I want to apologize to all of you who have been coming here over the past few months only to find little or no new content. I’ve written three articles this summer for publication elsewhere, but since my excruciating shoulder injury in July I’ve badly neglected the blog.

Since 2005 I’ve written over five thousand posts here; as my own views and focus have changed, the content of this site has changed from a breezy potpourri, sprinkled with posts about evolution, martial arts, and philosophy of mind, to a darker concentration on the long currents and cycles of history, religion, society, culture, political philosophy, and human diversity that make civilizations rise and fall, and that are making this one fall before our eyes.

In particular I’ve been gnawing for years now at the nature of the American Founding, and wondering whether the grave illness now threatening to put an end to that noble experiment is due to something “baked into” its originating principles, or to a failure to respect them and adhere to them.

In a post two years ago (one that prompted a stimulating exchange with the conservative writer Michael Anton) I wrote that I was “dogged by the question of just where things went off the rails in the West.” (See the linked series of posts here.)

Central to that question is this one: is the decay we see all around us in the early 21st century a result of the principles the American system was built upon, or did it occur in spite of them?

Every social system sturdy enough to achieve maturity faces this question when it reaches, sooner or later, a crisis of doubt and exhaustion. When this happens, there will always arise two factions in bitter opposition. One believes that the problem lies in laxity and infidelity regarding founding principles; the other calls into question the principles themselves. One side will argue that radical change has been foolish and destructive, and will call for a doubling down on original principles; the other will say that those principles are (at best) obsolete, and that the only way out is to double down on change itself. The pattern has repeated itself throughout history in nearly every complex human system, whether political, social, or religious — and in these last years it has brought the United States to the brink of civil war.

In the United States of 2018, the debate is almost entirely between a Left faction that calls for radical and accelerating change, and a Right that seeks a return to strict Constitutionalism, States’ rights, meritocracy, border control, diminution of Federal power, demographic stability, and individual liberty — in general, what today’s academic jargon would call a “re-centering” of the philosophy of the Founders. Listen to any of the prominent voices on the Right — whether it’s the Claremont or Hoover Institutes, or National Review, or Thomas Sowell, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or media personalities like Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh — and what you will hear is that the nation’s problem is that it has lost touch with the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; with the philosophy of Locke and Hume and Montesquieu and Jefferson and Franklin and Madison.

There is a solid argument to be made that the blame here should indeed be laid upon “laxity and infidelity regarding founding principles”. Mr. Anton himself is a strong proponent of this view, whose primary intellectual bastions are the Claremont organization and Hillsdale College. Two recent books defending this position stand out, in my opinion: The Political Theory of the American Founding, by Thomas West, and America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, by Robert Reilly, which I am currently reading.

Related to all of this is the question of religious faith, and of the existence of God. A central problem, as I see it, is whether the natural-law underpinnings of the Founding are strong enough to hold up the Western (and particularly the American) edifice without reliance upon belief in God. Although Thomas West works hard in his book to shore them up with arguments built upon reason alone, even he acknowledges at the end of his summation that none of the arguments he presents suffice on their own. As I’ve moved away, over the years, from the “scientistic” atheism of my youth, I’ve come to the opinion that secularism is deeply maladaptive for human groups (see this post from eleven years ago, when I was still far less open to the possible existence of God than I am now). John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I have had very little doubt for years now that he was right about this, even if the natural-law assumptions underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are left unexamined by most people, and usually glossed over even by intelligent, secular Americans. How many Americans, after all, burrow down to the philosophical roots of why the rule of law is itself good or just, or precisely how we can know that justice itself should depend on assumptions of absolute equality before the law? (Bear in mind that we already qualify this latter principle when defendants are on trial, for example by considering profoundly defective intelligence, and other questions of mental competence.)

Robert Reilly’s book brings exactly these questions sharply into focus, and in doing so identifies just what is at the heart of the struggle we see playing out in America’s culture (and in its streets) today. It is the conflict between two models of Creation itself, and the nature of Man. The first model is one in which reason and comprehensible order are primary, meaning that God’s creation — Logos — is a book that rational Man, himself created in the image of God, may read and be guided by. The second is a world created entirely by Will, in which there is no objective order, only whatever state of affairs God decrees from moment to moment. The terrible danger in this latter model is that if God is taken away, all that is left is the will of Man. The law, shorn of its transcendent origin in the rational mind of God, is simply whatever the sovereign says it is. What is good, what is just, even what is real — all of these things, unmoored from everything save human will, become nothing more than prizes of power. How can a constitutional order possibly survive in such conditions?

That second model is not new; even in Christendom it has been afoot since Ockham, and then Luther. But until our era it was checked, in part at least, by faith in the benevolence of God’s Will to maintain the Good. When faith in God dies, though, and belief in God becomes belief in Man, there is at last no restraint on the temptation of Man’s will to absolute power — and because that absolute power includes not only temporal sovereignty, but even the radical power to define what is good and what is just, the last check, that of conscience itself, vanishes as well. Everything, at last, is rendered unto Caesar.

