Postmodern Iconoclasm

23 June 202023 June 2020 The Portly Politico8 Comments

Statues are coming down all over the United States. A few years ago, during our nation’s last bout of racialist temper tantrums and looting, the calls were for Confederate monuments to come down, on the premise that our nation shouldn’t celebrate “losers” and “traitors.” For an historically illiterate population that just knows that “slavery was because of bad white Southerners,” it was a compelling, if ultra-simplistic and stupid, case.

At the time, many conservatives pointed out that, hey, if you start tearing down statues of former slave owners, you’re inevitably going to move onto George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Should we really judge great men of the past solely based on one practice, one that we now acknowledge as immoral, but that was widespread—and, let’s not forget, practiced globally, with particular zest and gusto among Muslims—during their lives? And let’s not forget that many slave owners wished to see the ultimate demise of the “peculiar institution.”

What we’re seeing now is an orgy of presentism, one that fits nicely with the orgy of animalistic rioting. These ignorant, borderline illiterate (they are, in fact, excessively educated in Grievance and Victim Studies, but uneducated in actual knowledge and Truth) progressives and their pawns live in a perpetual present, in which the only good is whatever the social justice commissars decided at the last struggle session. “We have always been at war with Eurasia.”

TBT: History of Conservative Thought Update: Edmund Burke

18 June 202018 June 2020 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The Summer 2020 session of History of Conservative Thought is really going well. Yesterday, the three young man each gave brief presentations on three excerpts from Edmund Burke’s writing, summarizing Burke’s main points and ideas.

It was made for a lively, far-ranging discussion. One of the students is taking another summer course, Terror and Terrorism, a popular summertime offering from one of my colleagues. I had the pleasure to fill-in last summer for the French Revolution portion of that class while my colleague was away at an AP Summer Institute. Apparently, that course just covered the French Revolution again, so it dovetailed nicely with our discussion of Burke’s Reflections on that bloody affair. We had a good time contrasting Burkean “ordered liberty” and Rousseau’s “general will.”

As such, I thought this edition of TBT could look back to Summer 2019’s HoCT update, “History of Conservative Thought Update: Edmund Burke“:

A bit of a delayed post today, due to a busier-than-usual Monday, and the attendant exhaustion that came with it. The third meeting of my new History of Conservative Thought class just wrapped up, and while I should be painting right now, I wanted to give a quite update.

Last week, we began diving into the grandfather of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke. Burke prophetically saw the outcome of the French Revolution before it turned sour, writing his legendary Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1789 as the upheaval began. Burke argued that the French Revolution ended the greatness of European civilization, a Europe that governed, in various ways, its respective realms with a light hand, and a sense of “moral imagination.”

To quote Burke reflecting on the Queen of France:

“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroick enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”

What a powerful excerpt! The “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” indeed, reign in the West. What Burke was driving at here was that the rationalistic, abstract bureaucrats who would abandon tradition in their quest for a perfect society would sacrifice everything that made their country great, and life worth living.

Burke was also arguing that there is more to obedience to a government or king than the mere threat of power. People are invested in their country and society—and willing to submit to authority—because of organic culture from which it grows. Uprooting the great tree of tradition in favor of abstract foundations merely destroys the tree, and plants its seedlings in shallow ruts of stone. What grows will be anemic and pitiful by comparison.

Volumes could and have been written about Burke, but I’ll leave it here for now. Next week we’re getting into the development of Northern and Southern conservatism, which should make for some pre-Independence Day fun.

If the South Woulda Won

12 June 202012 June 2020 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Amid all the upheaval of the past few weeks, conservatives are wondering, “What next?” and “Where did we go wrong?” There are multiple answers to both questions. To the latter, there are the familiar suspects: the 1960s, the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, the influence of the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism, etc.

One possible answer—one that’s been pushed aside in our historically incompetent and racially hypersensitive era—is the victory of the Union in the American Civil War. I wrote extensively about “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War” a few weeks ago; in that essay, I wrote that

…[T]he biggest legacy of the American Civil War was that it marked the victory of a certain Yankee political philosophy and political economy over the rest of the country. The North and the South took fundamentally different views of the world….

