culture war

The Postmodern Right Is The Next Wokeism

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

One of the things that initially surprised me after I wrote Woke Imperium, was that so many more left wing people wanted to engage affirmatively with it than right wing people. A big part of it was because it was they who had first seen their causes taken over by the easily manipulatable moral panic-types. The easiest people to drive to support needlessly aggressive policies around the world are human rights activists, after all. But another element of it, I think, was that many right wing people read it and correctly had their warning bells go off. I compared The Great Awokening to the Reformation to start, particularly the Puritan experience in early American and 17th Century British history (an analogy I am quite fond of), declared it to be a direct successor of the Reagan-Bush Jr Era Moral Majority, and implied that such moralistic impetuses to sell imperial expansion would likely evolve into a post-woke and possibly even anti-woke sequel.

Regular readers of this site know I have been a constant critic of postmodernist social justice since the start and long before it became the cool thing to do. This even predates the blog itself, dating back at least to Kony 2012 if not even before, with my teenage undergraduate disdain for what is incorrectly called ‘critical theory’ and elaborate and obfuscatory language used to ’empower’ (make the writer sound smarter than they are) that did anything but. They will also know that none of this collective cultural insanity of the past decade plus has ever once tempted me to become conservative or to throw my left-populist economic views under the bus. In fact one of my persistent critiques of wokery was that the longer it went on the more obnoxious the inevitable right wing backlash to it would be. People with a progressive/whiggish view of history seem incapable of understanding that all things come in cycles rather than ascend some linear path.

The desire to become a moral majority is hardwired into American culture, be it left, right, or center. And all present in effect the same danger. The triumph of slave morality in the service of the suppression of dissent. The sterilization of public space to avoid psychological discomfort. The fear, quivering in the shadows, that ones own faction does not have a monopoly on ethics. ‘Just Be a Good Person,’ can be easily swapped out for ‘Just Be a Normal Person,’ etc.

One can simply disavow moralism, adopt an amoral power-based view of the world that reflects polycentric reality, and be done with such fears entirely, but I digress.

Currently, I am busy with other longer-term projects, but I am also on the side paying attention to certain trends with the assumption that I will in the future be writing another examination of moralism in the service of neconservatism. This time, I suspect, it will be about the right. We have also seen a discussion, if one can call it that, online of what the ‘Woke Right’ is. Usually and laughably this entails a conservative old guard lashing out at younger conservatives who take a dim view of Israel and are increasingly interested in class politics. This is some opposite-world territory, as it comes from the faction attached to a sentimental and identity/grievance politics based world view where the U.S.-Israel security arrangement is viewed as a positive and even necessary feature of global stability. This is also a faction that believes that identity (in the form of Christianity, ‘based-ness’ or whatever) is more important than class and logistics. That is quite literally a copy/paste of left-wokeisms priorities, if for ostensibly different purposes. It is the Republican Boomer establishment that is actually the Woke Right here. The difference now is that the evangelical phase of the 80s-2000s was so loathed and backfired so badly once it went down with the Bush Ship that it will be quite some time, if ever, that Jimmy Reptile and all his friends are back in the driver’s seat.

This leads me to begin (without yet coming to firm conclusions) to speculate as to what exactly the right-wokeness will be. I can tell you this much, it will be a compromised merger of multiple trend, as no single one of the following has anything remotely approximating popular or institutional support. The goal of the right-moralists will be to create what they will inevitably and pretentiously refer to as a ‘Hegelian Synthesis’ out of a variety of these trends. They will most likely fail to establish this as official policy, but they will absolutely create a kind of virtue-signaling side economy of Crusader Pepe profile pic approved ‘alternative’ media that people are expected to show deference to if they want to be in the club.

The Catholic Convert Inquisition

For many Millennials and Zoomers, and especially that most cursed demographic of those between the two, converting to Catholicism is all the rage. All hipsters become Catholic, after all. That need to moralize while also being part of a community is creating a seething underbelly of young fogies ready to RETVRN to before Vatican II. Seemingly utterly oblivious to the contradictions of joining a ‘universal church’ that is meant to spread across all the cultures of the Earth while simultaneously railing against globalism is a self-contradictory position, but it is no different from the woke left’s fantasies that one day they would take power (Ha!) and replace the bad rapacious capitalist American Empire with Socialism’s True Children.

This cannot become a dominant faction on its own because the majority of Catholics (i.e. not recent converts) do not share any of the bizarre fixations this new group has and largely sees them as an unwelcome imposition.