So this is what I’ve been brooding about as I’ve watched the cities burn, and as all the natural categories and self-evident truths that have guided the nation since the Founding have been thrown on the pyre. Regardless of whether the Founding itself contained intrinsically fatal liabilities, it is clear, I think, that as we lose our belief in a transcendent foundation for natural law all becomes mere Will, and that under such a regime, the American nation as founded — or anything that would have been recognizable as America to anyone born before 1975 or so — cannot long endure. That may not bother some of my friends out there on the Nietzschean Right (you know who you are) but all I can say is: be careful what you wish for.

Happy birthday, America. Never in my lifetime has the fate of the Union seemed more precarious.

To begin our 245th year, President Trump gave a rousing defense of the traditional American nation at Mount Rushmore. Unlike the terrible forces arrayed against him, this man truly loves his country, and he understands the awful threat it faces. May he prevail.

You can watch the speech here.

With a hat-tip to my e-pal David Duff, here is an open letter written by a black professor at UC Berkeley urging us not to be taken in by the infantilizing Democrat race-hustle known as Black Lives Matter.

The writer makes the essential points: that BLM promotes a malignant, paternalistic ideology that “strips black people of agency”; that explaining American black dysfunction in terms of white-supremacist oppression is absurd on its face, given that other groups — even other black groups — often outperform American whites in socioeconomic success; that the narrative of black helplessness, and dependence upon whites to alleviate their condition, is not only in itself a pernicious form of racism, but is deeply dispiriting and demoralizing for blacks, and that to teach black children this lesson of their own inadequacy predisposes them to a life of failure and sullen resentment.

The writer also points out that money given to BLM flows directly into Democratic Party coffers, and so works to preserve the political ascendancy of that party in precisely those places where black misery is at its worst — cities that have, in many cases, been under total Democrat hegemony for a half-century or more.

Black Lives Matter is a transparent affront against human dignity, and against the founding natural-rights principles of the American Founding. It is a Machiavellian scheme that, in a ruthless struggle for political power, pits one group of whites against another; the black people it purports to stand for are merely pawns on the chessboard. It is the tactical endgame of a decades-long strategic battle that began in the universities in the postwar era, preparing the ground for this final assault by conditioning generations of students to despise themselves, their nation, their history, and their culture.

I have reproduced the letter in its entirety, below. Thanks to Zero Hedge (itself under withering assault just now) for publishing it.

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I’ve long supported subsidiarianism – the idea that government should be as local, and locally accountable, as possible. I’ve also been saying for years that the U.S. has become so large, and so diverse, as to be ungovernable by central authority. What’s worse, the power held by that central authority is so pathetically insecure that everyone imagines that if they try hard enough they can bite off a chunk of it. If sovereignty cannot secure its inventory of power, then public life becomes a feeding-frenzy, in which we end up biting pieces out of each other. In 2020, the water is dark with blood. (Simply put, we are watching sovereign power itself being looted.)

So if Seattle, etc., feel that they have so little in common with the historic American nation that they are unable to accept our traditions, mythos, and way of life, and unable to live an ordinary life in the United States without feeling driven at every moment by the need to bite off more power — then it would be better for everyone if they simply broke away. (Which they seem already to be doing.)

This isn’t a happy prospect, of course, for the people inside these places who still wish to live in the previously existing USA. We should do whatever is necessary to protect them as they depart, and – this won’t be easy – to make some arrangement in compensation for their property.

But it should by now be obvious to all that the United States as currently constituted simply isn’t working. It is a violently dysfunctional marriage, and the only hope is some sort of divorce. There can be no comity without commonality.

As for the brand-new nation known as CHAZ, it will be interesting to see how this little experiment in sovereignty plays out. I wonder if Mr. Raz Simone can chew what’s he’s bitten off.

The late Yuri Bezmenov explains. (To bring this fully up to date, we would swap out “Marxism”.)

I’m browsing my old posts, to see how much of our current state of affairs was visible in prospect years ago. Here’s a long excerpt from something I published back in 2012.

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… Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation is young and virile enough to value opportunity over security, and while its people can muster up enough self-confidence, social cohesion and unity of purpose to agree upon national goals, and to make a serious effort to achieve them.

We are not such a nation any more — lean, athletic, vigorous and hungry. No, we are now in late middle age: weary, obese, weakened by cultural self-doubt and existential guilt, too fond of comfort, too wary of risk, exhausted by corrosive metabolic disease and the collapse of our immune system, sapped by parasites, and all but immobilized by all the clutter we’ve created and accumulated. We can hardly get off the couch even to look after our own most basic needs, and resent the idea that we should have to. We can hardly bear to look in the mirror.

