Alt-right? All ‘lite’

From The Death of Major Peirson, John Singleton Copley, 1783

It’s as I’ve been saying for awhile now. My biggest problem with the nouvelle nouvelle-droite, or the ‘alt-right’, is that they’re philosophically weak. I believe I had them pegged as a ‘rancid mixture of free-speech absolutism, postmodernism and white identity politics’; to that I’d add that they haven’t gone anywhere far enough down their rabbit hole. Certainly not as much as they like to pretend they have. Nothing bores so much as a poseur, and the ‘alt-right’ are pretty much all low-calorie fizzy drinks.

Think about it this way. If the ‘edgiest’ thing they have on offer is the idea that the races are not equal, then there’s no real difference between the views they’re offering and the original formulations of, say, Kant or Hume (and arguably Locke as well, though it seems from the primary sources that Locke was less doctrinaire in his ‘race realism’ – or at the very least inconsistent in it). Kant and Hume both posited ‘scientific’ hierarchies of the races, which look remarkably similar to those proposed by the ‘human biodiversity’ people today – with whites being blessed with superior intelligence and blacks with inferior intelligence but greater ‘brute’ strength. So, if anything, the nouvelle nouvelle-droite are really just peddling weak tea from the used teabags of the original Enlightenment. If your only, or even most prominent, objections to Enlightenment liberalism are based on race, then you don’t actually have any.

The easiest way to understand the fundamental insipidity of the alt-right and the milquetoast, limpwristed nature of their intellectual pretensions to ‘reaction’, lies in the confluence of the alt-right’s intellectual lodestones with transhumanism, eugenicism and technological utopianism, primarily through the LessWrong crowd. The fact that there are so few teleological differences between the alt-right’s ideal society and the ideal society most ‘progressive’-minded Americans of the 1910’s and 1920’s envisioned, should drop a massive hint that these guys are all guff. There’s very little of Voegelin’s belief in epistemic limitations in any of the nouvelle nouvelle-droite, less of the characteristic caution of Kirk (whom Vox Day, speaking for the alt-right, explicitly rejects), still less of the ‘small-is-beautiful’ sensibility of Carlson, and nothing at all of the tragic classical sensibilities of Strauss or Bloom. For someone whose introduction to the American tradition of classical conservatism was through the anti-fascist poet and historian Peter Viereck, the nouvelle nouvelle-droite strikes me as so thoroughly lacking in any of the vital, creative or self-reflective elements of this tradition as to be a complete non-starter.

Then, consider that the opposition to the growing infatuation with Enlightenment ideas at the time was basically on the other side of the contemporary argument about race. The Anglo-American Tory moralist tradition (represented by such people as Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Beilby Porteous, Richard Oastler, John Strachan, William Wilberforce, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enriched by dialogue and practical coöperation with the Quakers) proceeded from the belief that black people were not ontologically inferior to whites. And all of these people, in one way or another, were also strident critics of what they saw as a sustained assault by Scottish and French philosophes on the traditional social strictures of Church and state.

But to these voices were joined, on the Continent, the Counter-Enlightenment thinking of – in particular – Johann Gottfried Herder (‘Notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth’), Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (who took an admirable linguistic interest in South Asia) and August Franz von Haxthausen (a devout Catholic and counter-Enlightenment thinker, whose sociological work in the German East and in Russia was aimed squarely against the anti-Asiatic racism of Custine). The work of the Orthodox Slavophils, in particular Khomyakov with his opposition to British imperialism in China, may be seen in this vein as well. Clearly there was something in the return to the Church that both the Anglo-American Tories and the Continental Counter-Enlightenment thinkers that strongly militated against racism and colonialism.

As a brief aside: poor Schlegel is emphatically not to blame for that later, perverse Franco-German interest in South Asia. Schlegel, like Tolkien later, was interested not in race ‘science’ but instead in linguistics, and attempted to show how European languages, and ‘Eastern’ Indo-Iranian languages like Sanskrit and Farsi, derive from a common root language. Rather, that Franco-German perversion is what happens when you try to bastardise the Romantics by attempting to fit them into pseudo-scientific categories of thought, of the sort pioneered by Carl Linnæus.

But let’s consider a group of ‘alt’-thinkers who actually did threaten the thought-establishment – to the point where the CIA took actions against them. Whatever their other faults, it is not an accident, and should not be seen as such, that many of the twentieth-century voices for pan-African regionalism and the non-aligned movement migrated to Apostolic Christianity – likely following the example of Broad Church Anglican convert and abolitionist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. Many were either Roman Catholic (Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Kambarage Nyerere) or Orthodox (HM Haile Selassie I, Bp. George Alexander McGuire, Fr. Raphael Morgan, Bp. Christophoros Reuben Spartas Mukasa Mugimba Ssebanja). These pioneers of African political philosophy and religious thought saw clearly the links between liberal Enlightenment thinking and the oppression they were then still under, and hearkened instead to the classics of Christian thought, which offered a far truer account of the human person and the virtue-oriented potential for freedom.

Speaking of the last, the great classical virtue-ethical philosopher Plotinus was born on the African continent, and should rightly be considered as much part of the legacy of Africa as of the West. The ‘conservative, reactionary and right-wing’ (in the elder sense) Imperial British poet Lawrence Durrell even made reference to Plotinus’ ‘great square Negro head, reverberating with the concept of God’! Take special care to see that it’s a British Old Rightist speaking up against the notion of black intellectual inferiority, in the context of the classical Western world.

To tie all this up: this recent comment from the excellent modern-day Roman Catholic High Tory commentator, David Lindsay, not only rings especially true, not only echoes Herder and not only cuts straight against the current gender-ideological and identitarian silliness on both sides of the political moment, but it is fixed quite firmly in the spirit of Johnson’s High Toryism. A spirit I profoundly endorse.

Any two human beings, no matter how divergent their ethnicity, can produce a child. Provided that one of them is a man, and the other is a woman.

All human beings belong, not only to a single species, but to a single subspecies, with less biological difference between any two than there is between a Labrador and a dachshund. The differences that there are, have been changing constantly ever since they first began to emerge, since they have not always been there.

But the difference between the two sexes has always been there, and it is written into the chromosomes of every cell of the body, no matter how the tissue may or may not be cut up.

On the first of these realisations depends every past and future achievement of the anti-racist movement. On the second depends every past and future achievement of the women’s movement. There must be no compromise on either as a matter of political principle. There actually can be no compromise on either as a matter of scientific fact.

Well said indeed.