The temptation to review The Odyssey is strong. Stronger still is the temptation to wail about the casting, the incorporation of rap, of modern themes overpopulating the film: what amounts to provocation. But this is to fall into an obvious trap. When your history is in the hands of your enemies, nothing pleases them more than to cast you as the iconoclast and themselves as the victim. Desecration from a position of power invites combat on uneven ground of the opponent’s choosing, a baited ambush that encourages moral inversion. It is better to accept what Hollywood is – without pretending it is good – and look at what it says, in spite of itself.

A story about ancient myths will collect modern myths in the retelling. The most obvious of these is post-enlightenment universalism, that everywhere and for all time people are the same. Thus cast anybody in any role: people are but clay. It serves to remind that the canon is nobody’s in particular. This was among the nobler intentions of our deceased outward-looking civilisational ethic – unshakeable confidence that the telling of our stories spoke to total truth – that led to disastrous consequences. It followed that our homes, and in fact anything else, is no longer anybody’s by right.

The Odyssey has survived reinterpretation before. A muddling of Greek xenia and Christian morality is excusable because this is what Western thinkers have been doing for two thousand years. St Basil the Great implored us to be like the bee, taking the honey; the cry “great Pan is dead” that rang out in the reign of Tiberius was interpreted as the implosion of the old pagan world, that would become the Christian world. It is impossible for us, even while we might regard ourselves as post-Christian, to properly inhabit the ferocity of the pre-Christian world, where Odysseus sacked the Cicones on his way home and carried off their women as lawful prize.

Yet The Odyssey, by virtue of its source material colliding with modern sensibilities, accidentally reveals Poseidon’s gale, blowing our own civilisational ship from one sea into another. It is difficult to view Odysseus's trials without envy. We wonder what men we might become in the face of such things. Many today live and die with their courage untested. Nicolás Gómez Dávila said that the tragedy of modern man is not that he is mediocre, but that he imagines he can be anything but mediocre. Layers of dependency deny us Achilles’s choice as offered by Thetis: there is no glory to be found in the monochromatic modern world. The divine is gone, a mere hallucination, explained away as Jung’s archetypes butting against the conscious mind, or simple schizoaffective disorder. But the monsters remain.

Therapy is one answer because the dominant vocabulary of journeying today is therapeutic, an inward one. This is not the inward journey of classical thinking, but largely a self-serving one. It is less grueling and more navel-gazing. Seven years with Calypso led Odysseus to forget his duty, to dissolve himself into the chthonic feminine; to eat opiates to restore his ruined mood, because man today above all else wants to feel fine even while his home is on fire. Odysseus must eventually return to the Penelope who waits from the Calypso who keeps. If it is uncomfortable it is because the old readings of man are still accurate: that the heart is deceitful above all things, that virtue and aristeia are painful overcoming, not reassurance nor patting ourselves on the head. Classical introspection exists in order to orient action; modern introspection serves as an end in itself. Most modern thinking is about evading things or acquiring things. The Odyssey is concerned not with fulfilment, but return.

What is remarkable is that Hollywood dared tell this story at all. An age that says everywhere and nowhere is home makes a film about homesickness, about going home, home as the particular; home only dimly remembered. It is a story about a man who must disguise his intentions and truest self, amidst his own inheritance; who is reduced to beggary in his own home, a home changed out of recognition. An age that welcomes strangers repeats a story about hospitality gone badly wrong, to everybody’s detriment. Fidelity to the old world is represented by a man with no eyes – who has gone blind – an impotent youth without the means to restore his home, and a woman who, while nominally in command, can exert no muscular power and is harassed by illegitimate squatters. She waits for the masculinity required to restore order. She is as lonely – at home but not at home, the mirage of power no comfort – as Odysseus, who is far away and uncertain. The virtues suggested are not tolerance, nor self-effacing humiliation, nor an inward therapeutic journey calming storms we would rather forget, nor gender myopia, nor egalitarianism. The casting only makes this more apparent.

Many suitors are outsiders, bound by laws of hospitality, who eat the feasts they never toiled to gather, drink the wine they never trod. But many are also insiders, scions of Ithaca’s noble houses, whose de facto rule is illegitimate. Today’s world imagines legitimacy as expertise, procedure, institutional authority: justifications as amorphous and unknowable and opaque as the wine-dark sea. These would-be suitors are like the Britons after Rome left, who cannibalised the old stone walls to furnish their own paltry dwellings, to make their own ersatz glory from the departed genuine article. Their ethic is entirely acquisitive and consumptive; not once is the stewardship of Ithaca considered, its defence. Ithaca is mere grab-bag, the satiation of appetite at another’s expense; plutocracy. It is kind of those who sustain this worldview to tell you who they are. In the end the suitors drown in their own blood, when home is properly remembered.

The film is about the anxiety at the end of an age. It was not the sacking of Troy but the men who lost their way afterward that doomed it. So it is with today. To remember who we are – that is the challenge thrown down by films like this, made by those who would prefer we eat lotuses forever and let the years lay us waste.

Germany has been in the headlines lately, not least because of J.D. Vance’s recent visit. He told the Germans, with the same American brashness served up in the 1940s, what he thought of them. I was reminded of Denethor in Lord of the Rings – the elder steward of Gondor who looked too long at Sauron, could not do what was required, and incinerated himself instead. This is the feeling twenty-first century Europe conjures, though there are hopeful signs amidst the Spenglerian sense of decline.

A savvy post on X recently circulated, captioning the photo taken last year of a German police officer being stabbed in the neck by a terrorist whilst tackling the wrong person. ‘This is Europe in a nutshell,’ it read. The police officer died, the Jihadist was shot, and a total of seven people were wounded. The image of the police officer holding down an ethnic German, whilst the foreign madman continued unabated, had unintentional deep symbolism, even if itself an imperfect reading of the event. It is through symbols that people communicate the ideas no essay can manage.

Such symbols bode poorly for today’s Europe. Rightly might many wonder what their governments are about. In the old days, those that helped foreigners and harmed citizens were considered traitors. Not always without controversy, mind, but this was the reason Cicero had Catiline’s followers strangled without trial; why King Charles I went to the block; why Ezra Pound spent over a decade in a psychiatric hospital.

In times of peace it is difficult to make good arguments in support of a foreign power; in times of war, impossible. But foreign people are a different story. In our age of porous borders, mass migration and Universal Man, the elevation of foreign people is considered the height of moral rectitude. On this subject three great factions, ordinarily opposed, march in lockstep. The first is the world of multinational business, who prioritise shareholder value over labour conditions, and are aboard this journey for cynical reasons. The second is our postmodern priesthood – the intelligentsia, the press, the entertainment industrial complex and the universities – who harbour deluded messianic visions of secular paradise. The third is an internationalist managerial class, composed of politicians, career bureaucrats, and many millions of functionaries who grind the gears of state. The predicament of today’s West rests on moral pillars composed of economic utility, ethical certainty, and the unrestrained growth of intrusive government.

All three are hostile to the notion of historically-defined nations for a medley of reasons. They harm profits; they negate the fever-dream of a deracinated and divested world; they require less government largesse. Foreigners imported en-masse are able to fill the needs of all these factions at once. Many factioneers seem driven by a pathological hatred of historic Europeans, or so their actions suggest. As the old saying has it, ‘those who the gods would destroy they first make mad.’ Perhaps there is method to the madness; perhaps it is only madness. That will be a question for historians.

When people decry that German authorities hold a double standard – charging a German man for calling a politician fat, for example, while imported criminality grows around them – they are assuming good faith on the part of their rulers. It is an error to mistake stupidity for calculated malice, what Sam Francis termed anarcho-tyranny. Petty criminals are not a threat to the status quo, but a mobilised public, growing tired of the direction things are heading, is. When you can no longer convince and cajole through the various means available – education and entertainment being the most ubiquitous – then the gloves come off.

It is a case of the people letting the elites down. This has happened before; last time, in the Communist world, they were starved and brutalised for the same sin. This time a new body politic is being imported instead. This is why Keir Starmer put grandparents in prison for Facebook boomer-posting, and why agents of the German security services think it’s funny to lock people up for their opinions. If you think our own recently-strengthened hate speech laws won’t go the same way, I’ve a lemon to sell you.

All Europeans, and the Anglosphere by extension, are haunted by the ghost of Adolf Hitler, even if our grandparents dropped bombs on Hamburg or defended Tobruk. We are told there are two options available to us: the sclerotic, suicidal zeitgeist of the present set, or Auschwitz. Every vote for AfD, or the local equivalent, is a vote for cattle trains rattling east. But there is a third option; in German, vergangenheitsbewältigung – stepping over the past.

The younger generation, whose formative years were unlike their forbears, are looking to step over the past. Votes are still being counted in Germany, but it looks like a fifth of the population aren’t spooked by Hitler’s ghost. Something profound is happening there, particularly in the east, but this will not be reflected in the government formed.

AfD will not be invited into a coalition with the CDU/CSU, who at this stage have 28% of the vote. Instead, CDU/CSU will join with their erstwhile rivals, the SPD, who sit at a mere 16%, in order to keep the ‘firewall’ excluding the AfD from power. The shambolic zeitgeist will continue in Germany, and by extension, much of Western Europe. The CDU/CSU, an eternal shapeshifter, turned to the right in recent years to court populist concerns and siphon energy from the AfD; but this is the party that produced Angela Merkel and presided for most of the 2010s. These are hardly the markers of staunch conservatism. But conservatism today rarely seems staunch, in character more like a latter-day Von Papen: ready to capitulate or compromise at any moment, only this time afraid Adolf Hitler might be under the bed.

Western governments in the 1990s and 2000s took a calculated risk when they dipped their toe into mass migration, hoping for a painless shortcut to economic growth. The situation is difficult now, but will become dangerous in the future. The utopian dream has failed and soon Europe will have to decide between suicide or survival. Their demographic transformation is akin to the Moors taking Spain in the eighth century. Many are waiting for El Cid, but it might be Hitler’s ghost that holds him back.

Much is made of our current competency crisis.  As befits a thoroughly commercialised society we have replaced competency with the veneer of competency.  Allen Ginsberg lamented that the best minds of his generation were “destroyed by madness” – not that I would recommend him as an authority on anything.  Millennial Jeff Hammerbacher, a techbro you’ve likely never heard of, provided his version: “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”  Appearances are more important than the thing itself; style over substance is hardly sufficient.  Our overarching faith is invested in marketing, which amounts to a belief in the absolute rightness of gentle, innocuous deception. 

But truth, like damp, makes itself felt eventually.  Anecdotal evidence for the decline in competency is everywhere, from the doors blowing out of Boeing planes, to the Australian Leadership Index’s dismal report on our sense of public trust, to that mechanic who didn’t properly fix your car.  Boeing spent $100m US on advertising last year, which to the layman might seem better spent ensuring their planes don’t disintegrate mid-flight.  The West begins to feel Third World, because not only have we imported the Third World physically, but we have ourselves forgotten what maintaining civilisation requires.  You aren’t supposed to sell everything you inherit immediately at public auction, like the irresponsible recipient of a deceased estate; you aren’t supposed to become a techno-barbarian playing silly games amidst deteriorating ruins. 

There are few systems more complex than the multilayered systems of power that dominate our deteriorating Western societies.  Love of committee has arisen as much due to fear of Freud’s authoritarian personality as because it is hard to litigate against a room of people who all blame the person to their left.  In the United States, we might rightly ask who now is in charge.  The answer is thousands of people whose names appear nowhere.  The sense that elected representatives, even the competent and well-meaning ones, can’t effect meaningful correction is omnipresent.  Millions in the West have no confidence in their managers.  Leaders is far from the appropriate term; most sensible people wouldn’t follow our elected leaders into a supermarket, let alone fearlessly into the breach.  They aren’t good for much, so we concede they aren’t much good: what starts as a competency crisis ends as a legitimacy crisis. 

On the surface this is because uncaptured competency, properly deployed, is the enemy of a system disinterested in the public good.  This is true from the perspective of vested interests, NGOs and lobby groups, as much as educational institutions and government bureaucracies largely invested in expanding their own remit.  It is of no help that the public mood is thoroughly demotic, not merely disinterested in excellence but actively hostile toward it.  Public art, popular culture, what masquerades as literature – all are cases in point. 

More precisely, we aimed for competency when we should have aimed for wisdom.  This is fabulously spelled out in Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a book that, though nearly forty years old, appears increasingly prescient.  The difference is not semantic: we educate and train our young people to believe the highest purpose their lives can serve is as a piece of machinery in an economic apparatus.  In part, this was the inevitable outcome of universal education, where some general justification for such an expensive and all-encompassing project must be proffered, beyond freeing mothers to participate in the economy and keeping their progeny off the street and out of the mines.  The lofty hopes for education developed by the John Deweys of the world have been smashed to bits against the sheer apathy of young people lacking a proper model of the Good.  Socrates, via Plato, would shake his head; it is no good to try to make Men of Bronze – those dominated by their appetites – into Men of Gold, those guided by reason and virtue.  But then Plato would never have dreamed of pressganging recruits into his Academy, and his thoughts on Democratic Man were not laudatory. 

In The Republic Plato drew a distinction between those things that are good because they get you shiny things, against those things that are good in and of themselves.  One is focused on that which is external; the other that which is internal.  Into the latter category he placed justice, which we might understand as virtue, or honour, or conscience.  It is better, he said, to be the good man believed by others to be wicked, than the wicked man believed by others to be good.  Those who saw mere utility in things that are good in and of themselves earned his greatest ire; the Sophists in general, and Thrasymachus and Glaucon in particular.  In an age that denies higher things even exist, it is impossible to make arguments difficult even in Athens’ halcyon days.  There is no better way to show the clever money that you are a fool. 

Those who snigger at such naivety cannot imagine a world where wisdom is in ascent, because such a world is beyond their experience.  To suggest such a time could exist is to open oneself to accusations of selective nostalgia by the same set.  Yet there were moments in our history where wise counsel prevailed, where the course was set by something other than a Ship of Fools, where a genuine flowering of the human spirit occurred.  Kant might be right that nothing straight was ever built from the crooked timber of humanity, but this does not alleviate us from the responsibility of seeking to straighten the spar wherever we are able.  It does not give us leave to indulge caustic cynicism, much less build our systems upon such a base.

By allowing free reign for this caustic cynicism we have taken those with intelligence and aptitude and reduced their horizons considerably.  Many believed those who told them that they should aim for whatever has most utility, rather than encouraging them to invest in their only enduring property: their character.  We have told them what they can get by being clever.  But we have not taught them to be wise. 

Wisdom has a moral element; those who are wise are also good.  If they are not good, then we do not call them wise.  It is not merely the reverse of foolishness, but the reverse of wickedness as well.  Competency is measured in linear fashion; it is being good at something, but not being good in the broader sense.  One can be a very competent swindler, liar, or adulterer.  In too many cases we have made prospective Men of Gold into Men of Bronze.  By aiming for competence in lieu of wisdom, it increasingly appears we have gained neither.

We have gained neither because competency – not to mention wisdom – frighten a ruling class who are shrewd without being wise.  Those who are competent get along without their largesse, which spells electoral instability; a legion of vote-thralls are more easily managed.  To be competent is to be a threat, if not to elite culture directly, then to those they depend upon to maintain their status.  Those who are wise must, if they have courage and are true to their principles, oppose what we have become.  Our ruling class have declared wisdom an enemy, and because they are competent at retaining their power if little else, have gone to war with the form of wisdom.  The last thing the current milieu desires is an unaffected mind, an upright character, and a head unbowed.

If you want evidence of this, beyond the competency crisis widely covered, look at what is produced by the universities, the ostensible berth of wisdom.  Watch the news, or a current affairs program, if you can stomach it.  Look at what is trending on X.  Ask a graduate of secondary school to write you 500 words on the good life.  Email your elected representative and ask them the same. 

You will receive a muddle in response.  Most will be confused by the question, because not everybody is made to entertain philosophical questions.  But those who would rule must.  It is the absolute minimum requirement.  If they are not competent on that question – the question of wisdom – then they must never wear any sort of crown. 

They are not only unwise; they are illegitimate.  From this understanding, viewed through a glass darkly and distorted like shapes on the wall of Plato’s cave, comes the surging we begin to feel beneath the cracks of our malformed general mood.  This is playing out in civil strife in the UK, playing out in recent farce in France, playing out in the US presidential election, playing out among an enfeebled ruling set across the West.  Waiting for wisdom from those who today have clambered to power is waiting for heirs from castrati.  It feels like satire against even living memory.  Declaring war on wisdom was not wise, but expecting it from those who have is even greater foolishness.  A fool and his money are easily parted; a fool and his civilisation appear no different.  

Whenever a commentator – especially a politician – begins to wax lyrical about cutting immigration for economic reasons, I become sceptical.  One must assume they’d be all in favour of giving the country away provided the process was profitable.  On the other hand, they are likely too cowardly to openly discuss the real reasons for their scepticism out of fear of being called names.  After all, names can be quite upsetting.  If there’s one thing a modern politician is afraid of, it’s a focus group who doesn’t like them. 

We let much of our speaking be done for us by cowards and hucksters committed to selling their own mothers.  The Centre Right loves migration because their supporters in the business world grow fat upon the thing, and well-off older voters are pleased, even as their own descendants risk denudation and disinheritance.  The Centre Left love migration because they import new vote-serfs ready to install them into power.  Both launder such barefaced power-grabs in the rosy language of opportunity, multiculturalism and a fair go.  The only thing either side are fair dinkum about is treating the past wealth and future prospects of the country as their own personal grab box.

Peter Dutton made some modest promises recently to reduce migration a tiny bit should the Coalition win power.  It’s about the furthest he can push the thing given the Overton Window and the needs of those who butter the Coalition’s bread.  If the will exists to push it further is anyone’s guess.  My suspicion is that the major party that makes meaningful immigration reform a reality will be hated by the commentariat, insufferable women in cafes, and especially Laura Tingle.  They will also be electorally unassailable.  This is especially true as generational shifts continue.  Those under thirty have never known an Australia anything like that of grandma’s day.

Dependence on migration is not an easy ship to turn, as the turmoil in Europe demonstrates.  Germany is following a time-honoured tradition in making verboten parties that threaten the status quo in the form of the virtual-outlawing of the AfD.  In France, the Centre Right will ally with the Centre Left rather than the resurgent populist Right, in a case of turkeys voting for Christmas.  Because we have knitted our financial systems to the glass-and-concrete shiny visage of neoliberalism, our severance from migration as a means of laundering our GDP numbers will be painful.  As neoliberalism begins to come apart, the centrist parties united beneath this mandate will lose their raison d'etre.  Perhaps, as happened with the Soviet Union, they will suddenly vanish and we will one day struggle to remember that International Blairism existed at all.  They will go out with the whimper typical of all who believe men live for their stomachs alone. 

There are other reasons, too; the Ganges must spill over to replace the children our liberated women never had.  After forty years of being told that happiness is only a girlboss career away, this ship is as hard to turn as migration generally.  People in the past married and had children even when it meant they couldn’t afford an investment property; the argument that economic reasons are responsible for our demographic decline is insufficient.  We must look within the mind, where all things are born and all things die, long before they are born or die anywhere else. 

Baked into the willingness of postmodern Westerners to surrender their countries and consider doing so a moral act is deep ideational demoralisation.  Quite apart from reasons of economic utility, the embracing of multiculturalism has its roots in a reading of the post-World War Two world.  If we cannot prevent wars between different nations in different states, then we ought to mix all the nations together into incoherent states.  That this would cause all the problems once between states to emerge within states appeared lost on the utopian architects of this notion, who behaved with the certainty of religious zealots. 

This occurred because we are a very religious people, but our religiosity takes the form of a firm belief that any show of national solidarity beyond joking about lamb on Australia Day paves the road to Auschwitz.  This telling of the last century of history casts only one villain – white Europeans, all created in the image of Hitler – against whom the truest heroes are victims.  Victims in this telling are the only paragons of virtue permitted, which is why today’s Europe agonises about boatloads of illegal pirates who have sniffed out a sucker from thousands of miles away. 

The only sniffing done in our own country is the farts of self-righteous bourgeoise types, for whom antiracism and anticolonialism and antimisogyny are a sort of Lord’s Prayer.  If you want to fight the woke, you need to reject the entire post-war imagining of the world, which is very difficult for most Westerners to do.  Anything less just chops the tops of the weeds, to regrow afresh when the next rash of favourable weather arrives.  You need to be proud of our national story, including the transnational parts that make us part of broader European civilisation.

