Blog name change

So, over the past several months, I have had the fortune (whether for good or ill, or simply funny) to be mistaken for a British person based on the title of my blog. This being in spite of the explanation I have had linked in the sidebar for the past several years. I am not, in fact, British and have no intention of being so. I do have British ancestry. I also have been a member of the Episcopal Church in the past and still feel a sense of fondness and warmth toward that faith and toward English culture generally. Yet, it still seems a bit misleading, even sinful, to encourage my readers or visitors to persist in a misconception about who I am and where I come from, especially given the importance I place on doyikayt. As such, I am renaming the blog The Heavy Anglophile Orthodox, which should hopefully place me in the minds of my readers on the correct side of the pond. In the meantime, I can only apologise for the confusion I have already caused!

New blog: Silk and Chai

Dear readers,

For over ten years The Heavy Anglo Orthodox has been essentially my online journal (that is the whole purpose of a blog, is it not?) on pretty much every subject that catches my fancy. On this blog, originally meant to be a Peace Corps journal for my time in Kazakhstan which turned out to be all-too-brief, I’ve explored religious philosophy, theology (in particular Anglican and Orthodox theology), heavy metal music, Cooper family genealogy, American politics with an emphasis on communitarianism, global politics, poetry, anthropological and cultural studies of the indigenous peoples of North Asia, Star Trek, Chinese opera, the cinema of Kazakhstan, and a number of other things.

To tell the truth, there’s quite a bit of clutter here, not all of which falls very well under the title The Heavy Anglo Orthodox. In any event, this blog has been drifting in a more ‘devotional’ direction anyway over the past year and a half, with a particular emphasis on the hagiographies of Orthodox saints. Quite honestly, it feels like that’s how it should be. A blog with Orthodox in the name should probably have a more religious focus in any event.

As a result, I am offboarding my gæopolitical commentary – including matters having to do with Russia, China, Iran and the Arab world – to a new blog, Silk and Chai. Silk and Chai can be considered a spiritual successor to my old now-defunct Chinese-language Weibo blog, The Tocharian Rider. It’s subtitled ‘Left-Eurasianist political meditations’, which is accurate but not entirely precise. Anything to do with axiomodern politics, food sovereignty, rural reconstruction, the world system, socialism, analysis and criticism of imperialism and so forth – from now on is to be found at Silk and Chai.

This is from now on, though, I hasten to add. The entirety of the content that is currently on The Heavy Anglo Orthodox will stay here. I’m really bad at archival maintenance, as can be seen by all the broken picture links in old blog posts from way back when. It’s best to leave things where they stand, though Silk and Chai articles will be expected to link back here a lot. I also may end up creating a parallel blog for my cultural commentary; we shall see soon.

So please, gentle readers, if you’ve appreciated any of the political commentary I’ve done over the years, please have a look at Silk and Chai, give the Facebook page a ‘like’, follow me on Twitter and so forth.

Insist on beauty for the poor

Patriarch Pavle of Serbia

I am, and have been, a firm believer for a long time in the idea that the poorest people in our society deserve both bread and roses, that there should be space for both labour activism and Liturgy in their lives. That was, and remains, one of the most attractive things to me about the Anglo-Catholic socialist tradition which somewhat adopted me during college. It’s one of the most attractive things to me about the early Renovationists – before, and in opposition to, the hæresy of the Sergianists – and the legacy of the Vekhi group in Russia. It remains one of the most attractive things to me about the Eastern European socialism that understands proportionality, preservation both cultural and natural, physically-beautiful built space that’s friendly to young families and old folks to be vital parts of its programme, and not merely optional.

For all of this, of course, I’ve had it put to me that I’m a secret reactionary. Wait, let me put this in the most literal possible way. A certain commenter told me – because I am opposed to rule by tech-bros, mind you – that I am actually ‘an eccentric right winger whose views occasionally overlap with leftism… gung-ho about early twentieth century Marxists and rural Maoists… because they provide a leftist outlet for [my] regressive social views’.

There may be a certain grain of truth to this. I do have certain views which range quite close to classical reaction – particularly in the mode of Pobedonostsev and Leont’ev, and to stretch that definition a bit, Khomyakov and Kireevsky as well. And yet I am forced to wonder. Is it right-wing not to want to live in a world dominated by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? Is it right-wing to want working-class people to be not merely seen but heard as well? Is it right-wing to want for those same working-class people, the same things those working-class people say they want? In many cases, that includes beauty. It’s something of a bourgeois assumption that poor people desire convenience and efficiency over elegance. This assumption is often massaged and conditioned into a belief that they deserve only those things which are convenient and efficient, and no more. As Reina Sultan puts it, writing at Intersectional Feminist Media:

Rich people in the U.S. (but also in most of the west) think that poor people cannot manage their own money — for no other reason than the fact that they are poor. I work in international development at an organization that provides unconditional cash transfers to women. This means they can spend the money however they want. It’s theirs. Without fail, we are bombarded at every conference with the same questions, “How do you ensure that the women won’t spend money on frivolous items like lipstick?” We don’t. It’s not our money. It’s theirs.

In prosaic terms, the real, physical needs of the working class often depend on more than mere convenience and efficiency. Women in particular, need to wear make-up and need to dress smartly for job interviews, if they want to get hired so they can feed themselves and their families. Oftentimes this presents a not insignificant financial hurdle for them. Efficiency is clearly not the only consideration. Of course there’s a double standard at play in this, and perhaps more than a whiff of sexism as well. But it’s hardly out of line to say that poor women – and men, for that matter – are no less apt to enjoy looking and smelling nice as much as rich women and men do. On a related sidenote: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed may be dated, but it deserves to be on every single American high-school curriculum.

But this anecdote actually reminds me of one of my very favourite CS Lewis anecdotes. On the way to an Inklings meeting Lewis stopped to give money to a street beggar, and his friend asked him if he wouldn’t merely spend it on drink. Lewis retorted: ‘Maybe – but if I had kept it, so would I.’ What this anecdote does particularly effectively, is that it eliminates the idea that the beliefs and desires of needy and stressed people are somehow of a different quality than ours, as well as the assumption that poor and wealthy people are any different in terms of what they deserve.

The spiritual needs of the poor are real and must be considered. When I was still going to S. Stephen’s Church in Providence, there was a middle-aged homeless lady who often stayed in the back pews. I was told, sotto voce, that she occasionally or more-than-occasionally struggled with bipolar or a similar disorder. But she loved coming to the church. She told me herself that she loved particularly the sensory dimension of the Mass, the approach of Christ before all five senses. It was clear to me that she felt most herself when she was in the presence of the Eucharist, listening to the hymnody of the Church, smelling the sweet smells of the censer and lifting her eyes to heaven. It would be a particularly cruel sort of person to want to take that away from her.

