The BBC reports today that the producer of the United Kingdom’s TV drama, Midsomer Murders

has been suspended after saying the drama “wouldn’t work” if there was racial diversity in the show.

Brian True-May, who co-created the series, told the Radio Times the long-running drama was a “last bastion of Englishness” and should stay that way.

Production company All3Media told the BBC Mr True-May had been suspended pending an internal investigation.

ITV said it was “shocked and appalled” by the producer’s comments.

“We are in urgent discussions with All3Media...who have informed us that they have launched an immediate investigation into the matter,” a spokesman added.

I cannot help but feel amusement at the thought that Englishness—imagine that!—is shocking and appalling to one of the country’s main television networks—something meriting “urgent [top-level] discussions”. Urgent discussions!

Quick! Englishness has been identified! Undiluted in a television drama! We must eradicate it! Fire everyone involved! Apologise, on our knees! Investigate, thoroughly! Get right down to the molecular level. And either cancel the show or re-cast it in its entirety. Never mind the show’s setting. Never mind demography in rural England (that will have to change anyway). Never mind the audience—7 million English folk. They do not count; their money is no good. They are, after all… English… Racist, bigoted, backward, tea-swilling, scone-munching, English-speaking, English scum.

The BBC report continues,

Mr True-May told the magazine: "We are a cosmopolitan society in this country, but if you watch Midsomer you wouldn't think so.

"I've never been picked up on that, but quite honestly I wouldn't want to change it," he said.

Of his all-white portrayal of rural life in Britain's murder capital he said: "Maybe I'm not politically correct."

The programme—which has run for 14 series—appealed to a "certain audience", he said.

Mr True-May added: "We just don't have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work."

Asked why "Englishness" could not include other races who are well represented in modern society, he said: "Well, it should do, and maybe I'm not politically correct.

"I'm trying to make something that appeals to a certain audience, which seems to succeed. And I don't want to change it."

Well, evidently, Mr. True-May failed to realise who it is that puts food on his plate. Reality is irrelevant; he is a producer, and it is therefore his job to produce an acceptable version of reality, not to depict it. Even a five-year-old knows that.

The BBC’s report offers the all-important piece of data that ought to have been addressed years ago:

A study in 2006 found the programme to be “strikingly unpopular” with viewers from ethnic minorities.

Of course, while this may appear to argue against the viability of strategies for racial integration, since it appears to betray some difficulty among ethnic minorities identifying with Englishness, the problem is easy to solve: just eliminate the English. Mr. True-May ought to have thought of it. But he refused. How did a man like this last so long undetected in the industry?

Some good points are made:

However Ash Atalla, producer of sitcoms The Office and the IT crowd, said it was a “generational thing”, where people of a certain age liked to believe that "Englishness" was all-white.

“Midsomer Murders is not for someone like me. I'm too young and I find the show rather dull,” he said.

Exactly. White is old and boring; dark is young and exciting. Midsomer Murders may have 7 million viewers, but they are unimportant. Who listens to a bunch of old coots? Old coots like the ones that live in those awful English villages, without a single Black face in sight? In time, thankfully, they will die out, as Tim Wise aptly pointed out in America, so the show may as well embrace the rainbow utopia of human brotherhood now, and start the bulldozer on that last bastion of Englishness. Flatten it now, concrete it over, so that the progressive tower of tomorrow may rise.

Judiciously, Atalla points out

“We have to be careful about seeking out something that offends us and then complaining. I would not want the viewers of Midsomer Murders complaining about something I liked.”

Yes. No need to overplay one’s hand. We would not want these pale-faced English villagers to start noticing things about the diverse metropolitan class.

At least there are some right-thinking citizens involved in the show:

Actor Jason Hughes, who has played the programme’s DS Jones, said he had pondered why Midsomer continued to have no ethnic minorities.

“I've wondered that myself and I don’t know,” he said.

“This isn’t an urban drama and it isn’t about multiculturalism. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for multiculturalism in the show. But that’s really not up to me to decide.

“I don’t think that we would all suddenly go, ‘a black gardener in Midsomer? You can't have that’. I think we'd all go, ‘great, fantastic’.”