Anti-Woke Media Kulturkampf

Because wokeness was so obnoxious and invasive, and embraced by so many corporate and government actors, it made a very easy target. An entire right wing griftosphere arose where some of the dumbest midwits on this planet were able to make bank embodying the principle that a stopped clock can be right twice a day. They infest social media and youtube, giving the most superficial and warmed over takes possible and whining that they are somehow an opressed class because the establishment that once courted them hates them now. Even as our Silicon Douche overlords pivot away into courting the right, they will still trot out this talking point for a year or two to come.

This cannot become a dominant faction because they are utterly dependent on those they criticize to even exist. As wokeness continuous to decline back into its pre-Tumblr migration status as a holding tank for mentally ill shut-ins and losers, all of its cultural cache and any pretense of punching up against the establishment is gone. Big tech kissed the ring. The era of the coding pronouns-in-email gendergoblin is over, the new era of the neofeudal techno-popes has arrived. Thus, in time, the anti-woke will be seen as the woke content creators are, tools of an establishment and dupes of fashionable trend chasing.

Israel

While Israel is hemorrhaging support across the public’s ideological spectrum, the fact that left wingers mostly come out hard for Palestine means that the reflexively anti-woke knee-jerkers often have to double down into a Boomer-style love of Israel and performative philosemetism. North Atlantic Jewish communities become a kind of pet cause of such people in the way that (a monodimentional image of) African-Americans became The Elect of the left. Censorship and cancelling have been perfected by AIPAC-aligned actors in a way the cultural left could only dream of achieving anywhere outside of Reddit and Bluesky.

This cannot become a dominant faction because the younger people are, the less infatuated they tend to be this foreign state whose interests, we are constantly told, must be placed before our own. But the bipartisan support for treating this strip of land in the Levant as sacrosanct is strong enough that The Olds will hang on as long as possible, and make their funding contingent on continuing such policies.

Zoomer Moral Panic

I have talked about this one before so I will keep it brief. If there is one thing Gen Z loves, its setting up arbitrary guard rails to creative expression, public policy debate, and cultural output. When their brood mother, Tipper Gore, shat them out her foetid womb she began to suckle them from the Teet of Cancellation, whispering in their ear all the while that to be made psychologically uncomfortable was literal violence and stochastic terrorism. This attitude is not simply a left-wing and female coded affect, as it is in the (equally cringe but for different reasons) Millennial generation, but pretty standard across the ideological and gender spectrum of Gen Z.

This cannot become the dominant faction because Zoomers are a smaller and poorer generation than any other. They won’t be buying their way to the heights of lobbying without help. But they are pulling from a long and recurring American tradition here, so they will find help if they seek it.

…

I believe the key to predicting the longer-term trends of the Right Wing Turn will be found in a merger point between the above factors. It is too early in this process for precise soothsaying, but for now I will venture this: the common point that all of the above factors share is moral sanctimony and virtue signaling in service not of social justice and equity as we are so used to these days, but for a nostalgic dream-cosmos of ‘normality’, which truly meets the definition of Nostalgia For an Age That Never Existed. It is an attempt to force a type of cultural conformity which has given up actually appealing to the masses but rather seeks to dictate the terms of public expression in the vain and ultimately doomed hope that politics is downstream of culture, rather than the opposite. It will appear to succeed for a few years as the hangover of the Woke Dark Age still lingers and we all settle our scores with the cancelers of yesteryear, but will inevitably inspire rebellion and became an equally poorly dating experiment as the one it sought to replace.

In this way I view it as The Hays Code 2.0. When Will H. Hays took on the job to ‘clean up’ film for the sake of 1920s WASP America he saw himself as fixing a problem that was existential. He succeeded to an immense degree, with interracial couples and foreign cultural practices heavily censored, and even married couples being forced to be depicted as sleeping in separate beds. Jokes about the clergy were haram, as was fictional violence towards children. One could state that film in this era still had some bangers, and it did. But compared the experimental breakouts of the early 20s and the true golden age of cinema (so far as I am concerned) in the 70s and 80s, its pretty weak stuff on the whole. Most of the best films from the Hays Era came from outside of America for a reason.

Despite this apparent success, in the end, Hays was directing all his energies towards a non-issue while the totally unrelated structural forces of the economy were barreling towards an unprecedented collapse. So too will the right wing culture warriors of today ignore environmental devastation, rising inequality, and the dangers of elite overproduction in order to score some cheap points and easy clicks. The future they are building is one of spectacle and distraction, not of serious policy. A set of priorities that unites all culture warriors in a poststructuralist consensus moderated through clickbait Catholicism. The modern right may be in denial about this, but it is every bit as postmodern as the post 1968 left became. And therefore every bit the useful idiot of establishment tastemakers, surveillance advocates, and warmongers.

