You have probably seen these charts before. They indicate exactly what you think they do, namely, that some people value the existence of a paramecium more than their own children. One might ask, how could such a valuation of things contrary to the natural order emerge. The answer lies not in some alien domain, but deep within the recesses of our own history.

Universalism originated as a secular outgrowth of Puritan culture, early in the nineteenth century. It was the main source of so many efforts to redesign society around a progressive mindset, and was the origin of the concept that the morality of man was malleable. Before its advent in the American North, it is nowhere to be found; isolated examples such as Lucretius and Voltaire notwithstanding. It was certainly absent from any historical Judaic or Christian worldviews.

One consequence was the expansion of social responsibility to those who one might never see. While this was always somewhat of an element of this within Christian morality, the plight of the unknown stranger was elevated for the first time above the plight of the known pauper. And so Charles Dickens would deride those do-gooders who would bemoan the plight of the slave abroad, and ignore the effects of the factory system at home.

Later in the twentieth century, a further development of this concept would lead to the elevation of the welfare of apes above the health of man. It is therefore entirely unsurprising that Jane Goodall was a product of the Congregationalist Church. I cite this example, not because of any intrinsic importance, but rather as the reductio ad absurdum of a certain pattern of thinking.

By the second half of the twentieth century, it would expand to the potential welfare of life forms whose existence is itself in doubt. The Planetary Protection Directive of NASA is its result, and has lead to a complete lack of investigation of the most promising habitats of extraterrestrial life. Hence Mars rovers investigate dead rocks and not the seasonal water plumes.

At some point in our development, we must commit to an absolutist form of humanism. I do not mean this in the typical, universalist sense of the word, but rather, in the advancement of the human species, if necessary, at the expense of all else. It must also apply to the preservation of human nature, and against the insectification of man.

Those phosphine molecules in the turbid depths of Venus might seem a distant cloud on the horizon, which may well turn out to be nothing but a mirage. However, if in far futurity our society is still ruled by those who identify most with the outermost circles, mankind will be in for a catastrophe of cataclysmic proportions.

Nowadays, hostility and violence get a bad rap. When one recalls how openly conflictual people’s relations with each other were within living memory, it almost feels like a look into a different world. Steven Pinker’s best-seller The Better Angels of Our Nature includes anecdotes from the mid-twentieth century showing how different public attitudes were even then. President Harry S Truman, for instance, earned widespread praise in 1950 for threatening a man with a beating. In response to a negative appraisal of his daughter’s singing, recounts Pinker, “Truman wrote to the critic on White House stationery: ‘Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below’.” One hopes he intended to challenge the man to a fight rather than simply attack him. In any event, our current, pacific mores are far from historically universal. Ernst Jünger, an intellectual star in mid-twentieth-century Europe, notoriously remarked: “I am a disciple of Nietzsche, and take the greatest delight in a struggle for power wherever it occurs and whoever wins.”

Human Nature

While the Rousselian image of man as innately peaceful still has appeal in some quarters, it is hardly tenable in light of modern findings. As we now know, a penchant for conflict is essential to the human experience. A few observations shall serve to make the point.

Beginning with Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, scholars have established time and again that human beings naturally tend to categorize themselves into groups and, having done so, to look down on groups other than their own. People’s need for self-esteem impels them to define themselves as members of superior groups, and to pursue their in-groups’ interests over those of outsiders. The very process of human self-understanding works, to a considerable extent, by contrasting oneself with various out-groups. Meanwhile, the evolution of collective identities shows how people’s increasing exposure to more diverse sets of fellow humans has provided ever more markers of difference to be invested with emotional salience. To the tribal identities of prehistory have been added national ones in recorded history, along with racial and civilizational ones during especially globalized periods. Even when people are bound together by shared identities, it happens with some out-group or other acting as a foil, and the way to bind diverse people together is to find an even more alien out-group for them to unite against. For this reason, the dream of world government will likely have to wait until we make contact with some non-human civilization.

Mankind’s essential character can thus be said to have a conflictual element to it. As science journalist Nicholas Wade writes in his recent book The Origin of Politics, a “propensity for violence cannot be eradicated from the human genome.” It is such instincts, one supposes, which account for the popularity of cultural products like Invader Zim—a cartoon series whose lovable protagonist is a deranged alien colonizer seeking to conquer Earth. Deeply human drives which we would rather not confront in ourselves become palatable when projected onto a quaint extraterrestrial.

This view of our species carries with it some interesting implications. If human nature is conflictual, then humans should thrive under conditions of conflict. This is, indeed, true in many areas. What follows is a brief overview of some of them.

Economic Growth

Competition is among the principal drivers of economic strength, as is suggested by the martial vocabulary in which business is often discussed and by the popularity of applying the classics of Homer and Sun Tzu to contemporary workplace settings. Unsurprisingly, more competitive industries tend to be more productive. According to a study by Roberto Fontana and colleagues, “breakthrough inventions are more likely to emerge in ‘turbulent’ . . . contexts” in which “successful innovating entrants replac[e] incumbents.” Nature red in tooth and claw!

Yet it is not only between companies that competition foments economic progress. The race for achievement between countries has also been a major driver of enrichment. Sociologist Liah Greenfeld argues as much in her lengthy monograph The Spirit of Capitalism, wherein she contends that nationalism served as an ideological motivation for the emergence of the modern capitalist economy. The desire to enrich one’s own nation and outshine others contributed strongly to the appreciation for commerce which developed in the early modern period, especially in Britain. This judgment is supported by analyzing primary sources from that era. This is apparent in sources from the period, such as John Wheeler’s 1601 screed A Treatise of Commerce (which, however, is still quite sympathetic to regulation) and Nicholas Barbon’s 1690 opus Discourse of Trade, an early defense of free-trade policy and key text in the development of economics.

Beneficent effects of international competition can be seen even in cases when it entails war or the acute threat thereof. In The Origin of Politics, Nicholas Wade observes that “the ferocious competition that warfare represents forces societies to innovate, invest, become more efficient, and deliver more for their citizens.” His examples include Japan’s Meiji Restoration and Russia’s 1861 abolition of serfdom. The latter, he writes, was occasioned by “defeat in the Crimean War,” which had “proved the necessity of modernizing Russian society.”