This is why, in our own country, any telling of our story that privileges the historic nation is unlikely to get very far.  You needn’t lionise the villains of a certain period to acknowledge that the post-war world, built entirely to prevent such villainy happening again, has its problems.  To suggest such a thing is to flirt with heresy. 

On this matter we are waiting for a Martin Luther, who is unafraid to embrace heresy and tell the truth, a truth that is like a lungful of oxygen to a drowning man.  If things continue along present lines the Australia I grew up in, not too long ago, will soon cease to exist.  It will become a mere geographic blot on the map.  I would rather the country I knew than $12 kettles at Kmart; I would rather the country I knew than Ubereats; I would rather the country I knew than a Camp of the Saints at every shopping centre.  It is a long time since Western countries had to think in existential terms, and a long time since a vision beyond full stomachs was proffered to the people.  Our glory is not yet behind us, but on current trends, it almost certainly will be. 

This article first appeared in Spectator Australia in June 2024.

Ever since Plato wrote The Republic, and Hobbes Leviathan, men have worked to systemise not only forms of government, but the rationale that underpins them.  This is entirely in line with the premise of Plato’s Academy, which implored that nobody who entered be ignorant of geometry.  As calculus exists to appraise endless variables, so the equivalent must be available for human affairs. 

The goal of political philosophers is first to describe the human condition and then provide legitimacy for governance.  As our systems became larger and more complex, these justifications took greater scope.  Early enlightenment thinkers hailed Natural Man, one free of social constraints and able to manage things from first principles, as the base for building Social Man. 

Hobbes imagined a state of nature as perilous, a war of all against all; Rousseau drew the absolute opposite conclusion.  Both were working backwards – imagining man where he started to explain where he ended up.  Hobbes sided with civilisation, Rousseau against it.  In these two thinkers are the germs of modern conservatism and modern liberalism, at least in limited political terms and in the Western European context. 

Later thinkers, like Weber and Durkheim – sociology being the bastard child of phenomenology and political philosophy – abandoned these rationalist positions for empirical ones.  Our love affair with data is not new.  Statistical studies too often serve to make the obvious and the absurd equally believable. 

It is of limited use to imagine Natural Man.  All of us are brought into circumstances prior to us.  To replace the concept of Natural Man, Rawles gave us the Original Position.  We are all asked to imagine ourselves in the Original Position, that is to say, as God.  Without recourse to our own interests – beneath a veil of ignorance – we can create a system that is fair and just for all.  This is impossible as the minute we are born we have skin in the game.  Western thinkers today pay homage to this idea as befits a society obsessed with detached individualism.  The Original Position, intrinsic to modern liberalism, is one reason Westerners are hopeless in advocating their own interests.  They believe they share the responsibilities, and presumably the invulnerability, of God; greater hubris is impossible.

Many thinkers in the last two centuries bent toward building a political system indeterminate from the human material that crews it.  Part of this is thanks to German idealism.  Hegel’s notion of the Absolute and Marx’s revolution of the proletariat are similar in that they talk a great deal about humanity but care very little for human beings.  The forces they imagine are beyond the ken or flow of ordinary life.  They channel residual religious energies that fermented the vague deism that presaged the materialist form this would take in Marx.  Twentieth-century political systems were deeply religious, appealing to faith, even if that faith was in historical processes.  Many books, now mouldering somewhere, were written about the inevitability of dialectical materialism.   

Indifference – at times hostility – toward the cultivation of virtue has characterised the growth of progressive systems, and liberal democracy is no exception.  As we have embraced cultural and individual relativism in our approach to normative ethics, we have become unable to express anything collective beyond Popper’s notion that we ought not tolerate intolerance.  The implication is that everything else is on the table.  Making even the most basic universal claim about virtue is bound to ignite a clamouring crowd.  Many now feel sorry for the most abominable felons, but will never forgive a racist.

I doubt Popper meant we should become tolerant of mundane human evil and view intolerance, today regarded as a political crime, as the only behaviour that should be resisted by civil society and the state.  Nonetheless the mainstreaming of Popper and his type positioned human freedom as the only measure of the Good Life worth protection.  Freedom in this context is badly misunderstood, subject to the utopian whims of individuals seeking apotheosis. 

In whiggish American constitutionalism we see the noble attempt to create nut-and-bolt systems tight enough to be incorruptible.  Here some Aristotle might be helpful to contemporary observers.  According to his take, there are good and bad forms of all sorts of government, depending largely on the virtue of those who man them.  A republic run by evil men is necessarily worse than a monarchy under a good king.  An indifference to character in lieu of system-type is endemic in our time.  We hope parameters and formulations will suffice, despite real-world evidence they will not.  Copies of liberal-democratic-republican systems, in places without established traditions of civic virtue, are hell on earth. 

Consider the crush depth of a submarine as analogous to the pressure of human wickedness.  Some systems, like communistic ones, implode the second the water closes above them.  They become farce.  Others survive longer, but if you plunge deep enough even the best systems disintegrate.  Some lend themselves toward human evil by incentivising its usage.  These systems dominate the history books of the last century. 

The defeat and discrediting of these rival systems allowed us to become hubristic about our own, to lionise them rather than the character of the individuals and societies that produced and dispensed them.  These systems that are no longer delivering on their own basic terms and continue an unabated downward plunge.  The premise of liberal democracy is that of a shared franchise and limited, divided state power; what we see now is the subversion of front-facing political systems to the benefit of those we cannot see, in the interest of those we cannot hold answerable.  Power dispersed in the way we’ve managed is power unaccountable, and the sheer viscosity and opaqueness of our governments lead people to mistrust them.  The ideal of a virtuous political class is as laughable to today’s public as that of virtuous real estate agents.  We know they are not, by interest or design, concerned with virtue; to suggest otherwise is to admit startling naiveté.  Virtue has been substituted with buzzwords that correspond to productivity or effectiveness.  Obsessions with ‘signature behaviours’ and ‘values’ indicate virtue’s absence.

The vision of political systems that can run themselves independently of their human cargo is the ultimate autistic dream of the mechanistic, technological worldview that Heidegger warned about long ago.  We spare our loyalties for systems, and argue intensely about them, while forgetting that the man is always more important than the machine. We forget the human element at our own risk, proving that the self-driving political system will never quite exist, and that we can’t expect even the most robust schema to function if people of ill will are in charge.  By indulging this fantasy we have neglected the cultivation of private and public virtue.  Like a train with no driver – or worse, a malevolent one – such a system will eventually derail itself catastrophically.  Perhaps amongst the wreckage we will remember virtue. 

I was sent to aid my master, Decimus Lucius Valerius, in the reign of Honorius.  My family had been with his a long time, and though I was a freedman born in Italy, the debts of patronage are great.  I did not take well to Britain this time. My bones were old and the cold deep, even in the south, where the climate was kind.  I went because I admired my master, and had since we were children, when I had first known this island.  I went also because nobody else was willing. 

In those days things were desperate, though they had been desperate since before my birth.  My master, stationed in Dubris, was part of the imperial magisterial administration.  His rank was Praefectus; he was born and lived in Britain most of his life.  He was in his fifties now, but in his youth he had commanded men against the barbarians who invaded the province from all sides in that moment of great calamity.  He spoke Latin with the accent of the north, which made his trips to Rome infrequent and embarrassing to his extended family.  To him fell the maintenance of order in the harbour town and the fort.  He was responsible for the cohorts encamped nearby, the classis that would dock, and the peaceful running of a town forgotten by Britain, in a province forgotten by Rome.  I kept his accounts.

Titus Caelius Severus, Legate from Rome and barely thirty, had recently arrived and taken up quarters in our villa along with his staff.  Severus and my master had nearly come to blows on occasion, despite their difference in rank.  Severus had no official position, which rankled him; he was expected to return to Rome at year’s end to provide a report.  His title was purely for leverage.  Rome was nervous of Britain. 

“You misunderstand my purpose, Valerius,” Severus had said, “I am not here to take your case to Rome.  I am here to take Rome’s case to you.” 

To this my master responded that he might find better lodgings in Londinium, to seek an audience with the proconsul who governed the entire province.  About this Severus was quiet.  The proconsul was known to be a glutton and fit for little else beyond table.  Beneath him Britain had not flourished, though she had not flourished for a long time. 

They rode the edges of the town, across the palisades with Severus’s aides and I in tow, to discuss the state of the settlement.  It was summer and the sun high in the sky, and from the sea blew an unfavourable breeze that brought the stink of rotting kelp. 

Shanties had formed along the walls, where Britons from far places cowered in lean-tos, and watched with slitted eyes as we passed.  There are no nails, reported my master.  Repairs are difficult.  Locals loot ruined buildings and the iron foundries are ill-supplied.  Little tax is collected.  People from the countryside flood the town whenever an uncertain sail is spotted at sea.  These people you see are from distant places and once ran their own townships, but they have come here in search of safety.  The land has not been safe since the barbarian invasions thirty years ago.  There are brigands and deserters that infest the inward parts of the province, who renew their numbers each year.

My master’s voice was like the creaking door that led to my quarters in our villa.  It had creaked for years yet nobody paid it any mind. 

“What of the cohorts?” Severus had asked.  We arrived at the fort where the cohorts were stationed, the wooden stakes that walled the garrison decaying, the eagle standard unburnished in the hirsute hands of the signifier.  The legions were stretched thin, detached into formations of varying strength along the coast.  These were not men in their prime.  We stood about as the Tribunus Militum, Constantine, led them in drill.  He was a large, hulking man with the demeanour of a non-commissioned officer, despite his rank.  He had been elevated, a fact for which his troops hated him.  They could abide orders from a man of equite or noble birth, but bristled when it came from a commoner like themselves.  But he was brave and ambitious and physically imposing and even Valerius, my master, had to pay him careful respect.  The troops had deserted en masse in the north in the last time of great trouble.

If Severus was unimpressed he did not show it.  Instead he spent much time looking over the books with the quartermaster and his bookkeepers.  Valerius and I stood to one side as they discussed the strength.

“You know what this means,” said my master.

“Yes,” I replied quietly.  They planned to denude our strength further.  Almost all the formations of good standing had already been sent to Gaul. 

We returned to the villa before sundown and I was tired from riding.  I was out of shape; this was a leisurely jaunt around the town and yet my legs were sore.  I sat with my wife and we dined in quiet.  Valerius did the same, though he was a bachelor, and Severus ate with his own people.  It was a maudlin evening to cap a maudlin day. 

*          *          *

A week passed when panic gripped Dubris.  Sails in the east.  We assembled near the docks to see.  I counted six ships against the morning glare.  Already word had spread across the town and the cohorts had been primed.  Constantine arrived with a detachment.  My master stood with Severus beside him, like a dog that never left his side.

The tides were bad and the journey arduous.  There was apt time for discussion, though nothing was decided.  At last a single ship under a flag of truce drew up and the Saxon delegation mounted the wharf. 

Their leader introduced himself as Saebert and was a man impressive to behold.  He was tall and broad in the way Germans are.  He held an arm in parlay; my master took it, though I knew from his demeanour he was not in a parlaying mood.  In halting Latin, Saebert explained his purpose.  He wanted to trade.

Furs, pottery, and metal goods for slaves and tin.  My master was unconvinced.  “You have the look of a raiding fleet.”

“Our people,” said Saebert, “do not trade or fight only, but both.  For now, we want only peaceful commerce.”  And he smiled with huge, crooked teeth, though he was handsome in the way that very powerful men often are.  “We are only six ships.  In number, we are not even a single hundred.” 

“How do I not know there are a dozen more ships a league beyond, where we cannot see?” said my master. 

“You cannot know that, as you cannot know many things,” he said, “but you have many soldiers.  I did not think it was like Romans to be afraid.” 

My master explained we had no tin, which was untrue, though Dubris was a poor place in these times.  Once it had been Rome’s first step into Britain.  Caesar himself had landed seven miles away. 

“Might my men lodge here for the night?”

“That is not possible,” my master said, “and you will have better fortune southward along the coast.” 

Saebert departed and we conferred.  My master ordered cavalry patrols deep into the countryside north and south.  He suspected they would land and form a raiding party.  “But keep it quiet,” he said.  “I do not wish for panic and general disorder.”  He was thinking of food stores and the already-overcrowded population of the town.  I was thinking that should we need to set to sea in a hurry, we would do so in pots and pans, on amphoras and dangling on lengths of rotting fencing.  I looked at the docks and examined the fishing vessels there.  There were no fleets due for some time and legitimate traders were few.  Those men might be traders, but they had other trades first. 

*          *          *

We convened later that day at the forum for a conference of the town’s worthies.  They sat at table while we aides sat behind our masters to shorthand the minutes.  With us were the magistrates of the town, the bishop of the see, the important men of commerce, and the other officials who held various positions as vicarii.  My master was in a foul mood; hosting Severus, and the arrival of the Saxons, had set upon him darkly.

“That was reconnaissance,” said Valerius.  “We must strengthen the town’s defences without letting word spread.  If we do, we will be flooded with mouths to feed.” 

The bishop, an older man of known irreligious habit, clasped his hands in front of him.  Long had he and my master jousted on the best way to manage the porous edges of the civitas.  He favoured whatever approach would flummox Valerius.  His arguments were sophistic and often persuasive.  “This will sit poorly with the local villages and pagi.  If they know that raiders are in the region, and we make no mention of it, they will look to their own interest.”

“Their own interest is our interest,” said my master, “and neither is served by choking the roads and abandoning their crops, for a threat that may not materialise.  The Saxons often cross into our territory undetected and have their own networks and friendly people with whom they deal.  We needn’t cause unnecessary panic.”

“If your fears are not misplaced, many may be killed and enslaved,” said the bishop, “and the Saxons are pagans who do not observe civility.”

“Then I hope you have your weapons ready.”

“It is not like our grandfathers’ day,” said the bishop, “we must accept that we Romans cannot alone hold Britain, and even the levies from the friendly local peoples are not enough.  Might we offer Saebert and his men employment? After all, Stilicho himself is a Vandal.”

“Better to hire wolves as shepherds,” replied my master.  “When they see that we cannot pay our own men, what do you think they will fight for?  Our good graces are not worth a sestertius to them.  The day I take military advice from a clergyman has not yet come.”

“Some battle order would do my men good,” said Constantine, “they are raring for it.”

At this my master’s face turned a shade of purple.  “Your men are drunks who spend all their time in the brothels.  That drill you put on the other day was shameful.  They are an insipid lot –.”  He stopped short of saying what I knew he thought: they come to resemble that which they behold. 

“My men have not received their pay in six months,” said Constantine, who had turned white in turn.  “I will not have my name besmirched.”

“The men who fought with the great heroes of old did not see their money for years,” my master continued, now in a temper.  He had advocated long for the arrears of the men; to have it now pretended that this was his doing threw him into a rage. “And they did more than sit around a guardhouse playing dice.  They are fed and housed.  And they ply other trades.  This is known.”  He turned to Severus.  “You see now what threats arise when we cannot pay the men entrusted with our defence?  They become smugglers and racketeers in the time remaining to them, when they are not playing at farming.” 

“They will fight if called upon,” said Constantine, white as a sheet.

“Doubtless,” said my master, and he paused.  He left unsaid what needed no saying. 

“Perhaps,” interjected one of the merchants, a fat tin mogul called Verres, “we might have benefitted from trade.”

“They were not traders,” said my master, who was beginning to become exasperated.  “Must you only think of your pockets?”

Verres shifted in his seat.  “I am thinking not only of my own pockets,” he said, “but the pockets of our townspeople, which, as you have noted, are empty.  There is no more commerce.  Fewer ships make the journey from Gaul.  My warehouses are full of unsold goods and I am far from the only one.”

At last my master tired of the back and forth.  He asked Constantine if there was news from the cavalry, the first of whom would be sending back word when they changed horses at the way stations on the limes of the civitas.  There was not.  Perhaps the Saxons had gone, but I could see that he doubted it.  He ordered they be ready, but held off on ordering the civic authorities to do anything.  “Drill the men,” he said to Constantine, “they need to be fit.” 

*          *          *

The meeting broke up and a grim mood descended as we departed back to our villa with our escorts.  “A fine council you have,” said Severus, along the way, not caring that I heard.  “It is obvious you loathe them.  How can you make this town function without cooperation?” 

“The religious leaders wish to become political leaders,” my master said, “and the merchants think the only metal in the world is minted into coins.  If I left tomorrow, this civitas would be broken up and gone the day after.  If you think I am talking pridefully, then you have spent too much time in Rome.”

At this Severus baulked.  He had learned something about Valerius, something he had not guessed.  I knew my master was speaking frankly.  I had watched middle-age consume him; a career, once bright, lost in the administration of a place that everybody had forgotten.  I knew his qualities well.  He was spartan in personal vices, read philosophy regularly, and clung to the old virtues of Rome.  In this he was a romantic.  He still believed that, far away, men of virtus conducted affairs of state with honour.  Had I shared his rank, and not respected him so much, I would have laughed at his naivety.  Something of the old virtues had been preserved in him, born and raised far from the eternal city, centuries too late.  I had read Virgil and Livy too, but knew that was history.

“That tribune, Constantine,” said Severus.  “Do you trust him?”

“What choice do I have?  I turn a blind eye to the men because they have gone unpaid.  They have no love for Constantine, that is known.  But he is clever with them.”

“Would the men follow you, should the need arise?  And the rest of the legion?”

“Without question,” said a voice, and I realised it was mine.  Both men turned their heads in surprise. 

“Your freedman has a high estimation of your qualities.”

“He should,” said my master, “it was my family that made him so.”  And they laughed, in the way that men of rank do.  But I caught the look of gratitude that passed from Valerius to me, and I knew then that he felt more vulnerable than his temper betrayed.  It was night by the time we returned, and the household staff stood on the threshold awaiting us, cast in amber by the lights they held.  I felt a sudden pang for this place, which was now my home.       

*          *          *

A spy was caught the night following.  It was a lucky thing; my master’s own men had received him, collected by the picketing cavalry who had returned late.  He had been caught skulking on the road leading to the town.  He had run when confronted, was ridden down, and spoke no local dialect the men had ever heard.  They had delivered him directly to Valerius, in hope of a reward; lean men on nags who received a bag of coin for their trouble. 

He was a Saxon, of that there was no doubt.  We stood around him in a darkened corner of the room in a corner of the villa.  The staff were scattered; we wanted this quiet.  For this work my master called in the head of his security, an ex-gladiator he had acquired long ago.  The man was called Milo and was covered in scars.  The sight of him was enough to turn milk. 

The Saxons had landed, though the spy’s business was, he declared, more exploration than espionage.  They were not there to raid, but to find markets.  Dubris had been denied them, but in the hinterland there might be people willing to trade.  This we doubted.  Milo expressed this with a series of blows.  Was he taking a message?  If so, to whom?  All men have a threshold of pain, but his was high.  If there was a message, he did not share it.  “If you are lying,” said my master, “I will crucify you.”  He made the gestures so the man understood, the universal language of the finger across the throat. 

*          *          *

We rose early after passing a poor night of sleep.  In the morning Valerius, with Severus and I in tow, arrived at the fort.  He gave his orders to Constantine, who stood at attention.  He looked more centurion than tribune. 

“They have landed seven miles away,” my master said, “where Caesar himself landed.”  He laid out the order of battle, emphasising the cavalry as his eyes.  He was patient; he thought Constantine a dolt, and Constantine appeared to return the sentiment.  People forgot Valerius was once a military man, and a very good one.  “Leave two centuries with me within the town proper.”

“Two?  That will leave me badly understrength.” 

“If they are in great number, form a defensive position and send back word.  I will summon the nearby formations and march to your aid.  Leave your first century here, and a second of your choosing.” 

The first century was the best century, the one composed of the most fit and able troops. 

“You will not come yourself?”

“My place, for now, is here.” 

Constantine shifted.  “The men would admire your presence.”

“Constantine,” said my master, “let us not pretend we are friends.  Are you afraid of the Saxons?”

The expression on Constantine’s face gave away his deep dislike.  He collected himself.  “We will set off immediately.  Expect riders with news by noon.” 

“I shall.” 

We departed, expecting the two centuries to arrive in the town proper within the hour.  My master was perturbed.  Sometimes he confided in me, rather than merely handing me instructions.  “He expected it.”

“My view?” I asked.  He nodded.  “Perhaps he is cleverer than you give him credit.”

“Constantine?  Never.” 

“I think you underestimate him.  I think he has been underestimated all his life.” 

“Then let us hope the Saxons underestimate him too.”  It was, I knew, the conceit of his class, and the secret plea of mine.  We could never be equals in rank, but I would never love him less for it; and nor, I think, he I. 