One of the great attractions of Orthodox Christianity, for me, is the insistence that the poor have their own sort of beauty that demands respect, even if it isn’t readily apparent. The face of Christ may be seen in the beggar at the church door, to paraphrase Chrysostom. You see this in Dostoevsky particularly – think Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment – but it’s present in Greek Orthodox theology as well. The sacrifice of Christ and the defeat of death by God was not efficient – on the contrary, it was gratuitous – but it accomplished a remarkable symmetry, even if it came at the expense of the overthrow of all worldly logic: the power of death defeated, by mere human flesh in the Resurrection. What place can austerity and the exaction of pettier debts and satisfactions have, in the light of this awesome and indescribable reality? What do we ungrateful servants mean by laying hold of our fellow-servants, by grudging the poor a moment of æsthesis, when the King of All has forgiven us everything with such wild and reckless abandon? If there is an austerity to be performed, it belongs to the self: an austerity of gratitude, the tears and toil of grace.

On Yemen – don’t despair

San‘â

I know I have complained a lot on this blog over the last two years about the stupidity and sheer evil of American war policy in Yemen: for example, here, here, here, here and here. Come to think of it, I’ve been complaining about it since 2014. I am also all too well-aware that such complaining actually has a tendency to produce fatigue and despondency. We have only so much ‘bandwidth’ for suffering before we shut down. And the way in which our news media inundates us with this suffering and outrage actually lessens our capacity for empathy. For my own part in this – and it is a part I fully admit I have played; I am as guilty of it as any other person with a keyboard, an Internet connexion and an inflated opinion of himself – I am sorry, and I beg my gentle readers’ forgiveness for it. I have been swayed by and contributed to this outrage fatigue.

That said, if we were to pick and choose something to be outraged by, this would have to be it. There is something wrong with a person who is not moved to pity and rage by the starvation of over ten million people. And if it were at the hands of our government and being committed in our names…! Because – let us be perfectly clear – the complicity in this starvation belongs overwhelmingly to the side that is blockading the port at al-Hudayda where food is supposed to arrive (still); that is turning clinics into targets; and that is bombing sources of clean water. Any drop or spot of blood that the Houthis have on their hands, is dwarfed by the utter deluge of it for which the Saudis, the Emiratis, and their allies – we Americans – must answer for.

Still, we should not give into despair. We should not throw up our hands and give Yemen up as hopeless. God does not turn His back on the poor or stop His ears to their prayers, and neither should we. The very first thing the Yemeni people need is for the bombs to stop falling, and for the Saudi-led blockade to end. As I have said before, there are several political pressure groups committing to achieving precisely this. In addition, we can also hold our elected officials accountable for this in a more direct way. E-mail them. Call them. If your Senator voted ‘yea’ here, particularly if they are Democrats, tell them you will withhold your vote for them unless they volte-face. The bombs have to stop falling – which means that we have to stop backing the Saudis. That’s the only way the humanitarian crisis in Yemen gets solved.

In the meantime, there are two very good, accountable local organisations that are helping families in Yemen get enough food, clothing, clean water, medicine and other basic supplies. They are running day to day and month to month, and can always use more financial assistance. These are Share Aid Yemen run by Qasim Ali al-Shawea, and Human Needs Development run by Adel Hashem. Please consider giving what you can. It will go to good use.

And, of course, pray for Yemen always. The elderly and the young; the orphans and the widows; the sick and the suffering; the sorrowing and the afflicted; the captives and the needy poor – the Orthodox Church commends all of these people to our prayers and to our actions. But, please, don’t despair.

Mine own faults

Lord and Master of my life,
Take from me the spirit of sloth, despondency, lust for power and idle talk,
But grant unto me, Thy servant, the spirit of integrity, humility, patience and love.
Yes, Lord and King, grant me to see mine own faults,
And not to condemn my brother.

As my Czech-Yiddish forebears would have told me as I made my prostrations after the fashion, roughly speaking, of Saint Ephrem the Syrian: Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it. And boy, did I.

This Lenten season has shown me up as a pretentious, preening, pompous fool, crowing over ideas which were never his own to begin with, and who is nowhere near as clever as he pretends to be. (But then, I should already have known that. My erstwhile gentle readers have been so kind as to inform me of it themselves, on occasion.) It has shown me up as a self-righteous, quarrelsome brawler in words. To Chase Padusniak, whom I called out with that post: I am sorry for my bitter polemic. Forgive me, a sinner. Even my attempts at humility have sharp edges. It has shown me up as a foreigner with a full belly and nothing better to do than to point fingers. It has shown me up as an intellectual-yet-idiot dupe, a self-deceiving excuser of harm in ‘good causes’. It has shown me up as a poor faster, an inconsistent almsgiver, a faineant prayer.

And this Lent brought me face-to-face, not once but twice – with an injury and a death, each very close to home – with the brute fact of mortality. The latter is still too raw. It was a swift and unexpected kick to the rear which will hurt far longer than this past Lent, or the next. (On that note: if you can spare a thought and a prayer for Mildred, you would have my deep and sincere thanks.)

Oh, yes: I am very much a sinner. And I am put very much in mind of that as Holy Week draws near, and Our Lord draws nearer on His path toward Jerusalem. This will sound paradoxical: it’s not comfortable, being in this frame of mind, but there’s an odd sort of comfort – or at least consolation – in it all the same. Forgiveness of others and prayer for them should never be far away in any event. But when accompanied by such stings, they somehow become easier, more natural. And there’s nothing more fitting, when my brothers and sisters around me are all in the same frame, throwing palm branches before Him as He appears before us.

For blessed art Thou unto the ages. Amen.

On Christianity and Arab socialism

Shiblî Shumayyil

It’s a true pity that John at EifD isn’t blogging anymore. His brief biographical sketch of Shiblî Shumayyil, a Syrian Christian and one of the first Arab socialists, is thankfully still up on David Lindsay’s blog. Christians were heavily overrepresented in the reform and revolutionary movements in the Arab world, and with good reason. It’s my hope to pick up where Mr John sadly left off and do a bit more profiling of the Arab Christian leadership in culture and politics, particularly on the ‘left’.

Shiblî Shumayyil was not alone; his Arab Christian contemporaries Salâma Mûsâ, Yaʻqûb Sarruf, Labiba Hashim, Farah Antûn and his brother-in-law Niqula Haddâd also advocated religious and œconomic egalitarianism. Later figures on the Arab Christian left include not only Sir George Antonius (not explicitly a socialist, but certainly narodnik in his political intuition), but also Qustantîn Zurayq, Michel ‘Aflaq, and a number of Palestinian radicals such as the al-‘Isa family which ran the Filastin newspaper. In addition, I hope to expand to some of the early Arab Muslim leftists, like al-Kawâkibî, who were the most friendly to Christian, Jewish and other minority interests in the Middle East.

This will very likely be an ambitious project for my blog, given that – unlike those of China and of Russia – I have not previously had much education in Arabic and Middle Eastern affairs. Much of the scholarly reading I will be doing on this subject will be on my own direction. Hopefully I can get a good handle on the subject and explore it in some degree of depth here.

His tongue a golden beacon

Archbishop Saint John Chrysostom

One of my favourite saints, the Archbishop Saint John of Constantinople whose Liturgy is celebrated regularly in every Orthodox Church I’ve yet attended, is one I’ve had yet to write about at any length on my blog, save in reference to some other point of theology or political philosophy, upon which his homiletics and other writings were relevant (as here, here, here, here and here). I hope Holy Father John will forgive me this oversight, and I don’t intend to let another one of his feast-days pass by unmarked!