Now there is someone who gets it (or who at least wants to keep his job). It is about race, not about reality or acting ability. We will no doubt see the problem corrected in the next seasons of the show, and everyone will finally be able to relax and celebrate.

 

Reading Jonathan Franzen's latest best selling novel, Freedom, brought to mind Chesterton's introduction to The Everlasting Man: Like all the stories I never wrote, it was by far the best one I'd ever written.

Freedom might have been a good book if Franzen had never written it. I read it wondering when the writing was going to go deeper than the desires of average people with too much freedom. It never did and it is not worth reading.

The initial reviews gave the book as much praise as any I have ever read. But I doubt it will be remembered as the timeless period piece Franzen aimed to write. I doubt it will outlast Sam Tanenhaus’s enthusiasms (see his NYT review, 8/29/2010).

The upshot of Deconstructionism has perhaps been to mislead too many writers that particular realities of the real world do not matter. If a text cannot convey a single perspective, but rather a complicated bundle of perspectives outside even the author’s purview, as Deconstructionism holds, then an author who thinks too much about theory can wind up saying nothing because he knows he might be saying anything. Interpretations can be gleaned even from a false picture, which is a reason for writers to be less diligent in depicting real things as they are.

Moreover, the particulars of a story come from the author’s intentions, and nothing matters less to Deconstructionists than the author’s intentions. To tell an author that his intentions do not matter to the meaning of the text is close to saying that understanding the particulars of the story does not matter. It is a short step from there into a realm of unreality, where the reality that is depicted in the text is not held accountable to the reality we live in when it comes to important particulars.

Deconstructionism appears to hinder Franzen especially because he does not really live in the real world to begin with. He had a privileged upbringing, which is apparently all it takes these days to be a great writer, because he’s never had another job and he obviously does not like people. A literary theory prone to overlook minor unrealities in search of many-sided interpretations can easily lead an author to depict fantastic portrayals, particularly if he already lives with a below-average connection to major realities, such as human nature.

Franzen certainly does not get human nature when it comes to the particular natures of men and women. Some of his characters are embarrassing inversions. A housewife has a midlife crisis and writes an extremely sarcastic account of her life. She eventually elopes with her husband’s best friend—realistic enough—but the best friend is ridiculous, a sometimes musician and a serial monogamist who sulks in self pity and never stops dressing like a narcisstic teenager.

Franzen tried to write a book about the way we are now, and in broad outline the book does accurately depict how far we are from bourgeoisie domestic tranquility. Everyone in the book is excruciatingly selfish until the husband and wife are almost dead, and that seems to be the point of Freedom; and Franzen’s only point about freedom: It is mostly miserable.

Parts of the book must come unreconstructed out of Franzen’s own psyche, which is that of a smart, socially awkward loner. To make that connection is the cardinal sin of Deconstructionism, which again is its downside: It is of no use to think about a text if the author has no real experience with the sort of context he creates through his writing. A book about people is likely to be no good from a non-genius who avoids their presence in real life.

In the sick society we live in today, individuals who don’t like people think about ordinary things people do in strange ways, or think too much about strange things strange people do with ordinary things. Freedom and Franzen's last novel, The Corrections, contain scat scenes that well describe poop. Writing is about making choices, and Franzen thinks about poop enough to choose writing about it profusely. If the point is that poop is a very real part of ours lives every day, perhaps that should militate against describing it in every book.

In interviews, Franzen has talked about interpretations of his book like a Deconstructionist, as if he's not responsible for what it means, which is tactful for someone who writes a lot about poop.

Regardless of what Franzen intends by describing poop, his point the story does not impact on the larger point I would make. That a novel with scenes special because of their dilating on poop has become so popular is itself a striking symptom of decay. We apparently like it when authors paint bright pictures of shit. What kind of people look for bright pictures of shit?

Children, and sick adults.

A film made as recently as 1993 may not yet perhaps be called a classic, but Les Visiteurs, the highest-gross­ing French-made film ever made, is at least a classic in the making.