Competition can also take place between communities within the same country. In their provocative page-turner The Triple Package, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld argue that those ethnic and religious groups which produce great achievements tend to possess three traits: a “superiority complex,” a sense of “insecurity,” and a capacity for “impulse control.” Through a series of case studies, they apply this notion to various groups which, in their view, have achieved above-average success in the United States: East Asians, Persians, Mormons, and so forth. Impulse control may not inherently have much to do with intergroup competition, but the other two features are all about comparing oneself to other groups and wishing to outdo them. One of the book’s more incendiary implications is that it can benefit a minority not to be fully accepted by the wider society. American Jews, the authors suggest, may see their levels of achievement drop “[a]s Ellis Island and the Lower East Side recede into the past” and the community loses its sense of insecurity and outsider status.

Science and Technology

It is seldom acknowledged how much scientific and technological progress has been driven by conflict—by competition among eggheads themselves, of course, but also by international rivalry. One need only think of how often national-security considerations and the necessity to outcompete foreign countries are invoked nowadays as reasons for improving education and encouraging research and development efforts.

Similar dynamics have obtained in the past. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson describes this phenomenon in an interview with Anthony Cumia. Tyson recalls how the New World was discovered not by a private company in search of revenue, but by Christopher Columbus, dispatched by a Spanish crown bent on improving its standing on the world stage. A similar dynamic was at play when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite and kicked off the Space Race. “We were at war,” Tyson stresses, and the USSR’s newly-acquired satellite technology was frightening in its potential for military uses. “NASA was formed a year later.”

This logic also explains why the Moon landing was not followed by a voyage to Mars, contrary to certain optimists’ predictions. Once it became clear that the Soviets would not outcompete America in space, there was no sufficiently strong impetus for an expedition to Mars. Even so, mankind may yet reach the Red Planet: “All China has to do is leak a memo saying they wanna put military bases on Mars. . . . We’d be on Mars in ten months.”

Public Virtue

Thinkers throughout history have suggested that military service conduces to the moral improvement of citizenries and that war makes people more virtuous. There may be an evolutionary side to this, as argued in the book Modernity and Cultural Decline, by Matthew Sarraf, Michael Woodley of Menie, and Colin Feltham. The volume suggests that, since effective warfare requires a high degree of group cohesion, the need to wage war has selected for psychological traits which enable people to get along. In the crucible of intergroup strife, they believe, people were genetically bred to be team players.

Things may have changed in recent times. Sarraf, Woodley of Menie, and Feltham reckon that modern warfare, as exemplified by World War I, is dysgenic: braver and smarter soldiers are killed more often, reducing the population’s overall quality. However, in a paper published around the same time as the book, psychologist Richard Lynn—a no less widely-denounced author—argues that the data on this matter are “inconclusive.”

Private Virtue

On the individual level, too, it has often been observed that conflict has the capacity to ennoble. In The Triple Package, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld make clear that individuals, no less than cultural groups, can be carried to success by high self-esteem coupled with insecurity (plus impulse control). The example they adduce is Steve Jobs, of whom an acquaintance remarked: “Steve always had a kind of chip on his shoulder.”

On the flip side, people’s desire to avoid conflict allows undisciplined individuals to descend into self-indulgence. One of Louis C K’s more insightful bits includes this reflection: “I grew up in Boston. And in Boston, people just beat the s[**]t out of each other, for no reason. They just beat the s[**]t out of each other. But I kind of think you need that, you know, to keep quality control.” The comedian goes on to relate how he went jogging on Venice Beach in Los Angeles and came face to face with a man roller skating while nearly nude. “And I actually had to stop jogging,” he adds, “’cause I needed my whole body to f[**]king hate this guy with.” If only they had been in Boston, and that stranger had been beaten up!

One is reminded of a sentiment expressed in Robert E. Howard’s story “The Tower of the Elephant,” starring Conan the Barbarian: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

Utopianism

The view of human relations as inescapably conflictual may seem bleak to some, but it bears remembering that attempts to stamp out conflict have led to some of history’s greatest horrors. As sociologist Paul Hollander writes in From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, bolsheviks and Nazis were united in their utopian desire for a world free of conflict. Hollander quotes historian Michael Ignatieff’s description of genocide as “a crime in service of a utopia, a world without discord, enmity, suspicion, free of the enemy without or the enemy within.”

Aesthetics of Conflict

Friedrich Nietzsche remarks, in The Birth of Tragedy, that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” By finding beauty even in life’s unpleasant aspects, we can reconcile ourselves to them. And since conflict, despite its beneficent effects, is often unpleasant, art which finds beauty in conflict is needed. The popularity of team sports certainly proves that there is demand for dramatized conflict. But sport is not exactly art in the conventional sense. One may therefore ask whether there are any artistic traditions that glean beauty from the conflictual.

Perhaps the clearest example of such a tradition is the Nordic pictorial art of the Middle Ages. Historian Henry Bamford Parkes’s book The Divine Order offers this reflection:

Abstract art elsewhere has mostly conveyed a sense of religious submission to transcendental realities, and has therefore emphasized rest and peace. But the art of the northern barbarians, consisting mostly of lines organized into complex patterns, suggested motion, restlessness, and disharmony. . . . This was the art of peoples who believed in the constant need for struggle against an unfriendly nature . . . .

A less obvious instance of art making conflict bearable is the hit series The Office (at least, in its American incarnation). With its masterly use of “cringe comedy,” it makes light of interpersonal tensions, thereby training the viewer to find them less frightening. By seeing enough awkward situations and subtle antagonisms depicted as droll and endearing, one loses some of one’s fear of them. Various explanations have been offered for why The Office has enjoyed such popularity so long after its last episode was released, but the show’s treatment of social conflict strikes me as the likeliest cause. Given the current epidemic of social anxiety, it is needed more than ever.

Another example of a work of art that aestheticizes conflict is Jonathan Coulton’s comedic song “Nemeses,” which repurposes the vocabulary and conventions of love songs to describe a relationship between arch-enemies. Just as romantic ballads speak of love as that which gives meaning to life, so “Nemeses” attributes the same function to enmity, the singer wistfully intoning: “Could it be that you need me / To keep you out, to run you faster?” To the listener, the implied comparison of foes to lovers feels strangely appropriate, an effect which should perhaps not surprise us. “Hate,” in Terry Pratchett’s much-quoted words, “is an attracting force, just like love.”

Law professor Michael Dorf praises “Nemeses” and applies its core idea to the fields of business, sport, and jurisprudence, seeing it reflected in the rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Dorf likewise deems the song’s message applicable to the US Supreme Court. “The lack of a real nemesis diminishes Justice Scalia,” he opines. “It makes his arguments look like they target a straw man.” As a sometime essayist, I know what he means.

