nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

The absurdities of contemporary society outlined in my previous post come from one clear source: the individualist ideography. Human relations are cast as oppressive restraints, and their participants, due to their nature as interchangeable, detached souls existing outside all human constructs, must be liberated from all such oppression, set free to… well, to do what? Individualism is largely silent on that question, but in practice, all it frees most people to do (in the first world, at least; its policies have been far more disastrous in other areas, most notably the former Rhodesia) is march listlessly about in architectural monstrosities of glass and concrete on weekdays and hammer themselves into the ground with cheap beer at night. Meaningless people living meaningless lives, inhabiting places that cannot be homes, occasionally falling into narcissistic restatements, whether New Age or liberal, of the dogma that created their problems in the first place. Or, of course, drug addiction. Anything to escape the hell they have no language to acknowledge.

Without structure, there can be no virtue, only subsistence. Asian parenting tactics are widely opposed, and even in my opinion a bit extreme (mostly because they focus on the wrong things; Asian culture emphasizes skill in repetition over skill in thought, which is useful for getting the best government bureaucrats, but not much else), but when was the last time you saw a white college student with actual competence? As in parenting, so in society: lack of structure breeds failure and apathy.

I saw a high school acquaintance go down that road. He was on the MIT track, but due to circumstances nobody possibly could have foreseen, his train got derailed and he ended up in a party college for rich, nihilistic SWPLs, at which point his parents decided not to give a damn about what he did. He ended up changing his major to philosophy, dropping out, and becoming a drug dealer. Many other people were ruined by that college, that shining exemplar of liberal individualism and hedonism at work; several people I knew there are now reportedly homeless, permafried from acid and riddled with STDs. But our language has no words for such concepts. The absurdity of contemporary society is made apparent by the fact that words such as “wasted”, “trashed”, and “hammered” have taken on positive connotations. Productivity is for squares, bro. Real men fuckin’ party. Drop that Bach shit, let’s crank some Kanye.

Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century arch-reactionary, saw this all coming:

In the progress of Emancipation, are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle? Horses too have “motives;” are acted on by hunger, fear, hope, love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity, ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude outline of all our human spiritualities,—a rude resemblance to us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame. The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:—I am sure if I could make him “happy,” I should be willing to grant a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that object!

Him too you occasionally tyrannize over; and with bad result to yourselves, among others; using the leather in a tyrannous unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times. “Am I not a horse, and half-brother?”—To remedy which, so far as remediable, fancy—the horses all “emancipated;” restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe: turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner! So long as grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin: oats in full measure if thou wilt. “Hlunh, No—thank!” snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? “Hlunh!”—Gray Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,—O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops are ended in this world!—For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of Hodge’s horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge’s horses to emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this habitable Earth no grass to eat,—in Black Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;—to roam aimless, wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos, by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour.

The main error of liberalism is its denial of human nature. We, the Whig says, are superanimal—fundamentally rational beings, homo economicus, separate from our hardware, and yet with no higher purpose than the base fulfillment of that hardware. (This, of course, is the Bentham/Mill debate, and the world, predictably, has taken Bentham’s side, leading to our current predicament. One cannot justify liberalism through Mill, for reasons explained best, albeit unintentionally, by Jeff Moss: Mill does not like big squooshy blobs.) If you build a contraption to dispense cocaine to a rat whenever it pushes a bar, the rat will waste away at the bar, forgetting even to eat; and in the end, we are but rats. At the very least,  if you firehose dopamine down my mesolimbic pathway, I’ll fry like one.

I have not written anything since my 18th birthday, so I’ll pick back up there.

I am now, they say, an adult, but the only difference I can see, leaving aside the obsession with political homeopathy peculiar to this nation and its ideological empire, is that I can now legally acquire tobacco. (Not that I had any difficulty with that three years ago.) The span of childhood stretches out endlessly into the horizon, forever expanding its scope as society degenerates. Several generations ago, an ancestor of mine left his country behind when he was younger than I to come to America with nothing but a book of prayers, take a job as a janitor, channel that pay into real estate investment, and die a millionaire. Clearly, such a thing is not even a possibility for this generation. College until 22, graduate school until God knows when, and then a predictable office job until 70 or death—if we’re lucky. The skills, the knowledge, the opportunity have been denied us by a machine intent on creating not factory workers, as is commonly charged, but Cold Warriors, schooled in nothing but the arcane arts of STEM and set eternally upon the single task of stopping the Soviets. But there no longer are any Soviets! Rebels without a cause become bureaucrats without a purpose, marching listlessly about their strange Vogon battleships, getting schwasted on the weekends in a desperate attempt to escape the invisible prison of the postmodern society they inhabit—only inhabit—even if it means waking up in a real one the next morning. Every sensible construct conquered is not destroyed, but merely replaced with an insensible one.