As for when the Hays Wokes and their Postmodern Right turn their glowing eyes towards actual hard policy- especially foreign policy? This may well be a topic for something more serious, professional, and substantial in the future. I certainly have some ideas. If you come across any especially interesting examples, feel free to send them my way. I am starting a collection. I suspect that ‘defending Christendom from the Muslamic Hordes’ will be a big part of it.

Those who are easily scandalized, regardless of their ideology, are the easiest to manipulate and build consensus around. What could be of more use for an increasingly neofeudal society than to keep neighbors at each others throats rather than teaming up against their lords? The more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same.

Please Clap for Meatball Ron

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSanctimonious, Ron DeSanctus, Meatball Ron, and my personal favorite, Ron DeSpectrum. He was built up to be the The Man…but he was not the man.

Unlike the many terminally online over-paid tradcath mutants on his campaign, I saw this from the start. Indeed, before he even declared he was running I knew he would be an abject failure. The reason? GOP voters want Trump sure, but more importantly, this interview: That face. The smug hubris immediately crumbling into deer-in-the-headlights-soyfacing the second an unscripted question appeared. You can complain all you want about politics and how they should be substance over surface and yet someone still has to be the public face of a campaign. And surely it couldn’t be…that face.

‘Folks, folks. I never called Meatball Ron “Meatball Ron.” I would never call him that. I call him Ron DeSanctimonious, the Florida Virgin. Just look at his face! It’s a meatball! That screaming rictus, no good. Very bad!’

His official rollout on XXXtwitterXXX was a technical flop and embarrassment, immediately and easily parodied by the Trump campaign. This bizarre behavior wasn’t just shaking of the national spotlight adjustment problems and would continue throughout the campaign.

A cope phrase you will hear from DeSantis fanboys is that ‘well, he was a good governor.’ I’m not a rightoid so I can’t say if I am fit to judge here by their standards. But what I can say is that I do think his tenure as governor must be at least overrated. Everything seems to have been targeted from the start to pander to national culture war headlines. His state was effectively a laboratory for clickbait. And it didn’t even work most of the time because even when he rightly went after the special Chinese-Concession-Port-like legal exemptions of Disney, he still got his ass beat.

DeSanctimonious really lived up to his name when this opponent of cancel culture decided to attack what little independence educational institutions have by instituting pro Israel cancel culture. This hero opposed to affirmative action took it upon himself to impose affirmative action for Jewish students. Partisan hypocrisy is always off the charts in election cycles, but the timing and obvious attention-grabbing of these policies are craven even by the low standards of the trade. So craven even republican primary voters could see through them as transparently pandering and two-faced.

While not personally invested in the Republican primary, I was personally invested in seeing DeSantis’ strategy fail. Had he succeeded, the horrible Woke Era would have been replaced by an equally horrible Anti-Woke Era and the endless cycles of media driven grievance identity politics would have continued forever. This may still happen, but it won’t be with its flagship pioneer at the helm. I think many politicians on the right are misreading the long-overdue rebellion against puritanical progressivism by thinking it means their form of religious fundamentalism allied to 4chan phrenology is in the ascendant. In actual fact I think (and hope) it means culture war itself is on the way out for the time being. The two factions of elites sought to distract everyone with these obnoxious parlor games while they continued to pillage the country, let infrastructure rot, and continue to bloat the military industrial complex for use in endless and unwinnable wars. But it is impossible to ignore.

Trump and Biden have both been failed Carter-esque Presidents. Nikki Haley is the demonic reincarnation of John McCain. And DeSantis was the harbinger that maybe people want substance over style. He set himself up as the substance, but he was only the style. And what an awkward style it was, too.

So Please Clap for Meatball Ron. Maybe Trump will make him Secretary of Transportation. It seems to be the holding tank for failed overhyped presidential candidates.

The Pastry Windmill People and the Scandinavization of Anglo-American Politics

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

The world quite rightly looks on at the continual self-immolation of political and civic discourse and even the diminishing capacity for self-government in Britain and the United States and wonders, ‘what is wrong with those people?’ It is a fair question. Though four centuries of unchallenged puritanism and excessive global expansion only now being reversed (debunking Anglo-teleological models of history and ideology in the process) do provide most of the answers. But present pathologies cannot be reduced to this political trend of extremist binaries fighting over very little actual material divergence being new. Anyone in the Seventeenth Century could have understood that rubes and dupes with little knowledge of the world but very strong opinions are useful pawns in times of state collapse and fractious decline. Indeed, its been my point for over a year now that trendy allusions to the Interwar Period are a flop propped up by the historically ignorant, and that our nearest historical parallel to the present moment is in fact the Reformation and the subsequently related Thirty Years War and British Civil Wars.

