Sunday, September 1, 2019

Vox Popoli: Godless primitivism is not the answer


But it's certainly to be preferred to the defenders of Tolerance, Equality, Progress, Inclusiveness, and Diversity, or TEPID as I have occasionally referred to the satanic veil of Social Justice. And conservatives are understandably alarmed that their incessant irrelevance and defeatist equalitarianism is being rejected by the increasingly nationalist young men of the West:

The reason this book is important is because it speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, levelling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite.

BAP would say—indeed does say—that this is where the logic of equality inherently and inevitably leads. He even goes so far as to deny that the American Founders meant a word of their rhetoric. I think this is impossible to sustain as a historical matter, but on the larger philosophical question it is possible that the founders meant every word but were still wrong. It’s fair to say, however, that BAP’s followers take for granted that the idea of equality is false. They even have a derisive term for it: “equalism.” They dismiss the language of the founders, of rights, of the American political tradition as “Enlightenment,” which—rest assured—they don’t mean as a compliment.

And I have more bad news for my fellow conservatives: the talented kids who’ve found this book aren’t listening to us. It doesn’t matter whether they aren’t listening because they found the book, or they found the book because they aren’t listening. The fact remains that all our earnest explanations of the true meaning of equality, how it comports with nature, how it can answer their dissatisfactions, and how it’s been corrupted—none of that has made a dent.

Bronze Age Pervert is correct to say this is where the logic of equality inherently and inevitably leads. The historian Martin van Creveld has laid that out quite clearly in Equality: The Impossible Quest. And the Founding Fathers quite clearly didn't mean their high-flying rhetoric. All men are most certainly not created equal, by God or by Nature, and Thomas Jefferson's reference to "British Brethren", "foreign Mercenaries" and "merciless Indian Savages" conclusively prove that the conservative fetish for equality is based on nothing more solid than their imaginations.

But the godless neo-platonic ur-fascism advocated by Bronze Age Pervert is not a viable solution to a very real problem. Lacking as it does any basis in philosophy or objective morality, it is absolutely bound to fail. The Bronze Age Mindset is just that, a mindless primitivist reaction on which it is impossible to build or sustain a functional civilization.

Without Christianity, without the European nations, without the Graeco-Roman legal and philosophic traditions, there is no Western civilization. Which, of course, is why the only solution to the undermining and subversion of the West is to return to the three core pillars of the West.