Scott Locklin

James Kalb's taxonomy of Alternate Modernities is something which hasn't been given enough attention. What are the actual alternatives out there? Are there any alternatives? I find myself abundantly in agreement with his and Professor Gottfried's pessimistic assessments, though perhaps I am looking at things in a slightly different way.

Addressing Mr. Kalb's idea that liberalism more or less had to end up the way it did, I must disagree. I strongly suspect many of the Alternative Right would be reasonably happy in the world of 1913 or even 1961. There was nothing historically inevitable about the liberal program turning into the preposterous abomination it is today: a demoralizing world in which perversion is mandatory, Europeans persecute themselves and erase their own history, and the idea of tipping your hat to a lady is absurd. Liberalism could have gone in completely different directions; for example, in 1961, one might have guessed that liberalism would have expended its energies improving the pace of scientific progress and human power over nature, rather than trying to convince everyone of absurdities such as the equality of the genders. Perhaps this would have taken us in some horrible new direction, worse than the present situation where we have dildo commercials at Christmas time, or perhaps it would have been better: but it would have been different. Dildo commercials were not an inevitable outcome of a John Stuart Mill essay, nor are they some kind of consequence of a lack of Catholic faith.

We got where we are today because of a quasi-religious movement. It was a deeply moralistic movement, made up largely of societal outcasts and marginal figures, and made possible by the connivance of mainstream American institutions, such as mainline Protestantism. Much of history is made up of such movements. Most present histories of the 1960s are written by the victors rather than objective observers. As such, the events of that era are looked upon as a historical inevitability, just as the Arab Chroniclers looked on their conquests of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires as inevitable outcomes of Allah's favor on the faithful. For us to look at any of the events of the last 50 years as having been inevitable outcomes of modernity is, well, silly. What happened was Western Civilization was overrun by a host of savage quasi religious zealots, before I was born.

The present prevailing orthodoxy has no holy book, though it has its gurus, taboos, demons and saints. The way it functions in our society resembles the Catholic Church in Italy or Austria; or, more properly, communism in Russia in the 1950s, minus the fun and the gulags. Certainly, the prevailing orthodoxy as it exists today could collapse, just as did the Soviet Union—but I don't see Americans as completely exhausted with multicultural liberalism as the Soviets were with communism. The vast majority of people in America actually believe in the nonsense; many people believe in it with considerable fervor, to the point where they would consider me some kind of horrible person worthy of censure or worse for not believing as they do. Beyond that, should the Empire fall, it's worth noting that the successor states to the Soviet system had no subsequent guiding principle. They fell apart into quasi nationalistic regions with various low-level civil and ethnic wars, which are still far from settled.

The leaders of our culture committed suicide from lack of confidence. We will not see Western Civilization again without some sort of quasi-religious modern day Livonian crusade against the people who run our decadent culture. Do you see such a Livonian crusade on the horizon? I certainly don't; at least not in America. There aren't any large groups of people with the right opinions and cultural cohesion to pull it off. The fact of the matter is, you'd be lucky to live in a part of the country where anyone of the Alternative Right had the cultural cohesion to organize something on the level of a church bake sale. There are precious few who can even publicly state their views for fear of being destroyed professionally. The situation is different in Europe. There are forces building in Europe which could make WW-2 look like a pie throwing contest, but in the United States of America at least, the insanity could last for many decades longer. Certainly there are good people remaining in the heartland, and many people instinctually know what is happening, but, Tea Parties not withstanding, they show no real signs of cohering sufficiently to change anything.

While I agree with Mr. Kalb that understanding human nature and how we got to our present state is an agreeable way to pass the time, I don't know that it's going to get us anywhere. Millions of minds will have to be changed before any serious political changes can be contemplated, decades of societal conditioning undone, vast bureaucracies will have to be unmade and hundreds of thousands of minor power-brokers replaced. Who is going to do this? What large group of people with a coherent understanding of the world and human nature will be able to do it? Who will replace our present ruling class?