The day passed.  There were no riders from Constantine.  My master summoned the council, and the mood was dark.  The bishop pleaded for peace; Verres pleaded for trade; Severus said nothing, though I was sure he was beginning to resent his assignment.  It was a continuation of the previous conference. Nothing was decided; if my master had hoped for support, material or spiritual, none was forthcoming.  The two centuries bivouacked in the market square.  We waited as the afternoon grew long.  My master had sent messengers to the nearby forts, but any relief was at least two days away.  Word spread among the townspeople that the cohorts had been massacred, that the Saxons were coming, that the city would be sacked.  People began to pile up their goods, but there was nowhere to run except into the countryside. 

*          *          *

By nightfall riders were seen at the furthest reach of a man’s eye, but they were neither Romans nor Britons.  Scouts returned their reports; Saxons on the road.  Many hundreds.  Valerius called council.

It is clear, he said, that Constantine was defeated or had deserted his duty.  All city men of fighting age must be ready to make an account of themselves. 

The centuries were deployed along the palisades, built in the old fashion of the hill-forts that once dominated the region.  I knew for many years Valerius had wished to rebuild the walls of stone.  They had gradually been scavenged into ineffectuality after their destruction in the invasions three decades ago.  Others would pay the price for the problems of insufficient labour and abandoned quarries in the diocese of Britannia Maxima. 

“We must seek terms,” said the Bishop, “will not you, Severus, Legate of Rome, see sense in this?”

My master was on his feet.  “We will defend the city.  That is our duty as Romans.  I will hear no further talk of surrender.” 

“Severus,” said Verres the merchant, “you are the man of rank here.  What do you say?”

Valerius nodded to the two centurions in the room.  They took a step forward.  He held up his hand.  “No sedition will be tolerated.  I invite you out of courtesy.  This is a military council, not a civic meeting.  Verres, you have many slaves and freedmen under your employ.  It will be of use if you organise them and send them to the decurions.  Bishop, the people look to you for guidance.  Lead them in prayers for the city, but no talk of terms.  You yourself said much of the savagery of the Saxons.  You are old enough to remember how it was.”

“Many of them are Christians now,” said the Bishop, “and many have likely served in the legions before.  They are more like us than you think.” 

I saw that as the strength of the cohorts had been stripped, so too had the authority of my master.  It was late and he was tired.  The civic authorities had no stomach.  Tomorrow we expected the Saxons would be before the town in full strength.  Our best hope was that our messengers had made it to Durovernum and Anderida.  Otherwise we would die in the dark. 

*          *          *

We needn’t have waited; the dark came to us.  The Saxons made for the gates in the hour before dawn, but the centuries were ready.  We met them at breaches they forced; we fought them in the streets; they did not torch the houses for hope of plunder.  They fought like Romans, in formation, but they were limited in manoeuvre.  They were bottled at the gate and breaches the size of a man, where not an inch could be given lest it become a mile.  Surprise was their weapon, but it proved blunt.  My master directed the men, as though he were leading a legion.  Across from him was Saebert.  There were no arms in parlay this time.  My master exhorted the men to die good deaths, and they obliged in the quiet order that is the birthright of Roman arms.  I was told the howls of the barbarians brought early labour to the pregnant women and stopped the hearts of old men. 

In truth of this I can say little.  I was entrusted with my master’s household.  I worried that my wife, though no longer young, would become spoils.  I would sell myself dearly before that moment; it would be my own quiet heroism.  I waited for word.  Severus fought with my master.  He fought well and bravely, but no man with the rank of Legate dare do different. 

The bishop goaded a crowd on the other side of the town to prepare gifts for the Saxons.  When I heard I sent Milo, sulking that he was not with my master, to put a stop to it.  The crowd set upon him and he barely escaped with his life.  I began to think the city unworthy of my master. 

When dawn arrived we saw more men assembled outside the town.  Dull gleam, visible from the villa’s roof, revealed chainmail and plumed helms.  It was Constantine’s cohorts.  They waited in good order, but they did not advance.  I cried impotently from the roof.  Move, you dogs!  Yet their presence cheered the men who, despite heavy losses near the gate, fought harder.  The Saxons were unsure; they were in the trap Vercingetorix laid for Caesar, but they had neither his mind nor his mettle.  At last Constantine signalled the advance.  The Saxons broke, and the cavalry formations ran them down.  It was over by midmorning.  The men went through the streets, rounding up stragglers who had survived the rout.  There was no mood for quarter.  The barbarians were butchered like wild beasts.  Constantine led the effort and by day’s end his armour was smeared with blood.  He made a fearsome sight.

*          *          *

Severus made a show of it.  He at last flexed his rank, and Constantine was elevated again, the saviour of Dubris.  For this his men cheered; there is no cure for the hatred of a commander better than success. 

Verres, I am told, purchased the fishing fleet at an outrageous price and set to sea with the goods that he could load.  His men were too busy to be sent to the decurions, loading tin and stores as their fellows died mere blocks away.  He departed.  They say there were Saxon sails on the sea; I never heard what became of him, though it would be a suitable fate if he were to become the object, not the subject, of his beloved commerce.

Afterwards blood was hot.  Saebert’s body was displayed in the square.  The bishop, hiding inside his church, was arrested.  My master knew it would not hold, that the ecclesiastical authorities would not tolerate it.  It was an act of futile retaliation for his obvious collaboration. 

Severus and he sat down across from one another in the villa when the business was concluded.  It was late in the night; the sound of men drinking throughout the town could dimly be heard on the wind.  Both men were exhausted, in the fragile state of mind that follows great danger, exertion, and excitement.

“I hope you have decided,” said my master, “what you will tell Rome when you return.” 

“It was a victory of Roman arms, like in days of old.  A small victory, but a worthy one.”

“It was nothing of the sort,” said my master.  “You have elevated Constantine.  A man more unsuitable I struggle to imagine.  He should be broken by the rods for his conduct; if you were not here, that is the business I would be about now.”

“On the contrary,” said Severus.  “He is a loathsome sort, that is certain.  Any loyalty he generates will be short-lived.  He has the natural cunning of an animal, but little more.  This means he is safe.” 

My master was enraged, as these days he often was. “You were present, as was I.  He had every opportunity to intervene earlier.  The battle should have been fought seven miles from here!  He was part of a conspiracy to take the town, and only aided us when the Saxons were already broken.  He was waiting to see the way things went.  He, the bishop, and the merchants; if they had not a conspiracy of deed, they had one of thought.”

“Valerius,” said Severus, “you are a damned fool.  Have you not realised why I am here?  I am here for you.  This province has produced too many usurpers, men who take the purple as they please.  It is a hotbed of dissent and ambition.  It is men like you – honourable men, men who other men follow – who menace Rome in our time.  Your reputation is great, far beyond this island.  Have you not wondered why your star never rose?  Those men today would follow you to the world’s end.  And that is the sort of man Honorius fears.”

There was silence at the table.  Severus looked my master in the eye; my master looked to the floor.  “What Rome is this,” my master said quietly, “where good men are regarded foes and wicked men friends?” 

Severus sighed and stood up wearily.  He looked far older than his thirty years.  “This is the Rome we have.  We are not reading Plato.  We must deal with the world as it is.” 

“Where the heirs of Catiline are celebrated?” said my master, voice rising, “where the old virtues are inverted?”

“You have spent too long on this island,” said Severus.  “I speak to you now man-to-man.  You have not been to Rome for many years.  Spend some time there, and you will find your thoughts different.  Perhaps it has always been this way.  I will tell them in Ravenna you are no threat to Honorius.  Do not make a fool out of me.”

“Still I am not trusted!” my master replied, his fists on the table.  “Do me one favour.  Take Constantine with you when you go.  Send him to Gaul where the barbarians are said to be massing along the Rhine.  I do not wish to have his stink near me.” 

“That,” said Severus, “I can grant you.” 

*          *          *

My master and I grew old in Britain.  Constantine crossed to Gaul and claimed the purple.  His revolt added weight to the death throes of Honorius’s reign, though at last his head was presented to the Emperor on a pole.  Of Severus, I heard no more; perhaps he paid a dear price for elevating the wrong man. 

Conspiracy was everywhere.  Men looked to their ambition, when they were not looking to their appetites: when they were looking to anything at all, aside from sails at sea.  There were always sails at sea.  I knew that when my master and those like him passed from the world, the sails at sea would be at sea no more.  How fragile a thing, our civilisation, a thing that dies in the hearts and minds of men long before the walls crumble, before the coffers empty, and before the traitors rise. 

Author’s notes:

• While Honorious moved his court to Ravenna in 402AD, it makes sense to refer to ‘Rome’ in the general sense that people today use it (and many contemporary commentators did as well).

• While Constantine III did attempt to claim the imperial throne, he did this before moving to Gaul. His revolt lasted quite some time and for a while he was recognised as co-emperor, though whether he was actually a common soldier or not is disputed.

It was inevitable that ANZAC Day would eventually become subject to the same pressures that assail Australia Day annually.  In the 2010s, this was spearheaded by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who first conflated the remembrance of Great War sacrifice with the suffering of Palestinians and other Muslims worldwide.  For this she was hounded from the country and fled to safer territory – London.  Supposedly the heart of the postcolonial legacy she spends so much time criticising, today’s London is no longer recognisably British.  This is the future her ilk want for all of us, for as she recently declared, she was merely ‘ahead of her time.’ 

Against this future, like a waning candleflame, are the memories of when we were a great civilisation.  That great civilisation warred with itself and created the conditions of decline we now grin and bear.  ANZAC Day stands in remembrance of a past almost entirely unrecognisable from the present.  The people who composed turn-of-the-century Australia are separated from us by the drift of time that renders history a foreign country.  Unprecedented change – technological, demographic and ontological – has rendered that drift a chasm.

The most recent ANZAC controversy revolves around the destruction of a Palestinian village by ANZAC troops in 1918.  The village was a Bedouin camp; according to contemporaneous observers, the massacre of at least 40 and as many as 137 villagers was undertaken by New Zealand troops, with some Australians in support, in reprisal for persistent theft and the occasional murder of servicemen.  This occurred after the Armistice, and was not part of any larger conflict.  Australia and New Zealand were billed by the Commonwealth to rebuild the village, but nobody was ever charged.

In 1948, the Mandate of Palestine would become Israel.  Thus Australia and New Zealand, in the eyes of today’s activists, are responsible for the perpetual violence that encases that part of the world.  From this we can glean a few things.

The first is the arrival of foreign tribal hatreds from far away that have little to do with the Atlanticism and propositional, post-enlightenment image of itself that Australia today holds.  We are perplexed that others are unwilling to sheer themselves from their roots, the way we have with ours.  Manning Clarke, who was by any reading an inveterate leftist, wrote of ‘The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green.’  Excited by Australia’s potential, he was apt to realise that we were was still recognisably a tree, cast in the image of the people who settled it.  This ethic has been carpet-bombed into oblivion, best illustrated by maudlin attempts to reimagine Australia along invented indigenous lines.  

We view severance with the genuine past as an ennobling, liberating act: this is why we talk about history as though it is a dead thing, only able to teach us ‘lessons’ on the traps that befell our jingoistic forbears.  We study history without humility, but with supreme hubris instead.  Much of history-telling casts our ancestors as stupid or villainous, who deserve our pity and scorn accordingly.  This helps us swallow contemporary notions of ourselves, which are unheroic and uninteresting.  We cannot understand those populations unwilling to part from the past.  We view them as stupid and villainous in turn, which is a mistake.  It is a mistake because it causes us to underestimate peoples who think far longer-term than our eternal presentism. 

Australia, like the rest of the Anglosphere, is uncomfortable with notions of heritage that privilege any particular reading of the past, even readings that are positive.  This is why our current elite have such agony around events like Australia Day and ANZAC Day.  They cannot help but see the spectre of the self-confident white man of a prior era looking back at them.  What he would say about our current state is easy to imagine.  He might wonder why all that blood and treasure went to waste. 

There is a deeper undercurrent to this, beyond notions of identity and historical anguish.  This is to do with what we regard as moral in our age.  Many believed Lord Acton when he quipped that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  This throwaway line has become one of our governing principles, so much so that Australia, and much of the West, organise virtually everything by committee and quail in the face of individual thumos outside of sport.  We are suspicious of it.  We see in every Great Man the shadow of the slave master.  Nonetheless, power must be wielded.

Many men, as Aristotle long ago commented, are natural slaves.  A moment of clear-headed observation makes this evident and obvious, and we should have no shame in noting this.  The wise man recognises that life has fullest meaning in service to a good master, and that we all serve something – if not something or someone noble, then our appetites.  Wartime is the most direct and prime example of service to masters; it is antiegalitarian in their sense, but egalitarian in ours, and together bound by duty and service in the most primordial sense.  Against this the pseudo-liberated contemporary person feels a degree of contempt, which is why they enjoy stories of soldiers committing massacres so dearly.  Nothing confirms their deepest-held beliefs more sordidly. 

Good masters are few and far between, because we no longer cultivate this ethic in our technocratic managerial elite.  The truth is that in fleeing good masters we have not fled masters, but have merely ended up with bad ones.  In attempting to achieve a self-reliant anarchy we have left open the door to those who are in fact most corruptible by power.

Our elites lionise those without any power – political power manifested as groups, ideally – as the most pristine of saints.  Only he without any agency can ever be truly morally good, which is why many do two peculiar things.  The first is to make ourselves seem powerless before fate – be it systemic racism or institutionalised sexism, or whatever takes the postmodern role of the moirai – in order to obtain some of the power allowed by powerlessness.  This we see in indigenous groups that campaign for recognition, in contemporary civil rights movements, in Black Lives Matter in America, in the MeToo movement, and in most progressive imaginings of the world.  Only the victim can be among the elect, which is useful if by virtue of pareto distributions you desire to exploit large but otherwise useless groups as vote-slaves reliant on patronage.  The character of those Bedouin villagers massacred by rampaging Anzacs fits the postmodern classification of moral good more accurately than the sacrifices of those who landed at Gallipoli.  This crack in the armour of our national day, writ large in the present transnational spirit, is the leverage by which the other side desire to break it open. 

This is obviously a false dichotomy; one genuinely victimised by history is generally forgotten and swallowed by it.  This has been the fate of many.  So addicted are we to stories that parody the American Revolution that we forget that the underdog story generally resembles an antelope swimming across crocodile-infested rivers.  These people adopt these strategies because there is power promised by the mirage of powerlessness.  There is nothing to it more complicated than this.

The second effect of this inverted notion of power is to make elite culture utterly self-conscious when it comes to proclaiming anything from a position of strength.  They must talk about everything from the position of political rights and historical injustices with the sanctimony of a disingenuous priest.  This is why statements oppositional to this pique the interest of ordinary people, who have not drunk the state-sanctioned Kool-Aid to the same extent their bad masters have, and in many cases have parted ideational company from them without either party being entirely aware this cleavage has occurred.  It in part helps explain some of the populist victories in parts of the world, though there is more to be said about this. 

It makes one long for a time when this was straightforward, when men raised banners and leaders extoled crowds in plain language instead of paying their dues to oppressed groups for crumbs of mutual patronage.  A medley of spiteful mutants united behind a Leninist project can only be a wholly destructive force, and those of us who cleave to notions of Being with more permanence feel alienated and betrayed by our recently-elevated bad masters.  We should not be surprised that they have the deculturalising effect of rampaging orcs.  They are barbarians, and as Chesterton said, the barbarian creates only by accident.  Everything else they do is destruction. 

ANZAC Day pays tribute to a world that no longer exists.  We look through a strange portal into a time with entirely different readings of the world.  This disconnect has allowed avenues of attack that cannot yet find strong purchase, but in time will, as has happened with our other national day.  The problem with ANZAC Day is that it is the legacy of a world that most postmodern people don’t believe has any value.  It is hard for those with tertiary educations to feel a whisp of sympathy for a historical oppressor class being mowed down by machineguns and filleted by mortars.  They might not be able to articulate such feeling the way Yassmin Abdel-Magied managed, but it has settled in their marrow.  Such masters have no desire for continuance, only severance, including severance from those of us who see survival in continuance. 

Recently a small miniature company in the UK, Games Workshop, announced a change to its longstanding lore.  I won’t get into the details; if you know, you know.  The result was a blowup of catastrophic proportions that damaged the company’s stock price and resulted in some very half-hearted social media explanations.  I grew up painting toy soldiers.  First they came for Star Wars, and I said nothing, because I was not a Star Wars fan.  Then they came for Bethesda, and I said nothing, because I was not a Bethesda fan.  Then they came for Warhammer …

Popular culture has become a proxy for the genuine wars about our actual culture, or what remains of it.  There are many terminally online types for whom Being is hinged on an IP dreamt up in a boardroom.  These people, predominantly Millennials and Zoomers, are fanatical fans of their respective universe.  There is nothing, in and of itself, wrong with this, provided there is some balance in one’s life.  Rather, the problem is that Adorno was right, as much as it pains me to say it.  Popular culture, or what he called mass culture, has obliterated organic folk culture and aristocratic high culture, replacing it with manufactured market-based slop.  It has further become a tool for social engineering in malfeasant hands. 

Most great works of art are the products of a single mind, with a single intention, often not well-understood by the creator of that art.  They act as a conduit for deeper truths about the world that we instinctively understand to be true, something native to all great art.  The collision between the single-mind and the marketeers is represented well in Star Wars.  It began as the not-particularly-original imagining of a man with a decidedly teenage view of the world, successful in part because it rode a confluence of genres and a particular time, not unlike J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter twenty years later.  It successfully tapped the zeitgeist of the moment.  Studios and publishers have tried the same trick ever since, and where they cannot determine the zeitgeist, they try to create it instead.  The quality of these products – as we must regard them – was insignificant compared to their market appeal.  I loved Star Wars growing up, but left childish things behind, so the recent sequels left me cold, even without the myriad of disasters introduced by a progressive marketing crowd on a mission to create a new zeitgeist.  Increasingly other Millennials have not left childish things behind.

This isn’t to say all popular culture is bad, but that it remains popular not in terms of having popularity, but in the old-fashioned sense of the word: that it is designed to appeal to the largest possible demographic.  Its motivation is market forces.  Homer’s Iliad was not motivated by market forces.  Goethe, Shakespeare, and whoever else among the greats you’d like to list were not motivated by market forces either.  Their popularity was incidental, a comment on their quality.  Modern popular culture puts the cart before the horse, aiming for popularity without quality, rather than quality without popularity.  Too often both are sacrificed.  But the fact that we receive a poor product, evidenced by a cursory look at any streaming services’ offers, is only the beginning of our problems.  The deeper problem is two-fold; in what popular culture has become, and in what it aims to do.  Both are prospective tragedies for the human spirit. 

To understand the vast appeal of popular culture in today’s world is not merely to comment on the growth of entertainment technology, disposable income, and leisure time.  These are all important factors, so obvious they need no further stating: factors that have allowed “real life to become indistinguishable from the movies.”   They have made popular culture the increasingly monolithic force it is today, where nobody can avoid its touch.  It is hard to imagine Edward Said giving Frank Herbert’s Dune the time of day, despite its obvious orientalist themes, half a century ago.  They let the man cook. 

Ancillary to this, and seemingly unrelated, has been the collapse of organic communities, identities formed by a fistful of soil, and the mutual usefulness of these communities.  In industrial society, we saw the beginnings of this, though communication and transport had not become sufficiently advanced that individuals could escape the proximate, whether Five Points in New York or Manchester in England or whatever metropolis was thrown up to accommodate the workers who flooded in from the countryside.  Post-industrial society completed the process by removing the individual from neighbourhood, creche, and family.  We spread now wherever we please, but have found that freedom is illusionary and loneliness is not.  Many of the ills of post-modern society can be laid here, though we are far from articulating an answer to this problem, if we even collectively regard it as such. 

Another seemingly unrelated tragedy of post-industrial society is the collapse of usefulness.  Many are not useful to the places we work, which in turn are of little use themselves beyond a paycheck.  The secret cry of many a human heart is not merely to be known, and know in return, but to be valued.  Value is not like fiat currency; we cannot print it at will.  To be valued you must do valuable things, but the scope for this, as the iron cage of bureaucracy and the law of degrees of separation holds court, is increasingly diminished.  Nobody is invaluable, we are reminded; they will advertise your position before you are cold in the ground.  We might live in great cities heaving with human life, but much of it is interchangeable, like a nest of ants.  Our souls yearn for small communities where, like in Cheers, everybody knows your name. 

