Totalitarian Humanism and Class Theory

Scott Locklin’s recent series on social class for AltRight was very intriguing to me, as Scott’s ideas overlap quite well with a theory of class and its relationship to PC that I have been working on for some time. He identifies the recently formed upper middle class of newly rich quasi-bohemians and affluent PC professionals as “the human embodiment of the Managerial State” and identifies this class as the primary enemy the Alternative Right needs to confront. I believe Scott is absolutely correct.

Last year, I did an analysis of voting patterns in U.S. elections according to socio-economic class. You can read the results here. Much of the data I discovered was unsurprising. The rich overwhelmingly vote Republican (outside of New York, L.A. and the Bay Area). The poor overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Blue collar workers (the “working class”) vote Democratic outside the South, where the results are more mixed depending on the locality. The more traditional sectors of the middle and upper-middle classes tend to vote Republican. By “traditional,” I mean Main Street commercial interests, small to medium sized business owners, middle managers, and white collar workers in traditional professions (like accountants). The major anomaly and by far the most interesting discovery in my research was the pattern of persons with solidly upper-middle class incomes and professional or social positions voting Democratic. This occurs primarily in the so-called “blue states,” or to break it down more accurately, in the counties, municipalities, and precincts in or around major urban centers where affluent professional people tend to reside. What we are seeing is the emergence of an upper-middle class that is economically prosperous, or even wealthy, but gives its political and cultural allegiance to the Left, often the fairly radical Left.  What I have called “totalitarian humanism” (we can call it “cultural Marxism” or simply PC if others prefer) is the ideological manifestation of this particular class.

The red-state/blue-state divide between Democrats and Republicans is normally interpreted as a “culture war” pitting the pre-1960s culture against the post-1960s culture. This would seem to be at least partially correct when it comes to partisan voting patterns within the middle and upper middle classes, though as Paul Gottfried recently pointed out, it’s doubtful that even ordinary GOP voters can rightfully be called “conservative” nowadays. But to a large degree I think partisan voting patterns can be understood as symptomatic of a wider “class struggle” between the traditional upper class that Scott describes, meaning the dying class of old bourgeoisie WASP elite, and an insurgency by this newly-emerging leftist upper-middle class.

This phenomenon is further illustrated by an analysis of the various factions and interest groups within the two major parties. It’s interesting that the Wikipedia entry on “factions in the Republican Party” includes only two issues of note, so-called “national security” (meaning the neocons and the overlords of the military-industrial complex) and “business” (a faction dominated by Wall Street, the banking cartel around the Fed, and politically connected welfare corporations). It’s clear enough that the professed social conservatism of the GOP is little more than an occasional bone to be thrown to the useful idiots who make up the “base,” as I’ve written about before. Contrast this with the Wikipedia entry on the Democratic Party’s “voter base” which reads like a role call of the PC Left: affluent liberal professionals, career bureaucrats, public sector workers, union bosses and their underlings, the academic left, college students who hope to join the upper middle class, elites among the racial/ethnic minorities, official gaydom, feminists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, little green men from Neptune, and on down the line. As Scott pointed out, it is precisely these elements that staff the “managerial state” or provide its clients or constituents, and PC provides their legitimating ideology.

 I believe Scott is correct that the “job of the alternative right…is to destroy the present upper middle class, and eventually replace it with something better.” If so, what will “something better” consist of, and from where will its allies and constituents come?

The Ideology of Totalitarian Humanism

Many on the alternative Right are inclined to refer to PC as “cultural Marxism.” In some ways, this is an apt metaphor, as the PC ideology bears a resemblance to the reductionist concept of class antagonism that orthodox Marxism advances. If the dualistic class dichotomy of “proletarians and bourgeoisie” is replaced with a newer dichotomy pitting feminist women, minorities, gays, immigrants, the transgendered and others having been or believed to be oppressed against the “hegemony” of “straight, white, Christian, males,” then similarities between PC and Marxism do indeed emerge. However, PC could in some ways be compared with totalitarianism from the other end of the political spectrum. If the duality of “Aryans” believed to be oppressed by and in mortal struggle with “the Jews” is replaced with the aforementioned dichotomy advanced by PC, a reductionism of comparable crudity likewise becomes apparent. Yet it would seem to me that such metaphors as “cultural Marxism” or “liberal Nazism” are not really the best characterizations of PC.

The best label for PC I ever encountered was “totalitarian humanism.” I can’t take credit for this term. I lifted it from an anonymous underground writer some years ago. Read the original essay here. Here’s a particularly enlightened part:

When one looks up the word 'Humanism' in an encyclopedia it states that Humanism is an ideology which focuses on the importance of every single human being. That it is an "ideology which emphasizes the value of the individual human being and its ability to develop into a harmonic and culturally aware personality". This sounds fair enough, right? Indeed it does, but it is my firm belief that the explanation here does not match the humanism of our time.

The so-called Humanists I have met have been putting a strong emphasis on humanity as a gigantic community rather than on the individual. Often one will even find alleged humanists who insist that the views, aspirations and basic happiness of indigenous Europeans is of no importance. Instead, these Humanists say, indigenous Europeans should bow down and forget about their own wants and desires for the greater good of humanity. The greater good of Humanity usually seems to be to take no interest in Europe's cultural heritage and integrate into a grey, world-wide, uniform "globalization" with the Coca-Cola-culture as loadstar.

Totalitarian humanism is a derivative of the classical Jacobin ideology that loves an abstract and universal “humanity” so much that its proponents don't care what has to be done to individual human beings or particular human cultures in order to advance their ideals. Perhaps the best summary of the political outlook of totalitarian humanism was provided by the maverick psychiatrist and critic of the “therapeutic state,” Thomas Szasz:

In the nineteenth century, a liberal was a person who championed individual liberty in a context of laissez-faire economics, who defined liberty as the absence of coercion, and who regarded the state as an ever-present threat to personal freedom and responsibility. Today, a liberal is a person who champions social justice in a context of socialist economics, who defines liberty as access to the means for a good life, and who regards the state as a benevolent provider whose duty is to protect people from poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs.

Dr. Szasz wrote this passage nearly twenty years ago. Nowadays, the laundry list of “poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs” might be lengthened to include classism, ageism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, looksism, fatphobia, thinism, beautyism, transphobia, producerism, “appearance discrimination,” speciesism, adultcentrism,  pedophobia, chronocentrism, and other creative efforts at dictionary expansion. Likewise, the therapeutic component of totalitarian humanism has expanded so as to include the supposed necessity of state action to save us all from fatty foods, salt, smoking, and soda vending machines in public schools. Like all totalitarian ideologies, totalitarian humanism has its contradictions, hypocrisies, and absurdities. For instance, public acts of anal intercourse are regarded as virtuous and courageous manifestations of human liberation and personal fulfillment, while smoking in bars or even in strip clubs is a grave menace to public health. Suggestive music videos and violent video games are symptomatic of an oppressively patriarchal and testosterone-fueled society, while surgically altering one’s “gender identity” is just routine day-to-day business, like getting a tattoo.

As one with something of a taste for the bizarre and eccentric, I might find the PC circus to be little more than a philistine but amusing bit of outrageous entertainment, akin to professional wrestling or the old freak shows of carnivals past, if it weren’t for the fact that these folks are hell-bent on imposing their “ideals” on the rest of us by force of the state. Totalitarian humanism is a war on sovereignty. It is a war on the sovereignty of individuals against arbitrary and coercive authority, the sovereignty of non-state institutions against political authority, the sovereignty of organic communities against a centralized leviathan, the sovereignty of nations against global entities, the sovereignty of history, tradition, and culture against prescriptive and prohibitive ideology. Totalitarian humanism is an effort to reduce all of us to the level of dependent serfs on a plantation ruled by an army of overly zealous concerned mommies and busy-body social workers backed up by the S.W.A.T. team and paramilitary police. Give me beautyism or give me death.

Carnival of Repentance

Now that the dust has settled on that overhyped, fevered Glenn Beck rally, what have we learned?  Is it clearer than ever that no sober knight will come riding in to bring the enlightenment that some of us thought the Tea Partiers might have offered? It appears that the expectations surrounding those initial enigmatic stirrings, which made one almost believe that the furor was about more than just anger over political issues, have been extinguished. Was it all just a momentary aberration?

As it turns out, White conservatives don't want to take the lead in preserving what remains of this country's now tenuous White, Anglo-Euro culture.  To take on such a responsibility would make them even more vulnerable to the racial bullets and daggers they have been ducking for years.

If Beck's rally taught us anything, it's that nothing has changed in the White middle-class mindset and that fear of the "racist" label continues to rule as strongly as ever. We've now learned for certain that such Whites are determined never to put the name to their fear and anxiety. If anything, they are fighting all the harder to bury even deeper the visceral knowledge of what is going on in this country and the inevitable future that is on its way. Christopher Hitchens's assessment of the August 28 mass meeting is correct, when he claims that Beck's tepid event was "a call to sink to the knees rather than rise from them."  (If Hitchens, of all people, gets it, who could miss it?)

Even as other groups gradually dispossess them in the country whose political system was constructed by their forebears, conservative Whites persist in their obstinate assertion that their apparent discontent is "not about race." What hogwash. Of course it's about race and culture. Why shouldn't it be?  No matter how assiduously they deny it, resentment is growing over the ever-looming fact that this country, due to swiftly altering demographics, will no longer be the product of those Founders. And reality informs us that the ruling law, that is, the Constitution (or what's left of it), soon will be openly renounced by competing populations that never have had even the remotest historical connection to the notions set forth by those Englishmen.

No one has to look far abroad to see what is on the horizon. In their guts these conservatives know what's coming, as their unnamed enemies pick up the pace in the drive to usurp political power.  What were mere hints just two decades ago have grown into loud trumpet blasts.  And along comes Glenn Beck who offers these perceptive, yet reluctant conservatives a way to feel better about things. According to his prescription, all they have to do is Believe and Pray.

After watching that half-baked celebration of Martin Luther King Jr., and the determined laundering of his well-documented leftist convictions, how could one not conclude, like Ross Douthat, that “Beck’s “Restoring Honor” was like an Obama rally through the looking glass,” that these conservatives wished to be "cosmopolitan and young-at-heart, multicultural and hip"? Nobody wants to be known as "square," whatever squareness entails at any given time. Remember how conservatives used to laugh at and rail at Political Correctness? Now, they're the ones who don't want to be depicted as "Incorrect."

My observations of these Whites lead me to agree with Paul Gottfried, who astutely argues, "Whites would desert the GOP in droves unless their party continues to make an effort to be PC." And further, he claims, many Republicans would not vote for a party that was "not marching in lockstep with the media in expressing horror over America's evil racist, sexist, and homophobic past."

Whites of all political stripes, no matter which political label they give themselves, have been sold on the unique wickedness of America's past racism that surely had to be the most grievous sin ever committed by mankind.  Hence, the Glenn Beck carnival of repentance.

Beck picked up on this peculiar self-flagellation, and his soap opera rally was customized to meet the needs of this constituency. It seems that the unconstitutional Brown v. Board of Education court decision, the deceptive Civil Rights Act, forced busing (which tore apart whole school districts around the country), a national holiday for a Black preacher, and endless, ever-evolving new perks and goodies to benefit Black elites, have not quite made the grade of cleansing those past sins.

And so, to prove that they possess no resentment over the decades of social strife that has plagued our society, in August, the good conservatives took to D.C., where they engaged in a ceremony to worship a 19th-century President, who could come up with no better solution to his nation's problems than a war that brought about the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen, and a Black man who specialized in emotional oratory.

One has to wonder who these people are who will march on Washington to "restore" the country's "honor," as the rally's theme boasted, yet are in the forefront of supporting some of the most dishonorable acts engaged in by their country's interchangeable governments. Just what is special about the moral convictions of these advocates, who fervently sermonize on such issues as patriotism, war, family life, religion, the nature of government, ad nauseam?

On the subject of race, as we've seen, conservatives are savvy on this score and have learned that one way to deflect the scurrilous charge of racism is to celebrate the icons and infinite memorabilia of the civil rights movement, while keeping a contingent of Black people on hand to be prominently displayed at public events. Who said these savvy Whites couldn't be condescending?

On the other hand, Whites are given little choice in this matter since, at the mere hint of the formation of any kind of all-White entity, Black and liberal elites will come charging in. Even if such an organization is inadvertently all-White, it must first be accused of loathsome, racist motives, so that it can be monitored. No matter how benign the group's objectives, if White men are its creators, then it must be put under surveillance and ultimately neutralized.

When the new group's leaders relent, we find a quid pro quo in place -- the intruding Blacks get the benefits of prominent positions and other perks, while the Whites now have cover from any other such intrusions and accusations. We saw this game successfully played against the Promise Keepers and, now again, very blatantly applied to the Tea Parties.

The Whites who resent the Blackmail flee, while the rest remain comfortably ensconced, adapting to the politically correct reality of the times. Whites, it would seem, must not be left to their own devices. Before taking back the country, is it possible that they will first take back the right to organize among themselves?

But don't feel too sorry, too soon for these conservatives, who greatly influence the country's political direction through the national leaders and ethos they inflict on our society.

Take a look at how they feel about big government that they rail against so vehemently. It's fine as long as it's out there doing what government should be doing -- that means making war. War making, you see, in the mind of the conservative patriot, shows how tough we are. And although we're not supposed to care what the rest of the world thinks of us, it's imperative to earn the world's fearful regard  when it comes to our toughness. It matters not who rules in DC, or how many of our young soldiers needlessly die in worthless battles, as long as the message is sent abroad that we're the biggest, baddest country on earth.  We're the USA! USA! USA!

Conservatives are dedicated to one of their favorite little war slogans, which is designed to justify why our troops are "over there."  When Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul comes along and reverses this little ditty, explaining that the terrorists are "over here" only because we're "over there," he gets drummed out of the corps, for "pacifism."  Woe to even the most faithful conservative, if he appears to diss the USA's abominable wars of choice.

When Iran's President Ahmadinejad is quoted making negative remarks about the leadership of the United States, primarily due to this country's toadying relationship with Israel, that's reason enough to urge the U.S. military to bomb and kill millions of innocent Iranians. Don't say nasty things about the USA or its Middle East client state, or we'll kill you.

Is this the mentality that worried Founder John Jay, who did not see leaders as being trustworthy initiators of war?  In The Federalist Papers, he claimed that some leaders will make war even "when their nations are to get nothing by it," and spoke of leaders harboring motives such as "personal ambition, thirst for military glory and revenge for personal affronts." Jay warned about a nation putting itself in situations that "invite hostility or insult," that could lead to "pretended" causes of war. And he was not impressed by the superiority of so-called republics as opposed to monarchies, believing that republics were just as "addicted" to war as monarchies. "Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?" he asked.

But what did he know? Obviously, not as much as our sanctimonious conservatives, who cheer as 19-year-olds are sent off to prove their mettle, while offering opportunities for these stay-at-home warriors to engage in "support the troops" grandstanding.  For all their noisemaking about restoring the Constitution, it is easy to suspect that these impostors look upon the Founders and their document as quaint and outdated as do most liberals.

And who isn't impressed with how well these conservatives have taught us about family and commitment? What outstanding models they have given us. At the moment they are apoplectic over maintaining marriage for opposite sexes only, yet these are the people whose foremost political leader just married his fourth wife, making a mockery of that institution. (Will the fifth be the charm?)  By the way, this mountebank of "family values" was the fourth husband of his previous wife No. 3. (How many broken vows does that make?) Could homosexuals, who claim to be "married," dilute the significance of marriage any more than this?

Chosen as Leader of the conservative camp by acclamation, this Talking Hero is looked upon as the fount of wisdom to those who seek to teach the rest of us how to think and behave.

Conservatives expect to be applauded for their brave and noble stands for the "unborn," yet these champions of life have done more to promote and condone promiscuous behavior among the young and single women, thereby increasing the demands for abortion, than any other single group.

Speaking of illegitimacy, these deluded crusaders, in striving to exonerate their other leader by acclamation, Sarah Palin, from the charge of irresponsible parenting, could only shrug and come up with a pithy, new catchphrase: "Life happens." As if we didn't know that. With the advent of Palin, American youth are once again blessed with yet another fine conservative role model.

And what about immigration? Can we really expect to see these conservatives carry through on their stances against illegal immigration? Don't count on it.

With John McCain's Republican primary victory this month in Arizona, there are already intimations that those who appeared to be firmly in support of closed borders and deportation might be moved by their deeper loyalty to the familiar candidate, no matter how weak or waffling his position might be on immigration. Will these conservatives, who have been making so much fuss as disgruntled Tea Partiers, turn out to be nothing but the Republican stalwarts they have proved to be in the past? Can they break the old party habit?

McCain's former push for amnesty was sincere and relentless. Given his many alliances with pro-immigration forces in the Democratic party, it's hard to understand how anyone paying attention would trust his current expedient turnaround.

This leads to another question. Is there any chance that today's conservative reformers will take the next step in calling for a moratorium on all immigration, the "legal" kind as well? Is there among some of them, at least, a sense of urgency to stem the tide of endless, unchecked floods from abroad?  But then again, is it likely that people who worship at the pedestal of Martin Luther King would understand the meaning of such terms as "cultural suicide" or "death of the West," or care about the transformation that is taking place around them?

When Libya's cynical Muammar Gaddafi laughs at the foolish Europeans, who have encouraged the emigration of millions of Third World aliens, and offers Europe's leaders a financial deal to keep more of the mob out of that continent, are American conservatives taking notes?

As literally tens of thousands of African refugees in boats try to reach Italy, the Libyan navy has been instrumental in keeping them out, thanks to an agreement with the Italian government. "We don't know," the bemused Gaddafi is quoted as saying, "if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions." And then he comes right out and says it: Your continent is turning into Africa.

Why should Europe turn into Africa?  Why should Europeans want to live in a negrified Europe?  Or an Arabized Europe? Why?

The good White conservatives in the U.S., although possessing an instinctive understanding of such questions, would be terrified to entertain such thoughts publicly, or even privately.  Better to take one's lead from the huckster Glenn Beck and play it safe, than to express the anxiety to which they dare not put words.