While Richard and others have rightly pointed out the many failings of military leadership; I see eventual military coup and Caesarism in our future. In the event of total economic collapse, the Army will still be there, and it will run the country. Whatever you think of the present use of the military, and however silly its genuflections to the false gods of liberal multiculturalism, it is the only large group of effective people left in America. Academia is a joke, the legal professions hopelessly corrupt, and the last vestiges of the manufacturing economy are mostly military. We can only hope such a coup would be led by good and decent men who look after the interests of the nation as a nation; an American version of Park Chung Hee or Lee Kuan Yew perhaps.

Mind you, I don't want this to happen: no sane person does, but I think it will happen, because Caesarism is how late societies fall apart. One doesn't need to be a Spenglerian metahistorian to recognize this is the direction in which we are headed, if we aren't already standing at the breach. One need only look at how the youngest generation is being raised: either future criminals surrounded by chaotic non-families; or coddled, drugged numskulls whose every waking moment is directed by their parents. The young today already live in a totalitarian state; I'm certain they wouldn't have it otherwise as adults. The rest of us are so cowed, we don't even notice that we already live in a police state.  Modern nations consist of many centers of power. Which one do you think is least incompetent?

We stand between the Scylla of multicultural bureaucratic plutocracy and the Charybdis of Caesarism. Which rock do you wish to avoid foundering on? What is to be done? We are doing what we can now: the political program of Paleoconservatism and the Alternative Right is the correct one: starving the beast is the only thing which will prevent disaster. In the meanwhile, we must build our communities and face the future with what equanimity and good cheer we can muster.

As if further evidence were needed that college education is a pyramid scheme; we hear today from the Associated Press:

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.

Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The findings are in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. An accompanying report argues against federal mandates holding schools accountable, a prospect long feared in American higher education.

....

Overall, the picture doesn't brighten much over four years. After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two.

Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains.

Imagine that: when working hard and studying traditional subjects, people actually tend to learn stuff! Just like those old dead white males said would happen! Who knew that bachelor's degrees in feminist queer art studies didn't equip their holders with a capacity for rational thought? I wonder what other hoary tenets of that antiquated bugbear, Western Civilization, might also be true?

One of the few edifying things about the tapoica-brained fruitcake in Arizona making the news: I smell fear. I don't think ordinary people in this country are afraid, but I'm pretty sure the ruling class are soiling their hormone-free recyclable underthingees.   Ramussen agrees with me as to the mental state of the political class:

The gap between the Political Class and Mainstream voters on this question is enormous. While 76% of Political Class voters are concerned that opponents of Obama’s policies will turn to violence, 60% of those in the Mainstream are not very or not at all concerned.

More than 75% of voters now believe the U.S. government lacks the “consent of the governed,” a foundational principle of the American political experiment.

 

How else can you explain IRA terrorist-lovin' "conservative" Peter King's preposterous Marie Antionette proposal? How else can you explain both the ADL and ... the SPLC of all groups coming to the defense of Jared Taylor and American Renaissance? Could it be these groups have realized that open debate with a man like Jared Taylor is a losing game? Their defence of Mr. Taylor is actually quite clever: had they done the predictable thing and gone after him and his organization, they would have generated considerable sympathy and almost entirely favorable publicity for Mr. Taylor's organization. One might even speculate that this story was planted by a sympathizer in Fox News to drum up sympathy and publicity for AR. Certainly that has been the ultimate effect; even though the neocons keep up their slurs ... they're forced to acknowledge and defend the "far right." Doubtless many curious people will have a look over there; I hope AR has their best foot forward.

Fear makes people do stupid things, like accuse innocent people. While the natural thing to do is to defend AmRen and Mr. Taylor from these slurs, really, now is the time to go on the offensive. If I were Jared Taylor, I'd take advantage of this bad publicity to get his message out. I'm no political strategist, but I've done some martial arts, and the right thing to do to a frightened and confused opponent is to overwhelm them. It's not a gentlemanly thing to do, but it is what you need to do to win. What does this mean, practically speaking? The left is presently busy hyperventilating over Sarah Palin; I wouldn't want to interrupt them when they're having one of those, um, personal moments. Go after the neocons: get the attention of their followers. The neocons are the ones who just dropped the microphone. The left is helping: let 'em help -their days are numbered anyway. Professor Gottfried has recently been doing a splendid job of pointing out the unbelievable vapidity of authorized "conservatives" like Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry -we need to do more of this, if we're going to peel away their supporters who don't realize there are actual alternatives to the media authorized nincompoops who claim to speak for them.