Les Visiteurs was co-written by director Jean-Marie Poire and Christian Clavier. The action starts in the France of 1123. A French knight, Godefroy de Papincourt, the Comte de Montmirail (played by “Jean Reno” who is incidentally a Spaniard, Don Juan Moreno y Jederique Jimenez, and a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy—perhaps a hint of where his political sympathies may lie) saves the French king in battle. He is rewarded by being granted the hand in marriage of the beautiful Lady Frénégonde (Valérie Lemercier). But he is drugged by a witch, and accidentally shoots his fiancée’s father—after which, understandably enough, she declines to marry him. In desperation, he consults a sorcerer, who says he can send de Papincourt back in time to stop the fatal arrow. But the sorcerer makes a mistake, and instead sends the knight and his squire, Jacquasse (played by Clavier) forward into the 20^th century.

This signals a rapid-fire series of vulgar, vastly amusing incidents with cars, fast-food “restaurants,” telephones, toilets, toothpaste, cling-film, and light fittings—all of which prove that the French have as much of a genius for slapstick as for Molièresque wit. One reviewer described the film justly as “a lunatic blend of Time Bandits, Tati and Benny Hill.”

Accompanying the visual jokes, there are frantic encounters with mod­ern French people—a black postman (who is set upon immediately as a suspected Moor), clerics, policemen, the incompetent sorcerer’s descendant and both Montmirail’s and Jacquasse’s own heirs. Understandably regarded as a dangerous madman by all the people he encounters (except, even­tually, by his present-day relative, Béatrice de Montmirail, also played by Valérie Lemercier), The Comte is des­perate to escape from what he sees as an ugly and diminished future. He is also outraged to discover that the fam­ily castle is now a luxury hotel owned by Jacquard, a superficially gentrified descendant of Jacquasse (also played by Clavier).

In his comments on my discussion of alternate modernities, Paul Gottfried observes that in our present situation there's no educational program, system of alliances, or political and cultural strategy that seems likely to get us out of the hole we're in.

I agree. If we start with what I called the modern "attempt to base social order simply on this-worldly empirical man," we can't get anywhere, because we can't escape the problem of conflicting wills fighting over who gets what. The only way to deal with that problem is by some combination of force and fraud, and any new combination of programs, alliances, and strategies is just going to be one more configuration of force and fraud. Why should our force and fraud work out better than everyone else's? Haven't the possibilities been tried and found wanting?

The problem, it seems, is the basic modern understandings that make our present situation what it is and so condition all the programs, alliances, strategies, and so on that now seem reasonable and practical. Things won't get a whole lot better until those understandings change, and that won't happen because some group of activists and theoreticians puts together a system of understandings that's more to their liking and tries to get them adopted by the dominant forces in society.

In particular, as Paul notes, right-wingers aren't going to create a better world by getting together and aligning themselves with selected religious institutions, "command[ing] the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview," and educating the masses into an outlook more to their liking. Among other problems, religious institutions themselves are affected by the dominant understandings.

But what then? If we don't like the way things are there must be some response--alcohol, skydiving, suicide, whatever--that makes sense even if political maneuvering is not likely to do much for us.

My proposal was to "go back to first things." What defines the political situation is what seems best and most real to the people involved, and if the situation is impossible those things must change. Current understandings have basic problems that (among other things) lead to a view of man as essentially asocial and eventually mean various forms of tyranny as well as "mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled."

It follows that the dissatisfied need first of all to understand the world better, and in a way that enables them to live in a manner more worthy of human nature. That, of course, is a prepolitical issue. It's worth dealing with in itself, since doing so will help ourselves and our families and friends. It's more than just a personal matter, though, since such initiatives can spread and transform social life. At some point some initiative will--it's happened before and will happen again--so why not ours if it's superior?

The present setup has basic contradictions, and won't last forever any more than other social arrangements have. With that in mind, those with an outlook and way of life that is more true and more worth living by should make their pitch and see what catches on and endures. As I commented, "revolutions begin in thought, and the way of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually."

The proposal sounds impossibly conjectural and long-range, but when there is no obvious quick fix you drop day-to-day events as your reference point and do what you can for what could work in principle. If what's needed is a change in basic understandings then that's what you should pursue. Modernity makes effectiveness the measure of thought, but to deal with the world effectively you have to deal on their own terms with issues that precede effectiveness, like what is real and good.