Saint John the Golden-Mouthed was born in Antioch to Syrian-Greek parents. His father, Secundus, was a career soldier who died when his son was still an infant; his mother Anthusa did not remarry, but instead schooled her son at home. Anthusa herself was gifted in rhetoric and had an extensive knowledge of classical pagan literature, which she transmitted to her son along with a love of the Holy Scriptures. It was a joy to her, though not a surprise, to see her son John – apparently so similar in likeness to her late husband – take so readily to this knowledge, and seek even deeper knowledge of theology. She sent him to learn rhetoric and oratory from the great Sophist Libanios, and theology from Saint Meletios of Antioch, who loved the youth as he would an adopted son, and had him tonsured as a reader in the Church there. Later Saint John studied under the well-known Bishop Diodōros of Tarsos, who gave him instruction in the ascetic disciplines.

On the death of his mother Anthusa, John withdrew from the world and became a monk. He spent four years in the wilderness and there wrote several volumes in defence of the monastic life. His time in desert solitude took a toll on his health, however, and he was compelled to return to Antioch, where his mentor Saint Meletios made him a deacon. Some years after Saint Meletios reposed, Bishop Flavianos of Antioch had John ordained as a priest – an office which John graced with his remarkable gift for oratory and homiletics. In addition to this, he began writing exegetical commentaries on Genesis, the Gospels and the Epistles of Saint Paul, emphasising not only the spiritual dimensions of these works but also their practical applications to the lives of everyday people, with a special focus on the need for almsgiving and on the abuses of wealth and power. This populist mode of discourse made his homilies and writings wildly popular in Antioch.

During this time, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus had unexpectedly resigned his position as Archbishop of Constantinople, to the surprise and dismay of the church there. He was succeeded by Archbishop Saint Nektarios, who died in 397. Upon Saint Nektarios’ death, the consul Eutropios submitted a ballot for Saint John to be appointed as his successor, without Saint John’s knowledge or consent. When Saint John was summoned to the election, he had to leave Antioch in secret to prevent a civil disturbance; once there, he was duly appointed.

Saint John set about at once reforming the Church – holding priests to higher standards of personal conduct, refusing to host lavish parties and refusing to offer bribes to priests in outlying districts. As in Antioch, where he preached charity and railed against the affectations and sins of the wealthy, these reforms made him very popular among the lower classes but also earned him quite a few wealthy enemies and detractors. He also set a personal example, living an ascetic lifestyle and using the funds allocated to his own office and upkeep in Constantinople, to opening and funding several way-houses and shelters for pilgrims, and hospices for the sick. He did not neglect, however, the glories of the Church. The Divine Liturgy which we celebrate ordinarily on Sundays was written by Saint John the Golden-Mouthed, and the antiphonal singing was a style that was pioneered in Constantinople under Saint John’s omophor.

Saint John continued to make enemies in high places, including the Empress Eudoxia, who – according to John’s enemies at court, who were more than willing to use intrigue to turn the powerful Empress against him – figured into some of Saint John’s more polemical homilies against worldly vanity, and in particular the taste of rich women for ornamentation and outward luxury. Empress Eudoxia convened a council composed of Saint John’s enemies, both temporal and ecclesiastical, had him accused of Origenist heresy, declared him deposed and had him sentenced to death. The Emperor Arkadios had his punishment commuted, however, to exile, though Saint John refused to tone down his language in criticising the Empress. When the authorities came to place Saint John under arrest, an angry crowd gathered to prevent them from taking their beloved bishop; however, Saint John went with them willingly – again, in order to prevent a civil disturbance which he feared would turn bloody.

During this time, a series of both natural and man-made disasters – including an earthquake, a fire at the Hagia Sophia and a barbarian invasion – were interpreted by Saint John’s supporters as Heavenly proof of his innocence and vindication of his cause. Saint John himself wrote epistles pleading his case with the bishops of the West, who attempted unsuccessfully to intercede on his behalf with the Emperor. Saint John was then sent outside the Empire into the Caucasus, forced to walk through months of cold and wet weather. Having fallen ill from the journey, he died en route in the Pontus, and his last words were: ‘Glory to God for all things!’

Saint John Chrysostom’s influence and legacy have been keenly felt. He was one of the most prolific saints speaking on topics of social justice, and his Homilies were read and translated as far afield as Kievan Rus’, where they no doubt had a deep impact on the unique form of caritative Christian social ethics that took root in that country. On the other hand, Saint John’s rhetorical style could also be polemical, and he wielded it to biting effect against Judaïsing Christians and homosexuals. This is a point on which his legacy comes under a great deal of scrutiny, some of it well-deserved (though certainly not all, and not in a blanket way).

In any event, the depth of his understanding; the moving power of his oratory; the keen concern he felt for the needy, the sick and the suffering; the love he had for the Church; the willingness he had to speak truth to the power of the Empress and her clique; the disposition he had to suffer rather than to do injustice – these are all things for which we rightly celebrate Saint John, who after his death was given the deserved epithet of ‘Golden-Mouthed’. Holy Father John, pray to Christ our God to have mercy upon us sinners!

Grace shining forth from your lips like a beacon has enlightened the universe.
It has shown to the world the riches of poverty;
It has revealed to us the heights of humility.
Teaching us by your words, O Father John Chrysostom,
Intercede before the Word, Christ our God, to save our souls!

Don’t be a sucker

I denied the ‘bromance’ in 2016, and I still deny it now. In fact, I’d say there’s more evidence of a bromance between the White House and a certain Slovenian Marxo-Freudian pop ‘philosopher’ than there ever was of one between the White House and the Kremlin.

The problem is, of course, that there’s never been that much ‘there’ there, when it comes to any sort of sub rosa relationship between the Russian and the American heads of state, and subsequent events have long since proven it. Trump’s surrogates have been attacking Russian interests in Syria and the Ukraine more actively than Obama’s had done, and just recently Tillerson has announced that the United States will be keeping a military presence in Syria, one committed to the removal of Assad, indefinitely. Obama’s one foreign policy initiative to have drawn praise and support from Putin, has been the one foreign policy initiative Trump has been the most assiduous about wanting to undo (to Putin’s chagrin).

The thing is, all of this was foreseeable, if one knew where to look. Trump did not offer substantive change, only a change of style. He was friendly with the NED; he was friendly with the big banks; he was friendly with the military contractors. What it boils down to is this: if Putin were for a moment to have believed that Trump was a trustworthy or useful surrogate in Washington, he would have to have been an idiot of colossal proportions.

And whatever else you may think of Russia’s President, an idiot he is not.

My advice to my fellows on the left would be to stop baying after the Russian collusion red-herrings, and start looking at what Trump actually does in office, whom his policies are actually meant to benefit. If you want to beat him, get a sense of strategy. Start looking at the big picture. Be as innocent as doves, but as wise as serpents. Don’t be blinkered by ideological blather from the American think-tank industrial complex. Trump’s closest friends on the international stage are decidedly not in Moscow and still less in Beijing, but in Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The more astute observers of American foreign policy, those with the best track record, have already seen ample enough evidence of this to draw that conclusion, and deplore it.