Surely we cannot believe we are free! And yet many of us do. Constantly the battle cry is raised: set us free from this oppressive construct, this totalitarian rubbish of a less enlightened age, that we may reach the only true freedom of the hermit, isolated from all but ourselves! But even the hermit cannot be truly free; can he cast asunder the barbaric chains of his biological needs? No man is free who still must eat. What are we to be liberated from, when liberation is attainable only in death? And, indeed, our contemporary liberation leads us closer to this state; for every bone removed from the skeleton society has built, we further collapse into an orderless mass. In the immortal words of the poet Jeff Moss:

Bones are important,
They do a big job.
Without them, you’d be just
A big squooshy blob.

But for every step we take in that direction, we further sense that something is missing, that something we never knew we had has been stolen from us, and we attempt to build it back, albeit in an unrecognizable form; perverted beyond recognition by that very formlessness, yet in always the same way. The American dream is replaced by the Roman. Rock and roll may be a recent invention, but sex and drugs are eternal.

The New York Times, that modern-day Pravda of left-liberalism, recently ran a review of a book purporting to explain the demise of the American left. The explanation given—that leftists failed, for unknown reasons, to maintain an “animating vision” of socialist utopianism—is, as one would expect given the Pravdan nature of the NYT, absurd, but the reviewer inadvertently mentioned a real explanation for said demise.

The left generally failed, according to Kazin, when it emphasized atheism, collectivism and ideological purity. It has been more successful when taking the form of broad, heterogeneous movements struggling for individual rights. Witness the rise of gay marriage, arguably today’s most effective left-leaning social campaign. Viewed as a utopian dream, it promises to transform the institution of marriage. But viewed as a civil rights matter, it simply aims to include more people in an existing institution.

By this statement, one can easily predict, given any leftist policy goal, whether it will succeed or fail: it will succeed if it involves expanding individual freedom, commonly known euphemistically as “civil rights”, and it will fail otherwise. On its face, this may seem like an odd statement; leftism, after all, is fundamentally collectivist, so why are its successes limited to a domain in which it does not lie? But it fits the reality of the situation well enough that, despite its initial counterintuitiveness, there must be a way to make sense of it.

And, in fact, there is: leftists succeed in implementing any policy goal that moves American society further toward the liberal ideal of maximized individual liberty. (Americans may be confused by this statement, since that ideal is much more commonly associated with libertarianism than liberalism in America, but libertarianism is simply a subspecies of liberalism that believes nongovernmental forces cannot restrict liberty.)

A clear example of this is American feminism, which, according to Christina Sommers, can be divided into two camps: ‘egalitarian’ (that is, liberal) feminism, currently the dominant philosophy in feminism, and ‘conservative’ feminism, the illiberalism of which has gotten it written out of the historical record, despite having been historically far more effective than egalitarianism:

Willard, a suffragist and leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, is another once esteemed figure in women’s history who is today unmentioned and unmentionable. Willard brought mainstream women into the suffrage movement, and some historians credit her with doing far more to win the vote for women than any other suffragist. But her fondness for saying things like “Womanliness first—afterwards what you will” was her ticket to historical obliquy.

Approved feminist founders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through Wollstonecraft-like appeals to universal rights. Their inspirations were John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Wollstonecraft herself. Stanton wrote affectingly on “the individuality of each human soul,” and on a woman’s need to be the “arbiter of her own destiny.”

What then, in practice, is leftism in America? It cannot be proper leftism, because proper leftism, as per Kazin, has not been successful; what has been successful is liberalism, which commonly disguises itself as leftism. This may be confusing to Americans, who have most likely never encountered a proper leftist and, if they have, were most likely too distracted by the rhetorical similarities between the two to tell the difference. (Liberalism and leftism are both progressivist ideologies, but they have one easily noticeable difference: the eschaton that liberalism would immanentize is one of atomistic individuals with maximum license and no connections to anything or anyone, with the possible exception of the benevolent State, whereas leftist utopian projects demonstrate at least a faint grasp of human nature. More on that later.)

American ‘leftism’, considering its in actu effects and its rhetoric of “civil rights” and “individual liberty”, can only be described as liberalism, or, more insightfully, as ultra-Americanism:

But when we look at the actual political motifs in the two kinds of anti-Americanism, we see very little in common – besides of course hatred of America.

Clearly it’s this word anti-American that’s confusing us. If we split it in half we can see the trend clearly. To be counter-American is to resist American political theory. To be ultra-American is to accept American political theory so completely that you become more American than America itself, and you feel America is not living up to her own principles.

But what is American political theory? It is, quite trivially, the dominant political ideology in America. Considering the history of American politics, it is clear the American political theory is fundamentally liberal, and that said history can be summarized as the bringing in line of American society to a distinctly un-nuanced reading of that oft-quoted clause in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

Liberty is license, happiness is hedonism, and our political discourse has been shaped in such a way that liberal hegemony currently goes unchallenged. The left, then, did not die due to lack of an “animating vision”; it was co-opted by liberalism. But how did this happen and what can be done? That will have to wait until next time.