Looking at more modern time periods, however, it wasn’t the Anglos that at this political juncture first. Much like how people when I was a teenager said that Japan was the developed country that ended up ‘left out’ of the turn of the century, observers have the order of things all wrong. Japan, it seemed to me then, was not a lost country, but the future of the developed world. More alienated, carved into monopolistic fiefdoms, and unable to grow due to Boomers making the very act of reproduction economically detrimental. I think it is now obvious that I was right. Japan showed where the Eurozone and the U.S. both were going. Now, here we all are.

Lets pivot away from late service sector model economies into ‘the realm of ideas’. Another set of countries showed the path of political parties extremely similar in actual content but extremist in shrill cultural presentation politics that effectively go nowhere well before such a model came to the Anglosphere: Scandinavia. If there is one part of the world more utterly devoted to Protestant pieties and idealism as an exercise in virtue signaling, surely it is this. I am also going to include the Netherlands here, which is not a Scandinavian country, but ideologically might as well be. Its people share the same flat-yet-self-righteous affect anyway.

Since none of these Pastry-Windmill Countries matter geopolitically, it is often hard to sell the case of their ideological odiousness to people from parts of the world that actually influence global events. They are, after all, nice places to live. Some, like Iceland (who I am leaving exempt from my criticism here because culturally it remains quite distinct from the rest) and Norway are fantastic places to visit. Non-Germanic Finland I have a soft spot for because so many of my favorite bands come from there. I myself have been to all of them save Denmark and Sweden.

The reason these countries are nice, however, has little to do with themselves unlocking a magical formula for good living but rather having small populations on relatively large and resource rich pieces of land in a high GDP part of the world whose geopolitical security has been extremely well provided for by the United States since the end of World War II. This is niche exploitation that anyone could do in the right circumstances. These were effectively poor and rural countries just a few generations ago who received massive amounts of foreign capital and faced few outside dangers. Their economic rise is part and parcel of having the right friends at the right time, much like the Gulf monarchies in the Middle East. Therefore, what success they have are hardly due to factors that could just be replicated elsewhere with virtue, bootstraps, and gumption.

And yet, when one lives for time on Asia’s westernmost peninsula (also known as Europe), as I once did, one meets many Pastry Windmill People who are convinced that they serve as some kind of righteous model (the saintly elect) which other parts of the world yearn to be like. Or, conversely, one meets another kind of Pastry Windmill Person, one who believes their societies are so nice because they are innately culturally or even racially superior and no one else could ever replicate such development for all others lack the correct skull measurements. Oftentimes, a Victorian British style hybrid of both of these Pastry Windmill Types will appear, expressing both the missionary impulse to enlighten the foreign savage and also show superiority…by turning them into good Scandinavians of course. This is done through a process called ‘getting educated’ whose specifics are never addressed…and which also seems to ignore how many Pastry Windmill People go abroad for their own education.

We have here the general prototypes of the political archetypes that presently plague us in the Anglosphere. The left dominated by priggish busybodies who believe that true change comes from modifying behavior and language rather than material conditions, a right entirely dominated by literal howling fascists, and a center who believes itself a logical end point of history even as the world they promise gets sucked down the drain in front of all of our eyes. Sweden, the most obnoxious country of the whole lot when it comes to ideology, gets wracked with anti-Semitic riots and racist trouble on a regular basis. Norway had the most devastating act of far right domestic terrorism anywhere in the world so far in the Twenty First Century. Denmark is world famous for its racism (though it has the decency to not be so messianic as its neighbors at least). Political parties that agree on everything except cultural signaling must then dial said signaling up to 11 in order to express their divergence. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Personal Anecdote Time: I once attended an IR seminar where a Swede stood up and-totally unironically- proposed that there were such things as ‘Humanitarian Superpowers.’ Countries that, in her words, would wield predominant influence on diplomacy through virtuous example and commitment to liberal values. Two nearby people from the Netherlands clapped at this…display. It is a memory that haunts me still. And yet, perhaps to our misfortune, this attitude was merely ‘ahead of its time’, as that kind of sentiment would no longer shock me if I heard it coming from the Center for American Progress or a talking head on cable news today. You get a lot of this in U.K. media in particular these days, as that country’s days of global influence are so far behind it that this might be all that is left now. The Guardian is particular offender here. Get ready for a near future bombardment of ‘you can’t pull out of any endless war in the Middle East ever because of women’s rights’ to descend on all of us from this quarter.