Of course you can go to Cheers every day, but you can equally not.  You can participate in social sports, or stop showing up after the first game.  You can attend church, but you are free not to, if something about it is unpalatable.  This, to the liberal mind, is freedom, because the modern liberal mind believes duty to anything other than oneself to be the worst kind of treason.  But nonvoluntary communities are where human beings find their place, and we have precious few of them left.  Prisoners who long to return to their cells and soldiers unable to adapt to civilian life are unknown to themselves shorn from communal bonds, even bonds as reduced and callous as those found within a correctional facility. 

Into the void of community, family, and the “viscous historical paste” of blood, has arrived simulated marketed fantasy to fill the void, in fandoms and fanatical Reddit posts and hordes of commentators on every corner of the internet.  Simulated value, gained by adherence to simulated universes, pleases what we must concede are ultimately simulated people.  Those Millennials for whom, as Dave Greene said, ‘found adulthood to be a disappointment,’ have retreated into childlike fantasy instead.  They are self-actualising into an a priori consumer product.  A society that knows more about the lore of the Elder Scrolls than its own history cannot boast of a bright future. 

The obvious answer to all this is family life, but here we find the ground salted.  The sexual revolution did not create good people; it created people in search of happiness, an avenue ruthlessly exploited by a ruling merchant class without noblesse oblige.  The right to happiness, however one conceives it, is the cornerstone of the post-modern liberal weltanschauung.  Too often we find ourselves trying to build castles on sand dunes.  C.S. Lewis put it well in We Have No Right to Happiness:

Secondly, though the “right to happiness” is chiefly claimed for the sexual impulse, it seems to be impossible that the matter should stay there. The fatal principle, once allowed in that department, must sooner or later seep through our whole lives. We thus advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then, though our technological skill may help us survive a little longer, our civilization will have died at heart, and will—one dare not even add “unfortunately”—be swept away.

The difficulties of today’s life, where one feels as though something monstrous is about to turn the corner, have lost their traditional remedies.  These remedies are genuine selfless and reciprocal bonds with others, and a propensity to look upward rather than downward.  Any attempt by popular culture to fill this void – with its variegated fandoms and obsessive corners of voluntary community – is laughable.  Attempts to do so are motivated by top-down grotesque corporate behaviour on the one hand, or the advancement of a certain set of principles by zealots on the other.  Thus the first danger presented by popular culture is that it has become a surrogate for genuinely lived life for vast swathes of post-industrial deracinated and deculturated Western populations, seeking reprieve from the harshness of a materially plentiful but unsatisfying manner of life.  The simulacrum of the online world is analogous to the danger of the lotus eaters encountered by Odysseus.  Such bugmen sacrifice themselves to live in fantasy forever. 

The other danger of popular culture is the tool it is set on becoming, in the hands of a zealous few who view it as a means of moulding minds on a vast scale.  The capture of popular culture, to the true believers on the other side, is at least as important as the capture of educational institutions was to a prior generation of leftists.  This is evidenced by the fact they are willing to virtually bankrupt themselves to do it, which is not the behaviour of purely rational economic actors interested only in profit.  They talk a lot about “reaching new audiences,” but I am no longer convinced.  It seems more apt that they are trying to conquer existing audiences, and fold them into a certain worldview by the psychological equivalent of blunt force trauma.

You can see this in what Amazon did to Lord of the Rings, what Netflix did to The Witcher, and what is currently happening within Games Workshop.  Video games, infested by parasitic entities like Sweet Baby Inc., have increasingly veered in the same direction.  This direction is the promotion of reductionist, unnatural and obviously false representations of human life.  Because it does not reflect truth, none of it can ever be art.  It serves several purposes: a humiliation ritual – particularly for men who grew up with stories of the heroic masculine – a fulcrum encouraging unrestrained girlboss feminism and a monadic view of gender, and a desire to demoralise and demonise European history and consequently our civilisation.  In sum, it promotes a postmodern, antihuman view of life, encased in suffocatingly shallow present political shibboleths that reflect their authorship: picked purple-haired young women writing in boardrooms with all the nous and skill of ChatGPT. 

We might raise our hands and shrug; it is, after all, mere entertainment.  But this sort of thing constitutes the prime ideational output of our increasingly centralised and monochrome culture, and what it has become instead is a front in our culture war.  We can take from this the lesson the Melians did not take from the Athenians in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War: that the more seemingly insignificant the enemy, the more important the conquest.  It demonstrates that nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of ideational victory for the other side, even in areas of life once considered trivial and frivolous.  When so many are addicted to media-consumption-as-life, and stake their very identity on its variances and show no desire to ween themselves from it, a great harvest of souls might be reaped. 

All art is political, said Orwell.  To say otherwise is a political statement.  In a time of mass society and mass culture—and amidst two-hundred years of varying revolutionary sentiment—it’s hard to argue he was wrong. But it would be better had he not said the thing. What starts as description often ends as prescription. 

Certainly, those in charge of erecting public art believe the sentiment. They subsume the art part completely into the political part, which is why we have Skywhale floating across Canberra and the Cheese Stick that straddles the Tullamarine Highway in Melbourne. These pieces are less expressions of artistic merit than aesthetic terrorism.  There is a barely-concealed cackle behind them.  They like to shock the civilised people in the room, like children at dinner who trot out a vile word they’ve learned.  The children, at least, can be given the benefit of the doubt.  The same is not true of the art world.

The art world, or that which presents itself as the art world, is not interested in beauty.  Instead, it has decided that ends trump means, and thus confess that beauty itself can only ever be a means.  For people of such reduced imagination, for whom everything is relative besides the rightness of their own freely chosen relativity, nothing can be done.  If we believe another of Orwell’s aphorisms—that beauty is meaningless until it is shared—we might say the same of their commitment to ugliness.  They are not content to leave their upside-down Pollock at home.  Instead, the constant barrage of manufactured ugliness in our public places is in character not unlike an unwanted sexual advance.

Part of it lies in our collective obsession with individual expression, which cannot broker hierarchy, because hierarchy is the father of all evils.  This is why the CIA generously funded American abstract expressionist art in the early period of the Cold War.  It had to serve as the bottom-up answer to Soviet Realist art.  You think you’re into the demos?  Now this is being into the demos! 

Not unlike the funding of the Mujahedeen, this one escaped the lab and became its own cultural force.  Much of what we take as given, in the age of mass media and mass communication and accordingly mass suffrage, seems to have originated in the brain of an intelligence man somewhere.  I am not sure the likes of Banksy would enjoy being regarded as the heirs of a program designed to manipulate minds. 

Architecture has suffered similar degeneration.  Almost all modern cities look identical, deracinated and functional, lacking the markers of uniqueness that today stand as monuments to a past that shames us.

The nineteenth and early-twentieth-century buildings in good maintenance in Sydney and Melbourne stand in stark contrast to their descendants.  It is not as though we suddenly forgot how to build beautiful things; we merely didn’t choose to any longer.  Like artists, architects plunged into the brave new frontier of the post-war order.  As Owen Hatherly writes in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain:

Brutalist architecture was Modernism's angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's divided between 'eyesores' and 'icons'; fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients.

Despite our pretence toward living in a demotic age, no period has allowed a greater stage for the preoccupations of elites than our own, preoccupations that usually have a lot to do with what they think would be good for the people, as opposed to what is in fact good for the people.  In sacrificing form for function—Le Corbusier famously called houses ‘machines for living’—we have gained neither. 

Here lies the prime problem with modern art and modern architecture: we have ghastly patrons.  In the latter case, our patrons are faceless developers who want a return on their investment with the lowest overheads possible.  They clasp hands with hare-brained designers desperate to stand out by conceiving formlessly novel yet spiritually identical shells.  Their god is market forces and a jealous hatred of antiquity, where men did far more with far less.  They care not what carbon-copy monstrosities they erect, beyond the barest aesthetic standards that are fashionable rather than beautiful, and we ordinary people, by virtue of needing a place to work and live, accept their bargain. 

In the case of our public art, our patrons are too often local councils and government departments.  Bureaucrats are not famous for their human qualities.  They are sensitive to trend and fad, as governments are the antithesis of hip.  To renew their demotic credentials, they shell out on eyesores.  This is the innocent explanation.  The other reason is that these types are co-conspirators in undermining the sense of themselves people once had.  They do this by instinct, rather than design; the instinct of the postmodern functionary, who believes he has ascended beyond quaint antiquated notions such as beauty, and must unceasingly inflict this upon everybody else.  Hence London’s most recent addition, a fat black woman in a blue dress upon Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.  If you ever wanted a sculpture to commemorate decades of imperial decline and national replacement, that is it. 

These ghastly patrons are made worse by the fact that, for them, art must be either entertaining or political.  It must be entertaining because, with the death of aristocratic high culture, for story-tellers or great works of art, market forces are the only patrons left.  Every new film is thus designed to appeal to cretins.  It must be political because, in Paul Krugman’s words, everything today is political. 

Everything is political because in modern democracies we delude ourselves into believing we all partake in the exercise of power, and so the exercise of power must be expanded to prevail upon everyone.  It is why you must stare at loathsome public art as you drive to your brutalist workplace in a city designed by people better suited to fabricating torture chambers.  The death of beauty—proper beauty, not the sort commercialised by advertisers—has gone a long way toward the coarsening of our public lives.

Singapore is worried, as The Washington Post reported last year.  There is a sense that the Chinese diaspora there might view their transnational home as China invitro.  “Shared vision,” is the byword for this, as Xi and the CCP aim to mobilise Chinese minorities outside the homeland to help lend muscle to a state ready to flex.  This should be of discomfort to more places than Singapore.

The multicultural experiment in Australia and most of the West was a toe-in-the-water prior to the end of the Cold War.  When the Wall came down it really took off, and has only gathered steam since then.  This is in large part because the big conversations about world power seemed to be over.  There was one superpower; there was one governing ethos.  Everybody would adopt it, and it was only a matter of time.  Russia under Yeltsin and a China enjoying Deng’s legacy would become core parts of the liberal international order soon enough. We would all march together into the sunrise, with all the peoples from the world singing the praises of societies that let us indulge ourselves and vote every few years.  There seemed no risk in throwing open the gates to all ye wretched of the earth, or those who wanted to make a dollar in an economy a little sounder than the one they left behind.  Critics were tarred and feathered as latter-day Rhodesians. 

And some new Australians have done very well.  Of this there is no doubt.  Others have not.  Tension between different groups, once they expand past a few percent of the population, is a feature of multiethnic societies.  We might enjoy getting our coffee and lunch from different-looking people from different-sounding places, and working beside them in nicely variegated workplaces.  Friendships with those from far away are natural for those who do not carry with them coarsely reductionist and disfigured views about the world.  Goodwill is possible, if not universal.

But the ethic of society writ large cannot be perfectly matched to that of the individuals within it, even if they enjoy goat curry and know how to say xièxiè.  In the same way personal morality differs from the morality of kings – who must account for far more – so solidarity in a state is different from solidarity among people who know one another in the flesh.  It’s more complicated than the ‘imagined communities’ Benedict Anderson banged on about, who essentially argued that the nation is merely a celebration of propaganda to bind disparate groups together.  We can’t wish a coherent society into existence, and to believe as much is to grossly overestimate the grasp of government, our now degraded civil society, and a particular vision the West believed would last forever.  It is also to overestimate the robustness of the society we inherited. 

It is further a mistake to consider goodwill universal.  When power and influence is on the table, minority groups with determined vanguards that know how to manoeuvre inside political systems will do their bit.  Sam Dastyari’s fall from grace and Jamie Clements’s Aldi bag of cash are testament to this.  Even when the donors aren’t directly foreign, the diverging interests of groups without a geographical stake – but with definite social and cultural ones – will make their plays.  What else was the Voice, aside from public contrition for guilt-ridden middle-class white liberals, if not a power-grab?  The United States is riven by this spoils-driven dynamic, which has contributed to the drastic decline of political life in that country, including looking the other way when one part of the population decided to collectively ransack the other under the guise of campaigning for ever-elusive racial equality.  Our desire to ape the American experience appears to have extended to importing intractable racial problems along with Hollywood, Levi Jeans and Netflix.

Multiculturalism of our sort, rather than the historic American sort, makes a lot less sense in a multipolar age.  We saw this in the wake of October 7, when crowds gathered in our cities and let slip just what exactly multiculturalism has wrought.  Those assembled bore no resemblance to Banjo Patterson nor Paul Hogan nor anything in between.  These deracinated products of multiculturalism, halfway between worlds, seek firmer ground somewhere.  The national identity we proffer appears anaemic and unsatisfying.  It involves singing Advance Australia Fair in monotone on the one hand – an anthem recently changed, which should speak volumes about our own civilisational uncertainty – and celebrates consumerism and enjoying oneself as eudaimonia on the other.  If we no longer believe our own national story is any good, why should anybody else, aside from reasons of financial gain?  There’s a term for that: piracy. 

Problems of identity are one thing, but geopolitical loyalties are quite another. In Australia, according to a Lowey poll, thinking in the Chinese diaspora tends to divide in three: one third loyal, one third uncertain, one third disloyal.  These are sobering numbers when discussing a population over a million strong.  Go to a cricket match at the MCG between India and Australia and see for whom the crowd cheers.  Questions about the malleability of the post-racial human being – an imagined creation of pure ideation – might soon find answers.  I respect my ancestors’ will is a Chinese axiom; our ethic is exactly inverted.

What happens when foreign powers decide that their transnational populations are not really the property of any other state, that they constitute a million Lord Haw-Haws?  After all, it was we who first regarded citizenship as virtually an automatic right with little significance beyond the paper it’s printed on, other than for tax purposes.  It is hardly fair to blame other national actors for treating our foolish mistakes as potential opportunities.  We might not think that blood is thicker than paper, but other people might.  And they might be the ones who set the rules of the game.

We’ve managed to build a postmodern tower of Babel, bricked with utopian prospects and mortared with the desire to do away with history.  The difference was that in our case, the mixture of languages came before God kicked over the sandcastle, rather than afterwards.  In this respect, we are even stupider than our biblical antecedents.  It is a monument to naivety, hubris, and the belief that history is dead, but history has a stubborn habit of returning from the grave.

This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.

In China beginning in 1966, there was a Cultural Revolution.  Hot on the heels of the mass-starvation that followed the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, the Maoist Red Guard set about tearing down what remained of pre-Revolutionary China.  The Four Olds – old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits – were extirpated as being the weapons of the Five Black Categories: rich farmers, landlords, counter-revolutionaries, right wingers, and ‘bad elements.’  The death toll was a paltry one to two million, dwarfed by the thirty to forty-five million who died thanks to the Great Leap Forward.  With Mao’s death in 1976, the Cultural Revolution, which had exhausted China, ground to a halt.

Traditional China did not die, but many traditional Chinese did.  Mao won his power-grab and confirmed his centrality within the Communist Party, and managed to prevent the Iron Law of Bureaucracy for a couple of decades.  Today the event is viewed as ‘ten years of havoc.’  It is a lesson in how to mobilise the young, how to attack the old, and how to blow up your society.  Today’s China seem a little embarrassed about, and limit public discussion on the subject.  As revolutionary China is now certainly a thing of the past, they look to shore up their authority by reaching toward the things the Cultural Revolution targeted for annihilation.  There are broad lessons here, too.

The West had its own revolution in the same period, the revolution of the New Left.  This revolution was a soft one, one that denied Mao’s credo, that

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The Boomers got their revolution, and it managed to involve parties, music, and the odd riot; not quite dinner parties or embroidery but the next best thing.  In other respects the Boomer Revolution was the same in character as the one that happened on the other side of the world. It took aim at the old and used the young as battering rams.  Like that revolution, it painted itself as an uprising of fervent youth, rather than an instrument of the establishment and those in power.  But it was animated by those with power; most successful revolutions are.  The best recent work on the subject is Generation ’68 by K. R. Bolton.  He concludes the book with this:

In fundamental outlook there never was disagreement between the establishment and the New Left. The same situation pertains today: the left plead for an “inclusive society,” while the oligarchs and managerial elite, in their board rooms and at their think tanks and NGOs, plan the construction of an “inclusive economy.” Both see this vision in global terms. Such has been the sales pitch for this common ideology of “inclusiveness,” in the name of so-called human rights and “democracy,” that the convergence between oligarchy and revolt can be readily observed in the recurrent waves of color revolutions against those peoples (whether Afrikaner, Serb, Syrian, Iranian, or Russian) who cannot be amalgamated into this common vision of a global, inclusive dystopia. The supposed dissent comes from the heirs of the ’68ers who, like their predecessors, are in revolt only against the primary ties of family, ethnos, and nation—the same things abhorred as much by the globalist oligarchy and its managerial elite as by the left. Their “revolt” is a false one, their ideology nothing but dogmatic yea-saying to the demands of their economic overlords. From its very beginnings and into the present, the New Left has served as nothing more than a useful idiot for the elite in the struggle between the deracinated archons of the world and those who hold fast to hearth and homeland.

Ideationally the New Left were a medley of Freud, Gramsci, and Gandhi, a real rogue’s gallery.  They promised individual liberation from our own repressed sexuality, the quiet overthrow of traditionally-oriented institutions, and the beginning of the anti-white sentiment, later referred to as postcolonial theory, that we see everywhere now ascendant.  All of this came with a great backing soundtrack. 

Unlike the Cultural Revolution, it was a revolution directed against people in uniforms, rather than by people in uniforms, because power in the West is rarely where it seems.  Like the Cultural Revolution, it lasted a decade and no longer, at least in its fervent phase.  The energy passes from these things, and stability reasserts itself, like the sun rising after a long and debaucherous party.  But that does not mean the revolution has gone away.  Today commentators would call it ‘putting the woke away.’  A simultaneous counter-revolution of the Right emerged, best represented by William F. Buckley and personified a little later by Ronald Reagan, but the damage had been done.  These figures could never undo the damage that decade dealt, because they were wedded to the idea that the contents of a man’s mind is his own.  This is not the credo of the other side.

The Boomer Revolution was ultimately a liberal revolution, one that did little to undermine the class structure of the West, much to the annoyance of Communist-types, but did a great deal to rewire the brains of those who lived in its wake.  Our cultural revolution was almost entirely an ideational one.  Liberalism, like Communism, is an imbibed mode of thought that must reject the proximate and natural and established to function.  Nobody in a vacuum becomes one; in this respect it is an infectious virus.  Traditionalism and what we once called conservatism are instinctive, as Roger Scruton pointed out. You can override your instincts, but it takes time and effort; often somebody else’s time and effort.  To keep this ideational furnace alive, billions of dollars and the waking lives of millions are thrown into the churn. 

People on either side of the 1960s thought completely differently about the world, even if their modes of life had not changed.  They went to work and returned to houses that stood.  In keeping with the fact that man is not merely the sum of material computations, the legacy of that revolution was more significant than that of its equivalent in China.  We are still living in the world the Boomer Revolution made.

We stood on the precipice of another cultural revolution not long ago in the West.  The pressure toward this began building during Obama’s second term, but largely went undetected by the powers that be.  This cultural revolution began online, because the internet is just the printing press with extra steps.  As that invention sped along the Protestant Reformation, so green frogs and memes helped along ours.  Just as intelligence agencies missed 9/11, so the establishment missed a growing threat to their own electoral success.  If Bacchus was the god of the Boomer Revolution, then Loki was the god of this one.  It was a proto-revolution encapsulated in a knowing wink.

Of this failed cultural revolution much is yet to be said.  It takes time to see things clearly.  This revolution, unlike the Cultural Revolution and the Boomer Revolution, was a genuinely grass-roots affair, which is part of the reason it was unsuccessful.  It was all energy without form: it had few clear leaders, few clearly spelled-out principles, and in character was an outpouring of vitality above anything else.  It latched on to Trump, who was savvy enough to harvest that energy, though he was not wedded to it.  Trump is a latter-day Crassus who sees where advantage lies.  He did what in politics we call ‘mobilising the base,’ only to abandon them once he had power.  Part of the Great Switch – where conservative leaders ended up representing the working classes and progressive ones ended up representing the middle classes – he proved that the culture war does matter to ordinary people.  Leftist pundits talk about how workers are foolish to support those ‘against their economic interests’, while they advocate for the castration of their children. 

The useful purpose Trump served was to direct all the counter-revolutionary energy of the establishment aggressively toward his person.  This showed how deranged the Left is, and the lengths they would go, both of which made for scenes of mirth, personified in the clip of that screaming woman at Trump’s inauguration.  This shared sentiment did a great deal to undermine the soft authority of talk show hosts and oxymoronic comedians, who embarrassed themselves for years on end.  Most of all, it demonstrated the complete moral bankruptcy of the Left.  This was most obvious in the utterly dishonest coverage of the 2020 riots, which managed to lionise criminality and rapine as though Gandhi was reborn as a street thug who didn’t do nothing. 