As one Dutchman observes, “This isn't Holland anymore,” nor is it France or England or Germany. And soon it won't be America anymore. In one country after another, clueless Europeans have already begun the process of dispossessing themselves via politics, as immigrants eagerly run for political office, thereby amassing power and influence over the native residents.

Is there something in Europe's water that compels the Whites to submit to this updated form of conquest?  Who are voting Black immigrants into political office in Sweden? The native Whites. Who just voted an African into office in Russia? The native Whites. At what point do Whites take responsibility for their ongoing demise or, as Paul Gottfried puts it, for going "soft in the head?"

It is true that, in order to achieve the quasi-religious goals at the heart of the multiculturalists' vision for America, heavy doses of brainwashing have been perpetrated on the public via school systems and throughout the media. The major targets have been youth and, most especially, White youth, as they have had their opinions and beliefs pummeled in "multicultural workshops," and "sensitivity training" sessions.  No one can deny that this 30- to 40-year campaign of re-education has been successful.

A recent caller to a New York overnight radio show is almost a stereotype of the proud, de-racinated White man. The de-racinated Zero. He described growing up in Missouri, in the midst of what sounded like a predominantly Anglo population. Years later, when he visited New York City, he claims that this was his first encounter with assertively ethnic people. There he discovered Greek sections of town, Italian sections, Chinese, etc.

It seems that this did not rest well with him, since he was used to calling himself simply "American," and could not comprehend any reason to expand his ethnic identification with a hyphen. The Zero Man always resents the use of hyphens. Not for him that Greek-American, Italian-American, Polish-American stuff. He's just a plain, old "American," disaffiliated from any specific cultural lineage and expecting everyone else to disaffiliate themselves as well.

This caller sounded as if he would be uncomfortable if described as an "Anglo-American" or "British-American." Mr. Zero probably would be uncomfortable, but why should a Chinese-American attempt to erase his Chinese ancestry to accommodate the deracinated notion of what constitutes an "American?"

The Founders did not seem to think of themselves as Zeros, yet misleading hype continues the fiction that this country was formed in a vacuum by people who shared no heritage. If this were so, why did John Jay thank Providence for giving this country to "one united people," who were "descended from the same ancestors?" Who establishes anything, that is expected to take root, with someone else's progeny in mind?

Western countries are now being inundated with populations of foreigners who actively discourse on who they are, and they're not going to let you forget it. As masses of Muslims bring their distinctive customs, laws and disciplines to Christian countries, and push the envelope to acquire even more privileges, Westerners are waking up to the folly of having thrown open their borders to an alien civilization. At one time, Europeans understood from past experience what was at stake, as they protected themselves, for centuries, from further encroachment by Muslims, and their American cousins instinctively understood that there were limits to "assimilation."

But that was yesterday. Today, Muslims learned that, this time around, there was no need to attempt a siege of Paris with guns or swords. Instead, they are able to hold hostage entire streets in that city, while they perform their Friday prayers in public. It's a sort of in-your-face dare to the foolish Frenchman. The authorities must defer to this illegal activity, or risk the kind of chaos for which Muslims in France are already well known. Not only will there be no banning of the burka, there will be no imposition of unwanted rules, as Muslims let the French government know just who's boss.

"We have been in darkness for a long time," intoned Glenn Beck the night before his big rally. "We have been standing in spiritual darkness for decades." Yes, one could say that, but not for the reasons you cite, Mr. Beck.

Maybe that darkness will be lifted when Whites finally extricate themselves from decades of witless but safe obsessions like cheerleading for obscene wars, dancing to the demands of civil rights hustlers, acting as self-appointed watch-keepers over who is deemed a true "patriot," presuming to be able to read the mind and intentions of God, and intruding into the birthing predilections of strangers.

At some point these misguided conservatives must turn their attention away from delusions and focus on the explicit needs of their own race, instead of fearing to deal with the unspeakable -- that is, diminishing as a group into minority numbers – 60 percent, 40 percent, 20 percent. It will certainly mean stepping into a more dangerous zone (and Whites do like to play it safe), but there's not much time left to muster the courage, if they truly want to preserve (or, more accurately, rescue) the core of that which the Founders set out to establish.

If these Whites ever get their priorities straight, who knows what they might accomplish? Perhaps they might begin by ceasing to expend so much energy on admonishing others for opting not to have children and, instead, begin a crusade among their own people to raise the birth rates of Whites. Wouldn't it be remarkable if there were a reversal of what now appears to be the inevitable?

Such an appeal to procreation could not be based on those ugly harangues about "sin" and "murder," in which conservatives love to indulge, but on a sense of pride and a concern for the future custodianship of this country. Of course, White reproductive rates might never be able to outstrip those of the Muslims and other Third Worlders, but a sound, restrictive immigration policy would go a long way towards evening up the demographics. If they fail to turn their focus to such realities, just who do these conservatives think are most likely to work at preserving the foundational institutions of the country they supposedly yearn to "take back?"

At his rally, Beck told over a quarter of a million hopeful Whites  that the emergence of the Tea Parties and similar entities of  discontented citizens is evidence of "the beginning of the Great Awakening in America." Would that were so.

Liberty, Equality, Heroin

This week Croatian police netted an impressive haul at a customs post on the border with Serbia. A Norwegian man driving into the country was arrested with 88.6 kilograms of heroin stored away in his vehicle, along with over a thousand boxes of cigarettes. The value of the narcotics amounts to 3.7 million Euros, about 4.75 million dollars. The suspect was looking to bring the drugs into the European Union with his family in tow. Apparently having the wife and three kids along for the trip was supposed to draw attention away from the 200-pound payload of heroin stuffed into his car. This may well have been a reasonable calculation on the Norwegian’s part, since the great majority of narcotics flowing from east to west do indeed reach their intended destination in Europe’s cities.

It is still undisclosed where the courier received the drugs, but we can make some reasonable conclusions about the shipment’s journey westward and who facilitated it. The logistics comprise the infamous Balkan Route.

• Like 90 percent of the world’s illicit opium harvest and its derivatives, the heroin originated in Afghanistan. Lest one think it was sent on its way to Europe courtesy of the Taliban, the chances of that are rather low. The insurgency gets an approximate 5 percent cut of opium revenues to finance its cause, around $125 million per annum out of $3 billion (NATO eradication efforts are centered on Taliban poppies, not those of local partners). The crop was much more likely to be cultivated under the control of regional warlords and U.S.-allied government officials in Kabul. People like Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s brother.

• After the sap from opium poppies is gathered and packaged, it will be smuggled in bulk loads across the Iranian border, usually by well-armed convoys of trucks. Iranian criminal groups will then receive the opium shipment and move it further west through Iran, sometimes with the complicity of corrupt officers of the security forces. Some of the product will be siphoned off and distributed to Iranian dealers- the country has the world’s highest rate of opiate addiction.

• At some point in its journey through southwest Asia, whether in a lab in Afghanistan, Iran or Turkey, the opium will be processed and converted into heroin with the aid of chemical precursors such as acetic anhydride. The heroin will be transported from Iran into Turkey. Since the nation’s geography is so critical to the Balkan Route, the government in Ankara can boast a relatively high rate of seizures. At the same time, elements within Turkey’s military and intelligence apparatus maintain well-established ties with Turkish and Albanian criminal organizations and benefit from guiding narcotics shipments into Europe.  

• The heroin will then be shipped from the central Turkish hub Istanbul and cross into southeastern Europe. As it edges closer to E.U. frontiers, the cargo will be broken down into more manageable and concealable loads so that couriers can evade border inspections. Kosovar Albanian gangs are largely responsible for running logistics and distribution of the drug in Europe, from smuggling routes in the Balkans to front companies in Paris and Rotterdam. NATO-protectorate Kosovo, the government of which is intimately connected with the Albanian crime clans, provides an excellent base of operations for channeling shipments into the E.U.

An in-depth look at the Balkan Route shows a narcotics-trafficking system spanning Eurasia with especially debilitating effects. Of the all the Afghan heroin that flows into the nations of Europe on an annual basis, 80 percent (around 85 tons) transits through this corridor. The ultimate result is that 10,000 Europeans (and 30,000 Russians) die every year from their addictions. The Balkan Route also conveys a geopolitical reality: key U.S. allies are major players in the global heroin trade. From the poppy fields of Kandahar to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, Washington is heavily invested in its agenda of controlling Eurasia and its energy networks. It is possible that U.S. policymakers simply prefer to overlook the disagreeable activities of favored clients, though researchers like William Engdahl have also noted that Afghan heroin functions well as a weapon against America’s great-power competitors. In either circumstance, Western banks can turn a handsome profit.

Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation has suffered setbacks this season due to crop blight. Regional warlords and powerbrokers in Kabul have prepared for such contingencies, though they’ve stockpiled enough opium around the country to supply world markets for two years.

The American attempt to occupy Afghanistan and impose upon it the ideology of the Open Society -- to gradually transform Tajiks, Pushtuns, and Hazara into secularized, hip-hop dancing democracy enthusiasts -- has been a prideful temptation of fate. Like Marxism-Leninism a generation earlier, the liberal universalist project is shattering on the crags of the Hindu Kush. What’s left is a trail of death and despair, complemented by massive quantities of soul-killing heroin.

White Nationalism Is Not Enough

As part of the process of developing what might be called a “revolutionary Right” for North America, I have endorsed both anarchism and secession. Yet anarchism is merely a theory of the state (or against the state) and secession is simply a tactic. Anarchist theory per se has little to say about what kinds of communities might exist independently of an overarching state, and no one is going to endorse secession for its own sake without some wider end in sight. I suggested in a recent interview with Dr. Tomislav Sunic that anarchism, secession, and white nationalism have something of natural triangular relationship with each other. While I do, indeed, believe this to be the case, the question remains as to whether white nationalism is an adequate intellectual or strategic paradigm for the growing alternative right. I would maintain that it is not.

This is not to say that white nationalists do not raise many perfectly reasonable and legitimate issues. Such issues include affirmative action and other forms of “reverse discrimination,” mass immigration and immigration abuse, the high rates of violent crime in minority communities, the formal or informal forms of censorship associated with “political correctness,” state interference with associational liberties, anti-white bias in hate crimes reporting, the desire for cultural self-preservation, the double standards involved with the label of “racist,” the extra-legal actions by left-wing vigilantes against those with views on race that defy liberal orthodoxy, the suppression of scientific inquiry in the name of egalitarian ideology, the influence of foreign lobbies on U.S. foreign policy, and a good number of other things. Nor should we be interested in taking seriously the liberal dogma that any sort of expression of political and racial self-interest, or ethnic pride and celebration, by whites constitutes “hate” or “racism.” One can love one’s wife or mother without hating all other women. One can have a preference for one’s own family without feuding with other families. One can favor one’s own children without abusing or mistreating other children. So the issue is not whether white nationalism violates this or that liberal taboo, but whether white nationalism “alone and unaided” is the most effective way of addressing matters such as the aforementioned.

The first order of business is the identification of the enemy, and the enemy is clearly those who are currently in control of the institutions that rule us: the state, the corporate plutocracy, the banking cartel, the mass media, academia, the legal system, and others whom our fearless editor has with great perspicacity dubbed the “sociopathocracy.” Nowadays, even an ostensibly “conservative” institution such as the military has succumbed to political correctness. White nationalists and those who share their concerns are certainly under attack by these institutions, but so are plenty of other people. Consequently, a resistance movement that defines itself exclusively, or even primarily, under the banner of race will be unnecessarily self-limiting. Far better to incorporate the issues raised by white nationalists, immigration restrictionists, and others with related concerns into a wider paradigm that packages together the issues raised by parallel movements and overlapping interests who are under attack by the same institutional authorities. There is a nearly inexhaustible list of such tendencies, including advocates for fathers’ rights, men’s rights, family sovereignty, religious liberty, the right to bear arms and act in self-defense, anti-tax, pro-life, national sovereignty, property rights, cultural preservation, quality and freedom in education, local autonomy, and many other things. Additionally, there is the growing list of economic issues generated by the ongoing dispossession and eradication of the traditional middle class courtesy of our plutocratic overlords.

The label of “white nationalism” brings with it a good deal of baggage that is not easily discarded. What do most people think of when they hear the term “white nationalism”? Do they think of Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Steve Sailer or do they think of the KKK, David Duke, Tom Metzger, uniform fetishists, the Aryan Nations, and The Turner Diaries? If we must choose a label, would not something along the lines of “conservative revolution” be more appropriate? Such self-identification puts us squarely in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Schmitt, Spengler, Pareto, Mosca, Michels, Evola, De Benoist, and Faye. Such a label allows us to group together a wide assortment of issues and movements under a common banner and against a common enemy. Beyond that, we need to consider the not insignificant number of minority, mixed race, or persons from mixed families that share many of our ideological and cultural concerns, or at least sympathize with many of our issues. Is it wise to push away an Elizabeth Wright, Paul Gottfried, Norman Finkelstein, David Yeagley, Carol Swain, Michael Hart, Michael Levin, Jesse Lee Peterson, Israel Shamir, or Mayer Schiller?

“Conservative Revolution” is conceptually broad enough to accommodate an array of anti-liberal forces within a framework of respect for natural hierarchies and particular attachments to family, community, religion, tribe, ethnicity, and other primary reference groups, and in a way that is compatible with traditional conservative and libertarian skepticism of “big government” and overly centralized power. On a horizontal level, it can accommodate tendencies ranging from fervent white nationalists to religious conservatives who are indifferent to race issues per se but oppose Cultural Marxist attacks on their faith and traditions to Jews and African-Americans who oppose mass immigration from the Third World. On a vertical level, it can include scholars of Machiavelli, Burke, and Nietzsche on the high end and conspiracy-mongers or Alex Jones fans on the low end. Such a framework also opens the door to wider acceptance by a threatened middle class that is rapidly sinking into the ranks of the lower proletariat and lumpen sectors. It is those sectors that will ultimately feed the numerical ranks of our movement, and in politics there is no victory without numbers.

Hoppe and Paleo-Libertarianism

It’s perfectly reasonable for my friends Tom Piatak and Christian Kopff to disagree with Hans-Hermann Hoppe on free trade, as they do in the comments. But it’s wrong for Tom to pretend that Hoppe isn’t an economic and political thinker of the highest order. He’s also far from a “loudmouth,” and he’s refrained from associating himself with the maudlin “Americanism” beloved by “ferrners” like Frum, Hitchens, and Sullivan. (Tom's and my friendship survived our heated debates about the 2008 auto bailouts, and I sincerely hope it will survive this dustup, too.)

I wasn’t there, of course, but my understanding is that at a ‘96 John Randolph Club meeting, Hoppe called Francis a “national socialist” and “social nationalist” -- as opposed to a “National Socialist” or “Nazi.” There’s a difference. And truly, “national socialism” isn’t a wholly inaccurate term for what Francis was proposing… (Hoppe’s speech can be read here and is developed further in Democracy -- The God That Failed.)

I wish that Hoppe and Francis could have pursued a debate, for though they disagreed on economic matters, on a deeper level they had much in common. Remembered mostly as an undeceived political commentator, Francis was himself connected with a “radical Right” 19^th-century European tradition, particularly in his conceptions of hierarchy and the scope of Western decline. This aspect of Francis, which his Chronicles editor didn't apparently approve of, is evident in articles such “The Roots of the White Man,” which Jared Taylor collected in the volume Essential Writings on Race. Francis’s notion of “anarcho-tyranny” is also the kind of concept that Hoppe’s libertarian Right could develop further.

I’m sure that the libertarian camp bears some of the blame for the breakup of the “paleo-libertarian” JRC. And perhaps the whole project was doomed to failure from the beginning: “paleo-libertarianism” represented a hastily assembled rearguard action against neocon ascendancy in the conservative movement, and there are simply limits to which groups can form a movement based on a shared animus.

That said, I find it difficult to imagine that the peculiar personality of Thomas Fleming wasn’t decisive in the paleo-libertarians’ undoing. Fleming’s ability to alienate colleagues -- as well as subscribers and donors -- is well known. (I’ve experienced it personally.) And though Hoppe never suggested Francis was a “Nazi,” Fleming is himself capable of great heights of vitriolic hyperbole. In the ‘90s, the paleo half of the coalition had the upper hand in terms of readership and organization; the situation is now much reversed.

I won’t say anymore on this subject. Ad hominem attacks against people with whom one shares quite a bit in common are rarely a good idea, and I’ve profited greatly from reading Fleming’s articles and books over the years. The best course of action, I’ve discovered, is to keep a good distance.

I Didn't Choose Freedom, Freedom Chose Me

When people get to my age (48), we are warned about the wrinkles, the hair loss, and the sleep difficulties, not to mention the price of beer-belly-evasion being eternal vigilance. What we aren’t warned about is a more unfortunate condition still: the embarrassing tendency to drone on in public about events which nine out of every ten hearers are too young to have heard of, let alone to remember.

Sir Harold Nicolson, diarist and George V’s biographer, amazed his readers in 1948 -- upon turning 60 -- by announcing that he was old enough to have seen Tsar Nicholas II, “surrounded by his bodyguard of enormous Cossacks, blessing the [River] Neva.” Similarly, I find myself more and more acquiring a mythic antiquity in young people’s eyes, for no better cause than that I have vivid memories of Nixon’s resignation speech and the Berlin Wall’s collapse. These memories, in turn, set me to thinking about my own undergraduate life, which, unfortunately, is best described in the words by which British poet Philip Larkin summed up his own youth: “a forgotten boredom.”

I should love to possess a Damascene conversion in my résumé, the way David Horowitz metamorphosed from Ramparts head-kicker to shrill neocon without the slightest hint of incongruity, let alone of anything so vulgar as contrition. Sorry, no dice.

Like almost everyone else whom I knew as a Sydney University student – this being the early 1980s -- I was singularly apolitical, having only a generalized aversion to Communism and to Reagan alike. Although I harbored a vague longing for Gough Whitlam’s 1972-1975 Prime Ministry of Australia, I would not have lifted a finger to give Whitlam his old job back.