The need for opposition is seen even in fiction writing. In his widely-used instructional volume The Anatomy of Story, screenwriting teacher John Truby contends that a story’s theme amounts to a “moral argument” wherein the author “make[s] a case for how to live.”

As a rule, the theme is explored through interpersonal conflict, as the writer “create[s] a group of opponents (and allies) who force the hero to deal with the central moral problem.” For Truby, “the most important relationship in any story” is “that between the hero and the main opponent.” Echoing our earlier observations about identity, he maintains that this antagonist is “the most effective way of defining the hero.” Perhaps Truby overgeneralizes, but there is a case to be made that most good storytelling is, at least in some small way, an aestheticizing of conflict.

Conclusion

The West’s upper and middle classes have become, in many ways, domesticated. But it does not do to straitjacket human nature. Deep down, we are all wild animals or Bostonians. Should we adopt Ernst Jünger’s ethics? Probably not. But perhaps a return to Harry S Truman’s would be salutary.

I can’t help but collect videotape.

This footage is made available for your edification and entertainment on the Youtube channel of Tom Swift. It is filed under the “science fiction” playlist as it would be too inconvenient to explain its true origins.

Stay tuned for more!

Ruskin and Morris provided the critique of machine-made historicism that inadvertently opened the path to the rejection of historical reference entirely.

Loos provided the moral framework — ornament as crime, simplicity as civilization — that gave ethical weight to aesthetic preference.

The Werkbund provided the institutional framework connecting aesthetic reform to industrial production.

The Bauhaus provided the educational mechanism through which modernist principles achieved professional dominance, training the generation that captured architecture schools globally.

Le Corbusier provided the most influential theoretical framework, presenting aesthetic preferences as logical necessities and urban utopianism as rational planning.

Giedion and Pevsner provided the historical narratives that legitimized modernism as the inevitable expression of the contemporary age.

The Zeitgeist framework derived from Hegel provided the philosophical scaffolding that made traditional architecture appear not merely different but historically impossible.

Postmodern and deconstructivist theory extended the rejection of classical proportion into the current period under different theoretical auspices.

The common thread throughout is the same philosophical error committed by postmodern epistemology — the use of apparently rational or historical necessity to protect aesthetic preferences from legitimate challenge, combined with the institutional capture of the mechanisms through which architectural culture reproduces itself.

The Victorian architect could decide to design in Gothic or classical style based on explicitly normative grounds. His arguments were based on the concepts of beauty, utility, and historicity. The modernist tradition replaced this heuristic with false claims of historical necessity and logical derivation, and used institutional mechanisms to enforce those claims against the preferences of the public and the arguments of serious critics.

Therefore, restoring the Victorian framework to architectural culture depends on doing so within intellectual culture more broadly. Hence, it demands the restoration of standards that distinguish genuine argument from rhetorical maneuver, honest normative debate from false claims of necessity, and the accumulated knowledge of a mature tradition from the ideological preferences of a professional culture that has insulated itself from serious challenge.

Modern man is conditioned to see the megacity as the epitome of society. There are several ways this manifests itself. Walt Bismarck suggests that most social dysfunction today could be the result of social media creating a global arena of competition, particularly with alterations in communication technology beginning in the mid-Tens. However, the effects of social breakdown emerge much earlier, with the advent of superstar cities. Beginning in approximately the mid-Nineties, the urban life was extolled as the highest and best to which one could aspire:

Omaha was late to experience the effects of this, but it began in the mid Tens with the departure of Conagra for Naperville. The hollowing out only then began in earnest. Thus the wages of centralization destroyed culture in much of the country much earlier than the Tens, in a similar way that the effects of social media would later accomplish.

When travelling through the rural North, one often perceives the heavy weight of a fallen civilization. There are abandoned mines, moss-covered stone ruins, and empty mansions left behind by some forgotten Victorian industrialist. Yet these places were once home to the elite who oversaw the golden age of American mass production. This is particularly well documented by A. M. Hickman, but conditions are similar in other places such as Upper Michigan.

Rural society is often perceived by American elites to be poorly educated and chaotic. Sadly, there are many regions which do little to dispel this image, particularly throughout the Sun Belt states. Independence can be had in the South and in the West, but at a fairly steep price. While taxes are indeed lower and the culture markedly less progressive, Northern exiles much to their dismay often encounter bad schools, an intellectual wasteland and crime rates no lower than those in the cities they fled. With a growing sense of horror, they begin to realize they will always be outsiders in their new home. While the Southerner and Westerner may range further, the Northerner makes his exploits possible. It takes a certain level of openness and risk tolerance to thrive south of the Ohio, which many of the exiles fundamentally do not possess.

Yet the rural North is somehow different. Libraries are usually decently stocked, and there seem to be far more bookstores around than elsewhere, even if they are only stocked with summer beach reading. Amish often dominate egg and milk production, rather than migrant-staffed latifundia. While the cities and universities are indeed more liberal than what one would encounter in Texas or Florida, the rural sections of states such as Wisconsin or Michigan are as reactionary as one could imagine. Crime in rural Northern areas is lower than almost anywhere else in the country, in places unchanged from the middle of the last century.

For these reason I believe that the North is best suited for the formation of a counter-elite. One potential plan for this is outlined in my 2025 essay, The New Cantons. Those attempting to flee the would-be socialist utopias of Mamdani and Johnson would do well to consider this plan. Hence the New Cantons could be a productive alternative to the Sunbelt.

Due to these factors, any serious challenge to the progressive matrix must be accomplished with the full cooperation of Northerners. While currently unaligned, true elite institutions do exist in Madison and Ann Arbor. Due to low real estate costs in these areas, it is possible to participate in them while living a traditional way. In particular, a Catholic counter-elite clearly does exist near and even within these universities, often organized around Newman centers. It also bears noting that Hillsdale College, the principal reactionary institution of our time is located in the Northern state of Michigan.

Right-wing aesthetics as they are today offer nothing to the Northerner. Country music is a product of the South. The Right is currently suffused with a predilection for the Confederacy, and the promotion of the patrician order of the Tidewater as the ideal to which one should aspire. This is largely lost on him, as most Northerners have no ancestors in Colonial America. Under such conditions, the Northerner has sublimated his ancient sympathies for Free Soil and the Union into an identification with the Marxists who despise the South for their own bizarre reasons. So can this year’s protests best be explained as an unconscious reenactment of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Hence, the energies of the Northerner are so uselessly wasted in hating the Southerner.