What are the exceptions? They are to be found in small, agile, self-organizing entities that are lightweight enough, and focused enough, and cohesive enough, and intelligent enough, to move, to act, to create, to <em>do</em>. They must be nimble enough to live in the shadows of tottering behemoths without being trampled, or eaten — but the great, slow beasts are dying now; their time is nearly over.

When I visited Singularity University in April, one of the speakers (I think it was Paul Saffo) said that he thought that modern nation-states were becoming obsolete, and wouldn’t be around much longer. I can’t recall if he mentioned that this is particularly true of democracies, but to me it seems it must be. Will there still be a United States of America, as presently constituted, thirty years from now? How? Why?

This Corona-chan crisis has been an excellent experiment in determining just how much we are willing to imprison and fetter ourselves to avoid danger.

Our prolonged interval of peace and prosperity since the Second World War — our isolation from the hormesis of what, throughout history, have been regular calamities and stresses — has made us unaccustomed to hardship. We recoil from it, and will make almost any sacrifice to avoid it.

What this crisis offers, to those who seek it, is a route to the most perfect of all systems of social control: the maintenance of a chronic sense of peril amongst a timid people. It becomes unnecessary to impose stifling restrictions; all that’s needed is to create the climate of fear, and the people will subdue and confine themselves. Outliers and dissidents are then easily controlled by shaming — or, if necessary, by the action of the State, with the grateful acquiescence of the general mass of the people, guided by a compliant (and complicit) press.

The image for this — if I had artistic skill I would paint it — is a frightened man sitting in the corner of a jail-cell, wearing a face-mask. The door is open.

Over at American Greatness yesterday, Mackubin Owens has written a short piece entitled ‘Pandemic Is Shining a Light on the American Character‘. Indeed it has.

There have of course been many Americans who have shown great courage in manning their stations, and keeping necessary infrastructure working, despite personal risk. Had it not been for them, we’d rapidly have descended into real darkness.

Mr. Owens, however, points out three aspects of our current national character that this crisis has brought to view. They are of course generally human characteristics, but to take a purely essentialist view leaves out the ebb and flow of civic virtue in the life-cycles of civilizations. Much of what we have seen is due more specifically to the qualities of this society, at this late stage of its life.

We read:

The first is the predisposition of too many political leaders to tyrannical behavior. Theirs is real tyranny: the imposition of a one-size-fits-all, arbitrary, sweeping, draconian approach to the virus, which has caused massive — and mounting —collateral damage. It is the imposition of regulations that violate the Constitution itself by many governors and mayors.

Those who have revealed their inner tyrant include New York mayor Bill DeBlasio, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The essence of the will to tyranny was best summarized by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said in response to unauthorized gatherings in her city, that to “save lives … we will shut you down, we will cite you, and if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.”

Of course, we are assured that those who issue these edicts do so for our own good. But as C.S. Lewis wrote in “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology”: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

Quite so, but there’s more to despotism than imposing harsh rules upon others: there is also the exemption of the despot himself from those rules. So we have Bill DeBlasio cracking down on “non-essential travel” while taking a motorcade from Gracie Mansion to Prospect Park to have a stroll, and Lori Lightfoot closing Chicago’s hair salons, then going off to get her hair done because she “has to be on TV”.

Second is moral narcissism:

…the tendency of many Americans to denigrate those who disagree with the draconian measures that have been deemed necessary to combat the virus. Moral narcissism goes beyond old-fashioned “virtue signaling.” The latter is a way to demonstrate one’s own moral superiority; the former requires one to shame those who don’t agree.

This was already in full view before the virus; it is nothing more, in this era of cryptoreligious zeal, than the shaming of heretics. It is no different from what we have already seen regarding “climate deniers”, “xenophobes”, and “deplorables” generally. We’ve seen it before, too: in the America of the 1850s.

Third is snitching:

The third negative feature — and perhaps the most troubling — is that this moral narcissism pits Americans against each other in a very dangerous way by inviting them to inform on their fellow citizens if they are not following the “rules.” Indeed, some states and cities have set up “tip” lines to allow informants to anonymously rat out their neighbors. Do we really want to set out on the path to becoming a surveillance state? Watch “The Lives of Others” if you really believe that this is a good idea.

I was expecting to see another item on the list: our ovine submission to overweening authority, our willingness to yield ancient and essential liberties at the first whiff of fear. I saw a meme recently featuring Junius Stearns’s painting of Washington addressing the Constitutional Convention, with text that said “JUST TO BE CLEAR, NONE OF THIS MATTERS IF THERE’S A VIRUS”. Yes, of course outbreaks of disease require some reasonable accommodation — but I think we were made, once upon a time, of sterner stuff.