nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Bonald writes:

I doubt there are any observations or arguments here that haven’t been written down by past generations of conservatives, many times before.  Given French legitimism, Jesuit natural law communitarianism, Dutch Calvinist sphere sovereignty, German Right Hegelianism, Russian mysticism, American Agrarianism, and the metahistorical masterpieces of Spengler and Voegelin, one sees that conservatism is poor neither in arguments nor in genius.  What it does lack is a tradition.  The irony here is exquisite, isn’t it?  Conservative thinkers do brilliant work, but it doesn’t get passed down.  A T. S. Eliot, say, will produce a powerful defense of some aspect of conservatism.  It will perhaps be noted, but then quickly forgotten, while the grand narrative–”conservatives are stupid; they have no ideas, just inherited prejudices”–remains untouched.  The next generation of conservatives begins intellectually from scratch.  We reproduce a small bit of what these earlier generations did, and we think ourselves very clever.

The obvious difference between modern-day conservatives and earlier generations thereof is that we have much greater access to information. Most research no longer requires days of digging through forgotten corners of libraries in search of the slightest clue as to how to proceed; these days, we can just hit Wikipedia for pointers, and Google Books and the Internet Archive serve up all but the last few generations of conservative thought.

The results? Carlyleanism, distributism, monarchism, slow history made easy. Access to narratives beyond those of the establishment. The power of our technology to challenge the prevailing narratives of our time has surely been covered many times before, but I doubt anyone has considered which narratives those are. We’ve always had Marx, but only now do we have Belloc.

(Incidentally, this is why I have no problem with e-readers. Actually buying ebooks from places like Amazon is problematic, to say the least, but I would much rather not have to stare at a computer screen to read Carlyle.)

So, here we are. Christmas Eve. I’m sitting in the corner of a McDonald’s, chugging down my third gallon of sweet tea, mulling over the real possibility of ending up homeless for a few days, thanks to the latest in a long series of family issues bordering on—no, firmly planted in, irretrievably sunk WIPP-style in—the absurd. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and, although some of the singers of the Spanish-language Christmas carols (why would they translate something as terrible as Jingle Bell Rock?!) do have ridiculous American accents, I haven’t heard a word of English since I ordered. What fun.

Such things make it far easier to understand the liberal absurdity of “emancipation”, described most accurately by Carlyle:

Certainly the notion everywhere prevails among us too, and preaches itself abroad in every dialect, uncontradicted anywhere so far as I can hear, that the grand panacea for social woes is what we call “enfranchisement,” “emancipation;” or, translated into practical language, the cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally the case at the rate we have been going for some generations past. Let us all be “free” of one another; we shall then be happy.

Our institutions are flawed, and rather severely so; not only that, but the flaws—more accurately, the heresies, for heresy is, as Belloc said, nothing more than “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein”*—are aspects of an ideology, Moldbug’s “Universalism”, which has been on the rise for anywhere between two and twenty centuries, and now clearly holds the scepter of prestige in the entire Western world. (Of course, one who follows Alain de Benoist’s origin story of Universalism would not see it as a heresy at all, but my sense of decency prevents me from criticizing Christianity one day from the center of its calendar—a center for which we may very well have capitalism to thank, since I, at least, would expect the center to be the far more theologically significant and far less easily commercializable Easter. But on the other hand, as early as 1833, it “all other doth efface”.) Given all this, is it any surprise that those institutions are commonly seen as irreparable?

Anyway, it is Christmas Eve, so I suppose I should post something in the spirit of the season. Here’s the least intolerable version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen that I could find, besides the instrumental Mannheim Steamroller versions:

And a relevant bit of context from Frost:

Whether you believe in the particulars or not, I think the ideas of God and The Devil as metaphors for the just authority and the temptations of evil are useful. If you believe in Good and Justice, why not call this natural order ‘God’? If you believe in Evil, why not call its personification ‘The Devil’? I make this mental substitution all the time when reading dusty old books, and it works just fine for me.

Leaving aside the problematic notion (it is a rare man who can withstand violations of subsidiarity with his morals intact!) of one “Savior … to save us all from Satan’s power”—a notion that Alain de Benoist would surely call Christian to the core—the message is strikingly relevant. Nobody at this point can deny that we have strayed far into the clutches of Satan, although if you ask ten people, you’ll get eleven Satans; we clearly now stand at the beginning of a paradigm shift, but there is agreement on neither the paradigm nor the shift. (My own prediction is that, just as the last century belonged to the left, this one will belong to the right. After all, the first Whig was the Devil. But I am most likely either too optimistic or too pessimistic here; it’s anyone’s guess as to which.)

* As for Belloc, I doubt the practical existence of such a scheme as he posits; there are many complete, self-supporting schemes out there, but none that can withstand the human factor. One that could, of course, would be utopian. This probably relates to dialectics somehow, but I’ll leave that up to someone more well-versed in that system than I.

In closing:

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface:
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

Mangan provides a definition of duocodicalism in action:

those laws which hinder [the globalizing elite] go unenforced, those which serve them are enforced.

Of course, this only applies when the globalizing elite are the ones in charge, as they are in the case of the federal government. One can easily imagine duocodicalism being used to further agendas that would be distinctly distasteful to said elite. Duocodicalism is a tool in the toolbox of the ideologue; like many other tools, it can be used for almost any purpose.

Anarcho-tyranny is the endgame of duocodicalism. Those who support certain tyrants will support the instances of duocodicalism that bring those tyrants closer to power. Duocodicalism can also arise out of honest confusion over the proper role of politics, but that’s another post for another time.

To accept the exercise of power by a government of one’s allies, one must also accept the same exercise by a government of one’s enemies.

To accept the suppression of speech found morally objectionable by a government whose ideology one supports, one must also accept the suppression of speech found morally objectionable by a government whose ideology one does not.

The easiest way to find out which ideology holds power at any given time is to find the one whose adherents support the most suppression of speech. Consider the schoolbook fable of the Puritans: it is said that they protested the lack of religious freedom in England, but established theocracy in their colonies. Better yet, consider National Socialism: they burned books in Nazi Germany, but enlisted the legal aid of the ACLU in America.

It is now said that there is an “international consensus”, backed by the United Nations, that ‘hate speech’ is to be suppressed. What does this say about where power lies?