No great causes convulsed Sydney’s student life. Vietnam was history; few saw portents in Afghanistan; and any non-Communist’s defense of East Timorese rights against Indonesian genocide would have been howled down as “racist,” even if details of this genocide had been generally available then, which they were not. A few hard-core Marxists did float around student groups, but they were likelier to be represented among faculty members than among kids. Even Marxists (generally Eurocommunists – remember Eurocommunists? – rather than Stalinists or Trots) clung to some intellectual standards. They never condoned plagiarism, four-letter words, beating opponents up, or more than the bare minimum of staff-student fornication. The occasional feminist crone could be avoided without too much trouble, outside such obvious madhouses as Film Studies.

All of which proved a pity from a vocational standpoint. After all, the poacher-turned-gamekeeper will always seem much more hip than the gamekeeper who has been a tedious old gamekeeper since the year dot.

Now we have established that as a Radical Son I was a non-starter, the question remains: Why was I a non-starter? Physical courage? That’s a joke if ever I heard one. Moral courage? My amount of that would scarcely have filled a teaspoon. Distaste for being In With The In Crowd? I would have no objection to such a destiny had it involved anything that intellectually interested me.

Only the other day, like Buddha sitting under his bo-tree, I suddenly received Enlightenment. Well, as much like Buddha sitting under his bo-tree as is compatible with wearing a business shirt, a neat pair of trousers, and formal shoes, while checking one’s E-mails.

The reason I could never cut it as a youthful Marxist was so plain, it had never occurred to me before. It amounted to this. Most revolutionaries, and in particular most Marxists -- Trotsky is a rare exception -- are atrocious writers. And even at my dopiest I always valued the ability to write above every other skill, except the ability to read. 

If Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Sartre, the wretched Hungarian sex-ed pioneer Georg Lukács, the insufferably pompous twelve-tone-music apologist T. W. Adorno, and the rest of that base crew (with not a skerrick of genuine financial suffering among them) had been half as readable as G. K. Chesterton, or P. G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, I might have been tempted to man the barricades. As it was, whenever I encountered the occasional conclave of true Leninist believers splitting hairs with one another in public about Marxian arcana (“Ah, but comrade, you can’t reconcile that with the Labor Theory of Value!” “Where’s the evidence that you’ve read Bukharin’s critique of Hegelian dialectic, man?”), I would simply bury my nose afresh in Orthodoxy, Scoop, or The Inimitable Jeeves.

And in Orwell, of course. Before reading Orwell I had already worked out (not that it needed more than an IQ of about 30 to do so) that there must be some linkage between linguistic corruption and moral corruption; but it took Orwell -- more especially his great essay “Politics and the English Language” -- to explain it. Having read that, I was pretty much proof against anything that Comrade X and Central Committee Member Y could threaten me with. I did not, therefore, choose freedom; if anything, freedom chose me.

To give concrete instances. Here is one of the best-known passages in “Politics and the English Language”:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. ... Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Here, per contra, is a representative passage from Lukács’s 1923 treatise History and Class Consciousness, which -- pity help us all -- is considered to be the clearest exposition of its author’s Marxian doctrine:

But in the case of the proletariat such a consciousness not only has to overcome these internal (bourgeois) contradictions, but it also conflicts with the course of action to which the economic situation necessarily commits the proletariat (regardless of its own thoughts on the subject). The proletariat must act in a proletarian manner, but its own vulgar Marxist theory blocks its vision of the right course to adopt. The dialectical contradiction between necessary proletarian action and vulgar Marxist (bourgeois) theory becomes more and more acute. As the decisive battle in the class struggle approaches, the power of a true or false theory to accelerate or retard progress grows in proportion. The ‘realm of freedom’, the end of the ‘pre-history of mankind’ means precisely that the power of the objectified, reified relations between men begins to revert to man. The closer this process comes to its goal the more urgent it becomes for the proletariat to understand its own historical mission and the more vigorously and directly proletarian class consciousness will determine each of its actions. For the blind power of the forces at work will only advance ‘automatically’ to their goal of self-annihilation as long as that goal is not within reach. ...

Well, which will you want to peruse?

I shan’t pretend that everything in the need to fight totalitarianism can -- or ever could -- be reduced to purely stylistic factors. All I offer is a variation of what Waugh (in particularly impatient mood) observed of intellectual fraud in general: “It is a matter for thankfulness that the modern … critics are unable or unwilling to compose a pleasurable sentence. It greatly limits the harm they do.”

Inclusiveness and Catholicism

[The seventh in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

The Catholic view of the world has lasted a long time and supported many good things, so the Catholic view of antidiscrimination and inclusiveness ought to matter to anyone interested in those topics.

But what is "the Catholic view"? The phrase can refer to anything from the view that best fits the overall Catholic understanding of the world to the average view of all Catholics at a particular time and place. As a day-to-day matter, people mostly take it to be the view expressed by Catholic functionaries. If the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops puts out a statement, that's the Catholic position.

Recent pronouncements

Day-to-day pronouncements by Church officials on discrimination and related issues often seem generally consistent with the advanced liberal view. That view takes the lead, and situations where Catholic doctrines and traditions make deviations necessary are played down. Or so it seems.

The advanced liberal view, of course, is that racism and other forms of bigotry and exclusion, which include any concern by the majority population for its own identity, culture, and interests, is pervasive, shameful, destructive, and evil, and fighting it in all its forms is a fundamental social and moral imperative. The effect is that the dominance of any particular kind of person--and therefore the authority of any particular people, culture, or family form--must be destroyed in every setting as a matter of simple justice.

But does such a view fit the Catholic view of the world? Is there something wrong with the existence of inherited practices and cultures associated with particular peoples and authoritative in particular settings? Do they all have to be disrupted and rendered nonfunctional in the interests of equality?

Such propositions seem bizarre. As I've argued in this series, the advanced liberal view is based much more on the interests, concerns, and preconceptions of Western ruling elites than on serious moral and social thought--which would include what's normally found in authoritative statements of Church teaching.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the view operative among Church officials should sometimes align with the interests of secular ruling elites. When those elites claim to stand for the interests of the disadvantaged their views can become quite seductive. And when they claim to embody reason and progress as well as irresistible power, even well-intentioned people may find it hard to oppose them. Who wants to fight against a future that is both inevitable and better than what we have now?

Perhaps in response to such influences, the way Catholic bishops and other spokesmen for the Church talk about political and social issues has changed over the years. As the Church modernized, centralized, and bureaucratized after Vatican II pronouncements by bishops (and professional staff) have tended to draw less on Church tradition and more on what amounts to the outlook of functionaries in a centralized welfare state. They have become more pleasing to today's New York Times, but perhaps less consonant with Catholic thought as a whole.

A further trend that has confused matters is that since Vatican II the Church has made great efforts to engage the world by emphasizing points of agreement and using the world's language--expressions like "rights" (scroll down for a discussion) and "discrimination"--to express its own thoughts. Many have asked whether the effect has been to communicate or to obfuscate the Church's actual positions. Even when the substance of a pronouncement is at odds with anything The New York Times might say, as it most often is, the differences often seem less important than they should.

Authoritative statements

So bishops and bishops' conferences can't always be relied on for a clear statement of Catholic teaching, and even papal pronouncements can be misleading. But if that's so, where do you look? It's an awkward question, since the hierarchy are authorized interpreters of Catholic belief, and I (like many others) am not. Life poses awkward questions, though, and in any event Catholicism doesn't claim to make thought unnecessary. Rather, it claims to make it possible and productive by revealing man and the world in their basic principles.

Catholics believe simply as Catholics that authoritative Church statements--e.g., statements from popes and general councils that are intended to establish a particular teaching--are reliable. Since the Church is generally very careful when it makes general statements intended to be authoritative, those statements should be of interest to non-Catholics as well. Intelligent and responsible men who care about the long-term effects of what they say have thought them through.

At that high level, there aren't a lot of clear general statements about discrimination and related topics. That's not surprising, since most statements about those topics by anyone anywhere are indefinite, specialized, contradictory, tendentious, or mindlessly dogmatic. It's to the Church's credit that it has said so little on the subject that is authoritative for Catholics. Human distinctions and societies are infinitely varied and complex, so worthwhile categorical statements are hard to come by, and the ones that are made are often of low intellectual quality.

In general, though, the view evident in authoritative Church statements is that race, culture, religion, sex, and so on do not determine human worth, and have often been applied abusively, but are nonetheless legitimate human distinctions that can legitimately affect how we treat people. If that's the conclusion, it doesn't lend much support to the advanced liberal view or the current antidiscrimination regime.

Specific texts

The most basic statements, of course, are found in the Bible, and here the part everyone refers to is Galatians 3:28:

"There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus."

People often treat those words as if they were a manifesto for contemporary left-wing egalitarianism. They aren't.

Paul's making a point about the unity of Christians. He makes that point as forcefully as possible by saying that it trumps the most basic human distinctions. So the claim that he's saying there's something specially wrong about distinguishing people by race, class, and gender (as compared with other distinctions) can't possibly be right. To the contrary, he's implying that race, class, and gender are the distinctions that are most enduringly important--if they weren't he would have mentioned the other more important distinctions instead.

He's saying, of course, that the trio don't affect ultimate human worth, but the same is true a fortiori of other less basic distinctions. So the verse lends no support to the view that there's something specially toxic about different treatment based on distinctions like sex and ancestry.

On that practical day-to-day point, I Timothy 5:8 is more relevant:

"But if any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel."

Particular connections matter, and charity begins at home.

Moving forward 1900 years, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and relevant nonscriptural statement relating to discrimination and equality is probably section 29 of Gaudium et Spes, one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council:

"The basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition ... With respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God's intent ... fundamental personal rights are still not being universally honored....

"Therefore, although rightful differences exist between men, the equal dignity of persons demands that a more humane and just condition of life be brought about. For excessive economic and social differences between the members of the one human family or population groups cause scandal, and militate against social justice, equity, the dignity of the human person, as well as social and international peace."

So the Church opposes discrimination with respect to fundamental rights based on sex, race, and indeed anything whatever. It also favors basic equality and opposes excessive inequalities while recognizing rightful differences.

People often talk as if those principles support antidiscrimination and inclusiveness as currently understood. They obviously don't. Not all inequalities are excessive, and if something is a fundamental right of the person, then we have it just by being persons regardless of what else we might be. We have it if we are men or women, and also if we are illiterate laborers, Tahitian bodybuilders, Catholic archbishops, or any other social condition. In each case we have an equal right not to be robbed or murdered, to a fair trial if someone's going to toss us in the clink, and to many other things.

We obviously don't have to be treated the same in all respects. There exist, as the Council Fathers note, rightful differences. To all appearances, then, race, culture, sex, religion, and the like remain for the Church real human distinctions that can have legitimate effects just as other human distinctions can.

Sex discrimination

The point comes out most clearly with regard to the position of women. Women can't be discriminated against with regard to fundamental rights, and

"access to employment and to professions must be open to all without unjust discrimination: men and women, healthy and disabled, natives and immigrants." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2433)

Nonetheless, women can't be priests. That's not an unjust discrimination. Nor is the restriction of the ordained priesthood to men some strange rule that's at odds with everything else that's right and good in human relations. The Church recognizes that

"women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive." (Evangelium Vitae, n. 99)

So "equality" and "nondiscrimination" don't mean there's no difference in the function and social position of the sexes. Indeed, the Church insists on the contrary:

"The Church can and should help modern society by tirelessly insisting that the work of women in the home be recognized and respected by all in its irreplaceable value ... Possible discrimination between the different types of work and professions is eliminated at its very root once it is clear that all people, in every area, are working with equal rights and equal responsibilities ... Society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers are not in practice compelled to work outside the home, and that their families can live and prosper in a dignified way even when they themselves devote their full time to their own family ... Furthermore, the mentality which honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the family must be overcome." (Familiaris Consortio, n. 23)

So the kind of discrimination the Church opposes is very different from the kind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids. What it means by "discrimination" is not difference in treatment as such but abusive discrimination that does not serve the common good or respect those subject to it. Promoting recognition of a distinction in function between the sexes is not that kind of discrimination, and in fact is a good idea that we should all favor.

The Church, then, doesn't support anything like what is normally called feminism. From an actual feminist point of view, it's incurably sexist. And from a Catholic point of view, actual feminism is wrong. That's why in Evangelium Vitae John Paul II called for a "new feminism" that would respect the "true genius of women."

Liberals consider such statements evidence of the incoherence of an official Catholic position that both favors and opposes "discrimination." What they show instead is that the Church doesn't agree with liberals on equality issues, even though it tends at present (wisely or unwisely) to use similar words.

Ethnic and similar discrimination

The evidence as to discrimination related to ethnicity and culture is less specific, but the same principles evidently apply. The Church says it's against "racism," which has an extremely broad meaning in public discussion today. Nonetheless, Christianity is not Islam, which merges the nations into a single Ummah conforming to a single law. Perhaps for that reason, the Bible accepts the existence of different peoples as normal and legitimate. It's OK from a Catholic perspective for Jews and Poles, and Israel and Poland, to exist and function, each in a distinctive way, even though their existence and functioning requires distinctions, boundaries, line-drawing, and exclusions, and even though ethnic loyalty and nationalism sometimes lead to abuses.

More generally, Pope Pius XII noted that

"There exists an order established by God, which requires a more intense love and a preferential good done to those people that are joined to us by special ties. Even our Lord has given the example of this preference towards the country, when He cries on the destruction of Jerusalem." (Cited here, ultimate source not yet identified.)

That view is solidly supported by Thomas Aquinas:

"Man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one's parents and one's country.

"The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred, since our kinsfolk are those who descend from the same parents ... The worship given to our country includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country." (Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 101, Article 1)

So blood ties, including extended blood ties and communal ties generally, are entirely legitimate. It's wrong to ignore them. Saint Thomas also notes that after duties toward God, we owe most to those to whom we are most closely connected, notably including parents and other blood relatives. See Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 26, Articles 6-8.

So the Church recognizes that it's right to have a preferential option for your own people. In other words, it accepts that some degree of discrimination based on ties like blood and culture is normal and good.

The point is strengthened by the very high value placed on particular community and culture, including national community and culture:

"By receiving and inheriting faith and the values and elements that make up the culture of your society and the history of your nation, each one of you is spiritually endowed in your individual humanity. Here we come back to the parable of the talents, the talents which we receive from the Creator through our parents and families, and also through the national community to which we belong." (Apostolic Letter Dilecti Amici, n. 11)

"Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death. At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence." (Centesimus Annus, n. 24)

If particular cultures and national communities have such importance for the way we become human and connect to God, then an understanding of diversity and inclusion that abolishes legitimate boundaries between them and so makes them nonfunctional can't be acceptable, and multiculturalism, which deprives every culture of any setting of its own in which it can function as authoritative, must be wrong.

It's evident, then, that the Catholic view of issues such as ethnic distinctions is not at all the same as the advanced liberal view. From the former standpoint, actions necessary or helpful in maintaining the identity and functionality of national or ethnic cultures are in general OK and indeed praiseworthy, as long as they don't involve contempt and abuse for other people.

There's no reason that principle should apply to aboriginal or minority cultures but not others, and it appears to apply quite generally. After all, in a globalized world every culture and people is an endangered minority with an identity and specific way of functioning that is threatened by current trends.

It is therefore relevant that John Paul II noted in Dilecti Amici, addressing the youth of the world:

"In regard to this inheritance [of faith, culture, and national history] we cannot maintain a passive attitude, still less a defeatist one ... We must do everything we can to accept this spiritual inheritance, to confirm it, maintain it and increase it. This is an important task for all societies, especially perhaps for those that find themselves at the beginning of their independent existence, or for those that must defend from the danger of destruction from outside or of decay from within the very existence and essential identity of the particular nation."

It's obvious that such statements are relevant to issues relating to immigration, diversity, and inclusion, and they don't favor the liberal position. The Catholic view provides a useful background for realistic discussion of such issues, and its implications are not necessarily what they are thought to be.

The Inclusivist Regime

[The sixth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

A common leftist claim is that established social and moral principles serve the interests of the ruling classes. The claim isn't applied to principles of which the left approves. In particular, it's not applied to inclusiveness. That's unfortunate, because it's obvious that inclusiveness serves governing elites by eliminating competitors and justifying an elaborate system of irresponsible control by those at the top.

In particular, inclusiveness makes money, bureaucracy, certified expertise, and therapy the sole permissible principles of social order, while treating other more traditional and natural principles as ignorant, irrational, and hateful. The rhetoric is familiar. Religious authority is bigoted and oppressive. Family authority is narrow, sexist, agist, heterosexist, ethnocentric, and intertwined with patriarchal religion. And authority based on history and tradition is exclusionary and racist.

If you speak of Southern history blacks don't like it, American Western history is offensive to Mexicans and Indians, and New England history excludes new immigrants from Somalia. The only history that remains valid is the history that led to the way things are now. You can appeal to Western history and standards, if you want, but only if you identify "the West" with the advanced liberal order and its victory over all competition.

Rule by professionals

Inclusiveness demands an enormous grant of power to a governing class composed of experts, verbalizers, and administrators and answerable to nobody. On the design side, the favored group includes legal experts, social scientists, and other theoreticians, and on the implementation side lawyers, jurists, educators, business leaders, journalists, media people, and civil servants.

That governing class draws much of its power from its absolute confidence in its own rightness. They don't see the position contemporary liberalism gives them as a matter of political or personal advantage but as a requirement of rationality itself. After all, to be professional is to be expert, and so by definition to know better.

Their dominance is considered legitimate and nonoppressive because they're professionals who run things in accordance with neutral standards not beholden to any particular ethnic, cultural, or religious tradition. Their strategic role in social institutions and complementary functions give them common interests and a common outlook, and their control of education and communication enables them to impose that outlook as unquestionable orthodoxy and define traditional forms of social organization as evil and those who favor them as bigots. Freedom, justice, and reason give them the right to rule, and suppressing alternative authorities and principles is a simple matter of suppressing oppressive irrationalities. No one can disagree, since they're the experts and it's expertise that defines what counts as truth.

Are our rulers liberal? Do they believe in inclusiveness? One might as well ask if Louis XIV was a monarchist. To give up their ideal of a rationalized and managed global order based solely on the categories and qualities that make sense to professional managers, our governing classes would have to abandon not just their class interests but their understanding of what is right, rational, and just.