Here is one potential solution to this problem. Although it is usually not articulated as such, a “Lost Cause” narrative does exist in the American North, with the state of the great cities before the chaos of the Sixties occupying roughly the same place in the Northern imagination as the great houses of the antebellum South do in the mind of the Southerner. This can be used to provide some sense of an epic destiny to the Sunburned Exiles and the others who fled to the featureless suburbs. Yet here does the similarity end. Northerners are a fragmented patchwork of different waves of European religious dissidents ranging from Puritans to the Irish of 1848 to Orthodox Jews. Yet there is one example of a strong republic formed by ethnic groups without a common origin. I refer here, to the Swiss Confederation.

The Swiss canton seems to be the best ideal towards the Northerner should strive. Each Canton would be identified by what it produces, and have a unique cultural identity. It also provides an antidote to the common observation that the Midwest is all but featureless.

As a method for the development of physical technology, the creation of small centers of advanced production seems to be optimal. The geography of the North lends itself quite naturally to this way of life; it is blessed by a multitude of lakes, rivers, islands and peninsulae. For this reason is the North likely to retain a more European character and orientation than other parts of the United States. ASML of the Netherlands runs on an interconnected network of suppliers, indeed some many hundreds of years old. It is network such as this which cultivated the Hanseatic nations into the high civilization we see today. While their are few American examples of this, Corning, New York is a remarkable exception. The town has been spared the worst excesses of post-industrial decline, as Corning remained a family enterprise, and was therefore protected from the vagracies of the stock market and other deleterious forms of “optimization”. It is therefore an excellent example of what the Industrial states might have become in the absence of outsourcing.

The culture of the new North will have several unique characteristics, among them the cult of the inventor. Tom Swift, the namesake of this publication, is in many ways the archetypical Northern hero; a fictional inventor of the turn of the century. The assorted literature, often referred to as “Edisonade” must become a key component of Northern popular culture. Due to its industrial base, Northern innovation tends to be more physical, and hence better suited to weathering the coming AI-induced white-collar collapse. This is also reflected by the success of its high schoolers in robotics competitions. Hence, the Sport of Tomorrow is likely to be most prevalent in the North. Another contributing element will be the rapidly growing Amish and Laestadian populations. There is no other portion of the Western world with old stock populations growing this rapidly. This is in part due to their inherent resistance to digital involution. In time, this will be a unique driver of industrial development.

The Northerner also has access to a natural frontier, which is becoming increasingly hospitable in the age of climate change. Across the water, there is an area largely untouched by man, filled with the primeval forests of antiquity. Hence Canada becomes the last horizon …

The West is in its post-Classic phase. It possesses more information than any civilization in history, more sophisticated analytical tools, more researchers producing more work on more subjects than ever before. However it is in fundamental respects less capable of serious intellectual debate than the world of one hundred and fifty years ago.

The educated layman of 1885 — whether in London, Edinburgh, Vienna, or Boston — was formed by a common curriculum of classical languages, history, natural science, moral philosophy, and literature. Trained not merely in content but in argument, he would encounter within a single university a genuine plurality of serious positions. A traditional Catholic defending Aquinas, a Darwinian naturalist drawing social implications from evolutionary theory, a classical liberal developing the utilitarian tradition, a Burkean conservative skeptical of abstract reason, a socialist subjecting capitalism to rigorous critique — these scholars disagreed profoundly about human nature, the foundations of morality, and the proper organization of society.

What they shared was not conclusions but standards. A common intellectual formation led to a near universal consensus regarding what counted as evidence, what constituted a valid argument and what obligations a serious thinker owed to opposing positions. A Catholic theologian and a Darwinian biologist could argue productively because they were playing the same game, even while disputing almost everything about its outcome.

That shared epistemic framework is what has been lost.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, certain conclusions — particularly regarding human nature, the biological basis of social outcomes, and the comparative assessment of civilizations — were deemed not merely wrong but a danger to the common welfare of mankind. The unpleasantness of that century yielded a catastrophic overcorrection. Rather than maintaining rigorous standards while rejecting specific misapplications, influential institutions chose to protect certain conclusions by insulating them from rigorous challenge.

Epistemic standards, once compromised in one domain, soon collapse in others. The habit of protecting favored conclusions spreads by institutional logic until the standards that were supposed to govern all inquiry become selectively applied instruments for defending positions decided in advance.

The contemporary university has become an institution where certain questions are forbidden. They are forbidden not because evidence has settled them but because acceptable conclusions have been decided independently of evidence. Professors reaching certain conclusions through rigorous inquiry face consequences that those reaching opposing conclusions through sloppy inquiry do not. The critical apparatus is applied ferociously to approved targets and almost never to the assumptions underlying its own operation.

The following plan is neither conservative nor liberal, neither religious nor secular. It is a restoration of the conditions under which serious debate between genuine positions becomes possible again. It shall be called the 1911 Project.

It might be asked why that year, and not another. 1911 is when the storied Eleventh Edition of the encyclopedia Britannica was published. Many of the contributors hailed from the greatest period of scientific and cultural achievement within the Western world. For this reason, the era shortly before the beginning of the Great War serves as a prime example of a civilization at its zenith.

This Great Restoration shall be constructed upon certain intellectual foundations.

Serious debate requires that its participants share logical standards, common reference points, and the habits of mind that rigorous inquiry demands. Formation precedes debate. The recovery of a genuinely educated class — formed through classical curriculum in the broadest sense, trained in argument rather than merely in approved conclusions — is the prerequisite for everything else.

Not all positions deserve equal standing, and pretending otherwise produces not greater openness but greater confusion. This center must be defined by epistemic standards — by the requirements that positions engage evidence honestly, meet logical standards consistently, and take opposing arguments seriously. Within those standards, the range of legitimate positions is genuinely wide. Positions outside these margins must remain at the margins or beyond, regardless of their political valence.

A framework that suppresses biological explanations of human differences while exempting social constructionist explanations from equivalent scrutiny does not apply this standard. Such a framework uses the apparatus of standards to protect predetermined conclusions. The same evidential and logical demands must be made of every position, be it comfortable or uncomfortable, fashionable or unfashionable. Under this restored framework, the range of positions occupying the serious center would be far wider than contemporary institutions permit, and would demand a more rigorous form of justification than is currently required.