If we want to get serious about rebuilding an equitable, just, prosperous and respected America again, then we need to get back to basics. Liberal bromides from the Cold War – followed by people across the political board – need to be checked at the door. We need to look further back, to the éminences grises of great power politics in the past: specifically Metternich and Pobedonostsev. We need to focus on our domestic problems – particularly those related to healthcare, jobs, infrastructure, education and local government – and in so doing we need to rid ourselves, as the Federalists and British Tories of days past did, of the illusion that we have either permanent friends or permanent enemies on the international stage.

I say we’d do well to follow Dr Bacevich’s lead.

Brief housekeeping note

Yes, I know that the link to the Brown-Greer China expat piece is down. Completely. This isn’t the first time Blogger has disappointed me that way: the post disappeared as I was reformatting the sidebar. Speaking of which, please do check out the Bunakov Series, the Fedotov Series and the Realism and Erōs sections below! (Links are provided for reader convenience as well as my own.) Unfortunately I don’t have an archival copy saved; so I will have to rewrite it or a similar piece at some point in the future.

Parenting and cultural engagement

Rod Dreher has been going at it pretty hard these past few days. And by ‘it’ I mean lambasting post-Christian tech, pop and political culture and doing his book push. As the parent of a beautiful four-year-old daughter, a lot of the stuff he brings to light really does keep me up at night, and I really do agree that giving her her own smartphone before she’s old enough to drive really is a kind of moral insanity. And I can’t really fault him that much for promoting his own writing – Lord knows I’d do that too if I were lucky enough to be able to make a living from this blog – though I do rather take fault with the overly-defensive, brittle and uncharitable way that he does it, usually by accusing critics who clearly have read the book with having not read it.

Rod is right about one thing. The culture is changing, and clearly not for the better. Even so, culture is something manmade, and it philosophically stands therefore that it does not and cannot have full control over man – unless he lets it. As for my take on cultural engagement, and how and which media – books, music, movies, what have you – we should (allow our kids to) consume and produce: well, here it is, for what it’s worth.

• Have you heard of Sturgeon’s Law? If you have, great. If not, here it is: ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’. Got it? Good. Engrave it on your heart. In letters of fire. Bold. Italicised. Triple underlined.
  
  
• You aren’t weird for wanting to limit your child’s exposure. Hyperviolent, hypersexual, blasphemous film and print media are out there, and they’re ubiquitous. It’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want your child’s incredible, impressionable, absorbing young mind to be filled with it from an early age. Ratings are there for a reason.
  
  
• Did I mention Sturgeon’s Law yet? It’s important.
  
  
• Even G-rated media can be harmful. There’s a lot of television and movies which have a putative rating of ‘checked yay for youth’, which still encourage bad habits. Talking back to parents and teachers. Bullying or judging other children for their looks, tastes or socioœconomic status. Conforming to corporate-consumer standards of ‘individuality’. Thinking ‘tolerance’, ‘being nice’ and ‘getting along’, important as they are, are the same thing as genuinely caring about people. Forming poor or shortcut habits of thinking.
  
  
• Not all ‘edgy’ is bad. Believe it or not, even violent, risqué, cuss-dropping films and television can still be spiritually or intellectually edifying. Some of my very favourite films are R-rated, and some of them, like Fight Club and Witness, ask tough but meaningful questions with which our society ought to find it useful to grapple. Keep means and ends in mind, and remember that reality is messy. Of course, YMMV as far as the maturity of the person you’re watching it with.
  
  
• Sturgeon’s Law? Remember it.
  
  
• ‘Christian’ literature often falls in that ninety. Depressingly often. Too many are the Christian authors who think moralising or sermonising in the form of a movie or book makes it worth reading. Or conversely, trying to make Jesus-talk ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ instead of presenting the truly weird, counterintuitive religion that Christ showed and Paul taught: a scandal to the Greeks and a stumbling-block to the Jews. If you’re going to write a book, write a good book with a good story. If you’re going to make music, make beautiful music. Don’t be all weird and twitchy about it.
  
  
• It’s okay. Sometimes you can judge books by their covers. Sometimes.
  
  
• Don’t be the morality police. Better to be ‘Merrie’ – in the sixteenth-century English sense of the word – and risk perdition that way, than to be a self-righteous legalistic Puritan (or Old Believer schismatic, or Jansenist) and ensure it.
  
  
• That’s right. I said ninety percent of everything. Exercise good judgement. Use your experience and good sense. I guarantee you, that way you’ll weed out enough of the poison to stay sane.

Has this blog shifted left?

On my Facebook page, I got a comment from a deeply-respected reader of this blog to the effect that it seemed I was going ‘soft’ on socialism. I had actually described myself as ‘Orthodox, monarchist, socialist – in that order’, and in light of my recent post on RH Tawney, this seemed to be a cause for concern.

Let me clarify my position, then. I don’t think the shift, if there has been one, has been that drastic; it’s more a shift in emphasis than in conviction. To some of my gentle readers, it may confirm what they had long suspected; to others, it may allay some of their concerns. As long as this blog has been active, I have considered myself a ‘man of the Left’, albeit one with a strong Tory streak. My biggest objections to socialism in the main, were its tendencies toward materialism and toward urban chauvinism, but I’ve also had a long-standing appreciation for the post- (or non-)Marxist socialisms of people like Ruskin, Morris, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Vonnegut, Fei, Wang and Miyazaki. The fact that there are Orthodox saints and martyrs like Blessed Ilya Fondaminsky and Mother Maria Skobtsova, whose socialist-revolutionary instincts never really went away on conversion, but in fact led them to a self-sacrificial embrace of Christ in the concentration camps, heartens me quite a bit as well.

I still do have a significant level of respect for distributism – and particularly for Chesterton and Mihalache. At the same time, the cliquish tendency among distributists to artificially distance themselves from their closest cousins (the guild socialists and the social-credit movement) has become somewhat irritating to me. I do understand the differences and their importance – I have, after all, read Mitrany’s book and understand its critiques, even of the ‘democratic’ socialists who threw peasant movements under the bus for the sake of ideological rigour. I also understand the ideologically-motivated, malicious and dishonest desire on the part of distributism’s ideological foes to tar it with a ‘red’ brush. I know exactly how this causes a certain level of defensiveness on the part of distributism’s committed defenders. At the same time, it strikes me as equally dishonest to understate or ignore the importance of the Oxford Movement and the left-radicalisms of Cobbett and Morris on distributism’s development in the West (Chesterton did, after all, love him some Cobbett!), or of narodnichestvo on its development in the East, through transitional figures like Svetozar Marković in Yugoslavia and Constantin Stere in Romania. German revisionists like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein were notably influential on the most successful distributist statesman of the Green Rising, Bulgaria’s Aleksandar Stamboliyski.