They would also have to give up their understanding of who they are as human beings. A professor in a prestige university or partner in a Wall Street law firm isn't special because he's American or white or Episcopalian or a New Yorker or a man rather than woman. He's special because he's a top professional who can look down on all those things and on people who think they matter. It's the ability to transcend such concerns that makes him what he is and gives him the right to run things.

Managerialism

The principle of rule by professionals naturally leads to institutions like the EU in which the professionals get together and run everything, leaving ordinary people out of the loop except to provide a facade of democratic legitimacy and perhaps an occasional reality check. Representative institutions remain, but at the national level their hands are tied by treaties and directives, while at the international level there is no minimally coherent people to hold them to account.

General conditions of public life facilitate the transfer of power to self-perpetuating elites. Political issues are too complicated and there is too much spin and maneuvering for the people to keep up with events. The ordinary concerns of life demand attention, and there are too many diversions. The people have been deprived of a literal or figurative common language, and all the machinery of publicity tells them they should trust the experts.

From the standpoint of those who run the show that's how things should be. Professionals should manage and they should be answerable to each other rather than to the ignorant, self-interested, and bigoted many. Not only ruling class self-interest but peace, prosperity, justice, and rationality require the whole world to be remade on the same lines as the EU. Or so it's thought.

Inherited and traditional institutions interfere with that goal, so they have to be done away with. Feminism, gay rights, mass immigration, affirmative action, and so on are useful means to that end, as are transnational bureaucracies and the abolition of trade barriers and other national distinctions. Professionalism knows no borders, and it extends to all aspects of human life, so why not unify the world in its image?

Dissidence

Nobody who matters sees anything but good in the eradication of nonliberal forms of authority. The institutions now dominant are competitive meritocracies, and those who get to the top get there by giving themselves wholly to the ways of thought that inspire their employers. Their education, their social setting and identity, the conditions of their working lives, and their absorption in career and consumption allow little scope or basis for critical thought.

Any objection to the indefinite extension of the liberal regime is excluded as advocacy of oppression. It's a kind of hate speech, since at least implicitly it favors freedom to discriminate. That is why "tea partiers," who offend by their inchoate opposition to big government, are racist know-nothings who are legitimate objects for paranoid fantasy and obscene sexual abuse by reputable news organizations.

The result is that the position of the powers that be is put beyond criticism. The only people who object are ignorant losers who can't put forward acceptable arguments backed by expert studies in support of their prejudices. The more of them there are, the more important it is to keep them cowed and silenced, and to re-educate their children.

That situation is consistent with democracy as now understood. The destruction of nonliberal authorities and forms of order enables the regime to maintain itself with minimal use of overt force and thus promotes the appearance of democratic legitimacy. Since the people have the theoretical power to cut off affirmative action and mass third-world immigration but do nothing effective about it, our rulers feel entitled to infer consent.

The people, of course, are in no position to exercise the power they have theoretically. Without an independent structure of authority they can't organize themselves effectively, and if they act on sudden impulse the regime can give them something symbolic and then outwait them, while refining the system of propaganda and taking other steps to avoid repetition.

In any event, democracy extends only to those who accept basic democratic principles such as tolerance and equality. Views of the non-inclusive--who include most actual people--don't count. The bigot is the new faggot--the man defined by his attachment to a way of life that's at odds with basic principles of social organization. Who cares what he thinks or wants? If the democratic process gives him something that matters, it's the job of courts and adminstrators to take it away from him.

Multicultural culture

Antidiscrimination laws tell us that no particular culture can be authoritative, since that would discriminate against those with a different cultural background. The logical effect is the abolition of culture as such: what can't be public and authoritative isn't culture but private habit and taste.

Particularities

Nonetheless, no human group can function without common habits and understandings that its members are entitled to rely on. Like anything else, multicultural society must insist on its own particularities to exist at all. It thus has its culture, one that trumps and suppresses the particular inherited cultures it claims to respect.

The culture of a multicultural society follows the lead of its dominant institutions and so makes bureaucratic and commercial institutions uniquely authoritative. Scientism becomes the theory of publicly-valid knowledge, careerism and consumerism the guide for living, and management and therapy the standard for human relations. All other standards and arrangements are purely private and lacking in authority.

Such principles don't deal with all aspects of human life. They result in a culture that seems satisfactory mostly to those who identify with the governing classes, who expect to gain by the established order, who have experienced little and suffered few reverses, and whose main concerns and connections relate to career, consumption, and the diversions of the moment.

Multicultural culture is therefore youth culture. Since it treats career and consumption as the human good, and suppresses the habits, attitudes, and institutions that order and give dignity to the lives of ordinary people dealing with normal human problems, it is most satisfactory to yuppies--to those who hope to have impressive careers and expect their knowledge and perceptiveness to give them an advantage as competitive consumers.

Power feeds power, and self-confident power attracts support. Young people who are trying to establish themselves, and therefore pay attention to the direction things are going, are especially likely to attach themselves to power that believes in itself. Inclusiveness has great attractions for such people. It makes the upwardly bound independent of their families and local communities. It enables them to identify with what is recognized as strongest, freest, most active, and most universal. It declares that they're winners who can take on anything. How can they possibly reject it?

Perhaps because of the implicit class orientation of advanced liberal social and moral understandings, profound differences have lately appeared between social classes in such indicia of well-being as marital stability and economic productivity. The educated upper class keep their lives in order for the sake of their careers and those of their children, while the lower classes, who are allowed no culture that corresponds to their conditions of life, become radically disordered. (For an indication of what that can mean, read Theodore Dalrymple.) Inclusiveness may or may not make the rich richer, but it assuredly makes the poor poorer by depriving them of goods money can't buy.

Identity

Even for yuppies, multicultural culture in the end leaves out too many departments of human experience. Life eventually brings conflicts, slights, and defeats, and the "me" generation has no way to deal with them. An indication of the results among intelligent, well-schooled, and generally successful yuppies can be gathered from websites like Gawker and Wonkette, which provide a window to a world that recognizes no higher standard than lust, greed, envy, ambition, resentment, and hatred.

Many of the deficiencies of multicultural culture come out in connection with understandings of personal identity. Inclusiveness tells us that characteristics that define identity have no legitimate public role. If my specific identity--as a man, member of a particular people, or whatever--affects my position in the world, then I am treated unequally because of who I am, contrary to inclusiveness.

To say that what I am should have no effect on my social position, however, is to say that I should have no essential connection to the social order of which I am part, and so to estrange me from that order. The progress of inclusiveness is therefore the progress of alienation.

The resulting situation has political effects: a man becomes one thing and society quite another, with no intrinsic connection between the two. Under such circumstances, normal grounds for loyalty disappear and the individual's relation to the political order is likely to become a matter of pure self-interest.

Since man is social, depriving identity of a public role cripples it even in private life. To make all identities equal is to keep them from making a difference. They do nothing to define our place in the world so they don't identify us in any significant way. They're hardly identities at all.

Liberal modernity is supposedly based on self-creation, but multicultural man can't create anything, least of all himself. The loss of standards and connections means loss of character, so he can't even identify anything very firmly. Everything dissolves in a haze of interchangeable possibilities. People become weak, conformist, trivial-minded, and easily manipulated. The sovereign individual turns out less sovereign than expected.

New forms

That situation can't last. We need to know who we are so we can place ourselves and understand how to act. Since we are social beings, we identify ourselves by our social position. Suppressing traditional identities by insisting that they be interchangeable brings in new forms of identity that are allowed to make distinctions and so are able to function.

What forms of identity, though? A progressive might say that man is autonomous so he can invent his own, but it isn't clear what that would mean. If I invent my identity, who is the "I" who invents it? Also, how does an identity I invent for myself become my identity? How does it identify me? If I decide I am Napoleon does that make me Napoleon? If so, what does "Napoleon" mean?

Self-invention has its questionable side in any event. Fluidity of identity mostly benefits those adept at varying their self-presentation for their own purposes and getting others to accept the result--in other words, the manipulative and delusional. In a free-floating postmodern world the con man and psychopath accordingly become major social types.

Luckily, few people can simply make up who they are, so most identities will not be invented. As always, they will have to do with one's relationship to the social order and the goods it recognizes. For that reason, career and consumption are at the heart of multicultural identity. I shop, therefore I am. I am who I am because I went to this college, work in that job, and live this lifestyle. Instead of the Catholic husband and father we get the politically-correct careerist and consumer, instead of white men we get "stuff white people like."

The new forms of identity inevitably correspond to new hierarchies of consideration and forms of exclusion, so it isn't clear what has been gained in getting rid of the old. Also, the new identities have certain disadvantages. They tend to be content-free and purely comparative, so what one gains from his identity others lose. They are external and easily lost, and for that reason make people insecure, subservient, and devious. And they deaden the imagination because they relate to an absolutely quotidian world.

Who needs them? People try to escape such a pointless system by rebelling against it. The rebel without a cause therefore becomes a major social type, although not one whose life goes anywhere or ends well. In the end people turn against themselves, and deface their bodies as a way of establishing who they are: piercing, tattooing, anorexia.

Coolness

Something more is needed--something that ties the man and his life to some principle that transcends particular needs and desires and makes them part of something larger and open-ended.

One answer to that problem is support for the liberal order itself. To give your support to the official views and have correct attitudes on political, social, and moral issues is to identify yourself with the highest standards socially recognized and so give your life a significance beyond itself. Liberal social views have therefore become part of the yuppy identity.

Problems remain, however. The liberal order is irretrievably prosaic and boring. It turns everything into a consumption good or productive resource and so effaces distinction and individuality. Its ideals are unsustaining. It has no room for the soul.

A makeshift remedy, but the best available within the liberal order, is provided by "coolness." It seems trivial, but people take it much more seriously than they admit.

Coolness started with jazz musicians, and still has something of the spirit of the night, of escape from everyday reality, of unconditioned freedom, of improvisation without a goal. it's the liberal equivalent of the divine grace that bloweth where it listeth and none can define.

It has something in common with sanctity. The cool are in the world but not of it. They possess a certain disengagement, so that they are independent of their surroundings and not easily flustered or excited. They're not conventional, and recognize immediately whatever they're presented with. That gives them a sort of perfect pitch in matters of perception, expression, and practical decision.

Of course, coolness is also very different from sanctity. Sanctity is about eternity, coolness about today. It has religious aspirations, but its hedonism and individualism means it goes nowhere. The lives of the saints have enduring interest because they point to something beyond themselves, the lives of the hipsters don't.

Its lack of substantive content allows coolness a place in the spiritual world of liberalism, but is otherwise a radical defect. It makes it a matter of style: that's why a clumsy attempt to be a saint is admirable, while a clumsy attempt to be cool is ridiculous. It also means it's unable to maintain standards. Miles Davis is dead, hipsters have gone mass-market, and grade-school children now have as much right to be cool as anyone.

At bottom, coolness is as silly as people think. It's notoriously unsustaining. Those who live by it either crash and burn, fall into gross hypocrisy ("sell out"), or grow out of it. Within the liberal order, though, growing out of it means growing out of the only thing, other than sex, drugs, celebrity, or lots and lots of money, that redeems life from quotidian dullness. It means turning into a boring, conventional, older person, just like Mom and Dad.

The basic problem, then, with cultural responses to liberalism is that in the end none of them work. The problems it creates go too deep for us to live with them in the long run.

Effects of Inclusiveness

[The fifth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Inclusiveness and diversity help dissolve particular connections in favor of universal formal institutions like world markets and transnational bureaucracies. The effort is part of the general advanced liberal project, and its intent is to recreate human connections on a basis that is more rational and fosters freedom, diversity, and individual identity.

That may be the intent, but the effect is to destroy the normal ways in which people connect to each other and turn them into a mass of essentially unconnected individuals with interests that are assumed to be basically at odds with each other. More specific consequences include disorder, conflict, regimentation, mindlessness, and the breakdown of the understandings and arrangements that enable people to know who they are and run their own lives.

An account of such effects is therefore in order. The reader can gauge for himself how much those effects match trends in social life today.

Unreality

It can be hard to know who to connect to. Employment decisions, for example, involve judgments of how things will go for people and how they will deal with others in complex and demanding situations. Such judgments involve questions of trust, compatibility, mutual comprehension, and ways of cooperation.

It's impossible to separate such judgments from a sense of who people are and their background and social setting. Antidiscrimination law insists on that separation with respect to basic dimensions of personal identity. Whether you're a man or woman, black or white, Navajo or Chinese immigrant, can't have any material effect on how you're expected to act or how anyone might deal with you in any setting that matters. If it did, and people took who you are into account when dealing with you, that would be discrimination.

Such a systematic denial of reality, turned into dogma and forced on social relations by all means necessary, makes it impossible for people to deal with each other directly and intelligently. They're constantly forced to act on the basis of principles that are obviously false. Such compulsion can only be destructive of human relations and social functioning.

Occasionally reality does seep in to some extent. People are expected to be "culturally sensitive," which means they're expected to know stereotypes and act on them in some respects. And institutions are expected to make special accommodations for physical and cultural particularities of those qualifying for "affirmative action."

However, no one is allowed to take such things into account in any straightforward way. In particular, no one is allowed to take into account the possibility that cultural or natural particularities might make some people less suitable than others in some connections. Diversity, meaning proportional or higher representation of minorities and women, is always and everywhere beneficial.

That's one reason differences in outcome are seen as a problem that insistently demands rectification. If more black students get low grades or fewer women pursue the hard sciences, administrators have to come up with a plan to close the gap. Its existence is patently unjustified, and socially and personally destructive.

The results of such demands include misplaced efforts, grade inflation, collapse of discipline, and extreme formalization of procedures. If discipline is based on "zero tolerance," bias won't be an issue. If everyone gets an A and no one gets disciplined, disparities disappear and the schools are a great success. And if some students learn nothing at all, that's where additional resources can be counted on to pay off most.

Compulsion

Inclusiveness tells us that the effects of differences must be eliminated, so that all kinds of people get equal rewards. Taken seriously, the requirement leads to tyranny.

"Society" is a network of myriad irreducibly independent agents. Inclusiveness, like social justice generally, attempts to hold the results of what all those agents do to a single overall standard as if they were the acts of a single person. The attempt denies local autonomy, and is at odds with how the world works.

For that reason, it requires an all-embracing scheme of control. The control must be fine-grained enough to govern everyday human interactions, and it must be exempt from popular concerns and traditional limitations. Otherwise, prejudice would have a veto power.

The need for compulsion is aggravated by the importance of sex, religion, ethnicity, and similar characteristics in human life. The tendency to discriminate on such grounds is permanent and pervasive, even in part innate: babies discriminate on the basis of sex and race.

Putting innate tendencies aside, enough human differences that matter are related to characteristics such as sex and race for free dealings to lead to disproportionate outcomes even where there is no discrimination. Where such disproportions arise the habits and expectations they engender accentuate them. If allowed to develop freely, they will lead to full-fledged intentional discrimination of a kind now considered outrageous.

Discrimination thus continually recreates itself if there's no supervening force continually at work to suppress it. Inclusiveness demands such a supervening force, and the need only gets broader as time passes. Any inequality corresponds to a benefit in which some don't share, so the settings and circumstances thought to demand intervention only multiply.

Uniformity

No person or society can realize all human possibilities. We are finite creatures who realize ourselves--become good, happy, productive, vibrant, and creative--by becoming something in particular. Since we are social, that particularity requires social particularity.

Inclusiveness denies that human need and so deprives human life of the environment it needs to thrive. A single social scheme, the inclusive society, has to apply equally to everyone. All social institutions have to be transformed so they make equal use of every possible kind of person. Society becomes a unitary machine, its members interchangeable components.

We must all be transformed. Swedes and Italians are different, and their differences make workplaces different. Inclusiveness insists on changing that and making each equally fitted to all. Every soccer mom, drag queen, black Muslim, Christian fundamentalist, and Hmong immigrant must be retailored to fit all settings equally. Those who resist can be treated as confused, ignorant, psychologically deformed, or evil.

The result isn't diversity but a single liberal way of life variously accessorized in ways not allowed to matter. The attempt to put diversity first destroys it.

That should not be surprising. Inclusiveness is the absolutism of a rationalized commercial and administrative system. It lets bureaucracy and markets retain their hold on us, but cuts down ethnic culture to ethnic-themed fast food, religion to a poeticized version of liberal ideals, and marriage to a sentimentalized recognition of almost any sexual connection. Under such circumstances human life becomes not vibrant and diverse but boring and trivial.

In theory we are free to hold privately whatever ideals of life we want. The freedom is of doubtful substance, since private ideals of life have consequences in the lives of others. For that reason a growing range of opinions--white solidarity is one example, disapproval of homosexuality is fast becoming another--are now beyond the pale even in private.

Local autonomy

By suppressing local particularities and turning distinctions and differences into injustices inclusiveness suppresses self-organization, and therefore social spontaneity and voluntary initiatives of all kinds.

Ordinary people can't act effectively unless local discretion is widely diffused and the informal good sense of the people is accepted as a generally sound basis for action. Inclusiveness rejects both. If there's significant local discretion inequalities will result, and "the informal good sense of the people" is shot through with settled prejudgments--that is, with prejudices.

For that reason inclusiveness requires suppression of local initiative and self-rule. Those things are unjust from the standpoint of social justice in any event. If I do something that benefits brother Bob, that's unfair because cousin Dick and uncle Harry get left out. More generally, informal arrangements like mutual assistance based on local networks and moral codes make the benefits of social life depend on group membership. That's obviously unjust, so such arrangements must be destroyed.

That's one reason schools teach children to throw off parental, communal, and religious authority. Those authorities aren't based on liberal principles, and they lead to particular local connections that don't benefit everyone equally. It's also one reason antidiscrimination laws force institutions to treat the attack on traditional and natural authorities as part of their reason for being. (If they don't insist on their total commitment to "celebration of diversity," they're likely to get sued.)

The natural result of such policies is degradation of functional communities and families. Our rulers view that as a good thing. It eliminates competitors to the liberal state, frees individuals from traditional bonds that are understood as irrational and discriminatory, and clears the ground for a truly rational and just ordering of society.

Family life

The effect of rules against sex discrimination on family life provides an example. Men and women differ, and the relationship between them is basic to all societies. To forbid sex discrimination is to forbid responding to the differences and deprive the relation between the sexes of social definition and support.

