Motus Mentis

For tonight, something to listen to and some things to read.

To listen to, we have John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb. This week’s 43-minute installment is dedicated to the cultural and demographic death of his ancestral homeland, the British Isles. It is a melancholy survey of the ruin of a great nation, but some things need to be heard. Please listen, if you have the time.

To read, we have two essays: a Catholic critique of the “alt-right” (now a catch-all term that is used more by critics of anyone to the right of Lindsay Graham than by the variegated dissidents, traditionalists, neoreactionaries, anti-universalists, anarcho-capitalists, Moldbuggians, technofuturists, ethnoidentitarians, critics of democracy, etc. to which it is so carelessly and indiscriminately fastened in the popular media), written by Matthew Rose at First Things, and a response by Costin Alamariu at Social Matter.

Rose considers a defining characteristic of this nebula of right-wing thought to be an antipathy to Christianity, which he ascribes to a belief that Christianity’s universalism has brought the West to a condition of “pathological altruism”. He is right that this is a recognized problem in neoreactionary circles, but in my own experience it does not result in a rejection of Christianity itself — which most Dark Enlightenment types see as an essential part of the traditional Western organism — but of the mutated, radically egalitarian Protestant cryptoreligion that has effectively become the established faith of the liberal, “secular” West. Are there atheists in this mix? Absolutely. Pagans? Yes, those as well. The dissident Right is large; it contains multitudes. But to characterize it as monolithically, or even largely, anti-Christian gets it wrong. (To imagine it as in any significant way anti-religious would be an even greater error.)

Alamariu responds to this:

Regarding Christianity, most people on the “alt-right’ are distinguished from the general population and from the mainstream of American conservatism precisely because they are religious, or rather, traditionalist. Matthew Rose might be acquainted with Twitter accounts like @NoTrueScotist (Tradical). These are not an exception, and are far more representative of the right-wing movement arising now in Western nations than anyone Rose mentions in the article.

Take France as an example. The “alt-right’ uprising in France precedes that in the United States, and began in 2013 with protests against the recently passed gay marriage law, and against mass immigration. Roughly 2% of France still believes in the monarchy”“not a symbolic or constitutional monarchy, but the King in Versailles with the Church ruling France together with the army. A much larger percentage wouldn’t go so far but comes close. They reject the French Revolution, and they reject a Catholic Church that betrayed the monarchy and itself””not to speak of what they think about Vatican II. But these are devout Catholics, many of who belong to the Society of Saint Pius X. Many come from France’s oldest families, including those who founded the French presence in the Antilles and other colonies. Many of these youth form the backbone of organizations like Generation Identitaire in France, a group Matthew Rose would no doubt label “alt-right.’ Their families have long-standing connections with Action Francaise, and more recently with Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement Pour la France. It is an act of arrogance or of ignorance to claim that such people are less devout because they don’t embrace Catholicism in the same way Rose does.

To be fair, Rose in fact argues that to see Christianity as being, in nationalistic terms, pathologically altruistic is a mistake. He writes:

The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, “God has made all the nations [ethnos].’ The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible.

Here Rose relies upon a distinction between “race” and “nation”. This is a particularly modern sleight-of hand, inasmuch as the distinction was essentially meaningless in Biblical times, and is only comprehensible in the context of the modern “proposition nation” — which is, of course, precisely what much of modern reactionary thought calls into question as a sufficient basis for durable and harmonious nationhood, depending as it does upon an axiom of universality and interchangeability of widely divergent human populations.

Alamariu offers this in reply:

Although it’s only mentioned as an aside in his article, central to Rose’s argument is the tired cliché, so beloved of polite conservatives and tamed traditionalists, that “racism is modern.’ This would be news to the devout Catholic Spaniards who spread Rose’s faith across the world and who came up with the concepts of limpieza de sangre, or with the casta system in the colonies and its myriad classifications like mestizo, castizo, zambo, and even more exotic, stratified in a formal racial hierarchy. It would be news to those very unmodern men who made the Law of Manu in India. The truth is what common sense would expect it to be: race is one of the oldest and most robust ways that mankind has had to distinguish different groups, and has always been central to the definition of peoplehood.

Rose gives the example of ancient Greece as the foundation not of racism but of a healthy nationalism, and points to the word ethnos; but as the other word genos implies, ideas of race existed even then. Plato’s republic was an idealized eugenic state modeled on the real-life eugenic state of Sparta, which continued a Dorian tradition of racial eugenics and concern with heredity explicitly promoted in the writings of poets like Pindar and Theognis. The fact that ancient peoples didn’t divide races in the same way we do is not surprising: they didn’t have much contact with either blacks or Asians, let alone Australian aborigines. But the claim that race is a recent invention and therefore can be looked down on by a Gentleman of Tradition is false. It’s a cop-out by weak conservatives who seek merely a kind of status in distinguishing themselves from “vulgar’ racists. It’s a pose and affectation largely for display in front of the Left. In his Politics, Aristotle very clearly says that difference of race is a cause of faction in states, and one of the surest causes of their destruction; the fact that he believed even the different Greek lineages were bound to hate and fight each other does not support the claim, as Rose and other “traditionalists’ imply, that they would have gotten along just fine with a Saxon, a Yoruba, or a Mapuche.

Later on, Alamariu adds:

The assault on health, on beauty, on manliness, on Christianity, on intelligence, accountability and competence as such, has gone a great way to forcing this most vital part of the youth into a virtuous reaction: this recently-spread meme is, in fact, the truth, or not far from it.

There’s much more. Read it all. The Rose article is here, and Alamariu’s response is here.