The other reason my thinking has taken a more Fabian turn of late is precisely this: distributism requires a far fuller and more cogent awareness of its radical roots if it is to retain its character. Allan Carlson, in his book Third Ways (a read I highly recommend, by the way), not only engages fruitfully and in interesting ways with the legacy of Karl Polanyi and the forgotten story of how Ellen Key’s ‘Swedish socialist housewives’ battled against the creeping ideology of defamilialisation. He also issues a stern warning to the would-be torchbearers of distributism and Christian democracy in our age. He notes the sharp turn of the Christian Democratic parties in the 1950’s away from the Catholic personalist radicalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Stephen Borne toward a bureaucratised, bourgeois ethic:

As early as the 1950s, Christian democracy as a vital worldview entered another period of crisis. The youthful excitement, energy and sense of positive Christian revolution evident in the 1940s dissipated… In Italy and West Germany, Christian democratic parties consolidated their hold on power at the price of their vision. By the early 1960s, they were increasingly pragmatic and bureaucratic, self-satisfied defenders of the status quo. Ambitious office-seekers, rather than Christian idealists, came to dominate the parties. Movements for ‘moral and spiritual renewal’ became simply mass parties of the right-of-centre. When a new ‘crisis of values’ hit Europe with particular force in the 1960s, the Christian democrats were unprepared to respond. They appeared by then to be old and discredited guardians of a new kind of materialism, the very opposite of what the movement’s visionaries had intended.

It’s precisely this turn in the Christian democratic movement in this country – the American Solidarity Party – that I’m most coming to fear. The party builders in many of the state-level outfits seem more concerned with building a big tent of the centre-right, than with challenging the Lockean presuppositions of our mainstream politics and articulating a genuine alternative to the two big parties. My explorations into Tawney and Cole, and my turn toward the saintly Bunakov for inspiration, comes straight from Carlson’s warning and example. Perhaps a good hard shot of Fabianism (of the localist, industrial-democratic variety which also takes virtue ethics seriously) is just the thing needed.

Dear Democrats

I know you’re feeling pretty bummed today. Well, I don’t blame you. You just lost the House, the Senate and the White House – all three in the same night. But you’re not alone: I feel the same way. And I bet the last thing you’ll want to hear right now is an angry lefty blogger telling you ‘I told you so’. But if you don’t want this to happen again, please, please hear me out.

I’m a ‘white’ (see below) male Christian millennial and an economically left-of-centre Wisconsin native on the very bottom rung of the middle class (for clarification: I live in an apartment, have no credit score, and spent the last year and a half functionally unemployed and separated from my family). I am exactly the sort of voter you couldn’t afford to lose, and you not only lost me, but you actively chased me away for genuinely believing in the important things (a realist foreign policy, a rejection of needless austerity measures and voodoo economics, universal health care, a fair and stable economy that works for everyone rather than just the privileged few) that Obama represented when he came to office in 2008. As such, I went third-party. But at certain points I was tempted, and could very easily have, gone over to the bloviating orange-faced grifter in anger and frustration, as many in my respective demographics did.

For a little bit of personal context, I write this as, last night, I got a letter back from my DFL senator Amy Klobuchar, who – when I wrote expressing my concerns that either this administration or the next would get us into a potentially disastrous war with Russia, and asking her what she planned to do about it – sent me back a form letter that says absolutely nothing pertinent about my question, but talked about the need for ‘targetted strikes’ against Daesh and the need to welcome Syrian refugees into Minnesota. As a result, I went to sleep thinking the Democrats deserved to lose all the way across the board in this election. And boy oh boy, last night did you ever get it. And you know what? I’m nowhere near close to happy about that fact.

Why am I not happy? Well, where to begin? Trump has no intention of doing a damn thing to protect the interests of people like me, let alone the folks worse off than me: the white working stiffs who gave him their votes, and who would be well-served by things Trump has no interest in – like a reformed money system that doesn’t take us back to the dark ages, and decent, publicly-managed infrastructure and services. For another thing, I belong to the (((wrong kind))) of white people. For yet another thing, I’m married to a Chinese immigrant who (with some difficulty and no small amount of time invested) came here legally. I know the rhetoric is that Trump only cares about getting rid of illegal immigrants, but for some reason I doubt either he or his supporters are willing to countenance such minutiae in practice. For still another thing, I happen to have a deep affection for Iran, her civilisation, her art and her people, whereas Trump sees them all as terrorists and wants to go to war with them over ‘rude gestures’.

So here’s a bit of real talk from a realist. If you don’t want another election like this one (and I know I don’t), perhaps you’ll listen to me. But I’m going to break it down point-by-point for you.

1. Cut the ‘narrative’ bullshit. Give us the policies. I don’t want to hear, and I honestly couldn’t care less, about how hard Clinton had it coming up through the Walmart executive ranks, or about how women ‘identify’ with her. But that’s a huge portion of what I heard from the Salon, Vox, Jezebel and New York Times crowd in this election cycle – how she’s always faced a double standard in her career, how she should be given a break because she’s a woman, and how I personally am a sexist for disagreeing with her policies. Well, you know what? I give women way more credit than that. I think (most) adult women can handle a few tough questions about policy, no? Which leads me to my next few points:
   
   
2. Stop supporting the damn bankers. Let’s get back to basics. Stop taking their donations and their endorsements. They’re clearly not doing you any good. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, CitiGroup and the rest of them clearly don’t give a damn about us in flyover country. So how does it look to us when our representatives and senators do everything they can to bail them out, and don’t lift a finger to help us out with our credit problems? (And believe me, we still have credit problems!) Don’t tell us that Bernie’s plans for reforming the banks and providing public postal savings banking are somehow pie-in-the-sky, or aren’t feasible, or aren’t realistic. I’ve lived in China – I did research on the PSBC for Positive Planet China, for crying out loud. I know how well they work for rural people, especially when they are compared side-by-side with the big privately-owned banks. What’s lacking isn’t know-how; what’s lacking is political will, and the big bankers stole that from you a long time ago with the temptations of lucre.
   
   
3. Take a better stand on providing decent public goods. You know, like health insurance! Practically every other nation with an advanced economy – and even several others without – have universal health care policies that work just fine and that most people are happy with. Hillary Clinton’s new-public-management muddling, triangulation and incrementalism are precisely the wrong kind of signal that needs to be sent in a campaign season when ordinary folks are worried about their premiums going up, and not being able to afford the privatised health insurance plans that you made them buy!
   
   
4. Support domestic manufacturing. And actually listen to the unions while you’re at it. You really screwed the pooch on this one, and let Trump outflank you from the left. If you want to win us back in the slippery Midland states of Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, well, this is how you do it. Again, it’s not a matter of ‘can’t be done’ – we have plenty of need for actual things in this country that people want to buy. Including high-tech things. We don’t need to outsource manufacturing to make those things for ourselves at an affordable cost; we just need the manufacturers to accept slightly-lower profit margins instead of chasing down the cheapest possible Southeast Asian near-slave labour. We could create a domestic manufacturing boom tomorrow by shunting some of our misbegotten military budget into, say, NASA and space exploration, and give guarantees to laid-off contract workers that they can take their union benefits straight into those space jobs! (And no, I’m afraid extraction-based boondoggles that ship overseas don’t count as supporting domestic manufacturing.) Or, better yet:
   
   
5. Write a job-guarantee policy. Set out a plan to actually implement the Humphrey-Hawkins Act which is already on the books – a solid piece of Democratic legislative craft which deserves to have a far more distinguished legacy than it does. Putting Humphrey-Hawkins into practice will involve some necessary changes to monetary policy, though, be forewarned – and in the short run those changes may be fairly painful. But the long-term benefits will be very, very much appreciated by the people whose votes you ought to be trying to win.
   