The relation thus becomes a matter of private sentiment. It's rationally indistinguishable, as a public matter, from any other connection among individuals. The consequence is to deprive marriage and the family of specific structure and function. They become names for a variety of arrangements, none of which has any authority because none can be treated as better than any other.

The resulting destruction of definite family forms means fragmented and dysfunctional families, impoverished adults, and badly raised--and often abused--children. The official response to such problems, replacement of local institutions and networks of assistance by welfare and social security systems, further undercuts family and community life by depriving them of function and authority.

Such changes are not an automatic consequence of social evolution. Natural tendencies keep returning, so what counts as progress requires a continual attack on the attitudes and habits that support and order the family. Useful and admirable traits like men's tendency to work harder and women's tendency to emphasize home and children once they're married and have children become social problems that must be overcome.

Organizational life

A free society requires a variety of institutions that are independent of government and capable of calling it to account. The variety is not only a check on government but a source of social strength: what hurts some organizations helps others, and society as a whole is held harmless.

Inclusiveness destroys that variety. The demand that every institution become equally welcoming to every group imaginable and mirror the demographic makeup of the world at large severely compromises institutional independence, identity, and diversity.

Since no culture can be treated as authoritative under such circumstances, all institutions must base their operations on rationalized bureaucratic and commercial standards. Procedures must be explicit, neutral, and easy to supervise. Decisions and standards regarding employment must be documented and made uniformly so they can be defended when reviewed by a tribunal. Even organizational purposes must be nailed down in some simple way so that bureaucrats can determine whether decisions are made for "legitimate business reasons" as they understand such things.

The result is totalitarianism with a happy face. The happy faces are, of course, painted on. Diversity and inclusiveness abolish the common habits and attitudes that tie people together and enable them to get work done pleasantly and efficiently. Instead of relying on informal perceptions and understandings, which would inevitably reflect particular cultural patterns, employees undergo thought reform and parrot "corporate visions." And in any case, "affirmative action" creates factions within every organization that depend for their position on victim status. The result is the replacement of mutual trust by officially-sanctioned rancor.

The suppression of standards, the restrictions on freedom of inquiry and discussion, the imposition of government supervision of hiring and promotion, and the increasing uniformity of permitted views in academic, media, and other settings, show the damage antidiscrimination requirements inflict on self-governing institutions and through them on society at large.

The destruction of the authority of particular culture bears especially heavily on cultural institutions. Rather than presenting, articulating, and developing a particular culture, which is likely to be one traditionally dominant at least locally, they must subvert it and celebrate diversity above all else. Anything else would make them agents of oppression.

The result is degradation of the culture to which the institution is supposedly devoted. Traditional and high culture therefore turn against themselves, and to the extent not replaced by commercial pop culture become at most tolerated hobbies or status symbols that get by on an association with glitz, glamor, and wealth.

Public spirit

"Inclusiveness" tries to separate the benefits of social life from religion, lifestyle, and ethnicity, and so from any specific community setting. Unless that separation is made, the rewards of social life will be different for different sorts of people.

The result is suppression of public spirit. Public spirit requires a link between public and private concerns. It depends on common understandings of the public good and the obligations of citizenship, and thus on shared goals, understandings, and expectations.

Such conditions arise quite naturally if people connect on grounds of community affiliation and thus in a way that implicates ethnicity, religion, and lifestyle. Those things are notoriously related to public spirit: WASP and Jewish organizations are both noted for civic involvement, but they carry it on in a somewhat different style and with somewhat different objects.

Such differences point to a benefit of allowing someone to establish a law office populated by duck-hunting Mayflower descendants. Such an office will have its own perspective and way of doing things, so it's likely to have a coherent enough view of the world and its place in it to support common action for public goals. Nor does allowing such an office to exist pose a problem for freedom and diversity, as long as those things are understood in a commonsensical way.

If networks of shared understandings weaken within private organizations, as they will if they are not allowed to choose members in accordance with felt affinities, common feeling dissipates, trust dwindles, and material success becomes divorced from shared loyalties and understandings of the use to be made of it. Any residual altruism is likely to be sentimental, abstract, and ineffectual.

Under such circumstances organizational and public life lose their moral aspects and become more and more an arena of ambition, greed, manipulation, and corruption. It's no accident that the revolution of the '60s and reforms of the '70s led to "the decade of greed" in the '80s and the "me generation" ever after.

The sole remaining public ideal, equality, becomes a racket benefiting the few. It is through the reflected glory of the great man, conferred by specially favorable treatment, that his people find their place in the sun. If Obama is president and Oprah is a billionaire, then black people have made wonderful progress even if 70% of black children are illegitimate and one in eight young black men is in prison. That's what's on TV, that's what all the leaders say, and that's what promotes self-esteem, so who can say it's not true?

Thought control

Inclusiveness can't respect freedom of thought. To question inclusiveness is to question equal inclusion, and therefore to make some people's standing doubtful and ipso facto to exclude them from full equality. For that reason the very existence of dissenting views means oppression. They must be extirpated in the name of freedom and equality.

More generally, every system needs standards, restrictions, and principles of cohesion, and doing away with some makes others more important. For that reason insisting on some aspects of diversity means cutting back on others. In particular, ethnic and sexual diversity requires limiting permissible opinion and acceptable educational background.

If it's dogma that group differences are always beneficial, and they obviously cause problems, then freedom of inquiry and discussion have to go. And in any case, elimination of natural and traditional understandings and connections means artificial ones must be substituted. That's one reason formal credentials are now so important, and everyone on our ever more diverse Supreme Court is a graduate of Yale or Harvard Law School.

Scientism, liberalism and dogma

In some ways it seems odd that liberals should suppress discussion of how differences matter. After all, liberals believe in science and rationality, and science and rationality tell us men differ. Why not face up to the situation and make the best of it? Whether the goal is inclusiveness or anything else, we are more likely to realize it if we understand the world as it is. Or so it would seem.

Scientism

The problem is that scientism is more than acceptance of the value of modern natural science. Together with liberalism, it forms a comprehensive approach to life. People today look to the two for everything they need to know, because nothing else has public validity. For that reason liberalism and "science" must satisfy demands that are not specifically scientific. They must provide satisfying ways to deal with the problems of life generally, and thus function together as a religion.

Their religious function means that liberalism and scientism make certain demands on the world. A religion of sin and redemption makes no sense in a world of perpetual this-worldly progress. In the same way, a utopian religion--or scheme of thought that functions as a religion--makes no sense if the world resists human wishes in basic ways. It must insist that the world is such that its outlook on things makes sense.

Scientism insists on treating politics and morality as part of nature, as it understands nature. It therefore excludes natural harmonies and transcendent principles, and treats logic, desire, and means-ends rationality as the only legitimate guides to action. The result is a tendency to treat conflict as the basic social reality, since desires conflict, and to explain all human things by reference to the physical side of life.

Those who accept scientism and admit the reality and significance of group differences are therefore likely to be tempted by actual racism--by the view that conflict among biological groups is the ultimate human reality. Hence the outrage among liberals in response to any suggestion that there are group differences that matter. If you accept that such differences exist, it's thought that you will logically be impelled to embrace something like Nazism.

Liberalism

For its part, liberalism tells us that our good is living by our own rules and getting what we want. For that reason, it must give people who make pleasing themselves their supreme goal reason to subordinate themselves to its authority. To do so, it must tell them that they will get along if they go along.

The demand has to be taken quite seriously, since liberalism insists on self-realization and has no place for self-sacrifice. Its own principles justify resentment, resistance, and rebellion by people who have enduring reason for dissatisfaction. Even if unsuccessful such a response would vindicate their autonomy and therefore their human dignity.

A situation in which basic social principles support rejection of the social order would be intolerable for any government, especially one that claims to govern by consent and strongly prefers minimal use of overt force. For that reason, liberalism can't admit that there are irremediable evils and inequalities.

It especially can't accept that there are intractable human differences in qualities like intelligence. Liberalism is based on human autonomy, on our ability to decide for ourselves what we will be. That's its religion, so it turns it into a sort of absolute. If some are intractably different from others in ways no one would choose for himself, autonomy is a mirage, and liberalism makes no sense. Such a result is obviously unacceptable.

Extremism, lying, and abuse

The emphasis on science and reason makes the liberal rejection of evidence of human variation all the more violent. It is very difficult to slight science and reason in a modern liberal public order. Inclusiveness slights them, because it rejects obvious realities. That situation is intolerable and must somehow be resolved. The method chosen is to redefine reason and truth on inclusivist lines and to stomp on anyone who notices that there is a problem.

The result is thorough corruption of intellectual life. All intellectual effort has to yield socially and morally acceptable results. Science becomes distorted, grades inflated, reason defined as unreason, aesthetic quality rejected as racist, leading scientists and scholars dismissed as cranks, and all those results accepted as patently just and rational.

Every event must follow the inclusivist story line. The result is that the world becomes incomprehensible. Newspapers express bafflement over homegrown Islamic terrorism every time it occurs. After all, it can't possibly have anything to do with Islam. And underperformance by blacks and lesser success of women become the great unsolved problems of the social sciences.

If one result is gross slander and injustice it does not matter. Who cares what anyone says about Rush Limbaugh? Racists, sexists, and homophobes don't deserve anything--certainly not truth.

Science wars

Some writers have recently complained about a "Republican war on science," and there's certainly a conflict between conservatism on the one hand and the technological attitude toward life on the other.

On the whole, however, the great bugaboo of creationism has very little influence on anything, while issues like stem cell research have less to do with science than with ethics, social policy, and philosophical interpretations. The liberal war on science is far more comprehensive, specific, and effective. It includes suppression of research into human differences, physical violence against sociobiologists and IQ researchers, misallocation of resources (think AIDS funding and initiatives to get more women in science), and pervasive interference with staffing and tenure decisions in the name of equal opportunity.

No one notices the problem because the liberal war is carried on to promote causes that all respected authorities, including leading scientists and scientific organizations, treat as beyond question. As I showed in my last piece, they are required by what are in effect metaphysical principles thought to determine the nature of reality itself.

Why the abusiveness?

It's common for those who dissent from established views on basic points to be ridiculed, ignored, and rejected, but the extreme vehemence of the response with regard to inclusiveness and the unwillingness or inability of those attacked to defend themselves calls for explanation.

Part of the explanation is the artificiality of discussions related to inclusiveness, which makes natural reactions of ordinary people disruptive to the point of vandalism. It's as if someone blurted out that the king has no clothes in a country in which the penalty for public nudity is death.

Part of it is the energy and enthusiasm of the attackers. Some of them have a direct personal stake in inclusiveness, others are motivated by the moral and intellectual superiority correct positions confer, still others by the joy of licensed abuse of dissenters in a world that is otherwise terminally sensitive, caring, and dull.

Another part is scapegoating. People speak of what they know. The assumption that doubts reflect hatred shows that private reactions to diversity issues are often grossly incorrect. People stubbornly feel more tied to some groups than to others. They feel that a Jew is more likely to be a competent lawyer than a black man. There's something artificial about the attempt to believe otherwise.

The result is that people feel permanently in the wrong on a fundamental point. The most direct solution is to deny the evidence of our senses: the king's clothes are indeed beautiful! Not only do people deny the truth of their own perceptions, but they try to expunge them from themselves by attributing them to the demonized other--to the "racist" and the "bigot."

Conservatives, less ideological and more practical-minded than liberals but equally subject to accepted ways of thinking, try to maintain the no-differences orthodoxy while giving way in some practical respects to the realities orthodoxy requires them to deny.

That, of course, lays them open to the accusation that they don't really believe the orthodoxy. The accusation is unanswerable, since they fully accept the orthodoxy as authoritative, but nobody really believes it. So when put to the question and called upon to explain themselves they can't do so. Their own principles convict them, and all they can do is abase themselves and try to buy forgiveness while realizing that they do not deserve it.

Wanted: Something to Dream

I have written elsewhere about the need for pro-White campaigners to provide their target audience with better incentives than the apocalyptic warnings about economic collapse, race wars, and extinction that have constituted the traditional fare of the White Nationalist movement. I have argued that the reason campaigners have failed to make real political progress, in spite of having logical arguments, a moral case, and massive supporting data, is that, in the effort to persuade and inspire action, key aspects of human psychology have been ignored. Even though he is typically steeped in sociobiology, the White advocate has generally relied on rational persuasion to advance the pro-White agenda, neglecting well-known pre-rational motivators, such as the need for status and self-esteem (which he knows well enough), and the role of emotion (which he often deplores). We often hear about confronting the boobs with "the facts," even though it has been amply demonstrated that, on their own, facts make no political difference.

In response to this, I have stressed the importance of style and status as pre-rational campaigning tools. And in my most recent article, I have also stressed the need to move away from the negativity, the pessimism, the paranoia, the emotional masochism, and the obsessive conspiratology that permeates much of the White advocate's discourse, in favor of a friendlier, more positive presentation. Overall, my message over the past year has been that White advocates need to become pleasant and sought-after company, look attractive, and create a parallel economy and status system so that they can both impress and have, here and now, something to offer the White folk whose attention are seeking to gain.

I deem these essential ingredients to a successful strategy, because the evidence shows that ordinary White folk, no matter what the state of the economy or the politically correct indignities they are asked to endure, continue to see White advocates as scary, angry, boring, stupid, impoverished, and old, full of complaints but without solutions, full of analysis but unable to tell them exactly how signing up to the White advocates' program would improve their lives. Ordinary White folk continue to entertain the misconception -- perhaps partly justified, and in any event gleefully perpetuated by the Left -- that were a pro-White faction to achieve political victory, it would inevitably create a fascist dystopia like the ones commonly seen in Hollywood films. This deterrent is further reinforced by the fact that White advocacy's "perks" often consist of ostracism, lost livelihood, prison sentences, and even death. Ignorance of "what is really going on" might be, for most, a small price to pay when there is no immediate threat and when pretending that everything will be fine means retaining one's social status, peace and quiet, and affluent lifestyle.

How to change?

Evidently, I am not suggesting that pro-White campaigners ought to change their message, compromise, or sell out. I am simply saying that they need to change how that message is delivered; that they need to reformulate the pro-White discourse so that it achieves its political aims rather remain a method of personal catharsis. 

The first step towards achieving this is understanding the White advocate's role in contemporary society. Presently, the White advocate is the gentleman who arrives at a party wanting to switch on the bright lights and turn off the music, to tell everyone to sober up and put out their cigarettes, to scold them for wasting food and electricity, and to inform them that the lawn needs mowing, the floors need scrubbing, the drains need clearing, the overdraft needs paying, the and garbage needs taking out. And when the lung cancer patient is dying, the White advocate is the gentleman who tells him, "See? I told you so! I told you smoking is bad for you, but no, you wouldn't listen! Now you've got what you deserved! And if you think you have it bad now, it will only get worse!" 

This is hardly a recipe for popularity, and it is no surprise, therefore, that so many choose to ignore this gentleman; that they applaud when the Leftist host says, "Oh... Let's get him out. He's a psycho"; and even help him loose the guard dogs against the party pooper, even though the latter is looking after many of the partygoer's best interests.

Yet, the task is not as difficult as my analogy makes it seem.

This is not just because some parties are dreadful, but also because its ideological matrix confers upon the radical traditionalist Right a number of discursive advantages, in the same measure that the Leftist's own ideological matrix saddles him with a number of discursive disadvantages. In other words, the radical traditionalist Right tends to be uniquely proficient in the areas where the Left cannot be -- because of the Leftist system of belief -- an adequate match without superhuman effort and without Leftists twisting themselves into highly artificial convolutions. Identifying the areas of advantage is the second step.

Where does the radical traditionalist Right's mindset enjoy natural advantages?

One area, in my opinion, is the ability to inspire heroic feelings of superiority, pride, and glory. This is strategically advantageous, because humans like to think that they are strong, and because they enjoy feeling that they are part of something powerful; it flatters their vanity, it caters to their need to belong in a manner that enhances their self-esteem. The radical traditionalit Right excels at this for the same reasons that the Left does not even try: the former has a Romantic ethic, aspires to greatness, strives to push forward and upward in an organic and metaphysical sense. This, of course, implies elitism, a hierarchical conception of life. Leftists, by contrast, are egalitarians, so they resent hierarchy because it reminds them of their own mediocrity -- after all, only the mediocre benefit from egalitarianism. Rather than elite, proud, and glorious, Leftists are resentful, envious, and self-hating. Accordingly, their tactics rely on guilt-mongering and on inspiring a sense of grievance; they are champions of the weak and the pathetic. It is difficult to feel inspired by this, let alone be roused into heroic action for abstract principles like "equality." The best they can hope for, therefore, is to inspire feelings of self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is unattractive, and people who are self-righteous tend to be preachy and irritating.

For the mystically-inclined, another area of natural advantage is our esoterica, which is linked to the Romantic ethic, which is in turn linked to traditionalist tendencies. Marxists would have never been able to produce a Left-wing analogue to, say, Armanism. Esoteric Marxism? Such a thing, were it ever to be invented, could erupt only out of a right-wing mind. Leftists are rationalists, materialists, anti-traditionalists; they see the world as a machine, without a soul. Whereas our side has thousands of years of rich and deep mythology and tradition, both exoteric and esoteric, to draw from for the elaboration of alternative, meaning-laden narratives, Leftists impoverish themselves by their wholesale jettisoning of the past, of tradition, of metaphysics. If the Left has any use for any of these, it is to subvert it, pervert it, mock it, and uglify it. The Leftist desires to be unmoored in order so that he may be given free rein to indulge his selfish individual appetites and impose his speculative schemes on pliant human guinea pigs. This confers our side with another strategic advantage: firstly, many ordinary folk feel attached to, and reassured by, traditional forms -- they are upset by fundamental change; and, secondly, for many ordinary folk everyday life is tedious and filled with drudgery -- esoterica caters to the human need for fantasy and escape, for something that supersedes the pedestrian reality of the material plane of existence. The Left, being solely concerned with material reality, can only emulate this with sneers, cynicism, and poor taste.

These unique areas of advantage can and ought to be further elucidated. They are also not the only ones. 