Such an approach might get results soon: things might be better than they seem, late modernity might be a bubble about to burst, the Church (which like everything else has its own characteristic way of functioning) might be about to revert to type, or something nobody has thought of might happen. Or it might take effect slowly or not at all. The same is true of every approach, though, and the basic point is that this approach--unlike others--could work in concept, and is worth pursuing on its own terms even if it does not.

The big question is what a superior way of thought would be. On that point opinions differ and discussion is necessary. In order to deal with man as he actually is and the problems politics actually present we need an outlook that's adequate to the world as we experience it. It seems clear, to me at any rate, that such an outlook requires an understanding of practical rationality not limited to technology and of knowledge not limited to modern natural science.

Otherwise we cannot, among other things, understand people. To understand and deal with life and human beings as we find them, I suggested that "something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good" is necessary. Whether I'm right on that is a matter for discussion. Still, each of us in his manner of life displays what he thinks is most real and most worth living by. We're more likely to make progress on basic issues to the extent we articulate and examine such commitments. Our problems today really are that basic, which is the reason there seems to be no exit from them.

Political modernity is based on rejection of the premodern belief that man participates in some sort of higher nature. As such, it can take several forms. Liberalism is the form that has won, but not the only one that has existed.

If we get rid of the transcendent, we might view man as fundamentally biological or historical, or as self-created in some way. Moderns have therefore tried to base social order on biology, history, or the triumph of the will.

 

Biology

Modern natural science favors physical explanations, so the most obvious and direct response to modernity is the attempt to base social order on the physical aspects of man's being. The usual physicalist view is that natural selection--in Darwin's terms, "the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life"--explains human nature and behavior. For that reason, physicalists have often viewed racial struggle as fundamental. The physical flourishing of the Aryan race becomes the highest good, at least for Aryans, and similarly for other groups.

A basic problem with the view is that what men find worthwhile in life cannot be reduced to the survival and multiplication of an extended kinship group. For that reason, the latter cannot serve as the guiding principle of social order. That is why people who put nation and race first have ended up emphasizing arbitrary will more than biology, and relying on theatrics, irrationalism, and violence to overcome the intellectual weakness of their position.

 

History

Secular conservatives, who are moderate modernists, have tried to mitigate the effect of their basic antitranscendental commitments by basing social order on habit and history. They hold the modern view of man, but accept that we do not have an effective technology of social life. For that reason they accept experience as their guide, and with it the necessity of the inherited, informal, and prerational aspects of social order.

The approach has failed. Secular conservatives are proponents of traditional ways and attachments, so they favor particularity and the practices, conditions, and institutions that allow it to maintain itself and function. In present-day America, those include federalism, local autonomy, traditional marriage, restrictions on immigration, limitations on the welfare state, and respect for the right of families and religious and community institutions to run their own affairs.

Conservatives have continually given ground on all those issues. Their weakness has been especially apparent in connection with issues related to "inclusiveness." Apart from illegal immigration and affirmative action, which are sore points for voters, conservative politicians have been willing to swear devotion to an antidiscrimination regime that is at odds with attachment to any tradition except that of liberal progress. Even opposition to affirmative action and illegal immigration has been sporadic and lukewarm, more a matter of opportunistic gestures than a genuine effort to change law and policy.

The failure was preordained. Belief in history doesn't tell you anything helpful when trends are against you. As moderns, secular conservatives accept satisfaction of preferences as the rational guide to action, but as conservatives they need people to act on other principles. Why should people do so when it becomes inconvenient? Continuity and respect for traditional ways may be a good thing in general, but there are exceptions, and why should my case not be an exception?

Political reality is shaped by how the world is understood. Secular conservatives do not seriously dispute fundamental current understandings, and those understandings make any serious opposition to liberalism seem irrational and wrong, the sort of thing that leads to Nazism and whatnot. They've already surrendered in principle, so why expect their resistance to amount to much?

 

The Triumph of the Will

Abolishing transcendence abolishes the distinction between preference satisfaction and the good, so that satisfaction of preferences becomes the rational purpose of all action. From that perspective, the most rational political response to modernity is the attempt to derive moral and social order from maximum preference satisfaction.

Preferences conflict, however, and they are equally preferences, so whose should prevail? The obvious answer is to prefer one's own, but "looking out for number one" is not, at least without severe limitation, a principle of social order. Since man is social, it does not even work in private life.