Needless to say, this same ‘humanitarian superpower’ person was also the same individual who later attempted to mock me for skipping out on a boring meeting of wonks in an office that wasn’t required so that I could go to a local history museum instead. I retorted with just enough humor in my voice to take the edge off that she ‘was basic’. She was.

The funny thing about this originally Scandinavian pathology of exceptionalism is that it is somehow even more delusional than American Exceptionalism. American Exceptionalism might be a cargo cult of a civic religion with very real and damaging effects on diplomacy in the world, but it is at least based on the knowledge that a powerful country has disproportionate sway on world affairs (even if in such a way that compromises that very influence by triggering backlashes). The idea of tiny geopolitical nonentities thinking they are in some kind of drivers seat, or even thinking they are playing good ear-whispering angel to the bad angel of Turkey or Israel or whatever on America’s other shoulder, is laughable. A further irony, and one that really infuriates the Pastry Windmill People if mentioned to them, is that the ur-Kantian liberalism of their region is every bit as much a public education derived state ideology as the flag-humping trucker nuts dangling Humvee driving American chuds they believe themselves to be so much better than. Both people are just parroting the mythology given to them by the dominant media and educational cultures of their respective societies. And both those societies seek validation in being seen as uniquely virtuous across the globe. Both are truly the children of the Reformation. Much like how the Saudis are the children of the Wahhabi Reformation. No sane person abroad is actually impressed by all of this posturing. Especially when it comes from a place whose sanctioning of another nation might…increase the cost of Pastry and Windmill imports?

Pastry-Windmills will retort that perhaps living in a boring and severe country with terrible fashion sense is a small price to pay for such socio-economic security. Once I would have agreed. But even if we traffic in the absolute binaries the Germanic peoples are so fond of (we shouldn’t), I know now I would take an interesting place, within reason, over a secure one. I know that to this day the basket case of Italy is a far more interesting and culturally vibrant place than any Pastry Windmill Country could ever hope to be. I value indulgent art and vibrant giallo cinema. I do not value boring social realism and Ikea-like starkness. I don’t want my cuisine options to be the culinary equivalent of canned dog food. And I don’t want everyone around me to have the same damn boring homogenized opinions divided by tribe into two superficially extreme but functionally docile tribes of Witchunter Generals. Nazis vs Wokecels. It happened first over there, then it came here. They aren’t, in the words of a former president, sending their best.

The only hope I have for the North Atlantic world is that its (genuinely impressive compared to most other places) ability to take in large amounts of very culturally different immigrants continues, and it is able to demographically decouple from WASP inertia and pathology. Changes may be painful, but it is well within the realm of possibility that such shifts could work out in the end. But Pastry Windmill Country is the Germanic version of WASP Mecca. Or perhaps more accurately, its Salt Lake City. It will never change. What could be a phase for us is a thousand year long way of life for them. I say we have followed their trends long enough, and its time to leave them to their backwards ways. Our collective ability to engage in critical and contrarian thinking will thank us if we leave this jar of pickled moose knuckle behind.

But hey, I am genuinely thankful for all the metal. But these days even that has often migrated elsewhere.

The End of/Right Side of History is a Recurring Delusional Fad for Simpletons

/ geotrickster / 4 Comments
Statue of Aphrodite defaced by Christians.

For a people so committed to the ending of cultural and political divergence, you would think fanatics everywhere would at least pay attention to the failure of all the other times they attempted the same project. If the definition of madness is endlessly repeating the same project again and again and expecting different results, then the universal idealists among us are truly the maddest of the mad. Perhaps this is why they despise the value of history so much. Because the message of history is that there is no message in history, save perhaps never to ignore your resource base and never to trust the pledges of fanatics claiming to be ‘on the right side’ of history. And it is very telling that an obviously ridiculous phrase like ‘right side of history’ is so commonly used in progressive politics today.

We have seen more than our fair share of the use and abuse of history by conservatives. Usually in the form of some kind of pundit with a superficial Wikipedia-level knowledge of key events and an uncritical and uninterrogated sense of the past derived from high school education that they desperately wish to affirm from further scrutiny. I have written here about that specific phenomena many times before. But the problem is that most non-conservatives, of all stripes, effectively cede the field to the right entirely because they themselves have a deeply diseased relationship with the past.

