don’t have and wouldn’t satisfy us even if we had it. We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived. It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse. It is not just that our hearts are cold; our hearts are foul. You say none of this applies to you? Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave. You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.
Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil. No physical technology and no socio-political restructuring can do what religion tries to do.
Describing the horrors of 20th-century Utopian schemes in his book Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn quotes (indirectly) Vasily Rozanov:
“The deeper reason for all that has happened is that vanishing Christianity has created enormous cavities in the civilized world and now everything is tumbling into them.”
Read Bill’s piece here.
Having had, last night, a lively conversation over dinner with a woman who chid me (and sought to correct me) for insisting that sex is indeed binary, I think a clarifying post is in order.
Before I begin, I’ll pause to express surprise and dismay at how stubbornly fashionable, and how prevalent, denial of the fundamental dualism of sex has become, and remains; it’s a distressing symptom of the radical deconstruction and obliteration of all objective principles and categories that has grown, from small clouds of doubt at the beginning of the Enlightenment, to the ruinous tempest now smashing everything in the West to rubble. To insist, in these times, on the objective reality of the sex binary is to make oneself (as, for instance, J.K. Rowling has done) a heretic and a pariah. Nevertheless, there it is.
What is sex? Why does it exist? Why does it seem to be, in all species, a driving force whose urgency is second only to — if not primary to — the will to survive? Why does every human tradition always and everywhere, without exception, distinguish between male and female, not only as essential biological types or social categories, but as fundamental — and binary — divisions of transcendent metaphysical order?
The universal (until five minutes ago) human consciousness of the centrality of sexual duality, and its inclusion in the traditional systems of every culture, surely indicates something vitally important. I want to make this case as simply as possible, though, with the broadest possible appeal in this secular era, so I’m going to leave tradition and metaphysics out altogether — but not before I point out that duality and polarity are the very essence of sex; it is only the existence of the twin concepts of male and female that give the idea of sex any meaning at all. That said, though, we can imagine all sorts of binary concepts — hard and soft, black and white, awake and asleep, tall and short, loud and quiet, beautiful and ugly, friend and enemy, etc. — that are extremes of continua, and allow for the existence of intermediates. Biological sex, however, is not like that.
Why does biological sex exist at all? The answer: it exists, simply and unambiguously, as a mechanism of reproduction. It is how most multicellular organisms, and some unicellular organisms, reproduce. The mechanism involves the fusion of two sex cells, or gametes, each carrying half of the complete genome of the newly created organism (which before subsequent division is now a single, fertilized cell called a zygote).
In all multicellular organisms, with the exception of some yeasts and fungi, gametes come in two (exactly two) strikingly different forms. This is called anisogamy, and it is probably at least a billion years old. The male form is sperm; it is small (too small to see with the naked eye, and first observed by pioneering microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1677), and it is motile. It has a tiny head, and a long whiplike tail that it uses to swim. The female form is the egg, or ovum; it is one of the largest human cells, and is large enough to see with the naked eye. It has a volume ten million times that of a sperm cell, and unlike the sperm, it is unable to move on its own.
These two kinds of sex cells — the two complementary components of human sexual reproduction — are all there is. There is no intermediate form, or mixture, or chimera, nothing halfway between a sperm and ovum. All human gametes are one or the other, and in biological terms, the combination of sperm and ovum to create new life is what sex is. There’s nothing cultural about any of it, and nothing that is a matter of opinion. As far as objective scientific facts go, this is as solid as it gets.
Those claiming that sex is nevertheless non-binary will now point to the indisputable existence of hermaphrodites, both human and animal. There are people with all sorts of ambiguous sexual characteristics, and there are animals that switch sexes during their lifespan, or even instantiate both sexes at once. Doesn’t that mean sex is a continuum?
No.
It’s important at this point to reiterate, and keep in mind, what sex is: a mechanism of reproduction involving the fusion of male and female gametes. The embryonic development, morphology, and life-cycle physiology of animal bodies can vary, and be disrupted, and make errors, in various ways, but the underlying mechanism of sex itself never changes at all.
Biologically, there are three forms of hermaphrodites — comprising two forms of “true” hermaphrodites, sequential and simultaneous, and what are called “pseudohermaphrodites”.
— Sequential hermaphrodites are animals that produce female gametes at one stage of life, and male gametes at another. Protogyny is when they start out as female and become male; the opposite is protandry. Some species go back and forth! (All three of these sequentially hermaphroditic forms can be found among reef-fish such as clownfish and wrasses; sometimes the changes appear to be induced by social-dominance hierarchies. The details are fascinating.)
— Simultaneous hermaphrodites are animals that can produce both male and female gametes at the same time. This is mostly found among snails and slugs, but there is one known vertebrate species — the mangrove killifish, Kryptolebias marmoratus — that pulls off this trick. Animals that can do this can do sexual reproduction all on their own.
— Pseudohermaphrodites produce only male or female gametes, but exhibit secondary morphological characteristics of the other sex. The example usually given is the female spotted hyena, which has what appears to be a penis, but is in fact an enlarged clitoris that functions as a birth canal.
Regarding humans: nearly every instance of “intersex” morphology is pseudohermaphroditic. Sequential hermaphroditism does not exist in any terrestrial vertebrate (and so not in humans), while simultaneous hermaphroditism — known formerly as “ovotestis” — is vanishingly rare; only 500 cases or so have ever been reported, and the bulk of those merely involve the presence of both male and female gonadic tissue, with actual production of both sperm and ova being even rarer (I haven’t yet to be able to determine if any examples of that have ever been seen at all).
What should be clear after looking at all of this is that even the various forms of hermaphroditism — even having both ovaries and testes — provide no counterargument to the underlying duality of sex. They offer no examples of any sort of intermediate, hybrid components of the essential, binary mechanism of sex; they are merely various ways of producing one kind of gamete or the other (or both). This stubborn duality means that biological expression of the mechanism of sex only exists in four, clearly delimited forms:
1) The production of male gametes;
2) The production of female gametes;
3) The production of both;
4) The production of neither.
If sex were truly “non-binary”, there would be a vast continuum in between all of this, a vague and fuzzy biological domain in which sexually reproducing beings used something other than sperm (male) and ova (female) — some spectrum of gametes that are neither wholly one nor wholly the other — to create new life. But in the billion years of sexual life on Earth, such a thing has never existed, and it doesn’t exist now.
Sex is binary.
About that pier we built in Gaza: don’t be surprised if it later turns out to have been built not to bring supplies to Gaza, but to evacuate Gazans to the West.