Fascism and bolshevism

It is not easy to make arbitrary will a principle of public order. Antiliberal moderns dramatize the paradox and then resolve it by emphasizing the conflicts and then appealing to collective power as their solution: the will of the people, party, or state, embodied in that of the supreme leader, overcomes all others and establishes order. The motive for participation in the effort, and thus the basis for loyalty to the regime, becomes the joy of smashing the opposition, together with comradeship in the struggle to make the willed order prevail.

A problem with the solution is that antiliberal moderns are moderns. As such, it is natural for them to view collectivities as arbitrary constructions. What is special about the proletariat or the German people? Who do they include and why? Why are Stalin and Hitler their perfect representatives? And why should my will and their will be the same? Such questions are unanswerable, so fascists and communists embraced irrationalism and relied quite directly on lies and violence as the basis for their rule.

The result was catastrophe. Antiliberal modernists took as their principle of social order worship of the power of the order itself. In the absence of substantive goods that principle could express itself only through self-assertion against opposition, the more extreme the better. In the end infinite victory in infinite war became the ruling ideal of social life.

A society that places itself on such a basis is not going to last. It will crash and burn like the Nazis, or sink into posturing, hypocrisy, and corruption that eventually becomes terminal, like the Soviets after Stalin.

Liberalism

Liberalism defers and defuses the problem posed by the sovereign will with its claim to maximize the satisfaction of all preferences equally. The will is to be tamed by the equal sovereignty of other wills and the demands of a technically rational system. Arbitrary power and social conflict vanish.

The peacefulness of its ideal has enabled liberalism to outlast communism, fascism, and Nazism. Nonetheless, those other forms of modernity responded to a real problem. By abolishing the idea of participation in higher goods and unities, the modern outlook separates individual goals from social needs. To re-integrate them some ideological myth is needed.

Fascists and communists proceed in a straightforward way by making the People or the State the only reality that matters, so the individual becomes insignificant. If that move is accepted--and those who reject it soon drop out of the conversation--the conflict between individual and collectivity disappears as an issue.

The liberal myth is more subtle. Instead of absorbing the individual into the collectivity, it absorbs the collectivity into the individual. It presents the liberal state as government by and for the people, here to serve them and acting only to promote their freedom and equality. What that state imposes reduces without remainder to individual desire and content-free public rationality. Obedience to its authority is not subservience but only intelligent promotion of what we already want.

Such is the official story. In fact, of course, liberal government is like other government. It is run not by the many but by the few. Those who rule try to make their life easier by accommodating popular concerns, but their guiding principle is less the will of the people than staying in power and running things in accordance with their own interests and understandings.

In fact, the liberal myth is no more true than the collectivist one. No government can favor equal freedom among men and their preferences, since some must lose in the event of conflict. Also, we often choose things other than satisfaction of desire: God, country, and family; adventure, struggle, and comradeship; the good, beautiful, and true. To the extent we prefer such things to getting our own way simply as such, hedonism makes no sense. It "gives us what we want," but we reject the goal as unworthy.

To avoid such problems liberal government has to tell us what to want. We can have what we want, but what we are allowed to want--safe and moderate devotion to career, consumption, and various private indulgences--must suit the regime. That is supposed to be the perfection of freedom, but who believes it? The desires we are allowed to pursue leave out everything we care about most. And the authorities from which we are freed--family, prejudice, religion, particular people and culture--are what enable us to live and act independently of the formal institutions that constitute the liberal regime.

The freedom liberalism grants is the freedom to be dependent on liberalism and do, think, and feel what it wants us to do, think, and feel. Who wants that? And why trust a system in which we all place ourselves under guardianship, supposedly for our own good, to turn out well?

 

The Moral of the Story

It's clear from what's happened that the attempt to build social order simply on this-worldly empirical man doesn't work. That's true for a variety of reasons. One is that it's part of the general modern effort to understand the world in a way that eliminates mystery and facilitates control, and if you deal with people that way you're going to see them as less than they are and tyrannize over them.

The conclusion is that to get out of the political, social, and intellectual hole we've fallen into we have to go back to first things. For starters, we're going to have to bring back something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good. Otherwise we're not going to be able to deal with man as he is or the problems politics actually presents.