   
6. Stop getting us into all these hare-brained wars. Stop rattling the sabre with Russia over a former piece of the Ukraine that isn’t going back anytime soon. Stop funding and arming the Saudis – they’ll just sell the weapons to crazy people. Stop bombing the Houthis, the Pakistanis and the Afghans. Stop supporting colour revolutions and ‘soft coups’. Stop saying ‘Assad must go’ when clearly he isn’t going anywhere. Stop creating needless refugee crises that we then have to ‘fix’ by (selectively) opening our borders. Stop making Trump – a man who wants to go to war with Iran over ‘rude gestures’ – look like a voice of reason on foreign affairs!
   
   
7. Allow room in your party for pro-lifers. You don’t ever need to lose another election if you stop worshipping at the altar of Moloch. I’m completely serious about this. Every single one of those Western European social democracies you profess to admire so much has far more stringent legal restrictions on abortion, particularly late-term ones, than we do – and they provide first-class health care and welfare services for new mothers! The future working-class demographic shouldn’t be artificially and brutally pruned with eugenic family-planning policies designed by the upper class, and we’re not monstrous misogynists or the enemies of women for saying so!
   
   
8. Stop hating on gun owners. I’m all for common-sense restrictions and gun licences that keep guns out of the hands of criminals, the same way and for the same reason we keep cars out of the hands of drunks. But guns are a tool, just like cars are. The fact of owning a gun doesn’t make one a child murderer or a brute or a troglodyte. But generally:
   
   
9. Stop telling people you disagree with to FOAD. Dismissing people as ‘racists’ for failing to conform to the latest highfalutin academic missives on white privilege might make you feel good and virtuous, but for obvious reasons, it’s not good politics in any sort of representative system of government. Same with calling people ‘sexists’ or ‘bros’ for daring to oppose a woman with bad policies, on the grounds that her policies suck. Same with telling millennials that they’re being spoiled brats for supporting a politician with actual values. Same with ganging up on people on Twitter to shout them down for tacky fashion choices. Same with trying to get people fired from their jobs for disagreeing with you. Cut that classist bullshit right out.

Well, there it is. If you don’t want this to happen again, then I humbly suggest get back to the values that you once stood for. Bernie Sanders (who, by the way, would have wiped the floor with Trump in the states you needed to win) left you a signpost, even if he didn’t take that road all the way. It’s up to you to follow it now.

Sincerely,
Matthew

Rod Liddle gets it

I have been thinking these days more and more about Dr. Strangelove, and how the attitudes and rhetoric in the American centre-left-to-centre-right with regard to Russia more and more resembles the anti-human arithmetical logic of General ‘Buck’ Turgidson in that film. And the reasoning we give for this idiotic sabre-rattling, all woven from the same century-old ideological tissue of Wilsonian Whiggery and interventionism which this blog has opposed from the very start, all drawing from the same tainted wells as the boosters of the horrific wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, resembles nothing so much as the unbalanced obsession of a certain fictional general over the imagined threat to the purity of his bodily fluids. But the ramifications of this rhetoric, risible as it is, are deadly in tenor, and this brinkmanship game against a power which is not directly threatening our national interests (but which is fully capable of defending itself) on the part of NATO and the American elites heading it, is an act of sheer strategic stupidity.

It seems no one gets this as well as the notably-cantankerous British Labour journalist Rod Liddle at the Spectator, who understands both the moral stakes and the history in the current dust-up (again) over Syria. He understands perfectly well that

1. There is no competent governing authority in Syria apart from Assad;
2. Russia’s actions supporting Assad may be heavy-handed, but they are in fact defensive, have standing historical precedent, and are well within the realm of international law;
3. Our governments’ actions supporting a fantasy of ‘nice moderates’ (but a reality of head-lopping Wahhabi extremists), on the other hand, are not;
4. Those actions are ‘done in the name of dippy, well-meaning, liberal evangelism’; and
5. These actions have ‘cost far more lives than can be laid at the door of the Russkies and Vladimir Putin’; and
6. The quickest way to end this most uncivil war with the least possible loss of human life is to ensure an Assad victory.

But it’s clear that our bourgeois élite class, mired as they are in a narcissism which defies reality every bit as much as the fictional Jack D. Ripper’s delusions do, have no interest in a peace that would help to stabilise the region, balance power between (again, a non-threatening) Iran and her hostile Sunni neighbours, and lessen the risk to the American populace of terrorist attack in the future. No – they want a free hand to shape the region according to their ideological whims, which are obfuscated in a haze of self-serving rhetoric about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ – rhetoric whose emptiness is revealed by the bland evasion of responsibility for listening to actual Syrians on the ground about what they want or about what would be best for them.

Or rather, they want to go back to the more comfortable black-and-white logic of 1964, when there was a clear-cut ideological enemy that really was out to destroy us. Such logic, however convenient, is not without its flaws – as Rod Liddle points out something quite important: ‘[y]ou cannot divest a country of its empire, its political system and raison d’être, its industry, its jobs, its money, its prestige and world stature in five or six short years and not expect some sort of rebound, some sort of hankering after the old way of life … a hankering after Putin’. But here’s the thing. Putin was not, at first, an anti-Western politician. He was part of the Eltsin administration; and he took over in the hope of reaching some kind of conciliation with the West. But the West repeatedly frustrated his hopes with the needless provocations of a recklessly-expanding and increasingly-hostile NATO. Putin simply arrived at the same conclusions as any self-respecting national leader would do after meeting with incessant insults, provocations and military encroachment. I say this as someone who has never been entirely convinced of the goodness of Putin’s policies. But Putin now has a ready and willing base of support in the shape of eighty per cent of the Russian populace, which he never would have had if we hadn’t continued our arrogant hegemonic policies in Russia’s near-abroad, which any Tory worth his realist salt back in the day would have told you was a bad idea.

As insane now as it has ever been

Father Stephen Freeman, of Glory to God for All Things, writes this prophetic missive on his Facebook page:

Prior to 1989, the political test for American parties was often measured by how strong their opposition was to Soviet Communism (i.e. Russia). Reagan called them the “Evil Empire.” The Democratic party was considered far too soft and willing to compromise, and was even accused of being sympathetic to the interests of Communist philosophy.

When B. Clinton took office, he sounded a stronger note of a willingness to wage war. Of course, the Soviet Union had fallen, so a surrogate was found: Serbia. In what has now been shown to be a war largely based on propaganda and false flag operations, Serbia was beaten into submission, and a new Muslim state, backed by NATO, was established in Eastern Europe.

The Democratic party was also established as a party deeply committed to the American war machine. The American incursions into Iraq and Afganistan were supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Both wars have resulted in massive devastation but with no substantive change in terror operations. The purported reasons for those wars have either been ignored, or must be counted as defeats for our military.

The recent administration gleefully supported the “Arab Spring,” in what was reported to be popular uprisings against various governments of the Mideast. Time is gradually showing those uprisings to have been largely engineered by America, with much the same result as our operations in Iraq and Afganistan. We have not made the world safe for democracy, we have simply made some places unsafe to live.