This relationship can be found everywhere now, with the de facto merger of the neoliberal establishment in the Anglosphere countries with postmodern academia and far left rhetoric (if usually not actual far left policies). The past is bad to them. People in the past had attitudes different than people today and therefore were also bad. Works of literature and philosophy from anytime before the rise of post-colonial and post-modern thought are therefore haram and must be expunged. The university, supposed to at least be the place meant to encourage atypical and norm-questioning thought, has become a giant H.R. department meant to ensure the imposition of a presentist monoculture on the next generation of downwardly mobile administrators and media people. The media itself has mostly given up all pretense at journalistic muckraking and has merged subservient stenography with declarations of religious faith in the church of social justice. If present trends continue, the majority of Generation Z and no small amounts of my own generation of Millennials seem to be well on track to carry out this mission of building a monoculture that pervades the public square. Those who know their future prospects are bleak are often those most likely to lash out moralistically as this is a socially acceptable way to ‘rebel’ without actually taking risks or digging deeper into the root (material) causes of societal decline. It is striking that, in an era where climate change represents our most clear and omnipresent threat, so many of the supposedly educated adopt culture war instead. Once seen as the domain of ignorant rural evangelicals, culture war is now the plaything of the social elite. Even if one wishes to prioritize culture war, one cannot ignore how the counter-culture trends on social issues of the last few decades before the 2010s actually delivered more measurable gains in a more hostile environment than the present top-down attempts at cultural engineering do, something I wrote more about here. If one is not a reactionary, one would be wise to feel what the backlash to this will be if this continues.

While its true that to glorify the past is ridiculous (and also implies a weak understanding of how events and eras actually work) it is surely just as ridiculous to castigate it from the point of view of present day trends. There is a lot of knowledge and wisdom to be found in taking the long view, and it is impossible to take such a view with knowledge based only around the time one was alive or even based only around a century or two. One can always be surprised by how many fellow travelers one can find hidden in long gone eras. Even in civilizations which are since departed. There were once cultures with widely different concepts of intellectualism and cultural expression than those which exist today. They are all fascinating. Some, I would contend, were even preferable in many ways. Especially on the cultural front. With the destruction of polytheism in Europe in the Middle East being the most clear breaking point from a more vibrant and interesting culture to the start of the monolith many Arab, Spanish, and Germanic societies have since sought to force on everyone else. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was an attempt to bring this type of brain dead political historiography into a new region, but fortunately it was brief and had limited effect (though enough for Chinese history lovers like myself to still rue). The PRC, a state which once carried out this state sponsored campaign of cultural terrorism, soon came to officially recognize these policies as a mistake.

Would that it was so in the Anglosphere. Here, the Christian sentiment that damaged European art and philosophy for centuries never seems to die, but only gets perpetually reborn under new forms. From the obvious sequels of the Great Awakening and the evangelical revival, to the less obvious such as militarized human rights foreign policy, American Exceptionalism, critical race theory, queer theory, the quest for ever expanding realms of ‘safe spaces’, and the present day pro-censorship trend, the tribes change but the underlying psychology does not. All of these adopt the very monotheist view that to come into contact with something you don’t like infects your soul like a virus, and affirms the idea that what is good or bad for you must be good or bad for everyone else. And always, it comes a deeply disturbing affirmation that the past is sinful, and that ones soul can only be immaculate by rejecting all things contrary to what the good people of the present do. We can stop the tragicomedy of history, these people propose, by simply rejecting it outright. And by also contending that to engage with any figure’s opinion, past or present, is to affirm all of them. No nuance in this brave new world. And nothing fills me with more concern than this growing trend I see of the hard left, already prone to sanctimonious preaching, reconciling itself with Christianity, the inventor of universal scolding and messianism. Should such a convergence fully occur, it will create the most insufferable and absolutist outgrowths of philosophy and culture of all time. I think we can now safely say what the one thing to make me see the right as the lesser evil would be, should such a wretched alliance occur.

The most ridiculous aspect of this argument is also the one that is most telling as to why fanatics despise a nuanced and contextual understanding of history: that we have it right now unlike before. If there is one thing a thorough study of history should tell everyone, it is that morality is as faddish and ephemeral a concept as fashion is. And much of it always dates poorly. Eugenics was once a progressive cause, as was prohibition. The inference is obvious: if so much that seemed obvious and good once now looks so terrible…what things that look good today will seem terrible tomorrow?