…[T]he larger point was that the South existed in a far more traditional version of the world than the Yankee.

The Yankee, instead, came from a Puritanical/Calvinist perspective. Weaver argued that the Southerner recognized and named evil, but rather than try to stamp it out—thereby breeding a multitude of smaller, more insidious evils—he sought to fence it off, to mark it. The Northern Puritan sought to eradicate evil–thus the radical abolitionist impulse (in the context of the Civil War), on down to the modern-day “Puritanism” of the SJWs, for whom nothing is ever good enough.

Immediately after the Civil War, the South, being out of national politics in the Reconstruction Era, could not stop the political-economic alliance of the North and West, which put into place high protective tariffs and expanded federal authority….

And so on. Essentially, the victory of the Union, which brought many material blessings, and the moral good of abolishing slavery, also brought with it the totalizing influence of Yankee imperialism and the erosion of legitimate States’ rights at the expense of expanding federal power.

History of Conservative Thought Summer 2020, Week 2

10 June 202010 June 2020 The Portly Politico3 Comments

The second week of History of Conservative Thought 2020 is in the books. We did another Google Meet session, as I’m still supposed to be quarantining, but we should be able to meet in person next week. My fever is virtually gone, and I’m finally feeling normal again.

The bulk of today’s discussion centered on Russell Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles,” which expanded a bit upon the six conservative principles Kirk wrote about in the “Introduction” to The Portable Conservative Reader. It was a great discussion, and it was interesting to read the students’ papers before class to see how their answer to the question “What is Conservatism?” changed after reading Kirk.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Civil War?

6 June 20206 June 2020 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here. NEW TIER: $3 a month gets one edition of Sunday Doodles every month!

The nation is aflame in disorder. These race riots—really, thinly-veiled pretenses for mob violence and destruction—have become a depressing feature of our progressive utopia; perpetual revolution for the perpetually aggrieved.

The reactions from the two sides of our great national divide illustrate the unavoidable contrasts. The Left either celebrates the violence, or washes its hands of it, claiming they can’t condemn the riots “without walking in the shoes” of looting blacks. The Right, grounded in reality and respect for rule of law, expresses disbelief that anyone, even a progressive, could somehow endorse or even ignore rioting.

The United States has not been so divided since the 1850s. When John Brown, the crazed radical abolitionist, staged his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he was hanged for his reckless crime. Brown’s goal had been to use federal arms to equip slaves, leading them in a massive rebellion—the deepest fear of slave owners. In the North and among the elites, Brown was heralded as a hero of and martyr to a noble cause. To Southerners, this praise seemed like cheering for a murderer—a murderer who wanted Southerners in particular dead.

Slavery was wrong—as tiresome as it is to have to repeat it in the vain attempt of shielding one’s self against attack—but Brown’s zealotry shed blood needlessly. Had he succeeded, many innocent Virginians would have died—and the rebellion would have been put down. Regardless, the differing reactions of the two sections of the country highlighted how thoroughly alienated both had become.

So it seems we are similarly poised today in the United States.

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First Day of History of Conservative Thought 2020

3 June 20203 June 2020 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Today marked the first day of the Summer 2020 session of my History of Conservative Thought course. Because I’m sick and awaiting COVID-19 test results, we held the inaugural session on Google Meet, discussing the big picture question “What is Conservatism?”

The session went quite well (and I was pleased to see that even with a fever I could last around 75 minutes). The students hit upon these concepts as being key to conservatism:

Fiscal responsibility
Constitutionalism (in the American context)
Limited/small government and States’ Rights
Traditionalism in a cultural and religious sense
Opposition to Progressivism itself (certainly a feature of Buckleyite fusionism
Peace through Strength
Strict immigration enforcement

To that list I added the classically liberal concept of natural rights and the Burkean idea of “ordered liberty.” We also talked about how the earliest conservatives of the Enlightenment Period were largely monarchists, and explicitly rejected the concept of natural rights (at least, rejected the concept as Americans understand it; that is, that all men are created equal and God gives them their rights).