The so-called Civil War in Syria which now occupies our attention, is not a true “civil war.” The various groups which make-up the opposition to the government are all financed, trained and equipped by America and Saudi Arabia. But it has been the place where the Arab Spring Project of America's war industry came to a halt.

And this brings us back to Russia. Both parties seem hell-bent on showing how strong they are by posturing themselves as the champions of freedom standing up to the demonic threat of Putin. The only threat to which they can point is found in Ukraine, where another American/NATO-sponsored color revolution failed to produce its desired result. Russia refused to renounce its own national interests.

Sadly, and dangerously, our rhetoric has ramped up to such a pitch that we actually speak of war with Russia. This is the same Russia with the same nuclear and conventional forces that have existed for a long time. War is as insane now as it has ever been.

And strangely, there is no evil ideology to which we can point, such as communism, that is somehow behind a dark Kremlin. The worst charges we can bring are Russia's defense of its Church and its lack of hospitality towards the social agenda of the gender revolution. If there is any ideology that is being nurtured among its people, it is Christianity.

What has not changed is the American military-industrial complex. A legacy of WWII and the Cold War, America remains mired in a war economy in which over $600 billion is allocated to the military per year. Our recent wars have cost trillions.

What gets overlooked is the simple fact that fortunes are being made. The American war machine is the American cash machine. We cannot point to ideological or political success - only to destruction and mayhem, and yet we continue to rattle the swords. That noise is a signal to the cash machine that the business of America is war and will remain so.

How did we become this nation?

Please urge your elected representatives to resist the call to arms and the insanity of more war. No good can come from it - and much evil will result.

We are not being threatened. Russia is not an enemy.

Indeed. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Thank you indeed, Father Stephen! Let us pray as the Church prays, for Russia, for Syria and Egypt and all the peoples of the Middle East, for our civil authorities, for the armed forces and for the peace of our nation; but beyond that, let’s get organised and make sure that the former two do not abuse or destroy the last. This is important. Join an anti-war movement. If you’re in the Twin Cities area, join us at the Anti-War Committee. Get loud. Get seen. Get heard. Tell Washington that their war machine is not being run in our name, and we won’t permit it to run with our consent no matter who gets elected in November.

A realist-left primer?

Clockwise from top left: Lasch, Solzhenitsyn, Mailer, Berry

Someone – and I would be more than happy to work together with the Realist Left and Lord Keynes on this – should put together a primer on the realist left, encompassing primarily (but not exclusively) American thinkers, poets, activists and essayists of the past century who embraced the sort of values we stand for: firm commitments to the working class, to fair trade and to the family, but also a deep-seated scepticism toward crypto-libertarian fragmentation, regressive identitarianism and the ‘lifestyle’ elements kindled by the American New Left. My modest suggestions, at this point, would include Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Norman Mailer and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Advisedly, of course, as I realise that these are all ‘cultural’ scholars, and the interests of Lord Keynes and Realist Left do swing more toward the economic side of the equation. I still hope that they would generate some interest.

Christopher Lasch is something of a no-brainer here. He began his idiosyncratic sociological career as a Freud-inspired Marxist, and throughout his career he never lost his deep-seated leftist revulsion at the entire capitalist structure or the narcissistic personality traits it encouraged. But as his career went on he began to see these same narcissistic predilections at work in the same ‘radical’ elements of the counterculture that claimed to want to displace capitalism. He saw in this ‘radicalism’ several decidedly non-radical, alienating elements: the abandonment of the family; the managerial revolution in the liberal arts; the obsession with youth and its maintenance; the elevation of ‘busyness’ as virtue; the pursuit of sexual pleasure at all costs and the corresponding ‘flight from feeling’; the shift from grassroots-radical producerism to the accommodationist language of ‘social mobility’; and the encroachment of a welfare system run by degree-holding ‘experts’ (usually with faux-‘radical’ lifestylist social agendas) upon the lives of working-class families. He grew deeply, perhaps even overly, critical of the communitarians for a ‘sentimentality’ which corroded their insistence on overlapping meshes of rights and responsibilities – but he embraced environmentalism as a form of politics which encouraged class solidarity and continuity between generations. Together with Lawrence Goodwyn (with whom he studied), he is one of the foremost historians of the populists of the 1880’s and 1890’s, whose heterodox economic and monetary ideas find echoes in modern monetary theory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may not be as much of a no-brainer, on account of the obscurantist and reactionary reputation he has gotten in American circles as a result of his Harvard address in 1978. And it is true: he supported the continuation of the Vietnam War, and the critique implicit in his address to Harvard was as much aimed at the ‘softness’ and mushy-headedness of the American academic and countercultural left as it was against the Communists who took over his motherland. He was no friend to the antecedents of the regressive left. He was a true patriot who loved both the nation he was exiled from, and the nation which sheltered him. Yet he was no war hawk – he spoke out with his wonted prophetic vehemence against the military campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. His economic ideas themselves tended toward a kind of decentralised economic democracy. Not only did he speak up (perhaps surprisingly to some) in favour of a form of the local soviet model as it had been originally envisioned in the early days of the Russian revolution, but he also had a high respect and admiration for the backwoods-Yankee town hall culture as it was practised in his adoptive Vermont. Also, similarly to Lasch, even though he wasn’t anti-industry per se, he endorsed an environmental-conservationist ethic because he felt that high-profile, top-down, wasteful boondoggles were ruining Russian communities and laying waste to Russian families, selling off Russia’s true patrimony to support its sprawling imperial ambitions abroad.

Wendell Berry is another kindred spirit in the same vein: the poet-prophet of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, the American farmer and the disappearing small town. The realist left may find some to disagree with in his sceptical treatments of (in particular) the ‘food industry’ (though I’d hope they appreciate his principled opposition to ‘free trade’ dogmas), but, critical as they are of globalism, they will also find much to love in his championing of local communities and local businesses, his championing of ‘producerism’, and his opposition to the proletarianisation of much of rural America. They may also enjoy the well-deserved literary lashing he once delivered to his gender-feminist critics back in 2003, as he defended the family, the family economy, and the growth of family-based industry and production. On the topic of immigration, he has decried the ‘mean’ sloganeering of both the xenophobic right and the regressive left, and called for a balanced, humane approach which respected all three of the law, the local economy, and the demands of those genuinely fleeing from violence and deprivation.

Last but certainly not least on my current list is the prodigious counterculture essayist and novelist Norman Mailer. I confess that I’ve been quite remiss on my Mailer for these several years in which he’s been on my radar; I have yet to read anything by him longer than a publicly-available essay. Yet what I have read from and about him has been intriguing. He was an ideologically-evasive and politically-incorrect man-of-letters, often (literally) pugilistic in his high-profile academic and literary feuds. He was, in the words of Taki Theodoracopulos, ‘anathema to those censorious leftists and middlebrow novelists who are taken seriously nowadays’. But he called himself a ‘left-conservative’, and his critics described him as a ‘radical moralist’: he wants to promote equality and alternatives to capitalism while at the same time conserving, in his own words, ‘family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance’ and other ‘dependable human virtues’. Yet at first glance, his books seem suffused with the horrifying possibility that neither, ultimately, may be possible in our current cultural moment… Certainly some more in-depth reading is due on my part in order to get the gist of his thinking, but I would like to give him a tentative boost here.