Quite a bit of it, I would be willing to bet.

If big picture issues matter to you, it is best to be above and beyond trendy moralism in the first place. Understanding structural forces in politics you want to change is good. But don’t ever get it conflated with these tent-revivalist trends that periodically sweep the Christian and Islamic worlds. In order to see the future more clearly, it becomes necessary to see the past clearly first. And that will also give you insight into the present beyond that of your more intellectually challenged and fad-chasing peers.

It becomes important to set up informal networks for those of us who, despite this ever growing monoculture by and for moralistic simpletons, plan, network and discuss as a proper counter-culture. No longer interested in trying to change this bizarre and periodic rising of anti-history anti-context people, we should break into a separate but parallel group. Occupying the same society but offering alternatives. This is not just for our own sanity, but also a useful community service. Monocultures, be it of crops, bureaucratic hierarchies or ideologies, create blind spots and thus increase the odds of society-wide failure due to an inability to adapt. Evolution cannot work without constant differentiation. A society that seeks to expunge intellectual and cultural diversity is a society digging its own grave. One thing ignored by many radicals today as inconvenient is that the Islamic State’s very destruction of ancient works of art was motivated not just by Islam’s proscriptions on the human form in artwork, but also by a hatred of divergent societies and separate states preventing their religion from being universal. The Palmyrene Empire, so notable for its brief but spectacular challenge to Roman hegemony, pre-dated Islam and differentiated Syria from the rest of the region. And Allah forbid anyone acknowledge their local context might matter more than a universal ideology. We saw in contemporary history in Iraq and Syria just what a danger to any kind of minority or even culture of critical inquiry such people represent. And what it must have been like to live in various times in the past when such people were dominant.

Well, I suppose we got what conservatives in the U.S. always wanted: a workable Rome analogy. Too bad its one that shows that the religion they treasure was the past equivalent to the wokes they hate so much today. Even I can admit there are some things not worth conserving. The Galilean Ideology has to be at the top of that list.

It is up to us to create a counter-culture alliance that one day could set up escape valves in society for when these hysterical moments all to common to the Anglosphere arise. Not just so that people can tune out of greater society if they wish, but also receive education and training from an outsider perspective in order to better understand and critique it.

This will be the topic of a future writing project of mine. One which, if short, may appear here and, if long, may become a short book or pamphlet-like work I would try to publish. I think that increasingly just as the H.R.-Neoliberal-Academia alliance pushes harder and harder for monopoly, there will have to be a backlash. Such a backlash would inevitably be diverse but it should also have some degree of coordination. Someone has to stand against the new dark age of the meek inheriting the Earth.

In the meantime…

The Black Longhouse

/ geotrickster / 10 Comments

“You’re feeling the oppression of Christian hegemony in conflict with native animism,” he said. “Self-righteous, puritanical men seized this land. You’re also feeling the eyes of the vultures evaluating the sweet texture of your skin. The eyes of many animals. Animals endure.’

~Laird Barron, ‘Worse Angels’

What follows is a symbolic manifesto of sorts. Take from it what you will.

In a world built on bones there is an entire hemisphere that is especially shattered by abrupt displacement. On the northern continent of that hemisphere is the seat of a degenerating world-empire. Within that empire are a people unmoored from the reality of the ancient land beneath their feet even as it dies because of them. They cling to the ideologies of a failing state despite these very beliefs having brought them to this point. The universal idealism of a simple moralistic world and one set of values to make sense of it has not just failed them-it has made everything worse for everyone. The ubiquity of their communications networks brings what was once left at the pulpit of the puritan into an unceasing daily bombardment of affirmation for collapsing monoculture.

But there was a time that lasted far longer before the coming of Christ and Cotton Mather when these lands had no such grifters. Tribes existed and fought each other as humans always do, but had no concepts of messianic religion, ‘biological’ race, or the glorification of victimhood. These many diverse peoples were wiped out by an unprecedented hemisphere-encompassing apocalypse where smallpox and plague took the majority as a prelude. Then came shattered bands of survivors still alive in a time where the recently dead outnumbered the living by multitudes and were forced to respond to an alien invasion of technologically advanced extremists. They went down in a hell of a fight that took centuries and their descendants are still live today, despite the odds.

In their place came a civilization that broke all contact with this past and rushed to fill the vacuum with their own inheritance…but not all these things were a sensible fit for the new locale. Despite the cultural disconnect of most of its inhabitants, its earthy chaotic gods sleep much closer to the surface than the long-buried and fully domesticated pantheons across the sea. This is not a land of mellow meadows and shires, but of earthquakes, blizzards, tornadoes, and towering thunderstorms. This is a land that scorns weakness.