The Managerial State, not content with the chaos it's created by upending sexual norms and creating the vast problems associated with multiculturalism, has developed a sinister new "problem" in immediate need of their tender ministrations: the nebulous and very human activity of "bullying."

Lately, the issue of bullying has been in the news, sparked by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was a victim of cyber-bullying, and by a widely circulated New York Times article that focused on “mean girl” bullying in kindergarten. The federal government has identified bullying as a national problem. In August, it organized the first-ever “Bullying Prevention Summit,” and it is now rolling out an anti-bullying campaign aimed at 5- to 8-year old children. This past month the Department of Education released a guidance letter to schools, colleges and universities to take bullying seriously, or face potential legal consequences.

What happened to Tyler Clementi was not bullying. It was sociopathy. What Ravi and Wei did to Clementi is already illegal, immoral and probably as immune to therapeutic social programs or new laws as the actions of most sociopaths are. There is no ethical code, law or social program which will prevent sociopaths from acting this way, nor are there any ethical codes in America by which the actions of Ravi and Wei are even marginally acceptable.

What "mean girls in kindergarten do" is simply nature. No matter what kind of mind-bending pharmaceuticals and Maoist reeducation camps you put five-year-old girls through, they're still going to pick on their social inferiors. It's not even human nature: this tendency exists in the nature of all social animals, from the wolf pack, to pot bellied pigs. All social animals form hierarchies. The only way to prevent this hierarchy forming is to completely atomize the social structure, by raising children in opaque test tubes.

Kenneth Minogue has written what appears to be an interesting new book on the downfall of democracy as a viable political system. There are some excerpts at the New Criterion which are worth your attention. Minogue makes the point that the Managerial State and prosperity has more or less corrupted the national character and turned us into a nation of politically correct victims and limp wristed careerists. He doesn't explicitly recognize the checks on this put in place by the founding fathers to prevent this (aka only letting male freeholders vote), but it's worth keeping in mind as we degenerate into a nation of slaves.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us...

It is this element of dehumanization that has produced what I am calling “the servile mind.” The charge of servility or slavishness is a serious one. It emerges from the Classical view that slaves lacked the capacity for self-movement and had to be animated by the superior class of masters. They were creatures of impulse and passion rather than of reason. Aristotle thought that some people were “natural slaves.” In our democratic world, by contrast, we recognize at least some element of the “master” (which means, of course, self-managing autonomy) in everyone. Indeed, in our entirely justified hatred of slavery, we sometimes think that the passion for freedom is a constitutive drive of all human beings. Such a judgment can hardly survive the most elementary inspection of history. The experience of both traditional societies and totalitarian states in the twentieth century suggests that many people are, in most circumstances, happy to sink themselves in some collective enterprise that guides their lives and guarantees them security. It is the emergence of freedom rather than the extent of servility that needs explanation...

The problem about identifying servility in our modern Western societies results from the assumption that freedom and independence are admirable, and their opposites not. Hence the strong human tendency to trade off freedom for some other condition of things—money, security, approval—must take on the appearance of a virtue. A further problem with servility is that its opposite might seem to be a swaggering parade of one’s own independence, but this is just as likely to be a cover for a servile spirit. Since the essence of servility is dependence of mind, independence is compatible with situational caution, as in the case of the assistant to Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who responds to whatever idiotic remark his press baron employer might make with the words “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” Wariness, tact, and hypocrisy are inevitable elements in the comic conditions of modern bourgeois life, and their significance is never obvious, even to those indulging them...

And if it should seem that invoking servility as characterizing some of the conduct of modern Westerners is excessively dramatic, let me observe that we do actually have a vocabulary that recognizes slavishness in the everyday life of our societies. It happens, for example, when we call someone a toady, creep, wimp, careerist, or some other such denigration. Indeed, our vocabulary reveals a variety of ways in which we recognize tendencies which are quite precisely servile. Any failure to perform a public duty unless some private benefit is given, for example, is an exercise in corruption, and such corruption is a derogation of the moral life characteristic of the slave.