Traditional religious belief, rigorously defended, belongs at the center. The Catholic intellectual tradition, Protestant scholasticism, and serious theological engagement with natural science represent accumulated philosophical achievement that educated people are obliged to engage rather than dismiss. A university that cannot argue seriously with Aquinas is not a serious university.

Evolutionary naturalism and its implications for understanding human nature, social organization, and civilizational development must lie well within the scientific consensus. The Darwinian tradition, the emerging findings of genomics and cognitive science, the serious study of population-level variation must become subjects of legitimate inquiry to be pursued with rigor and reported with honesty, not to be sacrficed on the altar of the Common Good.

Serious political philosophy across its genuine range — classical liberalism, conservatism with genuine intellectual content, rigorously argued socialism — belongs at the center. So does the honest comparative study of civilizations, conducted with the same empirical standards applied to any historical question.

The margins are equally important to define. Positions earn marginal status not through ideological inconvenience but through epistemic failure.

Strong social constructionism — the claim that human nature is so thoroughly malleable that observed differences between groups require no biological explanation — occupies the margins because it cannot honestly account for the convergent evidence of genetics, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology. It is an extreme metaphysical commitment dressed as scientific consensus, and it should be treated accordingly.

Postmodern epistemology — the family of positions claiming that logical and evidential standards are merely expressions of power rather than genuine constraints on inquiry — is self-refuting and belongs beyond the margins entirely. A position that claims truth for the proposition that truth is a power construct cannot be engaged on its own terms. It is not a contribution to serious debate but a dissolution of its conditions.

Contemporary paganism, superstition, and pre-scientific spiritual frameworks presented as serious epistemic alternatives to rigorous inquiry must be exiled to the shadows. This by no means discourages the serious historical and anthropological study of pagan traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and pre-modern spiritual practice. The study of these domains is entirely legitimate — such traditions are genuine subjects of scholarly inquiry. What is not legitimate is the claim that they represent ways of knowing epistemically equivalent or superior to methods developed precisely to overcome the limitations of intuition, tradition, and wishful thinking. A university that treats astrological prediction or shamanistic cosmology as serious competitors to physics and biology has not achieved greater openness — it has abandoned the standards that make any knowledge worth having. The Victorian intellectual — whether Catholic or Darwinist, conservative or socialist — would have recognized this immediately.

No quarter would be given to flat earth cosmology and similar empirical absurdities. Such are crude superstition unmediated by serious theological or philosophical framework. Pure tabula rasa blank-slatism would not be recognized as a serious position. Locke’s actual position was far more nuanced than the modern caricature, and serious Victorian thinkers were well aware of this.

The boundary between center and margin is drawn at epistemic failure; the point where a position can no longer engage evidence honestly, maintain logical consistency, or take opposing arguments seriously. That boundary excludes crude superstition and magical thinking for exactly the same reasons it excludes strong blank-slatism and postmodern self-refutation. This standard must be applied without exception.

Any honest account of the Victorian intellectual achievement must consider its most potent engine — the frontier. The expansion of Western civilization into new territories generated not merely wealth and power but scientific knowledge of the first order. The demands of navigation, tropical medicine, geology, botany, ethnography, and engineering produced by contact with unknown environments drove inquiry in ways it never would have otherwise in purely academic settings. Darwin’s insights emerged from a voyage, and Wallace’s from decades in the jungles of New Guinea. The great Victorian syntheses were born from contact with the genuinely unknown.

The frontier is a driver of scientific inquiry, civilizational energy, and human formation. It requires only environments that demand the highest capacities of human ingenuity and reward their development with knowledge unavailable by any other means. In our time, two such frontiers exist, and both dwarf in scale and scientific potential anything the Victorian age could offer.

The ocean floor is less understood today than the surface of Mars. Covering more than two thirds of the earth’s surface and reaching depths of eleven kilometers, the deep ocean represents an environment of extraordinary scientific richness — novel chemistries, biological systems that challenge fundamental assumptions about the conditions life requires, geological processes that reshape our understanding of the planet’s history and dynamics. The practical implications are equally significant: mineral resources of enormous potential, energy systems, pharmaceutical compounds, and biological insights with applications across medicine, materials science, and engineering. Systematic undersea development — permanent habitation, resource extraction, sustained scientific presence in deep water environments — would provide the frontier that has historically accompanied the expansion of the known world, without displacing a single existing population or violating a single existing sovereignty.

Space is larger still. The solar system contains resources — energetic, mineral, spatial — that render all historical disputes over terrestrial territory almost comically parochial. Mars offers a second cradle for human civilization and a laboratory for understanding planetary systems including our own. The asteroid belt contains metallic and mineral concentrations that, if accessed, would transform the material constraints under which human civilization has always operated. The outer planets and their moons present chemical and physical environments so alien to terrestrial experience that any serious attempt to command their resources will require advances in virtually every field of natural science.

More important than the resources is the demand. The Apollo program, at its peak, was the most concentrated application of human scientific and engineering intelligence in history. It drove advances in materials science, computing, medicine, nutrition, communications, and dozens of adjacent fields — not because anyone planned those advances but because the demands of the frontier created problems that existing knowledge could not solve, forcing the development of knowledge that did not yet exist. This is how frontiers work. They do not merely apply existing science — they compel new science into existence by presenting challenges that existing frameworks cannot meet.

A society organized around the serious pursuit of undersea and space development would be a society with genuine long time horizons — with reasons to invest in knowledge, infrastructure, and institutional capacity that will bear fruit across generations rather than quarters. It would be a society that selects for and rewards exactly the qualities — rigorous inquiry, engineering excellence, physical courage, institutional competence, sustained collective purpose — that the restored intellectual framework described here is designed to cultivate and that serious civilization has always required.

The Victorian synthesis was partly sustained by the narrative of expansion — by the story that civilization was going somewhere, that its best energies had an outlet worthy of them, that the horizon was real and reachable. That narrative, in its terrestrial form, is exhausted. Its replacement is not retreat into the management of decline but expansion into environments that make the Victorian frontier look modest by comparison.

The impeding crises of the coming century — regarding institutional degradation, demographic collapse, and outright civilizational failure require exactly the rigorous and honest inquiry that contemporary institutions are increasingly unable to conduct. They require scholars capable of following arguments to conclusions regardless of comfort, maintaining the distinction between empirical questions and policy questions, and holding genuine uncertainty honestly rather than resolving it prematurely in favor of preferred outcomes.