But knowing you have bad kings, who finally show that they are bad kings, is not the same as being able to do something about it.  It also does not help if half your fellow countrymen have willingly blinded themselves.  It is further difficult when these bad kings, while stupid in some very obvious ways, are also very cunning.  Their cunning has been demonstrated in the past few years.

There were three prongs the counter-revolutionaries employed to strangle what might have otherwise been an existential threat to their position.  The first was fortuitous for them; it was the pandemic.  The pandemic allowed a propagandist bait-and-switch that allowed all of the Right to be regarded as unscrupulous anti-vaxxers who wanted grandma dead.  This was a well-laid trap into which many stepped, especially in my country, Australia.  A taste of the mockery and ridicule the Left had experienced for the past five years was redirected toward ‘cookers.’  Many of those against the vaccine at last had a singular issue into which they could pour all of their vague mistrust toward contemporary institutions and elites, those they suspected were not their friends, but had neither the vocabulary nor the opportunity to previously express.  They were portrayed as being utterly selfish to the point of disregard for society as a collective: ironically, the exact ethic of the Left.  This further allowed a sense of crisis to motivate the protection of the status quo, which is why we suddenly saw everybody posting pro-vax profile pictures online.  The reduction of complex political matters to the acceptance of enormous government mandates was intoxicating to those in power, who had a moment not unlike the Wilsonian types who decided that, in the wake of World War I, a ‘moral equivalent of war’ was necessary to ensure that government had the popular support to do what it liked.  The Ukrainian War and various other crises have served a similar purpose. 

The second fatal blow dealt by the counter-revolutionary movement was in the centralisation of the internet.  Of this, much more can be said.  For our purposes, it is sufficient to know that ‘community standards’ have ensured that this difficult flank has been partially secured.  Reddit has been purged; Facebook turned into a farm for photos of grandchildren; TikTok hypnotises and brain-damages the young; YouTube, once full of quality dissident material, is now the playground of safe fellow-travellers like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro.  These fellows, who served as good entry-points to that revolutionary vibe a decade ago, have become gatekeepers instead.  They neuter the energy and direct it into manageable quarters.  The conventional conservative, who still believes the society he knew as a child exists, can only help the other side, even inadvertently.  The strategies they have unsuccessfully deployed for the last few decades will not suddenly begin working; besides which, their vision of the good society is one that allows a watered-down Boomer Revolution to continue forever.  The difference between a gateway and a gatekeeper is subtle; they stand at the same post, but their effect is oppositional. 

This is why, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the Left had a meltdown reminiscent of the good old days when Trump first won the presidency.  A decade ago, this would have been viewed as just another billionaire acquisition.  But direct ideational control is now very important to our overlords, who remain nervous.  The internet, we once believed, would open doors to new ideas and allow access to the world’s vast depository of knowledge and wisdom.  It turns out that people who read old books don’t like the impertinence of our new sacrosanct abnormality.  In response to this the internet has become a tool of censorship and redirection, in the hands of latter-day railway moguls who have monopolised the means of communication as their precursors did for transportation. 

The third reason is simple: friendly elites were nowhere to be seen.  A revolution without elite support is a peasant’s revolt, and a peasant’s revolt is doomed to failure.  The heirs of Watt Tyler, whose head ended up displayed on London Bridge by Richard III, are those January 6ers languishing in prison.  Conservative elites seem to think society is still business as usual with woke characteristics, and, by their very tepid brand of conservatism, are vanishingly unlikely to get behind anything risky.  They fail to realise that society has gone off the deep-end, and we can’t pretend it’s 2006 any longer.  Conventional conservatives appear to be arguing in defence of a society that no longer exists; they make vague statements as though the rug is still beneath their feet. 

Conventional conservatives are children of the post-1945 world order, who are frightened by forthright shows of ethnic solidarity of any stripe, and blood-and-soil scares them as much as their opponents.  Because they have become liberal creatures of ideation, they believe everybody else can, too.  The Boomer Revolution got to them as well; they might think the sixties went a little too far, but they’re unlikely to deny the validity of the Civil Rights movement, for example.  Even if they read Bentham, they’re unlikely to cleave to his utilitarian ethos, which might suggest that the greatest victims of the Civil Rights movement was those it was supposed to help. 

They believed the spooky Alt-Right was the reincarnation of the naughtiest form of German Nationalism.  Well, if you want to stick a middle-finger toward the post-1945 Liberal International Order and the Boomer Revolution, the easiest way to do that is to post a swastika somewhere.  It’s a powerful symbol; it’s the equivalent of the peace sign in the 1960s, even if in interpretation it is almost exactly oppositional.  It demonstrates solidarity with the first great revolt against a global and totalising modern project, whether liberal or Bolshevik in character, whatever you think of the character of that revolt itself.  The Second World War has become the foundational myth of our postmodern society, and everything revolves around a particular reading of that event.  You don’t have to think the Nazis were heroes – I do not – to believe the world order that emerged from their defeat to be an imperfect one.  The desire to pretend those things must be mutually believed is an excellent piece of propagandist mastery that puts Goebbels in the shade.  Calling people Nazis still works, though it loses power by the day by virtue of a decade of inflation. 

Yet both the swastika and the peace symbol are examples of the perennial adolescent desire to annoy the adults, and nobody wants to be ruled by adolescents.  The difference is that the adults in the second instance were in fact quite happy to harness the energy of the manufactured revolt of the Boomer Revolution; in the former case, those who could, didn’t.  The terrible irony is that the empty-headed utopianism of today’s elite, the heirs of the Boomer Revolution, will make racial politics – that thing conservative elites believe can be defeated by goodwill and liberal principles – the flavour of the future.  It is not a future I look forward to.  They have kicked the can down the road, perfectly in keeping with the Boomer Revolutionaries, who wanted to remain twenty-one forever. 

The Loki energy of our failed Cultural Revolution was a fatal problem, because it could not convince those who took themselves seriously to support it.  They instead rallied to the boring and doomed banners of populist conservatism, which is really just liberalism in the slow lane.  For lack of elite support, the New Right was scattered and driven.  The Biden administration created an effect of suffocation, decadence and decline.  With this defeat a sense of accommodation afflicted many; for a trivial example, look at the once-edgy figures of YouTube who became flunkies of the Current Thing.  The Boomer Revolution has a long reach.

But what caused the beginnings of that nascent cultural revolution of ours remains strong.  Biden perfectly encapsulates the remnants of the Boomer Revolution: exhausted, without energy, and barely mentally coherent.  This ethos remains powerful, because it has institutional support, the backing of global commerce, and our entire economic system behind it.  But these things began, like all things, in the minds of people.  The Boomer Revolution proved itself a spiritual wasteland to large swathes of societies two generations removed from the intoxication of Woodstock.  In the minds of people it will die, and something else will replace it. 

For this there is reason for optimism.  The enemy deployed tricks: now we know what those tricks look like.  As the meme-posting generation of 2014 grow older, they will become parts of the establishment themselves, part of the reason our neurotic and necrotic elite is doing everything possible to keep white males away from the levers of power.  But competence has its own logic.  We will see what this year’s presidential election in the United States brings.  We might not be rid of bad kings for a while, but at least we now know what a bad king looks like.  The next step is the formulation of a good king.  For this, energy-without-form is necessary but not sufficient. 

Recently the Australian University Accord met to discuss the manifest failings of our tertiary education system.  The result has been a predictable raft of recommendations, couched in the langue de bois of our mandarin class: equity, innovation, agility, et al.  In other words, all the things that got us into this mess to start with.  These are words that, once they start tumbling from someone’s mouth, indemnifies them against the risk of being identified as a genuine mind.

Established by the Labor Party, we should expect the Australian University Accord’s report would reflect Labor values.  Those Labor values now apparently include the annihilation of the working man, with the recommendation that 80% of Australians should pass through the hallowed doors of the university system.  They, like everything else in a society driven by data-as-God, mistake quantity for quality. 

In one respect, they are addressing a genuine problem.  As a nation we are perhaps stupider than ever; PISA results continue to decline, and our primary and secondary education systems are mutual reflections of our tertiary system.  Literary references, a command of basic mathematics, a sense of history, and the ability to write coherently: these all seem blue remembered hills. 

But furthering universal education is unlikely to fix the problems the proliferation of universal education created.  For reasons entirely predictable, education proved vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns.  An elite education cannot be made available to everybody; it is far easier to ensure that nobody receives an elite education.  This is the cost of equity-above-all-else as a governing principle.  People are not equal, and cannot be made equal.  People cannot even be made to regard one another as equal.  Equality, along with our obsession with data, is another false god of our age.

The problem with the university system is not one of scarcity, but one of inflation.  We bend every possible requirement to allow people the opportunity to enter university, and do everything possible to prevent them failing once they’re there.  We’re one step from conscripting the population into tertiary education, and the credentials required for entry-level jobs have changed to reflect this.  This is to say nothing of adolescence extended, family delayed, and earning prospects limited for several years of study.  A bachelor’s degree today is the equivalent of the school leaver certificate of yesterday; people collect master’s degrees today like they collected Pokémon as children.  Credentialism for most of the population represents a ticket to the middle class and social respectability, as much as potential earning power in the future.  These are powerful incentives, which explain why 60% of the population has been pressed into the ivory tower at some point in their lives.  Yet careerism is not the only purpose the university is supposed to serve.

Among those giving, everything produced by the university sector – certainly in the non-empirical world – has been through a peer-reviewed strainer to prevent anything original or novel emerging.  They reference one another like incestuous monks and write in a bizarre argot to demonstrate their membership.  Some faculties, and some universities, are worse than others.  They bring to mind the scholasticism of earlier centuries, but without the rigour.  And, as was the case in the Reformation, genuinely new ideas will emerge from outside the walls of what we consider epistemologically established.  Many academics are reincarnations of apocryphal medieval theologians arguing about the quantity of angels that can fit on a pinhead.  It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for your average academic to produce something interesting. 

On the receiving end, the university system is no better.  Every second person has a mickey-mouse degree from a mickey-mouse university, and few of them could hold an intelligent conversation with a secondary school graduate from half a century ago.  Whatever the university is producing, it is not minds.  But I’ve long held the suspicion that this is exactly the point.  The last thing the postmodern West is interested in is a population with minds, and for most people what passes for wisdom today is browsing Wikipedia and calling out logical fallacies on Reddit.  The snarky intellect of the educated millennial or zoomer, like a shallow and unbearably noisy stream, lacks blue water.  We produce sophistry among those who should be passing on the knowledge of our civilisation, and encourage cynicism among those who receive it. 

Aside from the turgid careerism of academics and the acquisitiveness of students – perhaps sellers and buyers of indulgences is a better term – there are two obvious reasons why the powers-that-be encourage this.  The first is for financial reasons.  Education is big business in Australia.  Only mining has a larger output share.  The university system doubles as a means of laundering citizenship and immigration, and siphoning money from overseas elites adds to the cash paid over the span of their working lives by native-born graduates.  The government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax.  No government that values its bottom line is going to advocate for less tertiary education.    

The second reason is an ideological one.  The universities are captured institutions: an American report estimated that the ratio of conservative to liberal professors shifted 350% in the latter direction since 1984.  Even if you enter to study STEM or something vocational, they’ll still get you with the mandatory modules on diversity and indigenous perspectives and all the rest of the postmodern religiosity we now accept as normal.  The result is a braindead middle class composed of eunuchs and temple priestesses.  If this sounds hyperbolic, remember how the university sector responded to the Western Civilisation courses offered by the Ramsay Centre.  You’d think they’d like more money and more students, but to give them credit, occasionally their principles get in the way.  Both ANU and the University of Sydney weren’t interested.  They value the message above the money.  Today’s liberal-Marxist elite, who live in constant terror afraid of their own shadows, will broker no competition in the world of ideas.  They know it was thanks to that they got their stranglehold to begin with.  They also suspect, in their heart of hearts, that their cherished ideas are terrible, anti-natural, and essentially anti-human. 

The postmodern university is a house of cards.  It would be too much to expect the Australian Universities Accord to admit as much. 

This article first appeared in the Spectator Online in March 2024.

Unless you reside under a rock, you’ve watched or at least heard about the Tucker Carlson interview conducted with Vladimir Putin.  There has been much commentary around it; some inane, some excellent. 

The American Establishment is in a panic.  Tucker resembles an asset who has gone rogue over the last few years and is now too big to stop, chatting amiably with a global supervillain.  “You have a great name. He must kill your name before he kills you,” said Juba the gladiator to Maximus in the film of that name.  It is similar with Carlson.  He is resilient to the usual strategies employed to burn assets.  In part this is because he is independently wealthy; in part because half of America listens to him; in part it’s because he seems a good man.  One can never really know these things, but he didn’t get on Epstein’s plane.  There doesn’t seem to be any leverage.

Carlson seemed a little out of his depth interviewing Putin.  He was not prepared for a winding lecture on the history of the Rus, but this winding lecture was not a mere jousting tactic Putin employed.  Russia has a past, and views itself as a single consistent entity shaped by that living history, a view lacking in the presentism of Western thinking.  Westerners, as befits democracies, think in electoral terms, and our intelligentsia are desperate for severance with the past.  States like Russia and China think in civilisational phases.  Thinking beyond post-second-term retirement plans is an advantage if you want your society to have a long future.

Because many in the West believe our governing values universal and internationalist, we think that everybody should get behind them.  We advocate for democratic and liberal reform around the world not only for the benefit of markets but for theological reasons; it is our secular religion.  Anybody who speaks in their favour, even if he is totally disingenuous, is viewed fondly by the Washington Establishment, viz. Zelensky.  Anybody who does not is a rogue state.  We are always on the lookout for Munich again and the partitioning of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss, because such historical analogies are the only ones anybody remembers, and to the liberal Hitler is more satanic than Satan. 

Yet it is foolish, for those in the West, to view Putin as an ally, especially in an age experiencing the return of multipolarity and realpolitik.  Those suspicious of the Washington Establishment and its broader consensus invert conventional thinking and presume that anybody who criticises the endless march toward globohomo is a friend.  You see strange types on X who declare that Xi is their spirit animal.  But Xi and Putin are leaders of the old school.  Their interest is their own national interest.  Putin is for Russia, and for Russians.  For this we can respect him, and perhaps try to understand him. 

In the old days, this was enough to consider such a forthright leader, even a rival, somebody you could work with.  National interest was about sovereignty, firm borders, diplomacy of many stripes, and the security of the state: in sum, power.  There was no requirement that national leaders swear pledges to internationalist causes, especially when they, who think in terms of their own interest and assume others do too, are likely to view this sort of thing as gamesmanship.

The American Establishment does not act in the American national interest; that is obvious, as Putin pointed out.  This would raise furore among Washington types, and did.  Many of those types genuinely believe that the expansion of NATO, of Cold-War-era geopolitics, is in the national interest.  But like any justified true belief, they may be scuppered by being mistaken or being deceitful.  The unipolar world, where America could presume fresh global norms courtesy of the Pacific Fleet, is fast fading.  National interest is further not the interest of international capital.  National interest is certainly not found in the presumed citizenship of those who are not citizens; it is in the prosperity and security of those who already are.  The American Establishment pretends to love the oppressed of the world but forgets its own citizens, who increasingly it appears to resent.  They are viewed as leftovers from a homogenous, religious and patriarchal world it wishes would hurry up and expire.  If Carlson’s mission is anything, it is to reverse that, not to help Russia.

One thing Putin said that was undeniably true is that the Russian in the street is more aligned with his principles than the man on the street in America is with Biden’s.  He was also exactly right when he said that true executive power is not vested in Biden, something the West has always been very proud of.  But power dispersed into agencies and bureaucracies that amount to a new Pretorian guard—which is what the separation of powers has degenerated into—is power unaccountable.  Should the Russians ever want a revolution, they know whose head to take.  Who can say the same in America? 

Most of all, one was left with the impression of statesmanship.  This should be a shot across the bow for the West, who for decades have served up safe electoral options who amount to absolute buffoons.  Not all of them are stupid; nobody climbs to the top of a political machine by being stupid.  But their intellect is not the sort of wisdom that we might hope for in a philosopher-king.  It is the ethic of the democratic politician, closer in character to the ethic of the real estate salesman.

This is a problem for late-stage representative democracies, who must produce woolly products that will not frighten skittish consumers.  As we now view our political processes as little more than transactions, befitting a society that can think no more deeply than a short of span of years, it is unsurprising what they produce have taken on the character of consumer culture as well.  What sitting Western leader could give a half-an-hour expose on a thousand years of history? 

It is not in the emergence of a strong and overbearing Russia that the West’s interest is directly served.  But rivals serve a purpose; verbose sociological types call it external threat theory.  The West needs to wake up, not into bellicose externalised aggression, but into a deep period of internal reflection.  We have forgotten who we are, something those rivals are determined not to allow happen to their own states.  They correctly note that ‘New Liberal Man’ is not in the national interest; they take authoritarian steps, about which Westerners clutch pearls, to reinforce the standards that until recent decades were considered essential for any healthy society.  An elite that allows a body politic to harm itself recklessly is no better than a parent that allows a child the same: unless, of course, that parent does not love that child. 

The retreat of American power is not something I welcome; I live in a country utterly at the mercy of its northern neighbours without American guarantees.  Americans are a cousin people, connected by blood and history, even if we both scramble to dilute those things.  Fools within Australia think that we can go it alone; anti-Americanism, always a preoccupation of the Left, has become one on our sort of Right, too.  In both cases, the problem is the character of American power.  I want American power to serve the right principles, not the wrong ones; to spend its currency on the right things, and not bleed itself white on the wrong things.  Sometimes these things require a global supervillain to point them out. 

This was originally published at Arktos in February 2024. A slightly altered version appeared in Spectator in the same month.

Ancient Rome, if Livy is to believed, was made possible by the kidnapping of the Sabine women.  The Benjamites, in danger of extinction, abducted the maiden population of Jabesh-Gilead after sacking the city.  Helen of Troy, who absconded with Paris, launched a thousand ships.  Modern commentators are scandalised by such accounts; they’d prefer Wonder Woman 1984.  But the past, like our nature, exists in spite of what we’d prefer. 

A meme that went about a few years ago—that the only reason girls like camping is because it reminds them of being abducted and transported through foreign territory by an enemy tribe—rings true because the stakes of conquest are different between the sexes.  Most things are different between the sexes, including virtue.  Female virtue, properly cultivated, is the most generative force on earth.  When it runs the other way, it is wantonly destructive.  Our weak handle on female evil has led to vulnerability.  This vulnerability is civilisational and existential. 

Many commentators overstate the Longhouse.  We do not live in a true gynocracy, because total gynocracy is as impossible as Wakanda.  Our times are characterised by weak men moreso than strong women.  Whatever power women wield in society is at the sufferance of men.  Men today appear content to suffer a lot.

The Longhouse is not the reality of true female control, but the all-encompassing feminine ethic that has absorbed Western elite and middle-class values, an ethic that Western men have adopted.  Why they did so could fill volumes.  In large part it is because they were told.  Accepting this dispensation contributed to the warping of our institutions that now seem beyond saving.  These institutions enforce their whims with energy, even as the rest of society is enervated.  They encourage women to be prideful and abrasive; they encourage men to be passive and fangless.  In character they resemble a wicked stepmother. 

It is also because old-fashioned virtue is hard, and the road has narrowed as our means of entertainment have become more expansive.  Into the realm of entertainment has fallen relations between men and women.  Other imperatives have faded.  There are many providers now, and they ask little in return.    

In a physical contest women lose to men.  Thus, their means of conflict are different.  Effective in interpersonal relationships, the girlboss state does not bring to mind a superpower.  Open conflict between women is usually avoided at all costs, and so conflict waged by a womanly state is likely to be rare, vacillating, and short-lived.  War is not good for women.

Women suffer in war because their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers are killed.  They suffer directly when war breaks its limited remit and cities are sacked or bombed into oblivion, or when they become spoils.  Otherwise they wait for letters or black sails.  For some, death is not the worst fate; there is Jauhar and those women who throw themselves from city walls rather than be taken.  Women properly bonded to their homes, like Hecuba and Andromache in the Iliad, recognise aristeia in men and love them for it.  They do not think it toxic, and Lysistrata was intended as comedy.  Neither gender has a monopoly on courage—long endurance as much as lightning action—though non-ersatz forms are as rare in the liberated postmodern woman as in the emasculated postmodern man.   It is difficult to imagine the types we’ve manufactured filling the pages of a new Iliad, male or female.  It is only in healthy societies that women encourage masculine virtù, because healthy societies know what both sexes are about.  Ours is not healthy, hence our soft attitude toward war. 