That is not an impossible dream. Revolutions begin in thought, and the scheme of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually. Advanced liberalism means mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled. It seems to me someone can do better.

One thing that always struck me about William Pierce’s broadcasts is that out of the two hundred or so that he recorded during the late 1990s, only one ever talked about the world he aspired to see following his revolution. One. Worse still, his utopian vision was not at all inspiring, being, for all practical purposes, a return to 1933. This, unfortunately, is not uncommon among those who, in some measure or another, share his ideas—even among those who are far less radical and apocalyptic, and think in terms of a ‘velvet revolution,’ or co-opting, or electioneering.

As I have written on previous occasions, if our camp is to catalyze a transvaluation of values, and eventually cause a purge of the top echelons of academic, media, and political power in the West, those whom we seek to inspire need to be given more than just a return to the past: they also need a vision that is forward-looking, indeed futuristic, even if ultimately founded on archaic principles. Otherwise, our camp will condemn itself to irrelevance, perpetuating the impression many ordinary people have that we are just aging nostalgics, who feel left out in the brave new world of progress and equality, and are reduced to waving an angry fist at modernity because we have no new ideas of our own. ‘Bankrupt’ is the term often used within the mainstream to describe our ideas and morality.

To get anywhere, one needs to know where one is going; and to get others to come along and make the hard journey to one’s paradise, one has to be able to at least describe what it looks like.

This is why I was interested in Guillaume Faye’s book, Archeofuturism, which Arktos Media published for the first time in English translation during the Summer of 2010. Along with Alain de Benoist, Faye is a leading exponent of the Nouvelle Droite, the European New Right. Faye, however, is more radical than de Benoist, who has accused him of extremism. And some say he is also more creative. Until recently, I only knew Faye by name and affiliation, having never taken the trouble to read him. Was it because of that photograph I have seen of him, grey-haired and scowling with bug-like mirror shades? Whatever the answer, I was pleasantly surprised when the present tome revealed that Faye’s outlook is very similar to my own. Indeed, it turns out that in Archeofuturism he articulates positions that I have articulated in some of own my articles. No wonder the book’s editor, John Morgan, was keen on my reviewing it.

Readers will easily infer at least one of the positions Faye and I share, as I have reproduced it in the second paragraph of this review. The difference is one of emphasis: I think archeofuturism is necessary to move forward; Faye thinks of it as the paradigm that must replace egalitarian modernity, come what may.

Traditionalists are often painted as partisans of lost causes. The ideologues of modernity and “progress” thus consign actual rightist movements to history’s dark remnants, all the while leading humanity’s march into a radiant future of equality and liberty.

We have witnessed their future, and all its supposed radiance is but an artifice. Modern civilization offers a plethora of material goods to mask the denial of the one true Good; it creates virtual worlds of distractions and amusements to convince man to forget how he abandoned the one true God.

Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher and premier theorist of the White Russian movement, saw this earlier than most. The Whites were first into battle in the confrontation with one particularly savage program of the Revolution, Soviet Bolshevism. As an unabashedly faithful Christian, monarchist and patriot, Ilyin understood the full gravity of the threat and how to combat it; above all else, he knew victory could only be achieved through the will to spiritual resistance, in a war beginning in our own hearts.

There is a certain logic of degeneration at work when a civilization loses its bearings. The Olympic Games are a case in point. Once a religious festival of the ancient Hellenes, the Olympics were first revived during the convulsions of the French Revolution.

Along with a number of other spurious fabricated holidays, the Directory in Paris held L'Olympiade de la Republique from 1796 to 1798. In place of classical paganism, the games were animated by the new humanist faith, with athletes competing to honor the gods of liberty and reason.

The Olympics would then be permanently established a century later, this time their rationale being the rather Victorian concerns of good hygiene and international brotherhood.  Since that time the events evolved from a propaganda battleground among the militant antitheist ideologies of the 20^th century into the vapid, overblown commercial extravaganza we know today.

While the Olympics held sacred import for the Greeks of the classical era, they have been recast through modernity as a pseudo-festival, a celebration of ultimately nothing. In his work In Tune with the World, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper saw that man's rejection of God leads to a frenzy of meaninglessness in a vain attempt to escape the terror of death.