At any rate, perhaps a project to consider, in the broader interests of keeping it real and keeping it left.

Alt-erior motives

In recent weeks, particularly due to the election season, we’ve seen a growing attention to a certain, primarily online political presence, called the ‘alt-right’. These netizens have been gaining influence for quite some time, and not least because of the attention being paid to them now by the political candidates running for president. It seems somewhat relevant now to pay them a bit of heed, given their growing prominence.

Here’s the thing: I follow a handful of the ‘alt-right’ websites with some significant interest: in particular, The Unz Review (I was personally acquainted with one of the contributors when I worked as an English teacher in Luoyang) and Social Matter. Generally these sites are thoughtful, interesting and entertaining, even when they happen to be wrong – even spectacularly wrong. And there are certain things on which the alt-right and I find fairly significant agreement, at least in negative terms. I share with the alt-right a deep hostility to imperialism and wars waged in the far abroad for idealistic and ‘democratic’ reasons. In fact, I share with the alt-right a profound distrust of parliamentarian proceduralism itself (or at least, the ideological faith so many mainstream liberals put in it). Like the alt-rightists, I view globalism as doing as much harm as good to genuine human communities based on geography and tradition. Also like the alt-rightists, I don’t view immigration and ‘free trade’ as necessary, positive goods. And finally, the alt-rightists and I agree that culture, broadly stated, is ultimately more important than economics.

But, high among my political commitments, I am a realist. Realists recognise core interests as needful in any alliance. If there’s anything I’ve learnt from the past decade-and-a-half of political engagement, it’s that core interests need to be determined before committing to any kind of shared action. Otherwise, as our government has ably shown, in our pursuit of projecting our model of governance abroad and remaking the world in our image, we will ally ourselves with Islamic jihadists in Syria one day, and FEMEN in Poland the next; or we will ally ourselves with out-and-out fascists in the Ukraine and simultaneously with sycophantic native-informant neocon ‘activists’ like China’s Liu Xiaobo or Russia’s Garry Kasparov. Core interests presume at least a partial positive shared understanding of the common good; and if that shared understanding doesn’t exist, ultimately an alliance will lead to strategic errors and conflicts of interest, ultimately bringing more harm than good. So the question with regard to the alt-rightists is: what the hell are you for?

That question, it turns out, is somewhat difficult to answer. The online alt-right presence is expressed largely through memes and macros, and their expression is usually aimed not at anything substantive, but with an eye specifically to offending those they imagine are easily-offended. They are the equivalents of Marilyn Manson, Tucker Max and Howard Stern – which should give you some idea that they are ‘pop-cultural’ in orientation rather than either ‘high-cultural’ or ‘folk-cultural’. It becomes necessary, then, to look at the lacunae they leave; the residue of intellectual assumptions behind the memes. What is left on the alt-right at the end of the day, is a rancid mixture of free-speech absolutism, postmodernism and white identity politics – none of which I find particularly appealing on their own merits.

The free-speech absolutism of the alt-right, in fact, is one of the reasons I’ve taken to looking at tribal values on their own merits. The Teutonic tribes of yore, even as they were not yet fully Christianised, understood that speech had power, and as such they had the good sense to regulate it, albeit informally. It is no accident, and should come as no surprise to the students of ‘human biodiversity’, that the American cultures and subcultures which descend directly from northern European immigrants (Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish settlers who came to the Upper Midwest and Plains states, for example; or the northern English colonial, and later Russian and Polish, settlement in Pennsylvania) tend to be so ‘nice’ – and it has nothing at all to do with any ideological commitment to ‘political correctness’. It has much more to do with the fact that, historically, armed societies have been polite societies, and if you said something un-‘nice’ to another warrior or his kin in a tribal society, you ran the risk of sparking off a deadly blood-feud. It is actually only in the context of an overly-feminised, atomised, homogenised and deracinated culture that the sort of Internet-based incivility and free-speech absolutism which the alt-right represent stand a chance of becoming socially-acceptable.

The postmodernism and the identity politics on the alt-right, on the other hand, are all too common, and as clear as day to those with the wit to see them. When reading alt-right screeds on Breitbart or on Taki, it is fairly obvious that they have studied long and hard at the feet of the Frankfurters and the Poststructuralists, and are eager to join battle with their teachers using the selfsame weapons. They lament their victim status with all the eagerness and crocodile tears of a teenage Tumblrista; the only difference is that they take offence on behalf of a slighted white identity. As Tom Slater puts it, ‘they may take up arms against weepy identitarians, but they share the same, deadening sense of victimhood – just with another set of dreamt-up grievances attached’.

The postmodernism doesn’t stop there, though. Still creepier to my mind, drawn as I am to certain traditional values, is this interest I see on the alt-right for transhumanist fantasies and schemes to break and remake both human society and the human subject, in ways which would have utterly appalled the Old Right (who in general had a meet and proper appreciation for the small vices, the hypocrisies and especially the habitual inertia of the everyday, common man). Read that passage in Yiannopoulos’s piece linked in my first paragraph describing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s scheme for stripping away social inhibitions for the purpose of getting human beings to think like machines, and see if that doesn’t chill the blood. It’s the stuff of Dickian and Gibsonian nightmares, CS Lewis’s NICE writ large. It is, in point of fact, the one aspect of the alt-right which is with true justification linked to fascism. I can, of course, understand why such schemes have an appeal to certain classes and subcultures, primarily haute-bourgeois Silicon Valley desk jockeys and start-up investors. It is a truism that a class which has managed to convince itself of its own superior intellect will come to see itself as the rightful ruling class. But God save us all from any government run by such ‘experts’.

On the other hand, there are two versions of the alt-left that I have seen forming. One of them, sadly, joins the alt-right’s pathetic postmodernism and white identity politics to sexual hedonism and transhumanism. The result bears an uncanny resemblance to Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevik street theatrics: the worst attributes of the lifestyle-left combined with the worst of the alt right; a poseur’s version of being rebellious and ‘transgressive’ through breaking race and sex taboos alike, and offering the very worst dregs of 19^th-century futurist thought in their place. The other version, though, the banner of which has been taken up by the blog of ‘Lord Keynes’, is far more sensible, to say the least! It explicitly rejects the postmodernist and identitarian direction of the alt-right as well as the ‘regressive [SJW] left’, but it retains the realist, anti-imperialist, anti-globalist, post-liberal and modernity-sceptical (that is to say, High Tory-derived) aspects of alt-rightdom that I’m inclined to respect in the first place. I’d very much like to see more of the ‘alts’ drawn into this ambit.

At the end of the day, what we need is not an ‘alt-right’ given to the weaknesses of late-19^th and early-20^th-century radicals, and guided by postmodernist and transhumanist delusions. What we need instead, if you will forgive me the anachronistic English wordplay, is an ‘eld-right’ driven by the modestly-cosmopolitan, virtue-ethical and realist suppositions posited by the High Tories and those who followed in their footsteps.