The newcomers could breed to the point where they were immune to native syncretism-avoiding the natural fate of conquerors. This further cut off the northern reaches of the hemisphere even beyond that of the rest. We live in their world now. But now, in the early 21rst Century, we see their world view cracking under the strain of its own hubris and excess. The opportunity to build something new is opening before our eyes. Something that fits this place better. Something that can at least bridge some of the gap between the incongruous ideological imposition of today and the natural state of a beautiful and terrible land.

There are those of all backgrounds and persuasions who find no tribe amongst the degenerating postmoderns of our time. They find the amplification of faddish superficial issues a distraction, the busybodies of the commentariat and consumer as the front for a past-prime ruling class in crisis. Witch hunts are everywhere as the fearful and ostensibly secular descendants of those original puritan settlers and conquistadores blame heretics for their own inadequacies.

Those who reject this status quo may find themselves walking in the woods as they travel apart from the trends. Let us say in the northeast or Great Lakes region-though it could be anywhere. The new growth forest of the woodlands hacked down and re-grown is filled with underbrush and small trees. Ticks lurk everywhere as un-predated deer strip the biodiversity as they spread like locusts.

Eventually these travelers make their way to a place deep in the woods. Giant ancient trees tower above in the old growth grove. Here, the underbrush is lighter. Flowers bloom again. Sharp unseen eyes raise their hackles as they know the deer tread lightly in this place for fear of predation. At the center is a longhouse. Those redoubtable large bark clad structures that could house many people and supplies. But this longhouse is different. It is jet black and angled as only a modern construct could be. It draws from the forgotten past but is no slave to it. It would seem incongruous to those who came across it accidentally, but not to our band our travelers.

On the inside they find the interior lit only by the fire pits. The shadows cast about imply a structure far larger than seems from the outside. There wait for them masked figures-wooden shamanic grotesques with distorted and leering features. Beneath this they wear well-tailored suits. They tell the travelers that to accept the uncertainties of a new future is to draw strength from a different past. The pipe is passed around as the masked ones speak of a land people belong to, and not a land belonging to people.

‘Mankind sought the death of Coyote, an animal once confined to the plains and Rockies. His attempts to kill it made it breed and migrate outwards. A century after this campaign began it has unintentionally spread the animal over the entire continent. Here, in the east, it has bred with Canadian wolves up north before moving south. It has thus grown in size and pack mentality.

‘The coyotes were misfits, but they came together to survive and perhaps for revenge. Now, they thrive while we decline. Be like this beast. Adapt to the new by breaking old bonds of safety. Your mouth must be red with venison for the flowers to bloom again and the ticks to recede. Face your fears directly and make them your allies against your foes. Come together at decisive points in time and scatter when countered. Always help to sabotage the complacently powerful and their defenders.’

These travelers realize their personal differences do not need to be ironed out-the diversity strengthens them. Here they can debate the most taboo subjects openly, shrouded from view of the puritans by the walls of the Black Longhouse. They have something more important now: common enemies. The missionary, the financier, the complacent monoculture that upholds them all.

As the travelers dance around the fire they revel in being both distinct and as-one. They know that their odds are low but that such difficulties only increase the glory of the fight. The future they want is yet un-defined but by taking the first step away from a failed consensus the mere possibility to building something new has been created. All of them now carry the Black Longhouse inside them.

The travelers walk out of the old growth region, through the moat of the striplings, and back into the roar of modernity. But rather than be sad as before, they see now that within this degenerating world is an abundance of new opportunities. Every decaying town is a chance to rebuild not in some nostalgic way for what it once was, but a new way to that leans forward and draws from a different and much neglected past. Many peoples, gods, and cultures united against a common old order and its increasingly hysterical defenders. What were the covenant chains of past entities on this land before colonization but the agreement that difference and divergence was fine, and could all serve a struggle against a common enemy? Such was the thought of people who lived in older longhouses. Already, one can hear the sounds of this new synthesis of forgotten old and dynamic new if one listens.

Somewhere inside a tacky suburban home at night, a clergyman (either of faith or of human resources and professional management) spots something outside the window. He peers through the glass to see the leering face of a coyote with wolf-like dimensions. The lights go dark and he screams, fumbling to bring them back on. But against one who sees in the darkness as if it was its own form of light…

In a time of monsters be the biggest baddest monster of all. And bring your friends. This ancient land demands no less of you.