It's fairly evident even to mainstream publications that there are too many Americans with college degrees, and not enough with the ability to do useful work.  Sure, if you go to the right schools, there is still some benefit in meeting members of the oligarchy. It is unclear that attending any other kind of school is worth anything, excepting as an extremely drawn out IQ test. It is very clear that the countless state schools, universities, community colleges: most of these are excuses for "virtuous slacking," rather than actual educational experiences. What do I mean by an actual educational experience? Consider the high school curriculum of, just taking an example at random, my mom, who graduated in the mid 1960s.

My mom went to an all-girls Catholic high school, taught by fearsome old nuns. Among her academic achievements from her very working class high school education: she has read a good fraction of Shakespeare, she learned enough Latin and Anglo Saxon to read books written in these languages, and she knows a bit of French as well. Her math in high school was integral calculus. When I went to high school ... well, I got a bit of French and we read Macbeth.  This wasn't unique to my mom either; William Henry writes about the debasement of intellectual currency in his book.

I'm sure someone will assert that knowledge of Latin and Anglo Saxon are unnecessary in our modern society. I suppose so, if you don't mind raising a generation of “educated” cretins who don't understand Western Civilization: however, there was also the integral calculus. There is also the implication that people in modern High School and College are learning something else which has displaced knowledge of Shakespeare, Anglo Saxon and Latin. I have yet to find out what this thing is.  Diversity studies, perhaps? I've only recently been teaching myself some Anglo Saxon, mostly out of embarrassment. From what I have learned thus far: the removal of Anglo Saxon poetry from standard educational curricula is egregious cultural vandalism. What better way to destroy a culture than to take away its past and give the "educated" a bucket of vulgar slogans in return?

Alas, bright cup! Alas, burnished fighter!

Alas, proud prince! How that time has passed,

Dark under night's helm, as though it never had been!

I'm sure some wise-acre will pipe up and tell us about how kids are learning all about computers now instead of learning of the glories of the Exeter poems. The funny thing is, all the people I know who have founded computer companies are college and even high school drop outs; and I know quite a few of these guys by now. They learned their computer skills by hacking, not by taking a course taught by some mediocrity who couldn't get a job at Google. Sure, they're often limited in their understanding of things like machine learning and statistics, but … people who know about such things are plentiful and cheap, thanks in part to the academic bubble, and frankly, very few people have found ways to make money off of machine learning and statistics.  People who can create technology companies are comparatively rare, and college doesn't seem to do much to create them. People who work in technology companies, well, they do tend to have college diplomas and make a decent salary. Their salaries are comparable to that of a policeman. While the policeman will never be recognized as a learned magnifico (or a nerd), he also has a retirement plan, a gun, a union, reasonable working hours, and unlike the software engineer with his student loans, he can't be outsourced, and an illegal alien can't do his job.

What is an economic bubble, exactly? There is a working definition in econophysics. A normal market is a situation in which many people have different opinions, investment horizons and models of how the world works. In a bubble, everyone has the same opinion, not because they're all doing research and have converged on the right answer. In this case the price would be fixed to an exact value. In a bubble, everyone follows a trend because they see the other fellow doing the same thing. Bubbles are only possible in times of cheap money; you have to bid up the tulips with something. So, you can see the present situation where everybody graduates from high school and attempts to go to government funded college is technically a bubble.  It is a bubble financially in that tuitions are very high due to government subsidy and cheap loans.

Does that look like a bubble to you? It certainly does to me. College is outrageously expensive. It's insanely expensive when you consider what it actually confers: a fairly limited puddle of knowledge, even compared to what we used to get for free in high school. College is long on political correctness, and short on the achievements of Western Civilization.