They’re reading Russell Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles” for next week, and we’ll check Kirk’s principles against their list.

SimEverything

26 May 202026 May 2020 The Portly Politico6 Comments

Summer Break is approaching, which means unstructured time, our most precious resource. I plan on using that time to work on some long-delayed eBooks—including one on Christmas carols—and to teach my History of Conservative Thought course. I’m also hoping to rebuild my music lesson empire after The Virus sacked the imperial capital. There will also be lot of family time built in.

In addition to all of those wholesome and productive activities, there is also the siren song of video games. Video games can become a major time sink (I’m learning that with Stellaris), but they’re a good way to unwind, and require a bit more focus and decision-making than passively consuming television.

One of the major video games meta-series of my youth were the various Sim games from Maxis—SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, etc. (I had a particular fondness for the scope and breadth of SimEarth, which I obtained on a bootlegged 3.5″ floppy disk from my buddy Arun in high school, back before I knew about or respected intellectual property rights). The sandbox style in play, which encouraged experimentation and open-ended decision-making, really made those Maxis games fun (not unlike Minecraft, which also encourages exploration and free play).

So it was with great interest—and a heavy dose of nostalgia—that I read “When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery” on The Obscuritory, a website dedicated to exploring games lost, forgotten, and never played.

Thalassocracy

18 May 202017 May 2020 The Portly Politico4 Comments

The Internet is a funny thing. Anyone that’s ever gone down a Wikipedia hole realizes that, pretty soon, that one thing you needed to look up can turn into a two-hour deep dive into barely-related topics.

It’s also weird. There’s so much content—so much that we can’t really quantify it—you’re bound to stumble upon something interesting. It is, perhaps, a sad commentary of the human condition that, given unlimited access to information and knowledge, we use the Internet primarily for mundane purposes, and frequent the same dozen websites everyday.

Of course, that’s also the problem of abundance. People can’t handle that many choices, and there are only so many spare hours to cram in unorganized knowledge.

That’s how I came to stumble upon the topic of today’s post, thalassocracy, or “rule by the sea.” I recently purchased a very nerdy space exploration strategy game called Stellaris (itself a recommendation from a member of Milo’s Telegram chat). Stellaris has a steep learning curve, so it’s a game that basically requires the player to do homework to figure out what they’re doing (my race of peaceful, space-faring platypus people has surely suffered from my ignorance).

That homework assignment (no, seriously, it’s a fun game!) sent me down a rabbit hole on the game’s wiki, and one of the in-game events involves a group called the Bemat Thalassocracy. I’d never heard the term before, and searched out its meaning. That brought me to a website called Friesian, which is apparently a site promoting the philosophy of Jakob Friederich Fries, an eighteenth-century philosopher opposed to that ponderous windbag Hegel. The website dates back to 1996, when it began as a community college website.

Lazy Sunday LXII: The South

17 May 202016 May 2020 The Portly Politico9 Comments

Poet Archibald MacLeish wrote that the American “West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.” The American South may be the same, but it’s more—it’s a country in the soul. It’s the culture, the faith, the land, the people—these elements truly make the South “the South.”

The South has been changing for a long time, but those old virtues are still present here, even if they are fading. The wickedness of modernity probes its tentacles into every crevice of every society, and the South is no different. We’ve managed to capitalize on the material benefits of modernity without sacrificing our souls entirely—yet—but the unrealized dream of the Reconstruction Era Radical Republicans to remake Southern society into the image of the North is rapidly becoming reality.

That said, the South and its more adventurous cousin, the West, have managed to hold onto the important things in life, namely faith, family, and work. In the United States, the vast belt from my native South Carolina in the east, driving westward to Texas, and up through at least Nebraska (that’s for you, NEO), still maintain sanity in a nation that is increasingly unhinged with an addiction to postmodern progressivism.