These capacities are produced by formation and sustained by purpose. A civilization that cannot think seriously about itself cannot navigate the challenges facing it. A civilization without a frontier toward which its best energies can be directed tends to turn those energies inward, with results that the twentieth century illustrated with sufficient clarity.

It can also be reasonably argued that the written word had at that point reached its zenith as a force in Western civilization. Literacy had by that time reached a large section of the populace, yet the production of visual media such as film was still in its infancy. Popular culture as we know it did not exist. Hence the layman of that time strove towards a greater comprehension of the classics, regardless of how paltry his own education may have been.

The thinkers of the late Victorian intellectual world could hardly be described as infallible. Yet there was a world in which intelligent schoolmen could debate seriously — in which rigorous argument was available to all positions, applied to all claims, and the distinction between a well-evidenced conclusion and a wishful one was maintained with genuine care. It was a world animated by the conviction that the horizon was real, that the unknown was worth knowing, and that the effort to reach it was the greatest pursuit of man.

The frontier is waiting.

Where are YOU?

You would not find the Roman to be a stranger. His hopes and cares are not very different from our own. He was even acquainted with a sort of calculating engine; its mathematical principles not dissimilar to those which define our time. The sands of time have covered all but a few surviving examples of this curious mechanism, the best being that extracted from the Antikythera shipwreck near the islands of Greece.

There are many examples of advanced automation from the ancient world, from the aeolipile of Hero,

to the hydraulis, a water organ created by Ctesibus of Alexandria.

These various creations of Hellenistic Greeks were not scientific curiosities, but products commonplace in the homes of the Roman elite. Cicero himself mentions an armillary sphere in the possession of his family, of similar make and mechanism to the Antikythera. Thus the building blocks of the Industrial Age were readily available at the fingertips of the Romans. Had those mechanical arts been developed with more care, one can only begin to imagine what might have been.

Yet due to the Apollonian nature of the Roman social order, such was not to be.

The Emperor Vespasian was certainly a generous patron of the arts and sciences, establishing salaries for teachers of rhetoric, and foundations for the restoration of statues. One day, an engineer came to him with a new mechanism for transporting columns over long distances. While the Emperor rewarded the engineer handsomely for his efforts, he refused to employ the novel device, stating “I must feed my poor commons”.

And commons there were in vast numbers in Rome, the result of endless raids and triumphs and the freedmen descended from them. Perhaps Vespasian feared the wrath of an idle multitude, recently expressed in the bloody and chaotic Year of the Four Emperors.

Roman culture was not at all congenial to elites wishing to play at architecture and mechanics. Law and administration, what we would call today the “tertiary sector” was the only respectable path for citizens of means. Even these were described with the negative term negotium ; those activites undertaken when otium , the state of aristocratic leisure was momentarily interrupted.

Such were the customs of the Apollonian Age.

We of the Faustian epoch smile on these ancient ways with disdain and ridicule. It is essential for the elite to enter the mechanical arts, if science is to exist in any form at all. Yet changes in our own society have made us more Roman than most of us would like to admit.

The greatest Western advances in technology can be credited for the most part to the northwestern portions of Europe, as well as the Northern states of the American nation. These regions while sharing an admiration for the classical arts and letters, differed from Apollonian society in one critical aspect: the absence of slavery and the relative scarcity of a servile underclass. It was this difference which provided fertile ground for the advancement of technology, not the advent of an inevitable tide of modernity. One need look only to the counterexample of the American South; an almost flawless facsimile of the social order prevalent in Graeco-Roman republics. Even that vaunted aristocratic culture of those American Cavaliers would have dissipated far sooner if not for the cotton gin; the work of the Yankee inventor Eli Whitney.

Yet in the past fifty years, the mechanical, or secondary economy has been largely abandoned by the citizenry for reasons almost identical to those given by the patricians of the later phases of Ancient Rome. Agriculture and manufacturing are scorned, and left largely to unseen masses toiling out of sight or overseas, creating a social order that provides little reward for technological development. In this way have the Northern virtues of invention and thrift been slowly but surely replaced with the Apollonian pursuit of otium.

Yet as the history of Rome allows us to determine the nature of our societal decline, the study of late antiquity provides the solution. The declining population of the waning years of the Roman Empire extended even to the slaves. Hence, water power was used to an unprecedented degree.

The spread of monotheism lead to the concept of a clockwork world, whose Creator had no use of wind gods or water nymphs to govern these properties. Therefore, the medieval mind became far more amenable to the pursuit of invention than the Roman ever was. The noonday sun of this Lacus Romanorum was replaced with one hundred petty Teutonic baronies.

These domains were defined by small populations and a state of ever-present conflict, providing a field for technological development hitherto unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

Hence, technological development is likely to remain in a state of sluggish equilibrium until the twin idols of globalization and the tertiary economy are worshiped no more. Unfortunately, the rapid development of the “multipolar world” is likely to hasten this event faster than we are able to prepare for it. The resulting fragmentation of the world economy will lead to a vigourous arena for technological development once again. It is then that the New Cantons may finally begin to rise …

Militarism in Literature and Life

Historically, Western culture has been far more warlike than is usually acknowledged, and modern Western societies may benefit from a return to some of that erstwhile militarism. A look at the literature of bygone ages is especially instructive in this regard.

The Militarism of Western Literature

In his commonplace book A Certain World, W. H. Auden writes: “Western literature began as the literature of a warrior aristocracy, and until 1914 it took the warrior ethic for granted; it assumed that war was glorious, and the words hero and warrior were almost synonymous.” He then contrasts the bellicose works of Homer with those of “the Chinese poets,” who, he avers, regarded warriors with “pity, not admiration.”

That the Western literary tradition is filled with fighting can hardly be denied. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were the core texts of Greek literature, and Virgil’s Aeneid, based on the Iliad, became Rome’s national epic. As author Donald Robertson describes, even Socrates was renowned as a war hero, a fact mentioned by Plato, Aristophanes, and Diogenes Laertius. Indeed, Socrates once likened his daring pursuit of wisdom to his service during the Peloponnesian War, stating that each was inspired by a similar sense of duty.