They are sufficient, however, for us to begin elaborating our own, forward-looking utopian vision. A utopian vision is necessary, because it provides direction, an ideal to aim for; because it unites behind a common purpose, it inspires aspirational sentiments of greatness and glory, and caters to the aforementioned human need for fantasy and escape. A utopian vision is like the advertisement in a marketing campaign. It needs to be forward-looking, because the arrow of time, indeed life, moves inexorably forward: you can kill a baby and make a new one; but you cannot put the baby back in the womb. 

Those who doubt the political significance of utopian inspiration ought to remember that while the Left was in opposition, it was as fundamentally critical of the existing system as we are today -- its message was "No, it's not OK and things will have to change radically, and I'm afraid you'll have to give up some of your privileges." On the face of it, this is not a message likely to prove popular with a ruling class or a dominant culture. Yet, at no point did Leftists forget to couch their critique with uplifting, moral language ("dignity," "inalienable rights," "fairness," "social justice," etc.) And neither did they forget to tell their constituents concretely how they would benefit from the Leftist program ("equal pay for equal wok," "universal healthcare," "no child left behind," etc.) The Left was successful because its leadership understood human motivation and it knew how to market its program effectively in a manner that was both consistent with the Leftist system of belief and difficult, for that reason, for the Left's opponents to emulate without looking like hypocrites.

On the basis of the above, I propose that our marketing strategy needs to focus on positive values that come naturally to us and which the Left finds difficult, or impossible, to replicate: quality, greatness, spirituality, heterodoxy, and romanticism. These values need to appear in contrast -- more often than not by implication rather than by accusation -- to the Leftist tendency to produce a world of cheapness, monotony, mean-spiritedness, materialism, and utilitarianism -- all of which are consequences of egalitarianism's race to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator. If we are able to develop a style of presentation, an image, that encapsulates our core values and message in an attractive, uplifting, and forward-looking manner, that captures White people's imagination, that enraptures them with images, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells that hint at what could be; and if we are able, at the same time, to develop economic opportunities (quality goods and services, as opposed to the modern con jobs) and status systems (awards, clubs, etc.) we are likely to make our target audience more receptive to the pro-White arguments and supporting data than it has been so far. The arguments and the data would then be marshaled by our target audience to justify their fantasies, yearnings, and ambition; the enemy's arguments and data would be dismissed, because boring and inconvenient. And access to parallel business opportunities and status systems unencumbered by political correctness would, in turn, inoculate our target audience against its dependency on the anti-White establishment. We would then be offering a carrot, available now, and not just the stick of fear of a cataclysmic future.

Back to my party analogy, we need to be like the gentleman who is throwing the rival party across the street, which is so much more vibrant and impressive in terms of music, food, décor, theme, cache, quality of attendees, and organization -- so much better, in sum, than the one being hosted by the Leftist that the latter's guests eventually desert him. A frivolous analogy, perhaps, but such is the world we live in.

Obviously, I do not regard political activism as a party, or as it being all about fun, style, and presentation -- to be sure, there is no reason why political activism cannot or should not be fun, but seriousness and substance still matter. I do maintain, however, that successfully selling a message involves necessarily making those to whom it is aimed feel good about themselves and their affiliation with the messenger; and that, if our side is to make political progress, this process and the methods, strategies, and tactics it involves needs to be understood and afforded much greater focus than it has enjoyed hitherto.

Some final thoughts. In some of my articles, including this one, I have used the terms "Left" and "Right". I use the Left-Right dichotomy for the sake of expediency. In reality, however, I do not see our mission in terms of a simple political binary, as the situation is far more complicated, indeed superseding the realm of politics (it has been suggested that our crisis is spiritual, for example). But I trust my readers will know what I mean; that they will understand that "Left" does not mean Democrat or Labour any more than "Right" means Republican or Tory - these are all liberal parties, all Leftists in my book. Essentially, "the Left" refers to the enemy: the rationalist materalists who believe in the ideology of equality and progress.

Also, sometimes I come across organizations that claim they exist to defend Western civilization and / or the interests of the White race, without making it obvious how they do this or what they plan to do. They tell us what they believe in and what they are against, and... they ask for money; but the prospective donor is not given in advance any real sense of what his / her money will be used for, let alone whether it will be used effectively. These organizations are not political parties, evidently, because they do not systematically campaign in elections, but... are they lobbyists? Award bodies? Literary agencies? Record labels? Or are they just websites, pumping out information for the benefit of the converted? Thankfully, White advocacy has in recent years been gradually moving away from this model; but, all the same, it needs to be re-stated: a generic organization with a grandiloquent remit is not sufficient. It is better to create narrowly focused organizations (small businesses, clubs, charities) that operate within a specific area, in a specific role, with a clearly circumscribed mission, offering opportunities and real goods and services in the market place. It might be that, looked in isolation, a record label, a battle re-enactment society, or a charity aiming to preserve specific monuments or sites, does not appear crucial in the battle for survival; but they are important in their aggregate, and, because specialized, they are much more likely than a generic organization to achieve tangible objectives within their scope of operation. Remember: focus is important in marketing. Another advantage to this approach is that the organizations need not be overtly political, and, therefore, not make themselves an immediate target for the censors.

In sum, I believe that ultimate success or failure will depend on, among other factors, whether our side is able to recast itself as the energetic forger of tomorrow, rather than simply the embittered critic of today.

Secession and the Future of American Statecraft

The late, great George Kennan was not only one of the most influential and important diplomats in American history, but he was also a serious man of the Right in every important aspect of his thought. With regards to foreign policy, he combined humility with unsentimental realism. Kennan recognized the ideological threat posed by Soviet Communism, but considered the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and extravagant interventions in places such as Indochina to be an inappropriate and unnecessary response. He was particularly opposed to entangling American foreign policy objectives with ideological crusades. In an interview with The New York Review of Books in 1999, the 95-year-old Kennan remarked, "This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as un-thought-through, vainglorious and undesirable." What was Kennan's preferred alternative? He insisted, "I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders."

In his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, Kennan described the United States in its present condition as a "monster country" that suffers from "the hubris of inordinate size" and proposed that America be ""decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment." He further suggested that the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago should become the equivalent of semi-autonomous city-states. Kennan's vision was not far removed from that of the self-proclaimed "left-conservative" Norman Mailer, who ran for mayor of New York in 1969 on a platform having the city become the 51^st state and devolving the municipal government to the boroughs by re-constituting them as independent townships. More recent thinkers, such as Vermont's Thomas Naylor, have gone even further, calling for full-blown secession of particular states or regions from the authority of the federal government altogether. Indeed, Naylor's colleague Dennis Steele is currently running a maverick campaign for governor for the sake of advocating completely independent nationhood for the Green Mountain State. While the Vermont secessionist effort has a left-libertarian flavor to it, the emerging regional independence movements in various corners of North America transcend the left/right paradigm. Texas' Larry Kilgore, an unabashed Christian theocrat and a proponent of complete secession by the Lone Star State, won 225, 897 votes in the 2008 Texas Republican Senate primary.

The most serious arguments against such efforts offered by a thinker on the genuine Right were those of Sam Francis. He dismissed secessionism as an "infantile disorder" and remarked, "I do not believe that secessionism will prosper as a serious political movement, but I do worry that it will prosper to the point of becoming a serious political distraction; a distraction from the imperative that Middle Americans now face of constructing their own autonomous political movement that can take back their nation rather than assisting the new underclass and the globalist ruling class in breaking it up." Dr. Francis preferred instead the more moderate but still radical by contemporary political standards goal of reasserting the Tenth Amendment. I do not know which is the least feasible objective, full-blown secession or restoration of an authentic federalism. Either way, it appears that the revolution by the "Middle American Radicals" that Francis hoped for is dead in the water and, as John Derbyshire has recently written, the Tea Partiers are well on their way to being just another arm of the neocon-friendly establishment.

Still, interesting things are happening in American society. A work published in 2008 by Bill Bishop, a center-left journalist, and titled "The Big Sort," showed how Americans are in the process of self-separating into more or less segregated enclaves along the lines of political ideology and party affiliation, religion, culture, race, ethnicity, income, age, and other such demographic concerns. Further, this process is taking place less at the state level, and more on the level of counties, towns, municipalities, or even precincts and neighborhoods. Efforts by the elites to the contrary not withstanding, Americans are apparently doing what human beings naturally do anyway: seeking out others of their own kind with whom they form communities. This state of affairs seems to fit fairly well with the decentralist vision offered by Kennan, Mailer, and the Vermont independencias. A 2008 Zogby poll likewise indicated that one in five Americans holds favorable views regarding the possibility of secession.

One thing is certain. If the Alternative Right were to embrace secession or radical decentralization of this kind, it would surely serve to separate the wheat from the chaff, i.e. those on the supposed Right who really wish to bring down the rule of the managerial-therapeutist-welfarist-multiculturalist elite as opposed to "conservative" careerists and main-chancers.

Inclusiveness and Reason

[The fourth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

The demand for inclusiveness is often attributed to emotion, but something so systematic and persistent can only be based on principle.

No one explains very clearly what the principle is, so it's evidently something taken for granted. The peremptory nature of antidiscrimination, together with the irrelevance of practical considerations, confirms that its basic principle must be quite fundamental.

As I will argue in what follows, the basic principle that leads to inclusiveness is the view of reason that critics refer to as scientism or scientific fundamentalism. That view has been with us since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and has slowly been transforming social understandings and relationships in its own image ever since.

The process through which it has been doing so, sometimes called modernization or rationalization, is still going on. The abolition of traditional and natural patterns of human life in the name of diversity and inclusiveness is a current manifestation of that process.

Scientism

Our understanding of reason is our understanding of how to reach reliable conclusions regarding the good, beautiful, and true. That process is neither simple nor easy.

That's why people rely for practical purposes on something more accessible and easier to manage than reason itself. The latter is not fully attainable by us in any event, and life must go on, so it would be unreasonable to do otherwise.

People therefore rely on intuition, habit, experience, tradition, rule of thumb, and so on. Those things don't give us comprehensive or perfectly lucid knowledge, but they're systematically related to the truth of things. It's difficult to do better and easy to do worse, so we accept them.

They're nonetheless incomplete, and problems arise when we reject the secondary nature of the practical understandings by which we live. That rejection is most often a matter of thoughtless habit, but can also take the form of positive denial that there is anything higher than the concrete principles we are able fully to grasp.

In either case the result is that our way of understanding loses its awareness of its incompleteness and need for a higher standard and so becomes crude and degraded. Mindless dogmatism is a familiar example of such a situation.

There are more subtle examples, and modern scientistic understandings present such a case. Those understandings are based on a stripped-down version of reason that sacrifices adequacy to clarity and reliability. They hold, in effect, that all rationality must conform as closely as possible to modern natural science. What doesn't satisfy that demand doesn't qualify as reason.

Modern natural science is of course rational and it provides very useful and exact knowledge. Its insistence on clarity, simplicity, testability, and uniformity gives it great power. However, that insistence makes science unable to deal with some issues. In particular, it makes it unable to deal with traditional and even natural patterns of life that involve complex and subtle distinctions that resist clear formulation and understanding.

Scientism therefore insists on ignoring such patterns and, when applied to practical affairs, suppresses them in the interests of a more comprehensible and controllable system. The result has been radical simplification of the intellectual and social world: extreme secularization, hypertrophy of rationalized social structures such as world markets and the administrative state, and most recently inclusiveness--the abolition of distinctions not directly relevant to market and bureaucratic structures.

It's too hard to find out what we really want to know, scientism seems to tell us, so let's treat something we can study, understand, and make use of more easily as equivalent to reality itself. In short, let's adopt naturalism. And as a social matter, let's get rid of all those messy distinctions that don't fit the kind of system we can understand and control. Let's become egalitarian technocrats who insist on diversity and inclusiveness.

History

Scientific fundamentalism has deep roots. Its components, such as the demand for simple, universal, and mechanistic explanations, have been with us since antiquity. Those tendencies have led on occasion to views very much like modern scientific materialism. Democritus (ca. 460-370 B.C.) claimed, for example, that "in reality there are only atoms and the void."

Until modern times such views might have been held by particular thinkers but they never enjoyed general currency. Today they have come together in an outlook that dominates public life and holds that modern natural science is the pattern for all reason and the only knowledge worthy of the name.

It's difficult to trace the exact process by which something as all-embracing as an understanding of reason attains dominance. However, the thought of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650) evidently marked a decisive stage in the rise of the modern outlook.

Both men aimed at a general intellectual reform that would make knowledge more certain and useful. Bacon, a practically-minded statesman, wanted to reconstruct knowledge on experimental principles for "the relief of man's estate"--that is, to make life easier, safer, and more pleasant. He thought that "knowledge is power," and with that in mind wanted it to reject tradition, base itself on observation of the natural world, and become a tool. In effect, he wanted it to become modern technology.

Descartes, a scientist and mathematician, wanted knowledge that would stand up against any possible doubt. He could not doubt the reality of his own subjective experience--as he said, "I think, therefore I am"--so he tried to base knowledge on that experience, together with the most rigorous reasoning possible.

Put the two views together and you get a narrow, focused, and--it turns out--extremely effective view of knowledge. On that view, we should be as skeptical as possible, take nothing on faith, and base knowledge and our whole way of acting as much as possible on our own immediate experience and on mathematics and logic. And we should treat the purpose of knowledge as practical: it has to do with getting what we want. It comes out of, and exists for the sake of, our sensations, feelings, and goals.

Such a view excludes from knowledge everything that goes beyond human experience and purpose. The transcendent, it seems to tell us, is beyond us. We don't know what it is, and there is nothing we can do about it, so why take it into account?

Some of the consequences of such a view, and the length of the process that has led to the present situation, can be seen in the history of the word "speculation." The word comes from the Latin specere, to look at or view. When it appeared in English around 1374, it meant "contemplation" or "consideration." By 1575, at the dawn of the modern age, it had taken on the disparaging sense of "mere conjecture." And by the eve of the great modern revolutions, in 1774, it had come to mean "buying and selling in search of profit from rise and fall of market value."

So in four hundred years "speculation"--attending to things on some basis other than knowledge as power--went from man's noblest faculty, contemplation or speculative reason, to making things up, to trying to get money without knowing what you're up to.

Characteristics

Modern natural science has great strengths. It can be extremely successful when pursued with discipline, attentiveness and ingenuity, so it calls forth high-quality intellectual effort. It has built-in checks that tend to catch errors. And it has solved a great many problems, and continues to support fruitful inquiry on a very wide range of topics.

However, it narrowly restricts what counts as evidence and proof, and its rigorous attitude toward evidence and inference causes it to take an extremely critical attitude toward tradition, common sense, revelation, and other nonscientific forms of guidance.

Many supporters of science treat the scientific enterprise as if it were a political movement aiming at world domination and insist on universalizing the critical attitude that has made the success of science possible. To appeal to any principle outside modern natural science, it is argued, would compromise an extremely successful strategy of investigation for the sake of some particular concern that may yet be dealt with--to the extent it's legitimate--within science itself.

And that, it is thought, would be an attack on the process through which we attain knowledge, and thus on knowledge itself. To look for reliable public truth from a non-scientific source is, we are told, antiscientific and therefore antirational.

The result has been a view that limits knowledge and indeed rational guidance to a very few sources, those upon which modern natural science relies most explicitly. Those sources are:

• Disinterested observations, especially observations that can be repeated and verified by any properly trained observer.
• Induction: what happened in the past will happen in the future.
• Formal logic, mathematics, and measurement, which enable us to organize and connect our observations and make them exact, impersonal, and usable. If an observation can't be made numerical it's not taken seriously.
• When necessary, additional assumptions that comply with Occam's Razor--that is, are as few and simple as possible--and can be tested by experiment.

The Razor runs wild

Occam's Razor is important. When someone tells you "you're just trying to force your values on other people" it's an appeal to Occam's Razor. You are, it's implied, bringing in something that's neither proved nor needed, so you're being willful and probably oppressive.

The problem is not Occam's Razor in itself, which is a perfectly sensible injunction to keep things simple, but its overly aggressive use, which in effect makes it govern reality rather than regulate investigation. Rather than tell us to choose the simpler explanation where two explanations work equally well, it's used to rule out explanations that refer to things modern natural science has trouble dealing with. It thus becomes equivalent to the dogmatic claim that modern natural science is sufficient for all our needs.

Consequences

The consequences of trying to understand the world only scientifically pervade present-day life:

• The experimental method that is basic to scientific knowledge tells us how events depend on other events, especially those we can control. If that's all we can know, then knowledge has to do with the control of nature, and rationality becomes difficult to distinguish from dealing with the world technologically.
• Modern natural science tells us about things that can be observed and measured by any trained observer who follows the appropriate procedures, and those that are connected to observations by a theory that makes predictions that can be confirmed, and is as simple, mathematical, and consistent with other accepted theories as possible. If those are the things we can know about, those are the things we can treat as real. Everything else is opinion, feeling, taste, prejudice, or fantasy.
• Further, science dislikes formal and final cause--the essential features of a thing, with their relations to each other and the results they characteristically bring about. Essential features and characteristic functions bring in too many imponderables. Who is to say whether, in a marginal case, something is a horse or not a horse? And who is to say whether it's the true nature of a horse to crop grass, win races, provide offspring, die gloriously in battle, live long and prosper, provide glue and horse meat, or occupy whatever volume of space horses actually occupy?

  Scientism therefore aspires to do without such principles. It prefers to appeal to material and efficient cause, the thing's physical constituents and the events that directly brought it into being. That aspiration is perpetually frustrated, since without formal and final cause it's impossible to discuss functional systems such as living things, but people nonetheless try to minimize their use or explain them away.

Such tendencies make evaluative concepts such as good and beautiful seem purely subjective. They have to do with form and function, so they depend on the observer's arbitrary purposes and interpretations. To treat such qualities as real they must be observed and measured, and for that to be possible they must be identified with observed preferences. But if "good" means "preferred," it's simply a matter of what we want, and the triumph of the good becomes indistinguishable from the triumph of the will.

