Motus Mentis

Lawrence Auster has died. There are things I would like to say about him, his influence on my own thinking, and the grace with which he faced his final ordeal, but I must say them later. He was a brilliant and difficult man.

For now, go and read Laura Wood’s entry at VFR. See also Henry McCulloch’s piece at VDare, and Bill Vallicella’s comments at Maverick Philosopher.

March 31st, Guangzhou — Having found a little time to write, I’ll add a few more remarks.

Mr. Auster was, as Bill Vallicella correctly observed, an extremist; his view of conservatism was a very narrow one, and he refused to make common cause with other self-styled conservatives whose opinions were not almost exactly congruent with his own. In this he could be almost pathologically stubborn; he picked a lot of fights with many people who broadly agreed with him, and fought them with a sudden and startling fierceness. Thus he alienated a great many people with whom it would surely have been more productive, in the long run, to have fought alongside. But in his view the great civilization of the Christian West was dying of a withering and degenerative disease, and there was no point in making alliances with those who brought any trace of the infection along with them. Being “the enemy of the enemy” was never sufficient to make anyone his friend.

Such factionalism is the cardinal weakness of the modern Right in its struggle against the comparatively monolithic Left. The branches of American conservatism exist in a multidimensional space defined by several orthogonal axes, such as religion, social tradition, immigration policy, ethnic identity, fiscal policy, Federalism, limited government, and foreign policy. Mr. Auster considered his own small region of this large ideological manifold — at the intersection of religious and social traditionalism, immigration restriction, and European ethnocentrism — to be the only hope of our civilization’s survival, and he defended his patch of ground with drawn sword and a wary eye.

He did so, however, with remarakable intellectual consistency and insight. As Henry McCulloch said, Auster refused to “bend the knee to the world’s fashions”, and he lived independently enough that he continued to write under his own name, even as his views became more and more heretical. (His views didn’t change; orthodoxy did.)

My first encounter with Lawrence Auster was to be on the receiving end of withering criticism for an item I had written about race and immigration. It was not pleasant; although Mr. Auster made several points I have since come to agree with, I thought I had not been understood correctly, and he quite obstinately ignored my subsequent attempts at clarification. (He did this sort of thing often.)

As time went by, though, and my own understanding of the West’s existential crisis deepened, I began to reject the neoconservative ideas that had attracted me in the early years of the last decade in favor of a more traditionalist view. Nobody articulated the traditional-conservative ideology better than Lawrence Auster. I continued to read VFR daily; I suspect that many others who had fallen out with him did so also.

Over time I mended fences with Larry, and in the last couple of years we took up an amiable email correspondence, and met a couple of times for lunch. Among other things, we shared an interest in the esoteric teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Larry’s great gift was analysis and clarification. Every day, he dissected current events to show the consistent progress of the disease affecting the West. Much of what he said was forehead-smackingly obvious once he had said it; I hope, and rather doubt, that we will still see things quite as clearly now that he’s gone.

Larry faced his terminal cancer, and the terrible suffering he bore before he died, with almost saintly grace. Though I am not a believer myself (and so lacked a central qualification for Auster-approved conservatism), I’m glad to know that his deepening faith gave him strength and comfort at the end.

Lawrence Auster should have been with us for many years to come. His death is a very painful loss.