Motus Mentis

Well, maybe some mainstream conservatives are actually beginning to. Here, for instance, is Rod Dreher, rising from the fainting couch (h/t to Porter):

The media have soft-pedaled this thing, but when it gets right down to it, all the diversity rhetoric in the world is not going to matter when a man recognizes that in voting Democratic for president, he is voting for a party that wants to send mentally disturbed males into his daughter’s locker room, and call it justice.

Eventually, the provocations of Social Justice Warriors, especially when they are race-based, is [sic] going to empower the militant whites, especially those drawn to pagan masculinity, and they are going to do what the rest of us would not do: Fight. This, because the best ”” that is, those who want peace, civility, and tolerance ”” lack all conviction to defend the conditions under which we can have those things against their enemies… White liberal middle-class society and many bourgeois conservatives have demonized within themselves, collectively and individually, the instinct that would have given them the strength to fight civilization’s enemies on the Left and on the Right.

Eventually? Welcome to the future, Rod. It’s just starting now.

Great, simple video here from a young Swedish woman.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times has been nibbling, lately, at NRx’s red pill, and has recently written both a column and a blog-post on neoreaction that seem at least partly sympathetic. For a man in his position, that is, as Orwell reminded us, a “revolutionary act”: to the extent that the movement has been mentioned at all elsewhere in the mainstream press — and it has gained enough momentum recently that it has had to be mentioned — it has only been to “point and splutter”, and to anathemize it, dogmatically and falsely, as “white-supremacist” heresy. Mr. Douthat, on the other hand, seems at the very least to be able to handle this hazardous material without the usual risk of anaphylaxis, or even, perhaps, a perceptible histamine response. (One suspects that he is actually developing a taste for the stuff, and is saying less than he thinks. I can hardly blame him on either count: he’s a smart guy.)

Today we have a good response to Mr. Douthat’s overture, from Mark Christensen of Social Matter. It is more than just a specific reply, though, as it covers a lot of the fundamentals of neoreaction (and so I recommend it to curious readers).

Here are some excerpts.

On the rejection of human universalism:

Reaction proper has always taken human biodiversity as one of several factors which impact civilizational order and evolution. If Douthat is asking whether reaction can accept the “Liberal Creationist’ belief that human evolution stopped 10,000 years ago (at least from the neck up), then the answer is obviously no. However, it is worth noting that reaction differs from some parts of the alt-right, in that it sees race as merely one of the elements which sovereign power must work with, rather than as a sufficient condition for a healthy society. The answer to global ethnocultural diversity is a global diversity of political regimes. The liberal idea that Sweden and Syria ought to have the same form of government is ideological derangement.

On the illusion of popular sovereignty in present-day America:

…Douthat’s pondering on whether reaction can abandon its illiberal view of political order requires a more in-depth response. Presumably, when Douthat means despotism, he is referring to rule by a non-democratic elite and the embodiment of sovereign power in a ruler or group of rulers unconstrained by constitutions, rule of law, or axiomatic moral principles. If they abide by certain norms or customs, this is voluntary. When pressed, their power is limited only by nature and by competing political powers, either within the state or outside it. The ruler or rulers are ultimately guided by personal judgement and how they choose to navigate the realities of rule and politics, rather than by legal systems of regulation.

The reactionary answer to outrage at this view of political order is simple: “please present an existing alternative.’ Now, most Americans would state that the Republic”“however corrupted by Big Money or Big Government or what have you”“is ultimately based on the Constitution. No part of the Republic’s governing bodies have total sovereignty, and they are restrained by the limits of the constitutional framework. There even exists a body whose job it is to make sure that make sure that the Constitution is being followed: the Supreme Court. But this body is the subject of strange disputes.

Republicans and Democrats have bitter struggles over whether the presiding judges will be conservative or liberal. It seems that when conservatives read the Constitution it says conservative things, and when liberals do it says liberal things. But then the Constitution in and of itself is not the foundation of the Republic; rather, the judgement of the Supreme Court is! The nation of laws is ruled by those who interpret what the law is. This even applies to seemingly unequivocal parts of the document. The rights to life and due process, for instance, are interpreted in ways consistent with the USG’s security requirements.

Obviously, reactionary theory begins with a rejection of some aspect of modernity as, at best, a dead end, and more accurately a grievous error in need of correction. But in favor of what, exactly?

The reactionary tradition … sets forth a drive towards order, harmony, and the organic hierarchy which derives from seeking excellence through discipline. This conclusion is what divides the reactionary from the liberal, and what lies at the center of the reactionary aesthetic.

Were the reactionary position to gain substantial ground, institutions which have long based their legitimacy on serving the cause of democracy and revolution would immediately lose it, since these claims would be exposed as lies and manipulation. Men such as Nicolas Gomez Davila, the later Heidegger, and Julius Evola attempted to live according to a philosophy of life which embraced duty, inner discipline, and transcendence.

This code reflects the values which aristocratic classes formalize at the high points of civilizational achievement. Roman senators praised virtus and popularized Stoic philosophy, the knights of Christendom learned chivalry, the Japanese samurai classes developed Bushido. The common function of these elite codes was to inculcate in the elite classes an ethic which would lead them to rule responsibly and thus maintain their position in the social order. Of course, in all cases there existed those who deviated from these principles and instances where those principles failed or were ignored. But it should be noted that their goal was precisely the development of a personality which could understand the purposes of these codes and reliably judge when exceptions might be necessary to fulfill them.

This is a crucial point: the very essence of the tradition that reactionary thought seeks to articulate and to preserve is discipline. What is discipline? Its most essential quality is the subordination of the self to something higher. (It shares this meaning with the word “disciple”.) It is only through discpline — the discipline of the craftsman, the scholar, the scientist, the artist, the healer, the warrior, the monk — that we can defy gravity, that we can raise some part of ourselves above the basest aspects of our nature. This is at the heart of the reactionary’s emphasis on hierarchy: if there is nothing above us, why bother to ascend? In the thermodynamic terms I am fond of here, discipline is profoundly anti-entropic.

The modern Left’s antipathy to hierarchy, then, can also be understood as an antipathy to discipline, and therefore to order, and to excellence. Think of discipline, dear Reader, and you will have imagined everything that this is not.

Read Mr. Christensen’s article here.

I’ve written often about the many isomorphisms between society and thermodynamics (see, for example, here, here, and here). The subject came up again in the comment-thread to our previous post.

Our reader Robert, a.k.a. “Whitewall”, noted the ceaseless efforts of the political Left to “force change where no change is needed or even wanted.” He added that “a workable contentment among people is somehow intolerable to them.”

This is a belt-high meatball for the thermodynamic metaphor, if you will permit me a meta-metaphor (or, perhaps I should say, a meta-meataphor). In thermodynamic terms, the relentlessness of the Left’s assault on order and hierarchy is easily understood:

It’s a mechanical, entropic process, like water finding every crack and fissure as it seeks the lowest level.

It is entropic precisely in the sense that it levels and flattens everything, as order yields to disorder. In particular, it levels the gradients that are necessary, in any thermodynamic system, for the possibility of useful work. Ultimately, everything will be undifferentiated from everything else. (Is that not the obvious endpoint of our secular religion’s pathological mission?) It is this flattening, correctly understood as a thermodynamic exhaustion, that is why Leftism always reduces societies to economic and cultural rubble.

The action of the Left is always to reduce potential; it leaves everything it touches in a lower-energy state. It breaks mountains into scree; it dismantles cathedrals to build hovels.