What is to be done? Well, to first order, nothing will be done.  According to this chart, we spend about as much on education as we do on health care. That much concentrated economic power won't go quietly into the night any time soon. The puling sanctimony over the holiness of education also doesn't bode well for putting a torch to the university system. People really believe that they will be undistinguished proles unless they have a bachelors degree in ... whatever. Many people who would otherwise be directionless in life comfort themselves by acquiring masters degrees in subjects which didn't exist 50 years ago. Excessive university education is a status bauble, as certainly as a Prius, Third World vacation or a Whole Foods shopping expedition. It is a phenomenon of people grasping after social status, rather than economic status. Until the idea of someone having a masters degree in public policy or women's studies becomes ridiculous, this preposterous charade will continue. One thing which should be considered carefully: if you decide your house isn't worth anything, you can default and walk away from it. You have to pay off your college education, worthless or not; bankruptcy can't protect you from the collectors of that debt in the United States.

While I often despair of modern civilization, the fact that the Saga Book of the Viking Society is available online ... all the way back to 1895, well, things aren't all horrible. As is usual with such things, the older works are much more interesting, so give them the attention they deserve. The Viking Society itself is pretty inexpensive to join, and has some valuable resources for people interested in Northern European history. There are few resources like this left: make people aware of them!

http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/

I linked to Professor Codevilla's essay in my previous works on social class, but it's important enough to merit a little discussion by itself. Professor Codevilla's essay came out as I was writing my own ideas down, and appears to have made quite a splash in the blogosphere. In hopes of encouraging more people to consider the emerging right wing perspective on social class, I'll append a few excerpts. Codevilla is definitely our type of fellow: he's more of a Hawk than most would be comfortable with, but he finds the idea of exporting Democracy to be ridiculous, and he knows where the problems lie. He served in the Navy, as a Foreign Service Officer, and helped the Reagan Administration transition teams on intelligence. He's also very much against the present day Republican party, which he sees as part of the problem.

While he's an occasional contributor to National Review, they have so far treated his essay like a piece of road kill; prodding at it with a stick to make sure it's dead. Radio silence from Weekly Standard. Reason magazine is excited, but resentful that he doesn't include gay marriage enthusiasts and dope fiends in with the "good guys." I suppose the ding dongs in Reason Magazine are rightly confused: nobody wants to think of themselves as part of the problem, which they assuredly are.  Meanwhile, just about everyone else who isn't a mainstream conservative is pretty excited. Rush Limbaugh (whose audience is largely working and middle class) has been promoting him, and I hope he continues to do so.

Part six of a series on social class in America. Parts five, four, three, two and one.

Many people on the Alternative Right seem to think that race and genetics are the ultimate forbidden topic in America today. I disagree with this. There are mainstream publications which manage to publish reasonably true things about race and genetic differences regularly, with nary a peep from the right thinking. Certainly, among the left wing, these ideas are highly politically incorrect, and mentioning them can get you into all kinds of social trouble, but people do talk about them, a lot. People still react to some such truths with rage and "right thinking" people must ritually denounce the implications of belief in the theory of evolution, but American society talks about race and "human biodiversity"/HBD plenty for my tastes.

HBD is a topic which never interested me much, beyond the occasional ribald ethnic joke to liven up a dull party. Part of the reason is I always understood it to be true; I come from a big family and grew up in a neighborhood of big Catholic families, and it was always pretty obvious that the apple never fell far from the tree. Part of the reason is, really, there's nothing much you can do about knowing this sort of thing; practically speaking it's generally actionably irrelevant. I have also read some popular books and articles on the subject where the statistics were so atrocious, the best thing you could say about them was that they came up with a good "just so story." I suspect a lot of the people who have written the HBD stuff of the last couple decades are going to end up looking as silly as people who wrote on this subject 150 years ago did. We're really at the very beginning of understanding the subject. Two of my big hunches about the subject are that ideas on outbreeding depression and epigenetics will throw the subject into utter chaos, and we will at some point realize we have done irreparable harm to ourselves as a species by doing things we now think of as completely harmless. You read it here first.

The one really ironic thing about the whole Thilo Sarrazin comedy, which nobody in the English speaking world seems to have noticed: he has an Arabic last name. I'm assuming his family emigrated to France some time around the Crusades, as they have recognized him as a Hugenot at least, but that's about as German a last name as "Abdullah" is.

Click here if you don't know what I am talking about. Of course, considering his statements controversial is also pretty comical, but this is the EU we're talking about.

Edit add: I suppose he could also be a Basque.