Yet war is worse for men.  The son of Hector had his brains dashed on the walls of Troy.  Every male occupant of Melos, as was the case in most protracted ancient sieges, was put to death upon conquest.  Vercingetorix was strangled at the Temple of Jupiter before a baying crowd.  Napoleon bayoneted and shot the defeated men at Jaffa.  German prisoners of war languished in Soviet gulags for the better part of a decade; Russian prisoners starved in open fields.  These are the highest stakes.

Men fight wars anyway.  Boys fencing with sticks are practicing; sporting events dress rehearsals; the all-in gambler is not so different. This is of great consternation to feminists, who fill actual volumes on the subject.  It is in our nature.  In keeping with our nature, the warlike part has righteous and wicked elements.  The righteous purpose of the warrior is to keep war from home.  The rules of war tend to reflect this, but every generation or two, the rules are thrown out.  This is in service to the arm’s race that is man’s lot on earth.

In defeat, men are killed and women are enslaved.  It’s a crude version of “women and children first.”  The stakes for women, particularly the young women our society lionises, are generally secondary.  They might end up like the Sabines, mothers to a different people.  But they will remain mothers; their offspring will always be theirs.  A change of status is not life or death.  Modern women might have forgotten their purpose, but their purpose has not forgotten them.  Other peoples will put them to it, even as self-appointed spokeswomen wonder, in those voluminous works, how best to emasculate their own men. 

They regard the wicked side of masculinity as a problem, as we all rightly should.  But the answer to an unruly child is not to murder him, and evil exists in more forms than one.  A society of castrati is a safe society, but it is not a generative one.  Even if it could be done, ordinary women would have no interest in such a thing, because feminists do not represent them all, and like humanity generally, infrequently know what is in their interest. 

Ridding ourselves of masculinity serves as a version of the prisoner’s dilemma.  A more masculinised society, unencumbered by notions of universal human rights, will maintain the advantage.  Unless everybody castrates themselves at the same moment, the fool who does ends up prey to the others.  A society that believes it has ascended beyond natural law, that for novelty’s sake makes bad versions of men out of women and bad versions of women out of men, does not know what it is about.  The future, like the past, belongs to the great power that can best match man’s law to natural law.

Castrated men, in the figurative sense, are of no use to anybody.  Knock-about male culture is instructive in creating useful males, the types women like.  It is no good to pretend the buttery product of today’s zeitgeist is useful.  Thucydides said that the society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.  Today’s society does no thinking, and increasingly looks as though it will do no fighting.  We think no longer because our thinking is done for us.  Thinking has become passive consumption, as has most other things.  We consume information as we consume fast food.  The result is intellectual morbidity. 

We will do less fighting because military recruitment is similarly morbid in Western countries.  This will worsen because Western women do not want babies, and a foederati can’t be bound by ties solely temporal and pecuniary.  Those long-lasting soldierly families who provided the iron of Western militaries are sending their sons elsewhere, in part because nobody wants to fight forever wars anymore.  The forever wars were a mistake, because instead of acts of national interest and police actions, they were sold as moral crusades and liberalising missions.  The over-zealous propaganda is essential because since 1945, all war must have clear moral lines to dupe a voting public.  War remains politics by other means, even if we like to pretend everybody is Hitler.  No society does mass propaganda as well as contemporary democracies, but this doesn’t stop electorates from getting bored; listen to two women talking at a café.  That’s today’s democracy, and nothing composed along those lines can fight lengthy wars effectively.  The rest of it is explained by diversity quotas and the departure of the warrior spirit, that together constitute the hubristic attempt to invert the natural order that proves so addictive to postmodern elites. 

It remains to be seen if war-by-proxy, using automatons, is the future, as people have been suggesting a long time.  Drones will do our killing for us as, AI will write our battle-plans, and pimply youths will command the future through an X-Box controller.  In this imagining the masculine warrior spirit is worse than useless; it is an encumbrance, prone to delusions of heroism.  Yet all our technological innovations so far have not altered what it means to be human.  They have merely made our lot better or worse depending.  Warfare is unlikely to be different.  The fantasies of technologists, all the way back to H.G. Wells, have never completely delivered.

Ukraine demonstrates that artillery is still the king of battle, and war has always variated between mobility and its opposite, from the Hoplite to the Parthian to the Legionary to the Panzer.  This is the axis war slides along; technology pushes it one way then the other.  The human element remains constant, and does not seem poised to depart the scene, even if we’ve made an industrial abattoir of the thing.  What will become of our depleted warrior ethos if we decide that, like so much else modernity promises, we can have only the detoothed bits we like?  A safe war, like a safe playground, is the natural desire of the overprotective mother.  There is nothing the overprotective mother won’t do to protect you, including unconditional surrender.  Where are the Ernst Jüngers of today? 

A society governed by a feminine ethos does not share the same sense of stakes as one dominated by a masculine ethos.  Defeat in total war is a secondary stake for such a people, because life will go on.  It might go on in slavery, but it will proceed apace.  Death at Thermopylae is an unmistakeably male ethic.  The daughters of the Sabines and Jabesh-Gilead made good; their sons went on to great things.  For most modern women, female heroes are the suffragettes, who attained female suffrage through male sufferance.  There could be no sufferance for Leonidas and his men, who fought when the sky went dark. 

War might be a masculine preoccupation, yet for a reasonable future it is necessary but not sufficient that men remain men.  Women must do their part, a part that has nothing to do with diversity quotas or military service or the delights of meaningless careers.  The feminine impulse has broken its banks, and the masculine ebbs at low tide.  A society like that, regardless of industrial output and defence spending, risks becoming prey.  The society that reinforces chastity and unaffected femininity is the only society that has a sure future.

This essay was first published in Arktos in February 2024.

At a recent conference, and against my better judgement, I attended an Unconscious Bias training session.  I was compelled by morbid curiosity.  A few years ago, resistance to Unconscious Bias training and testing was all the rage among the self-proclaimed “Intellectual Dark Web.”  Despite their objections this sort of thing is now so accepted in many professions it is as though it always existed.  For the uninitiated, Unconscious Bias training serves, in theory, to divest you of your unmapped prejudices, prejudices that ramp up in accordance with your whiteness and your maleness. 

“We are going to bend your brains a bit,” they began, as though their ideas are original or interesting. We’ve heard them before; if you’re part of the intelligentsia, you hear them all the time. I take no pleasure in reiterating the banalities of their version of the Nicene Creed, and I know equally that we ought not pretend Goliath is more frightening than he is. Part of the point of these exercises is to humiliate opponents through rendering them powerless, and suggest where power might lie. Few have moments of moral transformation thanks to these sessions. They have moments of moral expedience instead.

Despite the fact all my biases are conscious ones, the first part of the session was to remind us that none of we settler stock are free of sin.  Like all theology, there is original sin, and the possibility of redemption.  Original sin is our history; redemption is found in destroying it.  We do this by abandoning our brains.  The war on generalisations – the prejudices built often through hard experience – is a war on our ability to categorise anything.  The result is a world of social confusion where predators pretend they’re prey and nobody can suggest otherwise.  The only generalisations allowed are those that are positive about certain groups and negative about other groups, along completely predictable lines, as philosophically incoherent as you’d like.  As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s a weird postmodern reconstruction of the Nuremberg Laws. 

The main thrust of the session was “decolonising” various curriculums and “indigenising” them.  What this means in plain language I cannot tell you, because no plain language was used.  One presenter mentioned a physics teacher who had complained there was no room for indigenous perspectives in his subject.  It seemed he had taken things at face value, a critical mistake.  She implied he had been thoroughly struggle-sessioned into compliance and left her office born again.  In this world, petty bureaucrats believe themselves fire-and-brimstone preachers.

An older lady emphasised the importance of Acknowledging Country in Primary Schools daily.  “When I was young, we had to stand for the Queen and sing the anthem.  Nobody told us why.  It was brainwashing.”  She stood on the precipice of a moment of great irony, perhaps even self-discovery, but the moment came to nothing. 

The thing was part-loyalty test, part-humiliation ritual, part-Chris Lily skit.  We spent some time filling out charts that indicated our privilege along intersectional lines, something no longer novel.  My colleague maudlinly declared that society was made for him.  He was deeply unhappy about it.  You should probably kill yourself, I said.  I meant in Minecraft, but the organisers of the session might prefer the literal sentiment.  Those who deconstruct whiteness eventually deconstruct white people. 

Another friend asked me to imagine what it would be like when these frothing people have the ascendancy.  One doesn’t need stretch the imagination.  They don’t have the ascendancy in terms of the popular will, but they certainly have the moving parts of society comfortably captured.  Elites determine society’s direction; middle-class intelligentsia carry out the program.  Some attendees were true believers, but many more were fellow travellers.  Despite the recent referendum result, they sense the breeze and fill their sails.  The empty-souled functionary, who would aid and abet the devil himself for a little advancement, is the oily rag upon which every regime depends.

What struck me most was the forthright confidence the organisers displayed.  This was not a vetted meeting of a secret society or a closed caucus room, but an ostensibly general audience.  Yet there was no attempt to disguise their zeal: they were upfront about wanting to destroy everything prior to themselves.  The degree of security they feel in saying such things indicates they believe that everybody thinks they are right. Products of higher education, and representative of their type, some might suggest the system has failed them.  If they think this guff is true, they are failures of intellect.  If they believe it merely expedient, they are failures of character.  Either way they are living arguments for the violent dissolution of the postmodern university, which is in fact working as intended.

As for ordinary people, many believe only that which benefits them, which is entirely human and the fatal weakness of mass societies.  Those who might believe other things are corralled into quietude; they have been persuaded against commenting on badly-clothed emperors.  Dissent is easily mitigated when mortgages and careers are on the line, even if this peril exists only in our minds.  Certainly, if the organisers of events such as these could annihilate their enemies, they would.

Among the questions was one about dealing with such recalcitrant types who resist the program.  Most are conventional conservatives, those types who still believe their ideas have a foothold in today’s world.  They argue using liberal conceptions – free speech and the antiquated meaning of equality – critiques for which the organisers have practised answers.  They are doomed to lose these arguments, because they assume good faith, the forever-trap for their type.  “It’s not 2019 anymore,” said the organiser, “the kid gloves are off.  I don’t care if I offend people.  This must happen.  It should have happened already.”  These people are the lovechildren of Whigs and Leninists, for whom timelines progress linearly, and thus the past has no lessons.  There is only progress and victory, even if victory is always one final push away.  They would behave like revolutionaries even if they achieved their hopelessly utopian goals.

Forget utilitarian arguments that suggest we ought to indulge this sort of thing as though it helps whatever marginalised group is presently in vogue. It won’t help, but that was never the point. Those groups serve as human petards, and the last thing those drunk on their disadvantage want is an improvement in their lot. They would be no more honest on the subject then than they are now. Instead ask the following: does this sentiment deal in truth?  If not, then discard it.  If you are not sure what is true, or do not believe that the truth can be known, then you have spent too long drinking from their trough. 

I left in good spirits.  The absurdity of these ideas guarantees that without patronage they are doomed to failure.  They are antinatural and once a man learns he needn’t fear these people, they lose all power.  The atmosphere was one of matronly schoolmarms giving naughty boys a lecture, even if all testosterone had been left at the door.  In addition to adherence to truth, the re-emergence of the Australian larrikin, who cannot abide a pompous fraud inflated with hot air, would be a welcome remedy.  Nothing can survive ridicule, which is why authoritarian regimes are unfailingly humourless.  We have become a humourless people, too, which reflects the dour authoritarianism they are busily making for us. 

A condensed version of this article appeared in Spectator Online.

A recent video I watched, on veterans of the American Civil War, cast into sharp relief the preoccupations of our age.  If only, the video argued, people then had understood PTSD, and an army of psychotherapists with ready prescriptions had been on hand, much human suffering would have been ameliorated.  It is typical of a time that views everything in narrowly scientific terms, as though the solution to human happiness is only a misfiring neural transmitter away, as beforehand it was only a couch session with Freud away.  The suicide of many of Freud’s first crop of psychoanalysis should put paid to the latter, and the recent discovery that SSRI medication is not the holy grail should do the same for the former.  As we learn and relearn, shortcuts in life often lead to narrow gullies and sharp cliffs.  To live is to suffer, and as Nicolás Gómez Dávila put it, “an irreligious society cannot stand the truth about the human condition.  It prefers a lie, however idiotic it may be.” 

The problem is the narrow scientism of our age, a viewpoint impossible to escape as empirical science has won so many victories in the last century and a half.  This is not a novel observation.  Wittgenstein loathed scientism, and Austin Hughes suggested that

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth.

This is not to suggest that the scientific method—which amounts to the application of natural law—is a waste of time, as many who oppose the current zeitgeist, in foolish haste, might suggest.  Scepticism of modern science is often conflated with scepticism of the modern project, which are different if mutually connected phenomena.  We ought merely note its limitations, limitations pointed out long ago by the likes of Huxley.  When physicalism intrudes into other realms—the mysteries of consciousness, of God, of moral law, those things that literature and philosophy reflect far better—it oversteps its remit.  Science might be subject to truth, but truth does not always appear to be subject to science. 

Part of the scientisation of our inner lives is reflected in the video, which talked at length about the travails of war veterans who suffered the usual malady of problems.  Cardiac and gastric problems, increased tuberculosis, insanity and institutionalisation, habitual criminality, rampant alcoholism, men who went mad with pistols, and of course, bigots who couldn’t grasp that the age of slavery had passed.  We are very close to making all of the above entirely matters of medical science, which should make anybody pause, because what is good for the goose is not always good for the gander.  It might be a meme to cry Orwell whenever we see the pathologisation of every human thought, as though drug addiction and kidney stones occupy the same category, but the truth is that human agency is a difficult thing to quantify, as people are infrequently honest, even with themselves.  C.S. Lewis wrote that the desire to rehabilitate has no limits, unlike the desire to punish, and if we concede that a man has little or no agency, then we can rehabilitate him to death.  Somewhere between total agency and its exact opposite lies the human condition, and long may it last; into this tragic tapestry is woven all the dimensions of our existence.  Being Peripatetics about everything means always looking downward for answers, and never elevating our thoughts.  We are not robots, though scientism and the worst determinist philosophies would make us so.  Nobody can love a robot, not even the robot itself.

The video lamented that the obvious psychological distress of those Civil War veterans was then characterised almost entirely as a moral problem rather than a mental one.  Today, we do the opposite; all problems are mental and only a few special peculiarities are picked out to occupy the domain of moral facts.  This is why the various courts in Australia see fit to criminalise a certain sort of salute, and prosecute to the fullest extent those who make it, but are happy to allow violent offenders, in the throes of drug addiction, a second chance.  One is entirely mental, and thus not their fault; the other is entirely political, and thus inherently moral.  The line between the two, like that of human agency itself, is blurred and difficult to tell, but few who willingly become addicted to drugs were likely moral paragons beforehand.  It appears the purpose of the law is neither exclusively to rehabilitate nor punish, but shapeshifts depending on the case at hand.  Aristotle might have said the man intoxicated is twice responsible, but in today’s age to commit a crime while in command of your faculties is to double your answerability. 

The desire to pathologise everything betrays a conceit at the heart of superficially meritocratic, individualistic societies; that every success and equally every failure is entirely one’s fault.  The rise of mental health, and the associated industry that has grown fat on our thinking, serves as a pressure-release gauge for failure, because there’s a great deal of ruin in every person.  The sheer burden of everything being on us, all the time, has done as much to atomise our world as labour relations.  There is also the Werther effect, which has propagated the delights of mental illness far and wide, so much so many Zoomers struggle to leave the house.  If this is the only way to relieve the crippling weight of total expectation within a milieu that cannot generate courage nor heroism, then so be it; sometimes descending into feigned multiple personalities is the easier road.

Of course our ancestors were not ignorant of what today we call PTSD; they had, if anything, a better understanding of life than their descendants, despite our litanies of peer-reviewed papers and obsession with educational credentials.  Information is not wisdom, obviously.  As Aeschylus tells it,

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Suffering in their time was not limited to death in battle and cannon fire; people died to things that today we regard as minor inconveniences.  Life was hard, families and communities tight, faith omnipresent, and despair enjoyed a pre-postmodern transcendence.  This is what a genuine ontology of life and death will do for you, as an individual and as a collective.  We have more to learn from them than we could dream of teaching them.  The pathologisation and scientisation of contemporary life embodies another of Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s many aphorisms, that “modern man lives on the ground floor of his soul.”   

One of the more colourful figures of the late Roman Republic was Publius Clodius Pulcher, a famous rival of Cicero, who in 63 BC was tried for the capital offense of sacrilege after dressing in drag to infiltrate a women-only ritual in reverence of the goddess Bona Dea.  His objective was to seduce the wife of Caesar, Pompei, and while unsuccessful, his action led to their subsequent divorce.  It was political machination of the most bizarre sort, full of strange legal wrangling, reminiscent of the earlier part of Clodius’s career, whereby he aspired to be adopted by a plebeian family in order to apply for a political office restricted to members of that class.  Late Roman Republican politics, replete with what today we call lawfare, brings to mind an adage of Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s, that “dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”

Thanks to Star Wars, which manages to gives a reductionist high school account of the decline of the Roman Republic and Weimar Germany that only today’s popular culture could provide, the general public is well attuned to this sort of thing.  After all, there is no greater fear in our fanatically demotic and ostensibly egalitarian societies than the Mandate of Heaven.  Shrewd observers note the sort of obtuse legalism taking place in the United States to curtail Trump as not unlike the trial of Clodius, or an attempt to paint him as a latter-day Cataline.  No doubt, if they could strangle him without trial like Cataline’s co-conspirators they would, and Trump falling in battle surrounded by the types of January 6 would make an amusing spectacle.  We are not there yet, but there are other discomforting signs that lend weight to Gramsci’s maxim, that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Who can look at our mass migration, in the name of cheap labour and eternal economic growth, without seeing the shadow of the Latifundia that characterised all of post-Punic Wars Rome?  Pliny the Elder lamented the end of the Roman small-hold farmer, replaced entirely by slaves.  Slaves competed for labour, and great landowners bought all the land when those left of the Roman middle class, depleted by decades of military service, couldn’t hold onto their estates.  Slaves and great wielders of capital are united in that they, for opposite reasons, have minimal stakes.  One has been dispossessed; the other is so much the opposite that, unless they are peculiarly oriented in character, they are more interested in a new villa or a new investment than they are in the health of the society that makes their life possible.  The latter embody the distinction drawn by Aristotle between noble aristocracy and corrupt plutocracy.   

Today, we have a housing crisis caused by that same plutocratic spirit, aided by a cosmopolitan ethos that declares nowhere belongs to anybody in particular.  We have not enslaved entire Gallic tribes, because Indian and Chinese elites make better customers.  Seventy-one percent of Californian houses are now bought by the Chinese; lines outside auctions and rental properties in Australia reflect the full variegated mass of the subcontinent.  We will not vote our way out of this conundrum along our current milquetoast lines, any more than the Romans could.  Too many are making too much, and too few can boast of a clear mind nor deep thoughts.  We await a populares instead, who, like every successful revolutionary, will unite the mass of the disenfranchised working and middle classes behind an elite vanguard.  Once those groups are joined, there is no political force on earth that can stop them: not lawyers nor constitutions, neither convention nor tradition, not even great privation.  Today’s optimates fear the likes of Trump because he is the wrong answer to the right question.  It is probably only a matter of time, and the postmodern versions of bread and circuses can entertain only so long. 

The Roman Republic took nearly a century to die, if you map it from the Gracchi to Caesar; our own course seems far quicker.  Republican sentiment—neither the anti-monarchic type nor the GOP type, but what the Romans meant by the word, this public thing—appears dead in the West.  Its assassins are the same, a ruling class that forgot noblesse oblige.  You can gauge this via whatever metric you like: the exhaustion with which we treat political events, the headlines produced by what passes for our literati, the bizarre preoccupations of our elites, the “general mood.”  There is a sense of icebergs coming directly for our bow, a sense that Western peoples have not had since at least the end of the Cold War.  Geopolitics is only a small part of this; there have always been enemies abroad.  It’s the sense of discord within that drives this unease, discord that has deep roots but has only really begun delivering its fruit in the past decade. 