For the mad dash to meaninglessness, contemporary Britain wins the gold. In the run-up to hosting the 2012 Olympics, London has just raised the curtain on its mascots for the summer games. While they're supposed to "chime" with children, these creatures are more likely to induce a fresh round of psychological disorders in the rising generation. Forget clowns; let's all welcome the new stars of kids' most fevered nightmares.

Aside from these concerns, the new representatives of the games neatly encapsulate the U.K.'s transformation into an alien, postmodern dystopia. It's particularly noteworthy how these entities came into being- by committee. "Wenlock" and "Mandeville" (named after the respective founding-places of the British Olympics and Paralympics) are the product of 40 focus groups over the span of 18 months, a fact that presupposes additional layers of administrators and experts guiding the entire unholy enterprise. Any individual creativity or artistic inspiration was thus quashed by the processes of the managerial regime.

Photo: Suzanne Plunkett, Reuters

The mascots' creators have also ensured that the characters are liberated from even the slightest connection to English history and culture. There they stand in a schoolyard in front of a rainbow mural, each a strange metallic cylinder with the all-seeing eye of a giant squid. Perhaps they're meant to symbolize Britain's ubiquitous surveillance cameras; that would at least make matters more comprehensible. Ever-vigilant Wenlock and Mandeville monitor London's multicultural chaos, represented here by the ensemble of children who might as well have been flown in from multiple points around the globe.

There are affairs more pressing than criticizing London's choice for its 2012 Olympics mascot. After all, one can find evidence for British social disintegration in its crime explosion, the breakdown of the family, mass immigration by invitation and numerous other symptoms of advanced decadence. Then again, the two silver aliens are fitting symbols of secular, egalitarian Cool Britannia's institution of formlessness. Modern society's worship of man ultimately leads to the reign of absurdity.

One of the less helpful features of the radical Right is its propensity to spend a great deal of time and effort analysing and complaining abou is wrong with modern culture, and a lot less time actually producing an alternative to this culture. For the most part, the nearest it ever gets to producing said alternative is generating endless suggestions of what needs to be done, without actually doing any of it. Worse still, most of the suggestions are not even actionable in the short to medium term because they involve the creation of vast operations, necessitating large and sustained investment, abundant personnel, established networks, and extensive infrastructure - all this within a community that struggles to raise even measly sums of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes I wonder if the people making these suggestions are serious about achieving change and do not just seek emotional relief.

Perhaps the tendency to make impractical suggestions stems from the tendency among elitists to think on a macro scale, a trait which I believe results from an inborn desire for order. This would explain the abundance of conspiracy theory buffs within the radical Right: what is a conspiracy theory if not a narrative, an ordered exposition, that efficiently explains a mass of otherwise confusing data and events?

Perhaps the most interesting, and definitely the most threatening type of writer, is the one who not only defies conventional categorizations of thought but also offers a deeply penetrating critique of those illusions many hold to be the most sacred.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), who first came to literary prominence during Germany's Weimar era as a diarist of the experiences of a front line stormtrooper during the Great War, is one such writer. Both the controversial nature of his writing and its staying power are demonstrated by the fact that he remains one of the most important yet widely disliked literary and cultural figures of 20th-century Germany. As recently as 1993, when Jünger was 98 years of age, he was the subject of an intensely hostile exchange in the New York Review of Books between an admirer and a detractor of his work. On the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday in 1995, Jünger was the subject of a scathing, derisive musical performed in the former East Berlin. Yet Jünger was also the recipient of Germany's most prestigious literary awards, the Goethe Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Jünger, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 101, received a commendation from Pope John Paul II and was an honored guest of French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Franco-German reconciliation ceremony at Verdun in 1984.

Ernst Jünger was born on March 29, 1895. His father was an academically trained chemist who became wealthy as the owner of a pharmaceutical manufacturing business, finding himself successful enough to retire while still in his forties. Jünger's parents' politics seem to have been liberal, though not radical, in the manner not uncommon to the rising bourgeoisie of Germany's upper middle class during the pre-war period. It was in this affluent, secure bourgeois environment that Jünger grew up. Indeed, many of Jünger's later activities and professed beliefs are easily understood as a revolt against the comfort and safety of his upbringing.