After the classical period came the Middle Ages, whose literature was dominated by knightly romances. As Maurice Keen details in Chivalry, these texts were not mere entertainment, but highly socially influential during the Middle Ages. In particular, they did much to mold the concept of chivalry, the behaviour expected of a knight. Mediaeval knights would even dress up as their legendary colleagues in a sort of proto-cosplay. Thus, Keen tells of Ulrich von Liechtenstein, a knight from Bavaria. Ulrich reportedly embarked on a “jousting tour” in 1240, “accoutred as King Arthur, together with six companions, also in Arthurian disguise; those who broke lances with them successfully were admitted to their company of ‘the Round Table’.”

Just like the warlike ideals of antiquity, those of the Middle Ages became foundational to Western culture. To this day, many a European country can point to a specific text which is considered the cornerstone of its literature. Many of these texts are mediaeval epics centred on warriors and their exploits. Examples include France’s Song of Roland, Germany’s Song of the Nibelungs, and England’s Beowulf.

The Cambridge Companion to War Writing is a superb series of essays revealing the centrality of armed conflict to much of Western literature. In the second chapter, Kate McLoughlin calls the Iliad “perhaps the greatest of all representations of war.” In the third chapter, Sarah Cole explains that, for Homer, “[o]nly war could test and develop what men valued above all else – honor, bravery, masculinity, leadership, and what we might describe as sheer power.” In the seventh chapter, L. V. Pitcher underscores “[t]he prevalence of war as a theme in classical literature.” Pitcher refers to the Iliad’s paramount position, but also to Pericles’s Funeral Oration, arguably “the most famous speech to come down from classical Greece,” an address dedicated to the Athenians killed in the Peloponnesian War. So much for Graeco-Roman antiquity. The sixth chapter, by David Jasper, emphasises the prominence of combat in the Christian scriptures: “Almost from its beginning the Bible deals in conflict and is soaked in blood.” “War,” notes Corinne Saunders’s eighth chapter, “a powerful and enduring cultural force in the medieval West from the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century, played a shaping role in the imaginative literature of the period.” And in her introduction, McLoughlin quotes Ernest Hemingway’s remark that war is the “best subject” for writing because it “groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.”

The First World War and the Pacification of Western Literature

If the Western literary canon exhibits a greater militarism than most other traditions, that is not the whole story. In A Certain World, Auden also observes that “Western culture” has experienced a profound “change in attitude towards war and the military profession brought about by World War I.” It was this event in particular, and especially the use of the draft and of modern weaponry, which shattered the traditional image of warfare as glorious and heroic.

It should be added that, on some people, the experience of the Great War had the opposite effect. Ukrainian nationalist writer Dmytro Dontsov understood World War I first and foremost as a rebuke to the nineteenth-century pipe-dream of harmonious coexistence among nations, as an admonishment that any people desiring to be free must be willing to take up arms. Nor was he cynical as to the nature of modern warfare. Instead, Dontsov projected an idealised vision of the nationalist soldier, likening him to the knights of yore.

On the whole, however, the First World War had a profoundly dispiriting influence on the West and drove its literature to depict warfare much more negatively. More broadly, a sense of absurdity and futility took hold, embodied by Dadaism and T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” (“The Waste Land” inspired a parody by H. P. Lovecraft entitled “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance.”)

Thinking back to my high school education, I nonetheless get the impression that, when we pupils were taught about the literature of World War I, the curriculum was biased in favour of the more dismal and disconsolate depictions of the war. We were acquainted with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” but not Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier,” nor any other of his poems. Likewise, we read the entirety of Erich Maria Remarque’s semi-autobiographical novel All Quiet on the Western Front, but no one breathed a word about Ernst Jünger’s memoir Storms of Steel.

Jünger can hardly be accused of sugar-coating the horrors he lived through in the trenches and on the battlefields. Still, his account contains a good deal more heroism than Remarque’s. Despite the mechanised, mass nature of the combat he witnessed, Jünger also depicts great acts of Homeric or chivalric quality. Of a certain Lieutenant Brecht, he writes: “He was one of the few who, owing to their indefatigable daredevilry, were encircled by a romantic nimbus even in this most prosaic of all wars.”* And while Remarque portrays his servicemen as seeing no sense in their fight, Jünger reminisces:

For four years, the German field soldier hurried from battlefield to battlefield in a worn-out coat, fed worse than a Chinese coolie, to make his far more numerous, well-equipped and well-fed opponents feel his iron fist again and again. There is no greater testament to the power of the idea that drove us.

None of this is to deny that the First World War was among the greatest tragedies ever to befall mankind. It was probably the main reason why Western literature since the early twentieth century has paid less attention to warfare than that of earlier periods. And yet, even in high school I noticed that our exposure to the literature surrounding that pivotal war was skewed towards the Owens and Remarques. Nor do I think my experience was exceptional. In general, it seems that the militarism of Western tradition tends to be downplayed nowadays.

Literature as a Tool for Improving Military Strength

Given all of the above, we may say that, throughout the centuries, one of literature’s core functions has been to increase a people’s capacity for warfare. Incidentally, a similar observation has been made about religion. Witness Richard Dawkins’s pithy comment in The Selfish Gene: “What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology.”

Literature, and art more broadly, can equip people for warfighting in various ways. For instance, it can raise spirits through optimism and comedy. Think of Will Eisner’s World War II comic strip, Joe Dope. Alternatively, it can do what Jünger does and talk about combat in a disciplined, imperturbable manner, in which no doubt ever arises as to the righteousness of the struggle. Profound suffering is mentioned, but made to feel like just another in a long sequence of events. By these means, Jünger restores a sense of normality, survivability, and honour to the situation. Through its detachment, his style resembles Caesar’s in his Gallic War. Then there is Brooke, whose vision is somehow both grander and more modest, as seen in the opening lines of “The Soldier”:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

Regardless of the method used, the common function of militaristic art is to instill drive and resilience, to improve one’s resistance to suffering. This grants it the capacity to benefit a vast range of people, in the civilian world as well as the military, and especially in our present age of mental frailty.

Is Military Art Inferior?