Crisis is nothing new; life on earth is largely about meandering from one crisis to another.  Western crises, economic or political or otherwise, were in the past rendered nonfatal by two things: a robust civil society and an intelligentsia that, with notable exceptions, were able to cleave to a common course.  Politics would swirl around these things, but while they held, you could avoid Robespierre and Hitler equally.  Post-war politics in Germany, among the working and the middle class alike, came to regard both those things as treasonous; in Revolutionary France, those forces themselves tacked sail toward revolution.  Today’s civil society is eroded, and our intelligentsia is hostile to anything prior to themselves, which is everything except progressive fantasies that vary from the childish to the diabolical.  There are no sea charts to suggest into what waters this will lead us. 

The Roman Republic died in the end because it was not worth saving: the spirit of this public thing was not even worth disinterring.  Whatever it had been before the Punic Wars, it was no longer; it had become a society of optimates and slaves.  Anybody who has read any reactionary literature recognises this style of thought is in vogue, because society seems to be in the hands of our enemies, and the words of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu ring loud: “If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it.”  One might be apprehensive about a new Caesarism—history is full of warnings—and yet increasingly view it as inevitable.  The questions are who and when, and what form the infant will take when at last it is born. 

There was a time when every schoolboy knew the story of the Battle of Arnhem, where in 1944, British, Polish and American airborne troops found themselves surrounded in that Dutch city, waiting for armoured columns that never came.  Immortalised in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far, it was a lesson in the limitations of unsupported light infantry.  When the Germans plunged into the Ardennes months later, they learned about the limitations of unsupported heavy armour.  The salient point, in both cases, is that even the sharpest individual part needs the whole to function, that elements behaving independently and without logistical support is a recipe for defeat.  Under these circumstances even the best Red Devil or Königstiger eventually winds up prey.

A similar model might be applied to the Right across the West, which very much finds itself behaving in a discordant and self-defeating manner whenever possible.  This is in part because the Right is, by necessity, a broad church.  No political compass, generally built by out-of-date soft centrists, can properly map the kaleidoscope that is Rightist thought, from Atlantic geniality to Lockean libertarianism to Francoism to Catholic Reaction to those other bits we best not talk about. 

Central to conservative electoral strategy since the 1970s, particularly in Anglosphere countries, is to appeal to Nixon’s ‘silent majority,’ to mirror William F. Buckley’s attempt to build a broad conservative front, to meld a respectable Right without recourse to “scowling primitives” or hijacking by “vulgarians.”  Buckley, who in 1988 was described having the “ability to hold on to stable and traditional beliefs even while [indulging] his instinct for change and variety,” was unable to pass that ethic on to the movement he helped create.  Some paleoconservatives made their best efforts to popularise their own ideas—holding slogans with Eric Voegelin’s seminal “don't immanentize the eschaton” written across them—but they would have been better off remembering another of Voegelin’s aphorisms, that “the death of the spirit is the price of progress.” 

While the ‘68ers were busily getting inside the tent and fouling it up, there was a belief among conservative leaders that common sense and the will of the great mass of people, concerned by the direction things were heading, might be sufficient as a counterweight.  This was the populist epistemology the neoconservatives put forth as they cobbled together that Rightist alliance that would banish the Left from political power in the United States and the United Kingdom throughout the 1980s, and one still employed by mainstream centre-right parties.  It worked, and sometimes still works, at a surface level; it can deliver electoral victory.  But the other battle—the one being fought for the soul of our thing—was increasingly neglected.  “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher declared.  As the Financial Times recently put it, “doctrinal conservatives stormed the three branches of government handily enough, but not Hollywood, the publishing industry, academia and other trades that form our habits of mind without our knowing it.”  Establishment conservatives often fight hard, but they always fight dumb. 

Right wing politics was reduced to a rejection of post-industrial politics on economic grounds, notably in favour of supply-side economics and in opposition to the “confiscatory state,” and struggled to postulate a positive vision of the future beyond mere prosperity and a vague philosophical holding pattern.  On the other flank, the respectable Right, ever wary of those who’ve read Evola or Spengler, were nervous that forthright cultural warfare would undermine their fragile consensus. 

Groping toward respectability-at-any-cost, ever a problem for the thoroughly class-conscious Tories in Britain, has coloured conservative politicians everywhere else ever since.  Fear of stepping outside Overton’s window has meant that conservatives are fighting a permanent rearguard action, a rearguard fought against the darker chapters in Rightism’s history as much as the Left.  Rearguards might be great for a fighting retreat, but they aren’t designed to take and hold ground.  As a result, those on the Right have lost virtually every battle that mattered, outside of economics.  We can quibble about how effective Ronald Reagan was on the social front, or how John Howard helped to revitalise Anzac Day, but those small victories are typically eclipsed when the electorate becomes bored and decides to vote for a change of air.  No politician is immune to this sort of frivolity, which is why they seem terrified much of the time.

This model initially succeeded because the promises of proletarian revolution rang hollow in developed Western nations, outside France, in part because the workers always had enough to eat and could afford their own houses.  The good bits of capitalism seemed available to everybody.  If this were enough, and remained so, all would be well; but it is not, and has not, and man does not live on bread alone. 

Eventually all our productive elements wound up being sent to the Third World, and everything became value-adding or speculation.  The gulf between the haves and the have nots has only widened since, and the middle-class finds itself both expanded and hollowed-out at the same time.  Short-term thinking—decades seem short in the scheme of things—has made these economic victories look a little less convincing in hindsight.  While this was happening, progressive elites were busy taking over everything else, because nobody seemed to be watching the gates.  Populism might win short-term power, but it seems ineffective when it comes to long-lasting change, because at day’s end, elites still run everything.  Failure to understand this is premised on a very deep deceit baked into all modern thinking, that of people-power: that in contemporary representative polities, the people govern.  Attempts to drive change from the bottom-up, as Neema Parvini points out in The Populist Delusion, “amount to little more than an inchoate rabble.”  He cites January 6 and the Yellow Vest movement as examples.

Populism is designed to reflect the mass to harvest its energy, rather than anaxias; hence, it struggles to make real institutional change along genuinely conservative lines, because the mass generally doesn’t think about these things.  The mass is interested in financial security, sending their children to decent schools, and being able to generally live a good life; the connection made between these things, and the broader problems at the sharp end of power beyond election time, is often tenuous and poorly understood.  The will is lacking for genuine restoration, because it cannot find expression among the mass beyond the superficial; a new lick of paint does the trick, a change from red to blue décor.  Because the institutions of a nation shape the internal bearings of its population, and they remain unaltered, meaningful change is impossible. 

This sort of populism, even if we accept it can still work, is premised on conditions of life that are fast disappearing.  Demographics, for example: not just ageing populations, but the fact those older cohorts are all that is left of that silent majority.  Younger people, wherever they might originally hail from—part of the problem, and an obvious intention, of mass immigration—often feel little connection to the nation where they reside, and less to the particular features of its history, which they often regard as litanies of sin, sometimes against their own ancestors.  Increasingly, they are not silent, much as we might wish they were.  This, as much as limited home ownership, is why Millennials seem to be bucking the once-assumed trend of conservatism increasing with age, and it does not help that the touchstones of life, once tightly grouped, are now kaleidoscopic, and younger people seem to be creatures of nowhere.  They, susceptible to the nothingness of modern life, fall quickly for the internationalist causes de jour manufactured by today’s elite culture, be they be about the weather or about human rights or whatever postmodern crusade sends out a siren call.  Against this the establishment Right seems to think “it’s the economy, stupid” is sufficient, because they used it successfully, and once it was successfully used against them.  Necessary maybe, but increasingly far from sufficient.  A reduction of arguments to merely the material reflect that fact the Right no longer know what they are about, that past successes have blinded them to present problems.

The Right needs vanguardism, because vanguards accomplish everything in politics.  The Bolsheviks went from an electorally insignificant party to total control in the space of a few years.  The French Revolution was powered by a small cadre of bourgeois lawyers, writers, and self-loathing aristocrats.  Vanguards exist to channel popular sentiment —Rousseau’s “general will”—into concrete political victories.  Without a vanguard, the Sans-culottes are nobody.  Without the Sans-culottes, Robespierre was nobody.  If I frighten you talking about revolutions complete with plenty of blood, I wouldn’t worry, at least not yet.  There’s no stomach for it, which almost guarantees that there will be plenty of blood down the line.  That’s not wishful thinking, merely comment on how great political upheavals tend to go.  We are well overdue, waiting for “a single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all.” 

There are three ways through which power can be achieved in Western democracies.  The first and most obvious is via straight-forward electoral victory.  But electoral victory, as hopefully established, is fraught.  This is in part because, as Andrew Breitbart famously quipped, politics is downstream from culture, in the American sense of the word.  Institutions shape our thinking, particularly among those who don’t do a great deal of thinking.  Elected governments often struggle through the mud in part because hostile or dysfunctional institutions, particularly the ones once called the civil service, behave in a distinctly obstructive manner.  Take Donald Trump’s wrestling match with the State Department as an example. 

Or take the British Foreign Office, that once ran much of the world with only a couple of hundred staff, up until the Great War.  Compare that to contemporary Australia, complete with an empire that expands to the Torres Strait, fielding a Department of Foreign Affairs with over six thousand employees.  It must be difficult for these vast bureaucracies not to view themselves as the true receptacles of power in a world that loves committee above all else, and lives in perpetual fear of the Führerprinzip.  So afraid are we of the Führerprinzip that those elected leaders must spend most of their time managing their image to secure re-election, daintily walking on eggshells, compromising wherever it is politically advisable, which is all the time.  Naturally, these sprawling departments weather each new political administration as the rest of us weather feckless bosses we know will wander off to greener pastures sooner or later. 

Among conservative leaders who manage to win electoral power, that carefully-cultivated image, sharpened by focus groups and fortified by armies of staffers, is under continuous attack by media outlets that are generally hostile.  National broadcasters, it goes without saying, are very much unimpressed with recent conservative gains—for example, the No vote on the recent Australian referendum—and are liable to throw themselves into frenzied tirades, accusing the population of letting the elites down.  The ABC and BBC, the media personification of the Longhouse, trade in this currency.  The Murdoch press is suspicious of anybody who scratches their head about free market economics or the consequences of runaway globalisation.  Only somebody with elephant-hide and a deep war chest, like Donald Trump, can laugh about it.  Those who haven’t been on-screen companions for much of the population prior to political life can never enjoy the kind of media-immunity that brings with it.  We risk our elected leaders being celebrities forever, because that is the kind of Sans-culottes we get nowadays, and today’s Sans-culottes merely need vote, rather than storm the Bastille. 

Something strange similarly happens to those conservative leaders who find themselves cut off and surrounded after winning power in Western countries.  This is the effect of that institutional power, similar to that worked on an undergraduate who walks into university with one set of nascent ideas and walks out with another.  It is as hard to deny the smart-set in political life as it is in social life.  Those political figures talk about draining the swamp, but the swamp ends up draining them.  Boris Johnson is a case in point.  They move to the centre so surreptitiously it is as though they were never anywhere else.  “We must govern for everyone,” they shout, but everyone is not the chattering classes.  They just seem like everyone, for as the proverb has it, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  The Chinese version: the loudest goose gets the axe. 

It seems that the ground is not prepared for electoral victory, and that muddle-headed conservative leaders end up surrendering rather less gallantly than much of the 4^th Parachute Brigade at Arnhem.  Without “an army of statesmen,” arriving like armoured columns, they end up prey to the existent lobbies and power structures that infest contemporary democracies.  Some willingly step on the fumi-e.  Whatever their reasoning, it is hard to feel good about the recent course of electoral politics in the West, even when ostensibly Rightist leaders have taken power through the ballot box, with a few exceptions in places such as Eastern Europe, where the cultural landscape is indeed very different.

The second option for seizing power might be called the Gramsci option, as it is an inverse version of exactly that the Left played successfully for many decades.  The long march through the institutions, Rudi Dutschke called it, and you find reference to it everywhere.  Conservatives were caught napping, busily setting a place for their sworn enemies in the name of fair-play, and a sense of invincible hubris.  Nobody saw the threat until it was too late; some still don’t.  They came to the Rugby game thinking it would be played as ever it had, not realising their opponents planned to ruck with knives and the referee had been poisoned in advance.  For their lack of forward thinking, and their unwillingness to get Enoch-Powell-dirty in the culture wars, we owe our current state of affairs. 

Tom Hayden, author of the Huron Statement and one of the founders of that student-led pseudo-revolt, claimed that the “silent majority” was incompatible with rule by the people.  He meant rule by his people, and his people, as that statement clearly declares, were after the means of ideational production.  By virtue of institutional capture, the silent majority gradually wound up excluded from any avenue of power beyond the most basic electoral franchise, and those avenues of power worked increasingly hard to neuter popular will.  The silent majority might vote, and they might be unhappy with certain things, but they lack the direction, power and will to meaningfully affect the institutions that increasingly shape our mise en scène.  And nor should they.  That’s why, in theory at least, they elect representatives.  Those representatives are often dashed to pieces against those institutions: Trump and his immigration reform, for example.  Curtis Yavin calls it the Cathedral, the systematic and seemingly automatic coalescence of progressive thinking in all our institutions; it’s hard to argue he was wrong. 

To win back the institutions through a campaign of infiltration and subversion—we might as well call it what it is—is only possible when your opponent is, in fact, napping.  The Left are not napping.  They guard those captured institutions jealously, knowing how they got there to start with.  They are vanishingly unlikely to accept a Trojan Horse full of armed Helenes inside the gates.  National Affairs estimated that, in the United States, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors has increased by 350% since 1984.  In Australia, the ousting of Andrew Thorburn from the Essendon AFL club, by virtue of his involvement with City on a Hill church, is indicative that this is not restricted to government and higher education.  Their version of tolerance is to quietly exclude people with different ideas, and loudly exclude them if those ideas get a little too forthright, or if there’s a possibility they’ll wield actual power.  Many workplaces have that odd conservative type working there, and some make it into middle-management positions, but they rarely make it further than that.  Structural inertia, you might call it, which can take generations to shift, as the other side dutifully discovered. 

Though the other side is a little disingenuous, and we give them too much credit, when we pretend that a few student revolutionaries on their own shifted the entire course of Western society.  As K. R. Bolton puts it,

The ’68ers were mobilized to change societies according to the requirements of the establishment, against which these alleged radicals imagined they were revolting. As for their “revolt,” nothing could be further from actuality: they were the useful idiots of the system that they decried. Their purpose was dialectical: their aims were so nihilistic that the establishment was able to push its left-wing agenda in the name of “reform,” “progress” and “modernization,” which seemed moderate, even conservative, by comparison.

Hardly Che Gueveras on the inside, it seems; infiltration is made possible by institutional support in the first place, which is why Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground went from fugitive to prominent university professor.  Much of that support comes not only from sympathetic academia but from market-driven engines of production and consumption, who are attracted to left-libertines because they make good customers; one reason we now have Pride Month.  Getting their heads around the alliance between big business and leftist politics is tricky for many conservatives marinated in the thought of Austrian economists and Ayn Rand.  Surely, as the Reagan era demonstrated, the free market is a panacea to our ills, not least of which is government overreach?  Such a solution seems less likely today, and it is even less likely that large corporations are even remotely interested in Rightist political ends, many of which are anti-globalist in their outlook.  Furthermore, such corporations are now beholden to the Environmental, Social and Governance Index, which is designed to discourage investment in problematic organisations.  Once you’ve publicly floated your company, you’re at the mercy of investors and sometimes advertisers, as Elon Musk’s venture into Twitter/X demonstrates.  At least he called it what it is: blackmail by another name.

There are strong pressures to conform to the governing ethos of international liberalism, and Robert Conquest’s adage, that any organisation not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing, seems to hold true here.  That said, I don’t put much faith in big multinationals, who have proven time and again Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”  Good luck infiltrating the Tech Giants, who run their own version of the Cheka, busily enforcing “community standards” everywhere they go.  Perhaps dying your hair purple and gaining several stone would be a good start, because unless you are made of very stern stuff, institutions end up changing you more than you end up changing them. 

The third way is to build alternate institutions that can assert dominance when those captured and corrupted institutions collapse courtesy of sacrificing competence for ideological loyalty.  Here, Herbert Marcuse helpfully spells out the strategy:

The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions. They have long been an aim of the movement, but the lack of funds was greatly responsible for their weakness and their inferior quality. They must be made competitive. This is especially important for the development of radical, “free” media. The fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation.

How well they worked their medicine.  Marcuse and his type saw the universities of the 1960s as ripe for conquest, and they were insiders looking out.  Today those universities are teetering on the brink of catastrophe, captured by rabid ideologues and embracing a business model that is the twenty-first century equivalent of selling indulgences.  They are further hostile to any kind of localism; they serve, in part, to launder a convoluted immigration process, which has made them Australia’s third largest money-maker.  For our own students they have become enormous rackets that prey on the minds of the young, to produce fanatical devotees of the current order—at least so far as the humanities is concerned.  Even if you’re studying STEM or something vocational, you’ll still have to jump through the various hoops to ensure no brain emerges unwashed.  They have embraced barefaced sophistry and more or less given up on being the heirs of Plato’s Academy, and bear the name only out of ease of reference. 

To illustrate both angles of attack—taking over institutions, or proposing alternative ones—take the Ramsay Centre in Australia, a case of genuine conservative philanthropy, endowed by Mr. Paul Ramsay AO, who aimed to fund a centre for studies in Western Civilisation.  One might think that History and Social Science departments in a Western country might be happy about this, but you’d be wrong.  The Australian National University wouldn’t take it, despite the financial advantages, and the University of Sydney claimed they’d only do so to “contextualise and problematise” the thing, because of course.  All this occurred under a conservative national government, amidst Commonwealth funded universities.  Here you can see the resistance to infiltration, and the paradoxical success of a program that incurred all kinds of hostility.  Unfortunately, there was only one Mr. Paul Ramsay.

In the world of media, there are enough ostensibly conservative-oriented outlets to create the impression that the Right is ascendant, an impression that many liberals, who live in constant terror, are quick to cleave to.  The truth is that many of these are shallowly milquetoast and regard the present problems as odd deformations rather than something in the DNA of our ethos.  People who talk about “woke” as though it is a brand-new phenomenon, and not the teleological outcome of things they themselves often supported, misunderstand the problem. Tucker Carlson, who enjoys the rare gift of being able to speak to everyone, began veering in a decidedly reactionary direction and was cut loose by Fox News.  This should raise some eyebrows about the loyalties of many of these large conglomerates.  The Spectator, the oldest conservative magazine still in circulation, published an article not long ago in favour of mass immigration for the usual economic reasons.  Many of these conservative media groups are the propaganda arm of the populist epistemology that has served in the past, but is unlikely to serve in the future; in this respect, they reflect the limitations of that metapolitical viewpoint generally.  They are uniquely vulnerable to controversy, and the whims of investors.  Thus the pressures mounted against them are not merely ideological but also profit-based, which is why so many now resemble tabloids and gossip rags, inane but safe.  Investors worry that pressure mounted by the bigger institutions will annihilate their investment, because the bigger institutions, as we know, are occupied territory.  Obscure smaller media groups and the work of dissident individuals, generally spearheaded by younger types, demonstrate fresh ideas, but these are limited in penetration, in part because of money.  They are free of investor-driven knee-jerks, but operate in relative poverty as a result.

The problem of building alternate institutions, as Marcuse pointed out, is very much a financial one.  As armies march on their stomachs, so the wheels of power consume vast quantities of money.  Thomas Sowell once commented that conservatives were playing their B team politically; the A team was out making money in the free market.  Perhaps he was right, though I am not sure I would call that A team particularly conservative beyond the barest of qualifiers.  There are some exceptions; Mark Andreessen, for example, isn’t afraid to generously invest in platforms such as Substack, that are ostensibly in favour of “free speech,” which increasingly, in our age of dissident argot, really means stuff that’s in opposition to the present zeitgeist.  These tech-types, who sometimes embrace libertarianism because content moderation is only an expense, remain so until the iron maiden starts to shut.  For his trouble, Andreessen gets called a Nazi everywhere, and pressure builds on Substack to deal with its “Nazi problem”; you can see why others might be reluctant.  Even if you front the money, there’s no guarantee that those who must decide what to do with it won’t crack under the pressure. 