Not to say that Northerners don’t love their families or God, but the governing ethos of Yankeedom is materialist efficiency über alles. Even the terse attitudes and abrupt styles of conversation suggest little room for even the most cursory pleasantries. The propensity with which Northerners sling around f-bombs is one of the more dramatic reminders of what cultural differences exist between America’s two great regions even to this day (although, alas, I hear more and more Southerners engaging in sloppy manners and foul language).

But I digress. I’ve made enough sweeping generalizations for one Lazy Sunday. You can read more of my sweeping generalizations about vast swaths of the country in these essays, all about fair Dixie:

“Southern Conservatism: John Randolph of Roanoke” – I somehow had never learned about John Randolph of Roanoke (outside of a reference in Richard Weaver’s Southern Essays) until teaching History of Conservative Thought during Summer 2019. This post was all about the feisty—some might say ornery—Virginia statesmen who constantly strove to keep Virginia strong and the federal government weak.
“Reblog: Conan the Southern?” – This post looked at a better post from The Abbeville Institute about Texan Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Howard’s tough Texas upbringing and Jacksonian derring-do inspired the ferocious barbarian hero, a self-made man in a world of evil wizards and sinister forces.
“The Hispanicization of Rural America” – After driving through some parts of western South Carolina and noticing there were only Hispanics, I wrote this post, lamenting the replacement of white and black Southerners. Here’s the key paragraph:

I don’t like seeing my people—the people of South Carolina—being displaced in their communities by foreign invaders who speak a different language, who don’t care about our Constitution, and who don’t want to adopt our hard-won culture of liberty. It took from 1215 to 1776 to get from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence; do we really want to throw away 561 years of Anglo-Saxon common law and careful cultural-political development in the name of multiculturalism?
“The Invasion and Alienation of the South” – The Abbeville Institute is the gift that keeps on giving. This post discussed an essay called “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” about a young Louisiana woman’s sense of total alienation in an ostensibly Southern city, Dallas. She also details the leftward shift, politically, of Southern cities, which I have observed in nearby Charlotte, North Carolina—increasingly a colony of Ohio.
“The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War” – An instant-classic in the TPP archives, this post originated as a LONG comment on “What Do You Think?,” a post on NEO’s Anglophilic blog Nebraska Energy Observer. I make some bold claims about the good that was lost following the Civil War—like liberty.

Bless your heart,

TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Conservative Revolution

16 May 202016 May 2020 The Portly Politico1 Comment

Friday’s post, “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War,” has enjoyed more traffic than my usual posts thanks to a.) the controversial topic of the American Civil War (gasp!—someone’s not denouncing the South!) and b.) and Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown graciously sharing the post far and wide. Thanks, Doc!

It’s put me in a bit of a historical mood. In history, the important points—the Truth—is often in the details, but I’ve always appreciated the contemplation of the philosophical implications of historical events. Thus, my mini-essay on the American Civil War focused more on the cultural and political costs of the war than the nitty-gritty details.

The costs were, of course, considerable. Historians of a conservative bent will sometimes refer to “reconstitutions” in United States history, with the Progressive Era and its immediate offspring, the New Deal, often cited as a major “reconstitution.” The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which elevated anti-racism and social justice above the freedom of association, was another such reconstitution.

Similarly, the American Civil War, as I detailed yesterday, resulted in a reconstitution of the Constitution, as it served to centralize more power in the hands of the federal government, curtailing States’ rights in the process.

An observant reader will note that each of these “reconstitutions” reflected some revolutionary fervor or upheaval: the horror of war, the agitation of Progressive reformers, the privations of the Depression, and the struggle for equal rights. They almost all resulted in an increase in federal power, too, often to intrusive degrees. In each instance, the ratchet turned towards more centralization and fewer liberties overall.

But the American Revolution—which made the Constitution possible—is nearly unique in the annals of modern history—much less American history—in that it was a conservative revolution. That is, it was a revolution that sought to conserve—or, perhaps more accurately, to preserve—a set of traditions and privileges, rather than to tear them up, root and branch.