The resulting pragmatic orientation transforms our understanding of the world. If knowledge has to do with control, if there are no essential functions or qualities, and if willfulness is our basic guide to action, then stable purposes and relationships dissolve. That dissolution is part and parcel of the technological outlook. An industrial process has no loyalties. A computer does not care what you program it to do. It works the same in all settings, and interacts with equal facility with any other computer anywhere. The technological outlook thus puts us in a sort of eternal now without place or context, in which everything is a neutral resource for the achievement of the current projects of whoever is in control.

Such views make it impossible to accept that we are what we are through participation in something larger than ourselves. The world does not dictate classifications and meanings to us: we dictate them to it. What something is depends on what we want out of it. Stable identities thus dissolve: as Marx put it, "all that is solid melts into air." Self-definition becomes the thing that makes us more than objects defined by our use in the projects of others, and is thus the essence of our dignity. Membership in a larger whole comes to seem oppressive. Since getting what we want is the purpose of thought, to classify someone and thus make him part of a larger whole is to treat him as a thing to be used rather than a person to be respected.

Hence the abolition of traditional culture, which is always based on particular connections, meanings, and identities, as intrinsically oppressive. Hence the belief that "essentialism"--the belief that things have a particular nature and significance--is ignorance and bigotry. And hence the belief that "discrimination"--treating one connection as more fitting than another--is irrational and wrong.

Different treatment on account of accidents of birth and the like is particularly offensive, since the individual does not choose them. That's why there is such extreme resistance to recognizing natural differences among human beings. Such recognition denies our self-createdness, our I AM THAT I AM. It denies that we can be free, equal, and self-defining, and so suggests that subservience is natural and unavoidable. That's why there is a human right in the EU to get your birth registration changed from "male" to "female" if you've had what is called a sex change operation.

Morality and politics

The belief that the principles of the modern natural sciences should be applied to morality and politics might seem surprising. Those principles are designed to deal with objects in space. Since we often concern ourselves with other things, like the good, beautiful, and true, it seems that scientific principle should have only limited applicability in human affairs.

Nonetheless, we are indeed objects in space, and it follows that we can apply the methods of the modern natural sciences to ourselves. Since we can do so, the scientistic version of Occam's Razor insists that we should do so--exclusively. We should try to rely, not just in physiology and physical anthropology but even in politics, morality, and social relations generally, on something as close to scientific reasoning as possible. It's considered irrational to do otherwise.

The logic of liberalism

The result of the attempt to make social relations scientific is contemporary liberalism, including inclusiveness, diversity, and all the rest. When scientism is applied to morality and politics it gives us both a highest good and a highest standard of justice. From those two principles it's possible to generate a complete political and moral system, one that's extremely simple and rigorous and therefore excludes all distinctions other than those it relies on.

The highest good scientism gives us is freedom, understood as satisfaction of desire. Preference and aversion are observable, and they're available to us as guides. Since that's so, scientism tells us, why not stick with them, and concentrate on setting up a system that gives us what we want and gets rid of what we don't want? Why bring in other standards based on things that are harder to demonstrate, like God, natural functions, essential qualities, or the good, beautiful, and true? That, it is thought, would be unscientific and therefore irrational.

The standard of justice that corresponds to scientism is equality. What's good is simply what's desired, scientism says, and since all desires are equally desires, all goods must equally be goods. It follows that the desires of all men deserve to be treated equally. To say one man's desires are less valuable than another's is simply to value him less. That's arbitrary, discriminatory, and oppressive. It's the sort of thing that leads to Auschwitz, and can't be allowed.

In effect, scientism tells us that there are no transcendent goods, just desire, and there are no essences of things that we have to accept and respect, the world is what we make of it. Also, formal logic and means/ends rationality is the whole of reason. For those reasons the rational approach to politics, social life, and morality is to treat the world as a resource and turn the social order into a kind of machine for giving people whatever they happen to want, as long as what they want fits the smooth working of the machine.

That understanding is the present-day liberal understanding. The correctness of liberalism, including inclusiveness, is thus demonstrable given the present view of reason. Those who accept scientism and reject liberalism are either nihilists, Nazis who reject the equal intrinsic value of some people and their purposes, or eccentrics who hold views that suffer from severe internal conflicts. The fact actual science is at odds with many egalitarian claims doesn't matter, since actual science is not scientism and the latter must satisfy needs actual science can ignore.

Its apparent unique rationality gives liberalism an insuperable advantage in political and moral discussion. If you reject it there is something wrong with you. You're irrational, nihilistic, or Nazi. Most likely, you're all three.

The rigor of liberalism

The specific features of the liberal order follow from its basic logic. These include:

• Universality. Reason is universal. Since liberalism follows from reason, it too must be universally applicable.
• Absolute validity. A system based simply on reason is the only possible legitimate system. Dissidents are not properly part of political discussion, since they reject reason. If they're accepted in the discussion they will corrupt it.
• Insistence on effective abolition of all institutions and standards at odds with the unity, clarity, universality, and efficiency of the system.

The last point is important. For a rational technological system to exist and perfect itself, everything has to be transparent and manageable from the point of view of those on top. All institutions have to have a clear orientation toward maximizing preference satisfaction or equality, and it has to be possible to supervise them and intervene to correct deviations and irrationalities.

The only institutions that measure up to those standards are markets (especially global markets) that are properly regulated, and bureaucracies (especially transnational bureaucracies) run on liberal principles. In contrast, traditional and local institutions--family, nation, religion, and non-liberal conceptions of personal dignity and integrity--are

• Opaque and resistant to outside control. They resist change.
• Not oriented toward maximum equal satisfaction of individual preference. They're oppressive.
• Not based on expert scientific knowledge. They're ignorant and prejudiced.
• Dependent on distinctions and authorities that are not required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions. The family, for example, depends on distinctions of age, sex, and blood. It follows that such institutions are bigoted and hateful.

Accordingly, liberalism tells us, institutions other than bureaucracies and markets have no right to exist. Their presence makes a just, rational, and efficient social order impossible.

They're also extremely dangerous. Rational action is a matter of trying to achieve some preference, with means chosen in accordance with technical criteria. Race, sex, family, heritage, and the like do not present themselves as simple matters of preference, and they're not technical criteria, so they're not rational guides to action.

It follows that they're mindless obsessions with no rational limitation on what they might demand. If allowed at all their demands naturally expand without limit and lead to Auschwitz. They must either be extirpated or brought into the system of liberal rationality by reducing them to private choices with no consequences for social relations that matter.

In other words, we must insist on diversity, inclusiveness, multiculturalism, and so on. Nation and culture must become ethnic cuisine and folk dancing, religion private discipline, personal therapy, or a poeticized version of advanced liberalism. None can matter more than any other, so none can matter at all.

The family can get lip service: it's said to be terribly important when that's useful rhetorically, as in the case of selling "gay families." In fact, though, it can no longer be recognized as a social institution at all, but as a sentimental or contractual arrangement with no special content or purpose and therefore no public function.

Example

Suppose you're an official who accepts scientism and its application to social relations, and you're presented with a claim by a gay rights group that they have a right to live in a society free of homophobic attitudes, and a claim by Christians that they have the right to educate their children in the principles they think right--which include the view that homosexual inclinations are intrinsically disordered. The two claims conflict. Who wins?

Obviously, the gay rights group. A basic purpose of public authority is to establish public rationality, which includes defending people from oppressive social structures. Christian morality is at odds with the equal standing of all desires that accept the liberal public order. It's therefore intrinsically irrational and oppressive and should not be allowed to affect social relations.

Further, the point of parental involvement in the upbringing of children is its contribution to their ultimate ability to choose and pursue their own legitimate goals, with the liberal public order the standard of legitimacy. The Christian parents reject that principle, which is the only principle that could justify their authority. So why, from the liberal viewpoint now dominant, should they be allowed to determine their children's education?

The immovability of inclusiveness

Liberals say they believe in reason. On their understanding of reason, their views are correct beyond all possibility of discussion. What part of maximum equal satisfaction of legitimate preferences could any intelligent and well-meaning person have a problem with? And what justification could there be for denying equal citizenship to those who accept the principle of equal citizenship? Opposition to the one rational and just system is not only wrong but obviously inexcusable. If you oppose it

• You're ignorant, confused, and irrational, since your opposition is against reason.
• You're trying to suppress and exclude other people to get more for yourself, to make yourself look better by comparison, or just because you like abusing people. You're greedy, resentful, oppressive, hateful, or all four.

Such views are fundamental to the present legal and public moral order. They're taught in the schools, guide all respectable leadership, and define legitimate statecraft. That's why in much of the West you can now be fined or put in jail for saying there are problems with homosexuality or Islam.

They're impossible to argue against, and therefore to resist. Public discussion must be based on principles acceptable to all parties, but the only principles liberals will accept for purposes of debating their opponents are stripped-down scientistic principles that when taken as the basis of discussion automatically give back liberalism.

All of us are affected by such views, at least to a degree. It's very hard to avoid falling into the basic assumptions on which the people around us--especially the people who run things--carry on discussions. The most basic of those assumptions is their understanding of reason, which is now understood to require liberal inclusiveness. That's why even people who officially don't accept it, for example would-be religious traditionalists, slide into accepting it in practice.

The Myth of "Judeo-Christian Values"

Reading Larry Auster's website over the years, I find there is much in his spirited commentaries that I agree with. Larry's attacks on liberals and neoconservatives, his stress on the enormous overlap between these two only minimally different groups, his focus on the immigration issue, and his critical examination of the government's war on traditional social relations and religious morals are invariably of high quality. Larry dares to say things that one would rarely see in mainstream liberal and neoconservative publications, and therefore we on the real right owe him a debt of gratitude for these efforts.

An issue, however, that he and I strongly disagree about is his conception of a Judeo-Christian war against Islam. First, I have never shared Larry's fierce revulsion for all Muslims as bearers of violence and hatred. I have known practicing Muslims for most of my life, and among them I have numbered personal friends. I have also never perceived any signs of violence or malice in dealing with these Muslims. Last Sunday my wife and I were with a young Turkish couple in a Turkish restaurant in Allentown, PA; and I found nothing off-putting about the Muslims I saw coming in to eat Halal food. They looked, acted, and ate like the Orthodox Jews whom I have known, and I felt much safer in their company than I would have felt among the inner-city minorities, who may be Pentecostal Christians. Such non-Muslims, in any case, were doing drug deals outside the restaurant in which we were dining.

Although I agree with Larry about the need for a moratorium on immigration, particularly from Latin America, and although I share his view that decadent, childless Europeans are committing physical and demographic suicide by repopulating their countries with lower-class Muslims, who often incline toward Islamic Fundamentalism, I strongly dissent from his unqualified generalizations about adherents of Islam.

Moreover, I think that there is something other than a sense of emergency that has fueled Larry's call for a Judeo-Christian front against Muslims as a collective enemy. To be very blunt (and I may be in view of the fact that Larry has scolded me more than once as a self-hating Jew), my friend may be addressing a personal problem when he grasps for conceptual straws, as a Jew who converted to Christianity. In order to bridge the poles in his hyphenated existence, he appeals to a desirable but (alas) fictitious unity. To say that Christians and Jews are both being targeted by Islamic Fundamentalists does not mean that they share a close friendship based on common religious convictions.

Larry may wish that such a community of belief in fact existed. And so do the Christian Zionists and the Christian employees of the neoconservatives, who share Larry's rhetorical habit when they refer to "Judeo-Christians." Admittedly one could describe Jesus, Peter, and Paul as Judeo-Christians but they may have been the last Jews who would answer to that description. In the first century total war broke out between two rival Jewish sects, the Pharisees and the Jewish Christians. While the Jews had the upper hand, which they didn't for very long, they went after the Christians, and from the High Middle Ages on, the Church paid back the Jews in a more devastating way, from a greater position of strength.

Significantly, the issues Jews had and still have with Christians are theological and cultural, as well as the result of persecutions inflicted on Jews by some European societies in the past. The central Christian beliefs, that God became man in Christ and atoned on the cross for human sins, are utter blasphemy from a Jewish or Muslim perspective. And the Rabbinic attacks on Jesus that are found in the Talmud are directed against the founder of Christianity as a blasphemer. David Gordon revisits all these facts in detail in a review of George Weigel's Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. But let me add other facts. The Rabbinic attacks against Christian beliefs were not a response to Christian persecution since they were produced in Babylonia, in what was then a predominantly Zoroastrian society. The only Christians whom the authors of the Talmud were likely to have encountered were Monophysites, who rejected the Trinitarian statement formulated at Chalcedon and who were living in Babylonia as a powerless minority.

Second, Muslims have never represented for Jews the religious problem posed by Christianity because the theological and ritual differences between Jews and Muslims are far less significant. As Maimonides pointed out in the 13th century, Jews may pray to Allah because the Muslim and Jewish conceptions of the Deity are the same. The Muslim dietary and ritual laws and the strict separation of the sexes also resemble their Jewish equivalent, although Muslims are less strict than Orthodox Jews in dietary matters. Unlike Orthodox Jews, observant Muslims will eat meat slaughtered by a Jewish ritual slaughterer, but Orthodox Jews will not return the favor by eating Halal meat. While some Jews fled from the Catholic Inquisition by going to Calvinist Holland and Dutch New Amsterdam, far more Jews left for the Ottoman Empire, where they were allowed to live for centuries in peace.

Until the eruption of hostilities between Jews and Muslims over Israel, Jews in the West continued to speak far more favorably about Muslims than they did about Christians. I myself noticed this difference in my youthful contacts with Jewish institutions, which always treated the Muslim world in a far kinder way than the Christian West. My students, who have read the historical writings of Bernard Lewis, noticed the same characteristic in this Jewish author. Whenever he compares the two universal religions, Christianity and Islam, Lewis favors the Muslims at the expense of the Christians. A distinguished Jewish historian already in his 70s, he reflects traditional Jewish attitudes toward the core religious beliefs of the two religions in question.

Until the mid-1980s when the neoconservatives started building an alliance with the Christian Zionists, Commentary featured scathing invectives against the Christian belief system as well as the "crucifixion myth" as the source of the Holocaust. Larry might wish that Jews thought differently about Christian believers since he himself is one, but alas most of them don't. Jewish organizations here and in Europe view Christians as people whose exaggerated guilt over the Holocaust can be channeled into support for the Israeli government. Prominent Jewish groups, such as the World Jewish Congress, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League, show nothing but indifference or hostility to the continued existence of Christian institutions in what used to be Christian countries.

Such behavior is not restricted to countries in which established Christian churches once persecuted Jews. It is equally present in predominantly Protestant countries, which have no significant histories of anti-Semitism. Why do most American Jews loathe the Philo-Semitic Christian Right, a religious force that only a lunatic would mistake for the anti-Jewish Russian Orthodox Church of the 19th century? In surveys about religious intolerance in America, as Norman Podhoretz rightly notes, Jews seem inordinately upset about Evangelical Christians, a group whose ethical positions are the same as those taught by Hebrew Scripture and who adore Israel almost as much as Larry.

My explanation, which Larry may not want to hear, is that Jewish distaste for Christianity is so deep-seated that it can not be written off as a legacy of Christian anti-Semitism. This unfortunate hostility actually seems to grow in intensity or expressiveness as Christians try to reach out to Jews. Christophobia may be weakest among Jews in Muslim countries, who have only minimal dealings with Christians, or among Israelis, who view Christians as a distant ally. But these Jews would not be likely go about celebrating Larry's "Judeo-Christian" values, although they might use and have used Christian Zionists as a link to Republican administrations, when the occasion presents itself.

I must also dissent from Larry's tendency to blame Jewish thinking about Christians on the effects of liberalism. Jews helped create and propagate this particular ideology largely as a protective device against an older Christian civilization. There might well be problems with the liberal ideas that Jews have supported until now, but it is simply wrong to pretend that Jewish liberals act from liberal motives that have nothing to do with their Jewish fears and hostilities. I've never met a Jewish liberal whose leftist politics was not in some way connected to his self-identity as a Jew. Larry might believe (and I wouldn't dispute his judgment) that this typically Jewish ideological stance is inappropriate for Bible-believers or incompatible with long-range Zionist interests. But it is the way that Jews have responded to their anxieties in the Christian West.  And mixed with this anxiety at some level is a sense of marginality grounded in theological difference. Here we come back to Larry's existential problem, which is his need to avoid confronting the Judeo-Muslim rejection of core Christian teachings.

These remarks are not intended to minimize the gravity of certain differences. Needless to say, I'd be delighted if Jews thought differently about the Christian world, which might end their tiresome attachment to what has become the cultural Marxist Left. But expressing this pious wish may be like wishing that elephants could fly. What seems unlikely, however, is that one could bring about an alternative reality by demonizing all Muslims. Indeed it is no longer even possible to be a crusading anti-Muslim, as the two Richards pointout, without having to consort with Christopher Hitchens-secularists, feminists, and pro-gay rights liberals. Larry's holy crusade is certainly not going forth as a Christian, or "Judeo-Christian," enterprise. It has turned into a tacit alliance with the very people he professes to despise.

Up With Anarchy!

In 1980, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate, Ed Clark, declared on ABC's Nightline that his party's political philosophy was, in essence, "low-tax liberalism." This line caused Murray Rothbard, among others, a great deal of vexation and led to the "moderate" and "radical" split within the LP and, ultimately, Rothbard's departure from the Cato Institute for the open air of Auburn, Alabama. (This tale is told well by Justin Raimondo.)

Reading David Boaz's recent declarations in Reason, "low-tax liberalism," or at least the low-tax part, is starting to sound like an attractive doctrine in comparison. It's probably unfair to say that in the minds of contemporary Cato luminaries like David Boaz and Brink Lindsey, "libertarianism" boils down to gay marriage, abortion, anti-racism, and Kerry Howley's right not to be looked down upon for her lifestyle choices... but these seem to be central, indispensable pillars of their philosophy. (Though to be accurate, Boaz and Lindsey want low taxes, too, and they sometimes like war.) 

Boaz's main argument is that 18^th and 19^th-centry America was less "libertarian" than people like Jacob Hornberger (and by extension, the Mises circle) think because blacks were discriminated against; in turn, the state's encroachment on personal and economic liberty and its war-making in recent times isn't so bad due to the notable decline of "intolerance." It's not an exaggeration to say that Boaz doesn't consider any society free if he senses that somewhere, some black person is being discriminated against. 