At any rate, financial backing for left-wing projects, by the likes of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, dwarf anything the Right can boast of.  Most of those conservative elites, part of the A team, seem content to invest in new properties and build new swimming pools rather than fight difficult and ugly battles, though they have less skin in the game than, say, somebody working a wage job, who cannot afford to buffer themselves and must live with the consequences of our increasingly miserable state of affairs.  A cursory look at who funds Black Lives Matter, and to what extent, is enough to convince that whatever else that so-called A team is investing in, it’s not a Rightist vanguard.  Such well-funded metapolitical organisations, subsidised by BlackRock and interested not only in participating directly in electoral politics but also in shaping the general mood, have almost no equivalent on the Right.  The A team could do worse than, say, investing in this publication. 

Strong electoral power could bring about a legislated ‘clearing out’ of these bad actors, as took place in Hungary—formerly the base of Open Society Foundations—though that is predicated not merely on the will of those who would legislate such a thing, but what is indeed possible when one comes up against hostile institutions.  Those obstructive bureaucracies, for example, are unlikely to smile on such a venture, seeing their own necks on the block next.  It only reinforces the salience of Yavin’s Cathedral, at least concerning Western Europe and the Anglosphere.

But where responsibility is ceded, opportunity waits, and it is in the small organs of civil society that have all but disappeared that the Right can make itself felt.  Recently the ABC ran an article that talked about the collapse of community organisations and managed to blame the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia on, of all things, the atomisation of broader society.  As is generally the case, they diagnose the problem half-correctly.  We certainly are atomised, and while no new phenomena—think Arendt to Fight Club—it increases as the twenty-first century goes on.  We have been pushed into the simulacra, into our holes and pods, and community life has been vapourised around us, particularly in the wake of the Pandemic.  Londoners locked in their houses in 1665, provided they survived, eventually came out.  Many of us never left lockdown.  In addressing the fractured social landscape of contemporary life, something the Left can only manage in terms of socialised programs or cant about mental health, the Right can build an army in the dark. 

The Right has other advantages, too; in aesthetics, for instance, which is why the Left is so desperate to portray them as brutish skinheads at every turn.  Generally speaking, the Right likes beautiful things, like classical and baroque architecture; the Left has Le Corbusier and Brutalism, the love of which has turned modern cities into soulless shells of their former selves.  Leftists are alternately beanpoles or obese land-whales; the gym and physical fitness, as many opinion pieces angrily relate, have become bastions of right-wing thought.  Good aesthetics, aside from being good on their own terms, are also a form of social proof.  Many younger Rightists have abandoned the brittle populist epistemology of the neoconservatives, and found other, stronger brews to imbibe.  To them, the story of the twentieth-century Right is one of defeat and rout, even if there have been electoral victories in the past.  For them, the Establishment Right can promise very little.  Their arena is the cultural and social one—a new globalised cultural populism that exists without leaders, without parties, represented by symbolism online—the arena the Establishment Right naively believed could survive a homicidal zeitgeist.  They have zeal but lack institutional power. 

Against this the Left has institutional power, and a lot of money, but seems bankrupt in the world of ideas, which is a little surprising, given how hard they’ve worked to feed brainworms into everybody’s supper.  Sure, they have BreadTube and a cornered popular culture, busily producing those over-funded Hollywood disasters, or streaming service propaganda like the Rings of Power or The Witcher, that few bother watching any longer.  These exist to remind you you’ve been divested of your stories.  There’s a mean-spirited cruelty to these sorts of appropriations, the causes the mask to slip a little; many can’t articulate quite what they mean, as they struggle to proclaim they aren’t racist, while feeling a little unsettled that Snow White isn’t, well, snow white any longer.  Leftist showrunners can’t move the heart, because they deny higher things exist; for them, a solid strategy would be to retreat on this front to better defensive positions, but they are infected with the same hubris that once coloured conservatives.  The poverty of their ideas about the world become more obvious by the day, as their fanatical attempts to cement that ideational hegemony, whether through popular culture or academia, become more pronounced, and more desperate. 

To exploit these vulnerabilities a Rightist vanguard must engage in the culture war; it must prepare the ground, to connect their ideas with the mass, as the 101^st and 82^nd Airborne prepared the ground for the amphibious landings that followed on D-Day.  This is done in the world of letters, and as our intellectual worlds regress to hieroglyphic and oral forms, through the varied spaces on the internet like YouTube.  As Keynes once quipped, many a free thinker is in fact bound to the words of a long-dead economist, and the same is true of the penetrative power of the ideas we articulate today.  The Right is not lacking in such ideas, but finds it difficult to unite them with a heavily propagandised mass population, one increasingly composed of assorted stock that enjoy no special relationship to the countries in which they live, yet vote nonetheless.  It is further hindered by the fact the Right is riddled with infighting, which of course is natural for any differentiated group roughly pushing for discordant, if broadly similar aims.  Nonetheless, it is for the mass—at least, geographically, culturally and nationally particular masses—that right-wing politics, though inegalitarian in its truest form, must be about, and certainly not for special interests, unlike many of our friends in the A team.  Part of the reason the other side wishes to create a single globalised mass, aside from ease of commerce, is to break any purchase the Right might have when speaking to those particular groupings that still feel a sense of historical legacy.  They have had some success in this, but particular features, renewed by the proximate nature of life, are difficult to totally eradicate. 

The mass by itself is undirected unpredictable energy; that is all it can be.  The mass has no virtue, at least not beyond the virtue of its individual members.  Every manner of thought that deifies the mass ends up disappointed, some so much that they build camps to punish them, or starve them, or outright democide them.  The mass will release Barrabas over Christ; the mass will watch daytime television and think The Project is profound.  But elites must love the mass, not in a kitsch pseudo-egalitarian abstractive way, but the way a shepherd loves his flock.  There can be no other way about it.  The mass can only be the object of power, never the subject, which is why today’s democracy delivers such half-baked products.  The elites cannot be of the people, but must be for the people, even if the people occasionally drag them through the streets.  Our elites today are not for the people, but love pretending to be of them, while snickering at them. 

An example of sneering elite hubris, in the context of the recent Australian referendum, was well-captured in a recent article that appeared on The Big Smoke:

We among the inner-city, latte-sipping, over-educated cultural elite (we, supposedly out of touch with mainstream Australia, whoever the fuck that is) are voting Yes in legion. You can’t throw a rock in my bubble without hitting a Yes banner; we signal our virtues at an olympic level. Bravo, us. But we’re also a cadre that has memories, and when the next federal election cycle rolls around, the results are unlikely to go well for the Coalition …

… If you’re a voter who is undecided, or doesn’t know what the vote is all about, take a leap of faith and trust me when I say that it won’t mean anything bad for you, and is an actual progressive step in the right direction for those who need it most. It’s not a cure-all, but it will do, for now. A No vote just stops it all, which will make next Saturday a red-letter day for (among many), the fucking Nazis. This is not a side most would really like to be on.

The best the Left can do is call you a Nazi, and increasingly less of us care.  You shouldn’t either; that’s their pornographic fantasy, not ours.  For a mass beginning to wonder quite what has happened to their ostensible betters, finding an audience and hearing for truth in a world hostile toward it is difficult, particularly as the internet is less free with each passing year.  It is easy to reach ever-shrinking existing audiences but hard to capture new ones.  It is a process of quarantine, precisely how the other side likes it best.  Nonetheless, this is the front that scares them most. 

“The culture war is a right-wing distraction,” they shout, as though the culture war isn’t what they’ve bent every muscle toward fighting for decades.  They’ve won it so conclusively that many now take our totally untruthful and abnormal social and cultural world as given.  When they start talking derisively about engaging in the “culture war,” it’s because they know this is a vulnerability, that our postmodern lives are anti-natural, and that this represents the possibility of the equivalent of a Normandy landing against their stretched Atlantic Wall.  Directing matters back to statistical questions, minutia of policy, political personalities, and their various shibboleths of moral purity—equality, diversity, inclusion, etc.—veil the fact that any understanding of those things must come from a position of cultural warfare.  Take a position and be unapologetic about it, but take the right position.  They have to stake their ground on utterly ridiculous issues, like pretending not to know what a woman is, because otherwise they alienate elements of their Leninist alliance.  An enemy that cannot tell the truth lives on borrowed time, but they can wreak untold damage in that time, and pendulums do not swing themselves. 

The trick is to direct the mass away from dope-like liberal prescriptions when they begin to feel the cracks forming in contemporary life, when the plastic and saccharine imaginings of progressives can’t provide satisfactory answers.  This is done by vanguard reactionary thought penetrating into common parlance, away from the stifling and suffocating liberal orthodoxies that today are everywhere abroad.  Most of us remember when we heard the first words of an obvious truth, one that we had not heard articulated quite so well, in public life.  It was like getting a breath of oxygen after being underwater far too long; this is why Jordan Peterson, despite his limitations, became a cult hero overnight to millions of men who had grown up imbibing only lies.  Nothing he said was terribly remarkable, aside from being truthful on subjects nobody else was comfortable discussing.  As Orwell said, speaking the truth in a time of universal deceit is itself a revolutionary act.  People are waiting to hear what they suspect is true, and while the truth might be a sword, and sometimes unpalatable at its pointy end, it is ultimately a liberating force.  Believing this is what makes a Rightist what he is, because he believes that things like truth are not merely matters of relative perspective, and that we ought not be a jesting Pilate who asks the question and doesn’t stay for the answer.  Conventional Rightist populism—predicated on economic terms and believing that wokeism is merely an unnatural deformation of our otherwise serviceable current order—might be effective in the short-term, but is no substitute for fighting the deeper and more difficult battles, battles that cut to the very core of what life is about; battles that take a very long time and accrue casualties.  We risk mistaking a strategy for the thing itself.  Think not in political terms, but in civilisational terms.  That’s what’s at stake, after all. 

It is in the establishment of alternate institutions in the cultural, intellectual and social world, and particularly ones that concern ideational matters, that the ground is best prepared for subsequent electoral victory, one prefaced on something deeper than the populism that has served in the past.  This requires money, forethought, and naturally, a degree of courage.  Electoral victory without institutional strength to fortify a galvanised mass—galvanised beyond that shallow populism that fades like the fidget spinner fad—seems doomed to limited success at best and outright failure at worst.  Fight Overlord, not Market Garden; the first Ardennes offensive, not the second. 

Recently in London there were two very separate protests.  On the one hand, three hundred thousand pro-Palestine types marched across the city on Armistice Day.  There was uproar about the timing, timing that was very deliberate; a reminder that our history no longer belongs to us.  On the other, a few hundred Right Wing types gathered to defend the Cenotaph, to reassert that history, even though the first march was not passing anywhere near it.  In their minds, it was Rorke’s Drift; in the minds of their detractors, Kristallnacht.  Neither account is true, but nonetheless, over a hundred arrests were made.  No prizes for guessing which group got nicked.  Union Jacks and the cross of St. George are less welcome in England than the flag of Palestine, and as one copper said in a moment of rare candour, “there’s more of them than there are of us.”  Whoever else is imagining Rorke’s Drift, it’s not the Metropolitan Police. 

However unsettled you might feel about the course of recent history, getting out and pounding the pavement is about as effective in this case as it is in acquiring white collar jobs.  Street demonstrations are demonstrations of power: the clue is in the name.  If you don’t have any power, there’s no point.  Populist revolts don’t work, because elites run the show, as anybody who’s read any history knows.  You’re putting a target on your back for no real reason, and what’s worse, providing fodder for a hostile media.  They have a perfect opportunity to pivot away from covering that which causes them great unease – conflict between two groups who both want to monopolise the victim-status totem pole, which in our post-Nietzschean world, translates into power – and put the focus back on the real problem, which as you might expect, is a restless native population.  Because they’re clever enough to never waste such an opportunity, they’ve not hesitated, and milquetoast former Home Secretary Braverman has gone the journey.  It was a trap for her, but it was a bigger trap for the rest of us.

Since 1945, much political energy has been bent toward crippling any genuine sense of nationalism among home-grown Europeans, wherever their transnational journeys have taken them.  This is why there are Holocaust memorials in every major city, but none to the Armenians, the victims of the Bolsheviks or the Holodomor, or those of Pol Pot or Mao.  Only one of these tragedies had the correct antagonist, even if it was the RAF that bombed that antagonist nightly for years.  Little subtleties like who exactly belonged to the Axis seem unimportant, when it comes to preventing the feverishly-imagined rerun of esoteric mid-twentieth-century German nationalism.  Today’s Britain is ruled by the colonial types of yesteryear, except they treat the United Kingdom the way those overseas possessions were once treated.  Certainly this is so where the original inhabitants are concerned, and many alibis are provided to smooth over this process of cultural and political disprivileging, oftentimes by the Tories themselves.  That party has an eighty-seat majority; if they liked, they could end overnight the turmoil that has gripped London’s streets these past few weeks.  They can’t, or they won’t; neither answer is particularly satisfying.  The historical Britain couldn’t be deader if we exhumed it and executed it again, as was the fate of Oliver Cromwell.    

If the Far Right protestors are guilty of anything, it’s being not-too-bright and a little brutish, though for their part, they received their share of elite support.  Even Douglas Murray inveighed on the subject, and Tommy Robinson and Katy Hopkins were mysteriously unbanned from X to encourage this Assembly of the Notables.  A cynical person might wonder what exactly the anti-Jihadi types, at least those within the establishment, are really about.  What are they defending, exactly: an unnatural liberal status-quo that created all the problems that now threaten it?  The same status quo that is incapable of recognising its mistakes, let alone learning from them?  It is because of effete liberal principles and policies that      Western cities now resemble the bazaars of foreign places, that our social cohesion has vanished, that long lines at psychiatric practices exist, or that The Simpsons, once satire, appears for many suburbanites an impossible dream.  You might wish to fight and die for Pride Month, for abortion-on-demand, for no fault divorce and all it brings, but I certainly don’t.  To call it Cultural Marxism is half the story; the rest is homegrown in the bones of liberalism, whether we like it or not.  That the two have made a love-match is a longer story, but if you’ve oriented yourself properly, your words ought to be those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Let the lie enter the world.  Let it even triumph.  But not through me.  Don’t get caught fighting for the wrong side; clear out your mental cobwebs before you start painting a banner with banal slogans written all over it. 

This is no defence of indigestible Islam, as incompatible with the West as any ideology imaginable, or the hybrid horrors that are created when the strictures of an austere desert religion meet iPhones and the rotting liberal self-conception of their new neighbours.  Remember the words of Houari Boumediene:

One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.

We’ve dug ourselves a deep hole, but digging sideways is hardly the answer.  Far away from our shores this ought to be a little unsettling, because we must pay the old world its due, and we can expect certain patterns, powered by our overly-globalised world, to make themselves manifest here.  Perhaps I am old-fashioned, a child of Empire, even if it was long departed before my birth, in that I consider Australians Englishmen far from home.  Much that is good about our country comes from that green and pleasant land; and if we forget this, our long heritage that goes back before William the Conqueror, we can only become prey to those other feverish-imaginings, those that imagine places stripped of history and displaced from time and place.  Defend your heritage, but defend it cleverly.

This article originally appeared in the Lotus Eaters in November 2023.

The heroic, so far as we imagine it in the flesh-and-blood, exists only in notions of the world prior to 1945—a time so abstract to postmoderns that it might as well have occurred in the Marvel multiverse. 

The pandemic made a virtue out of cowardice.  Nobody was willing to face, in those early days, the prospect of mortality with anything resembling dignity.  It was all about scratching out another year, month, week of life.  For the materialist, this makes perfect sense, but this was not the ethos of Horatius at the gate.  

Our established doctrine is something monstrous that combines what we once knew as Left and Right, market economics crossbred with Marxist thought, executed with liberal effeteness, and all polite sensibilities rotate around it.  Only the exceptions of Old Night—ardent religiosity and parochial nationalism—can avoid the pull toward it. 

Listening to two women talking at a café was evidence enough that the West will never win another war.

We are awash with information without knowledge, in a simulated and panoptical kaleidoscope of thought, where no moment is private, where music and noise are omnipresent, where genuine reflection can only happen in the shower, and where every collective attitude is demotic and levelling.  Out of this milieu we should only expect foolishness and vainglory, as a storm produces sound and fury, which indeed signifies nothing. 

As the printing press broke the back of all established authority in its time—political, moral, spiritual—we ought to expect the same from our own latter-day foray into epistemological dalliance. 

Modern life is wading through thigh-deep mud and swinging at phantoms.  There is no decisive battle, no clear enemy to strike.  It is a test of endurance, a marathon not a sprint.  It is easy to have courage once, but hard to keep it forever. 

Postmodern society is one gigantic Theseus’s ship.

Star Wars has more hold on the majority of the population than the course of Western history.  No society that enfranchises a mass that thinks that way has a genuine stake in the future. 

The tragedy of the postmodern person is not that they are malformed bugmen, but that they believe themselves capable of being anything else. 

Our feeling that learning cannot be so simple as the mere impartation of knowledge—of remembering—is so ingrained in the technocracy we have become that we have overcomplicated something very simple.

Our society puts great nobility and beauty to trivial and frivolous ends. The Witcher 3 soundtrack, which in its aesthetic form seems to bring one closer to God, was created to sell a video game. That is the West in a nutshell—the greatness of our ancestors, now bent toward consumer markets.

The foreigners who are proudly Australian—born and bred, and more Aussie than I—may be marooned in the future. They will be men without countries, and the arguments in sympathy for them will be tired and worn. They will be the ultimate unfortunate victims of their predecessors who cried wolf one time too many.

The Left may have begun the neo-racialisation of Western polities, but the Right will likely finish it.

A revelation for me was the realisation that humanities education is not failing, but is in fact succeeding beyond the wild imaginings of its recent progenitors.

We often talk about the discrediting of socialism by market forces, but have yet to consider the discrediting of market forces by the tumults of the human heart. Who said we were merely a bag of needs and wants and consumer choices? Our hollow cities, our rude billboards, our empty people—we forgot we were men with souls, and who can blame our souls from revolting?

The excesses of freedom, if not limited and curtailed within every human heart, eventually become destructive.

The libertarian faces this problem: his ideology was never conceived for mass society. A small, elite intelligentsia, versed in letters and the classical canon, might cleave to a Burkean notion of liberty amid limited institutions. But it can never be so for the hoi polloi. And it is they, hand-in-hand with the plutocrats who rule today’s society, who are in the mahogany study, though neither love books nor tradition, and resent any limit on their appetites. Maultoon’s land of manners was not for the Everyman. Our forebears correctly sensed that universal egalitarianism was a destructive, homogenizing force, that would sack the library and embrace the equality only ashes can bring.

Positing that surrendering to all one’s desires and foibles is a form of true nobility to the self is perhaps the greatest betrayal of the true human spirit, which must deny itself to know itself.

The worst part of modernity is feeling robbed of a home, of the particular, of a place where yesterday was much like tomorrow will be, with special and unique features. Others have their homes, but this is yours; and what we are letting happen to ourselves is precisely the crime we condemn our ancestors for doing to others. The man without a home, or with a home swept out from under him, is a lost and contemptible thing. He lives beneath a conquerors’ yoke or chases the ashes all his days.

The allure of Marx, to this day, is that he provides a glittering and verbose vindication for robbing others and seizing political power. How much wool is over the eyes of the revolutionary is debatable, but this seduction, which the rueful wake of a thousand brutal Cultural Revolutions will never suppress, springs eternal in the breast of the naive idealist and the hardened scoundrel alike.

Extreme inclusion means the exclusion of people with ideas.

The mainstream Right must realise that the window of opportunity to win this reasonably is closing. We have always operated by the modus operandi that the means are more important than the ends, a fitting epitaph for a movement that puts principles before power.

The red pill was to realise that individual liberty is not the highest good. Divorced from a culture of service, duty and restraint, personal freedom becomes enslavement to appetite and the self.

There is a great experiment happening in the contemporary world. It is to determine whether a great weight of cognitive machinery can drown the truth, attempted on a scale never before possible. Universal schooling, compulsory tertiary education for the middle class, corporate media, tech giants and bureaucratic hegemony have all attained an apogee never before possible.  The old protectors—tradition, religion, place, and the particular—have collapsed so suddenly and completely it is as though they were never there.  Against this, can the truth make a hearing for itself?

Of course, the corporate world went progressive. What sells better than the ‘do what you want’ mantra of the last seventy years? What started culturally would find its form politically in this demotic age, a noxious brew imbibed from every ideational orifice we have. How does one bring this juvenility to heel, when it has succeeded in the marketplace, the so-called stopper of progressivism and foolproof tester of ideas? It is clear that all of our old tools and weapons are rendered ineffective by this weird synergy of capitalist and revolutionary.

Everything the modern man does has the feeling of simulation, a product of too much leisure and prosperity.  Even his revolts feel simulated.