Over at The American Conservatove, Dan McCarthy makes a good start at dismantling Boaz's essay, but, in my opinion, Dan doesn't go nearly far enough: 

He writes,

Presumably part of the answer to these questions is that Boaz believes rights of minorities can be sufficiently protected, and crime prevented, detected, and punished, without an indefinitely large government - the things he likes about our vast tutelary state can be preserved and made more efficient, and the things he dislikes can be discarded without damaging the framework. I'd say his vision is close to what Ed Clark proudly called "low-tax liberalism."

If that's what Boaz and liberaltarians like Will Wilkinson want, what about people like Jacob Hornberger? They are not indifferent to or unaware of the evils of slavery and bigotry, rather they want to purge the older American model of government, with its emphasis on states' rights and decentralization, of its defects - racial injustice, etc. - just as Boaz wants to purge the present tutelary state of its defects. Hornberger is no more forgetful of the evils of past forms of government than Boaz is unaware of modern government's infringements of liberty. If Hornberger doesn't reiterate those old evils at every opportunity, it's because in the year 2010 everyone recognizes those evils for what they are.

[...] The freedom of the tutelary state is the freedom of a free-range dairy cow: in exchange for care and protection, you pay your taxes and may frolic in the fields as much as you please. It's a timid sort of freedom, but it is freedom of a kind.

An alternative based on the older American tradition, by contrast, need not logically lead to a slave-state; indeed, most of the Founders recognized that slavery was inconsistent with the principles of their system.

Many Founders, including Jefferson, felt that the presence of a vast racial underclass would have dire implications, though one might quibble with Dan over the degree to which they opposed slavery as such, or considered all persons worthy of citizenship. But these are historical and empirical questions, and can be put aside for the real theoretical issue at play -- the difference between "libertarianism" (so-called) and decentralization.

To udnerstand what I mean, conceive, if you will, of a hypothetical situation (though, luckily, one that's starting to seem more and more plausible each day):

The U.S. federal government collapses under financial strain, and its armed forces lack the will and resources to preserve the Union.

From this starting point, one can imagine a whole host of new -- or rather old -- social formations arising in the stead of the defunct federal order.

All but a handful of liberal dead-enders would stop paying their taxes and obeying regulations; and after the initial shocks subsided, most everyone would partake in all sorts of "free trade" of goods and services. Stretches of the country might very well evolve into anarcho-capitalist, individualists orders, with only marriage (or consensual devotion contracts) and familial bonds as non-economic governing authorities. Perhaps.

It's equally, probably more, likely that communities would congeal around rather illiberal, authoritarian precepts, traditions, and kinships. Parts of Brooklyn, for instance, might divide between Latino and Black nationalist blocs in which all other races would be excluded and tribal hierarchies rigidly enforced. The great economist Gary North might get his wish and be able to establish a Protestant independent city state that would make Calvin's Geneva seem like Cancun in comparison. Adulters and homosexuals would be publicly stoned. Some less severe, though no less exclusionary, communities might develop in places like Montana, where it would be tacitly understood that if one couldn't ride a horse and hunt, one just didn't belong. Non-whites and open homosexuals would be looked at funny. Throughout the North American continent, great swaths of land would be fenced off with barbed-wire, and feature socially intolerant signs declaring "No [Blacks/Latinos/Whites/Catholics/Jews/Asians etc.] Allowed!" Bands of thieves, vagrants, and thugs would roam the countryside and godforsaken inner cities, giving rise to a new Samurai class that, though guided by a code of honor, would apprehend and execute criminals without a pretense of a trial. Communities would gratefully compensate these hard and ruthless private contractors for their services. 

In this fantastic, though seemingly likely, scenario, there might even arise an all-male city -- we'll call it "Boaz" -- that would become so liberated that the creative use of narcotics and sharing of paramours wouldn't just be permitted but required. Then again, this state-less pleasure dome might soon prove susceptible to said roving criminal bands and thus need to call upon the Samurais -- or even Gary North's sense of chivalry.   

I'll end the intriguing thought experiment here, for the sake of brevity. My point is that this easily imaginable anarchic world -- in which whole new vistas of personal preferences would arise -- would seem evil, authoritarian, and downright "un-libertarian" to someone like Boaz. And, moreover, it would be "un-libertarian" in a way that our current welfare nation-state -- which has war-making, taxing, and spying powers undreamt of by Joseph Stalin -- is not. 

There is simply no reason to believe that decentralization, or anarchy, leads to greater social "libertarianism." And the historical evidence points in the opposite direction.  

The 18^th- and 19^th centuries -- not exactly ancient history but considered benighted, knuckle-dragging years by Boaz -- actually featured more free, unregulated trade than the 20^th and 21^st. It also had a high degree of monetary unification -- not under a One World (fiat) currency like the Euro but the silver and gold commodity standards. There's little indication than any of this economic integration led to a greater quantity of "libertarianism" in Western society. Europe became less brutal and more technically advanced, to be sure, but it also underwent advances in the subjugation and colonization of undeveloped peoples; national consciousness and Darwinian, eugenic scientific thinking made strides; and hereditary monarchy was re-installed.        

Boaz might want to believe that his beloved postwar "libertarian" order could have arisen in the absence of a strong therapeutic welfare state, but it's quite difficult to make this case. (In turn, Dan McCarthy might want to believe that a society with a minimal Constitutional state would eventually come around to the idea of purging "racial discrimination," but he runs into the same historical problems.)

I've encountered many "libertarians" who express wonderment at the fact that so many liberals and leftists support such good things (in their estimation) as gay marriage, polymorphous sexuality, and the breaking down of social hierarchies, but then turn around and support such bad things as high taxation, regulation, and increasing bureaucratic power. But it's the "libertarians" who are confused and the Establishment liberals like E.J. Dionne, Keith Olbermann, and Matthew Yglesias who are ideologically consistent.    

The Boazian paradise in which abortions are readily available and religious and racial discrimination, frowned upon -- also known as "now" -- would only be possible with a state powerful enough to stamp out any sign of "intolerance" wherever it might raise its ugly head. Since Boaz believes he upholds a universalistic system,  attached to no single people or civilization, one can conclude that the ultimate culmination of "libertarianism" would require a planetary government. 

If only it were just about taxes... 

Anarchism of the Right

Patrick Ford's recent discussion of the "libertarian problem" observed how resistance to the neoconservatives had produced an unusual alliance on the Right between such divergent elements as "hedonistic anarchists and medieval Catholics." Patrick expressed skepticism of whether the libertarian-traditionalist alliance can be a durable one, given the sharp differences to be found among the respective philosophical foundations of the two camps. Traditionalist objections to libertarianism are usually rooted in what is often described as libertarianism's "atomistic individualism" whereby an ideologically constructed conception of "abstract liberty" is elevated over and above more concrete and immediately tangible matters of culture, history, tradition, community, family, religion, and so forth. Libertarians are accused of deifying the economy as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to the end of meeting human needs and irrespective of the impact of economic forces on non-material values. The traditionalists will say that while libertarians may deny the innate equality of individuals, libertarians implicitly endorse an egalitarian ethos regarding human groups such as nations, cultures, religions, regions, races, and genders. Libertarian economism simply regards these things as interchangeable commodities, and no more significant than different brands of deodorant or fast food. In other words, libertarians are simply liberals who reject the welfare state, according to the traditionalist critique. For this reason, many libertarians see mass immigration from the Third World into the West as no big deal, as human cultures and ethnic populations are interchangeable, with economics and political ideology being what really matters.

This critique is a fairly accurate one, though it does not apply to all brands of libertarianism. Murray Rothbard, for instance, rejected this kind of reductionist outlook and became an outspoken critic of such tendencies among libertarians in the latter part of his life. Further, it does not follow that the baby of anti-statist politics should be thrown out with the liberal-reductionist bathwater. Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of radically anti-statist tendencies that might be collectively described as an "anarchism of the Right." Commonly labeled "national-anarchism," this new anarchism draws its inspiration less from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman and more from such divergent sources as De Benoist, Nietzsche, Junger, Evola, Schopenhauer, Belloc, and older strands of anarchism such as those advanced by Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Stirner, and Kropotkin.  Its leading current proponents are Troy Southgate, Flavio Goncalves, Hans Cany, Peter Topfer, Andrew Yeoman, Welf Herfurth, Chris Donnellan, and, at least peripherally, myself. "Anarchism of the Right" differs significantly from other ideological strands bearing the "anarchist" label. It shares the anti-statist politics and opposition to imperialist war of the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists, yet rejects their neo-Lockean philosophical foundations in favor of a Nietzschean or Evolan "radical traditionalist" outlook. While libertarians and anarcho-capitalists tend to be economics-oriented, anarchists of the Right prefer to emphasize the particular, and champion the sovereignty, autonomy, and preservation of unique cultures, regions, ethnicities, identities, faiths, and tribes against the homogenizing and universalizing forces of the global economy, technology, and imperialism. On economic questions, these anarchists likely have more in common with the Catholic distributists, Southern Agrarians, Proudhon, the classical anarcho-syndicalists, or Kirkpatrick Sale than with the editors of Reason. Nor do the anarchists of the Right share the vigilante liberal sentiments of the "antifa" stormtroopers. Indeed, they are more likely to be the target of such unsavory elements.

Central to this new but growing form of anti-statist radicalism are the concepts of community and tribe. Towards this end, anarchists of the Right favor the development of autonomous communities existing independently of overarching state systems for the sake of maintaining the identity and ideals of the tribe, and therefore look askance at mass immigration, preferring instead community self-determination with full rights of exclusion. Matters of ethnicity and race are certainly essential to this outlook, though not exclusively so or in a reductionist way. For instance, a "tribe" can be a group of persons committed to a particular way of life, set of cultural norms or political ideals. The "tribe" can therefore be a community of ascetic religious sectarians, radical ecologists committed to the non-use of industrial technology, hippie communalists, homosexuals, neo-pagans, radical survivalists, racial separatists, or drug users. The Alternative Right is a genuinely diverse milieu of beliefs and ideas. This is in sharp contrast to official "diversity" with its emphasis on a diversity of skin colors, genitalia, and sexual habits, but complete uniformity of thought. Perhaps one of the most common characteristics we share is our pariah status in the eyes of the liberal ruling class. The therapeutic-multiculturalist-welfare states that currently rule our Western societies are clearly our enemy. An anarchism of the Right may prove to be an essential part of the intellectual arsenal against our enemy, the state.

The Mohammedan Jihad and Ours

Why is the Muslim world in the condition it is? Why do Muslims do such odd and inhuman things? Why does Spain translate more books in a year than the Arabs in a thousand years, Pakistan edit physics textbooks to get rid of references to causality, and the Arab world remain at the bottom of every measure of development for countries outside sub-Saharan Africa?

Robert R. Reilly, in his forthcoming book of that title, says it's all because of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. According to its subtitle, his book, to be published by ISI, tries to explain "how intellectual suicide created the modern Islamist." As such it's a clear and informative account that emphasizes basic issues and quotes lots of primary sources. (Like all accounts, it's imperfect, but more on that later.)

According to Reilly, the closing is longstanding. It began in earnest with the overthrow of the Mutazilites by the Asharites in the Abbasid caliphate around 848 A.D., and was pretty much completed by the 12th century. The Mutazilites were theologians who read the Greeks and liked what they saw, so they made reason primary in understanding everything, including God. The Asharites, in contrast, believed in God as absolute will, so that His uniqueness and unity meant that His arbitrary decision determines everything. If you said that reason determines God's actions you were denying His supreme freedom and omnipotence, and if you said that something that wasn't God (like human decision or the essential nature of things) had any effect on anything you were a polytheist.  

The Asharites had more Hadiths and Koranic verses on their side, and they had much more support from the people and their rulers, who soon got in the habit of killing Mutazilites. So they won. That victory was sealed in the intellectual sphere by Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), who is often considered the greatest Muslim philosopher but whose thought resulted in the permanent exclusion of philosophy from mainstream Sunni Islam.

The line of thought makes sense in its way: God does what he feels like doing and there's nothing more to be said about it, so there's not much to reason about. On such a view all that's left of the life of the mind is Islamic jurisprudence and Sufi mysticism--the study of God's arbitrary commands, and the cultivation of a nonrational sense of God's presence. What else could thought possibly attend to?

Hence the closing of the Muslim mind. At bottom, Reilly suggests, Muslims don't believe that looking into things and thinking about what you find makes sense.

So what to do now? Reilly is bigger on problems than solutions (which does him credit, given the topic). He believes that the only possible solution to the Muslim problem would be reappropriation by Muslims of the openness to reason that characterized the Mutazilites. They have an absolutely fundamental problem, and they have to deal with it on its own level.

He often talks as if that would enable the Muslims to reconcile Islam with modernity and become good scientifically-minded democrats like us. His view of ultimate goals is a bit unclear, though, since he does not say that the Muslims need an Islamic Reformation or Enlightenment, and for good reason. He doesn't emphasize the point, but he makes it clear that there are basic tendencies that come out of the Reformation and Enlightenment and define modern Western thought that align with troublesome features of Islamic thought, e.g.:

• Cartesian doubts about the possibility of knowledge.
• Humean denial of intrinsic causality in favor of "causality" as mere habitual sequence of events.
• Metaphysical nominalism and denial of essential natures, so that words and concepts become extraneous to what things really are.
• The view that the world consists of arbitrary arrangements of atoms in space, or some such.
• Nonrational spirituality that tends toward noncognitive mysticism.
• Denial of rational ethics in favor of ethics based on arbitrary will.

He notes that 20th century Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb picked up on tendencies common to modern Western thought and traditional Sunni thought, and the results have not been good. He doesn't use the expression, but evidently accepts the notion of Islamofascism as a merger of Islamic extremism with Western elements. He points to distinct Nazi and Nietzschean elements in Islamism, for example, and asserts that it is more single-mindedly concerned than previous versions of Islam with this-worldly success to be achieved through violent action.

His basic point, then, is that Islam needs to pay more attention to themes modern Western and traditional Sunni thought both reject. In short, as he says, it needs an Islamic Thomas Aquinas to naturalize Aristotle in the Islamic world. That's not very different from the Pope's view in the Regensburg lecture, and indeed Reilly cites the Pope several times.

He notes, however, that a thousand years of irrationalism is hard to overcome, especially since longstanding consensus is a source of authority in Islam, and the recent tendency has been all the other way. Nineteenth and twentieth century attempts to make Islam more rational have all petered out, and the crazies are back, crazier than ever.

Although sober and sobering the book is not as pessimistic as the facts the author lays out would warrant, and it scants serious problems with the modern West that makes the situation worse. The author has to connect with his readers, he can't cover every possible issue, and he wants to encourage people to do something, so he has to moderate the gloom and doom. Above all, perhaps,  he believes in the enduring message of the Declaration of Independence, which makes him more optimistic about the modern liberal West than I am.

An issue he doesn't discuss is that the Asharites and al-Ghazali may well have been correct in the way they worked out the implications of the Koran and Hadiths, and indeed the basic features of Islam. His language sometimes suggests that scriptures and the like are raw materials that theological decision can shape into almost anything. I doubt that's so, although nominalists might disagree with me.

For example, the created or uncreated nature of the Koran is probably the most basic point at issue between the Mutazilites (created) and the Asharites (uncreated). But the Asharites seem right on the point. It seems clear that God's final word must exist from all eternity. If there's something He really means to apply forever, then He shouldn't have to wait until some particular time to make up His mind what it is. Christians and (I believe) many Orthodox Jews agree with mainstream Muslims on the point. So if that final word is the Koran, then the very words of the Koran must be eternal and uncreated, and literalism and simple submission ("Islam," as they say) seem called for.

It's also worth noting, as Reilly does in passing, that those who continued to pursue Greek philosophy in the Muslim world always seemed to end up adopting materialistic pantheism and denying basic doctrines like the creation of the world ex nihilo and the resurrection of the body. So there seems to be a problem with Greek philosophy from a Muslim point of view, or with Islam from a Greek philosophical point of view. The two don't mix. And in any event, the branches of Islam where Mutazilism retained influence, like Shia Islam, don't seem to have ended up much more rational than mainstream Sunnism.

Some additional points that occurred to me:

If the Muslims reject rational thought and the concept of cause and effect to the extent Reilly suggests, how seriously should we take them as a military threat? Is "War on Terror" the right conception? The jihadist threat is diffuse and enduring, there's no definable agency to do battle with, and in any event there don't seem to be many Mohammed Attas with enough grip on cause and effect to bring off a major operation. So it's not much like war, as war is normally conceived.

Thinking of the struggle with Islam as a war is problematic in any event. War centralizes, secularizes, and simplifies. The tendency of the War on Terror has been to simplify the conception of the West and identify it ever more single-mindedly with diversity, inclusiveness, tolerance, secularity, and enlightenment. From a basic philosophical standpoint, it has made us more like the Sunni Ummah, a community defined by the abolition of essences and particularities in the interests of a single universal nation based on will, force, and a universally obligatory legal scheme.

If that's so, and if what the Muslims need is an intellectual revolution that changes their basic philosophical outlook, how is a war that promotes principles resembling the ones they have to reject going to help them bring it off? It seems that what would make most sense is keep the Muslims at a distance (e.g., by immigration reform) and emphasize our own greater jihad (spiritual struggle, like getting rid of liberalism) over our lesser jihad (military struggle, like invading Muslim countries). That would help us, and it would also give the Muslims a model in their own very difficult internal struggle--if that struggle is to take place at all--to overcome mindlessness and violence with natural law.

Reilly is aware that the struggle with Islam or Islamism is basically a struggle of ideas, and he has protested against the tendency to fight the war of ideas by broadcasting pop music and images of happy American Muslims to the Muslim world. Instead, he wants us to broadcast the principles of the Declaration of Independence: man as endowed with God-given rights and government as vindicator of those rights. It's hard to see how the proposal can work though when those in authority in the West don't believe any of that. You can only give what you have, and what we have is happy talk, Britney Spears, and advertising images.

Another thought: in Reilly's telling the Muslim world did seem to suffer a real death of thought after the triumph of Asharism and al-Ghazali. Is something similar what we're seeing around us in the West? Will it get that bad for us? All the more reason, I'd say, for emphasizing our own greater jihad.