There is a common notion that something about militarism is inherently detrimental to artistic quality. “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music,” goes a popular aphorism attributed to Georges Clemenceau. Yet one may ask whether military music is truly so inferior. The great Ayn Rand, no militarist herself, was nevertheless very fond of it. Recalling a childhood trip to Finland, she even credited a military band with having ignited her love of music as such: “We spent practically every day either on the beach or in the park. [I]t was my introduction to music. They had this military band playing in the park, all day long almost. And that’s when I discovered all my early favorites, from the age of six or earlier.” This event is echoed in The Romantic Manifesto, where she says that reading Mickey Spillane, an author she enjoys, “gives [her] the feeling of hearing a military band in a public park.” At age seven, Rand encountered opinions similar to Clemenceau’s: “All the older people thought that I had a very uncultured taste, because what I liked was . . . military marches.” Knowing Rand’s worldview and opinions on art, it was probably the upbeat, can-do spirit of the marches which most appealed to someone so devoid of militarism in other respects.

Militaristic values can lead to better, rather than worse, art. This may be inferred from Danish anthropologist Agner Fog’s “Regality Theory.” Fog places societies on a spectrum from “regal” to “kungic.” The former are marked by strict discipline, warlike attitudes, high fertility, and a tendency towards authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the latter exhibit lax social norms, egalitarian values, and low fertility. Of course, these are merely general tendencies. Interestingly for our purposes, Fog argues that the extent to which a culture is regal or kungic also tends to shape its art in certain ways. In Warlike and Peaceful Societies, he summarises:

Regal cultures have a marked preference for a highly embellished, refined, and perfectionist style, while the members of kungic cultures appreciate the more individualistic, imaginative, and less rule-bound artistic expressions. . . . This tendency to reflect the level of regality appears to be the same in many different kinds of art, including music, dance, literary fiction, drama, painting, body adornment, and architecture.

I hope I may presuppose the reader’s agreement that “highly embellished, refined, and perfectionist” art is preferable to the “less rule-bound” kind. Some of the sins of modern, anarchic art have been discussed by Max Nordau and Stephen Hicks.

Some aspects of traditional literature may inherently tend to predispose people to typically militaristic and “regal” modes of thinking. Literary critic Adam Kirsch speculates that “poet-critics” are often politically conservative because “anyone who is intimately involved with an art like poetry must believe in inherent hierarchies of value and ability: some poets are better than others, some poems are better than others.” Kirsch adds that “poets . . . have a strong shaping urge, a desire to establish pattern, balance, unity, . . . desires . . . satisfied in aristocracy (like Yeats or Tate) or fascism (Pound).” Kirsch is probably on to something. To be sure, modern poetry often dispenses with pattern, balance, and unity. But then, hardly anyone reads modern poetry.

Are Military Ideals Inherently Unsuitable for Governing Civilian Life?

When one praises militarism in literature, some wariness is to be expected. Many have suggested that military values should not be applied outside of the armed forces, as they are simply inappropriate to civilian life. For instance, free-market firebrand Milton Friedman was clear in his praise for Chile’s economic policies under the Pinochet régime, but also expressed surprise that such liberal measures had been adopted by, of all things, a military dictatorship. In one interview, Friedman stated:

The military is distinguished from the ordinary economy by the fact that it’s a top-down organization. . . . So the basic organizational principles in the military are almost the opposite of the basic organizational principles of a free market and a free society. And the really remarkable thing about Chile is that the military adopted the free-market arrangements instead of the military arrangements.

Yet Friedman’s distrust of the warrior class was probably undue. Far from being uniform in their prescriptions for society, military regimes have held a wide array of political positions. In Les Révolutions d’Amérique latine, historian Pierre Vayssière observes that military coups in Latin America have shown a roughly even split between left-wing and right-wing ideology. Moreover, a 2006 article by Asia scholar Alexander Vorontsov emphasises that “states ruled by the military have experienced both prosperity and hardship.” As an example of the former, the author argues that South Korea’s economy flourished thanks to the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, and that this prosperity facilitated “the ensuing process of democratization.” Chile’s example was probably less exceptional than Friedman assumed.

Military rule is sometimes referred to as “stratocracy.” The Wikipedia entry for that term lists a few examples of stratocratic rule: Ancient Sparta, ancient Rome, the mediaeval Korean state of Goryeo, the Cossack Hetmanate, the Military Frontier of the Habsburg Empire, Myanmar, and Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, two small territories on Cyprus with a population of about 20 000 people.

Upon analysis, this lineup paints stratocracy in a surprisingly positive light. Sparta was certainly a totalitarian nightmare, but other examples listed seem far more benign, with greater freedoms and/or better living conditions than comparable societies.

The Cossack Hetmanate, a precursor to modern Ukraine, exhibited major elements of parliamentary rule. As summarised by Grokipedia, the Hetmanate’s parliament, the General Military Council, held considerable power over public affairs. For instance, it could elect the head of state, or Hetman. Over time, the Council’s prerogatives were eroded by increased Russian control and the rise of a de facto oligarchy. Still, a revitalisation of the parliamentary, anti-autocratic tradition was attempted in 1710 by Pylyp Orlyk. Orlyk, a Cossack statesman in exile, penned a constitution which has since come to be regarded as an early example of the separation of powers. Sadly, the document remained largely theoretical, though one author notes that “several military victories in 1711-1713 enabled the application of the text to some parts of . . . Ukraine.”

Of the Habsburg Military Frontier, Wikipedia observes: “Unlike the rest of the Catholic dominated territory of the empire, the frontier area had relatively freer religious laws in order to attract settlements into the area.”

Akrotiri and Dhekelia, home to British military bases, likewise appear to be fine places to live. One travel writer, having visited the areas, concludes: “There ain’t an awful lot to see, but that’s the whole point.” Another describes Akrotiri as “very cozy, with many small English pubs and a beautiful village center.”

Overall, stratocracy seems to have a very mixed record rather than the unambiguously negative one which many would expect. One may also recall the leadership of Frederick the Great, renowned for both his militarism and his enlightened governance. According to historian Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Market, the Prussian monarch’s “priorities as a ruler were the expansion of his kingdom and the enhancement of state power through rationalizing the bureaucratic and military apparatus and promoting economic growth to fund them.” In other words, a key motive behind Frederick’s enlightened, rationalistic mode of ruling was his striving for military might.

Seeking to maximise hard power may positively affect the administration of various spheres of public life, provided that it be pursued rationally. Military strength can be considered a sort of acid test of national flourishing, a measure of collective well-being that reflects many diverse factors: economic strength, scientific innovativeness, popular contentment, and on and on. Therefore, its proper pursuit should result in a balanced, holistic approach to policymaking rather than one which obsessively focuses on some one element.

Militaristic Culture in the Present-Day West

Denizens of the Western world often balk at anything that smacks of violence, and hope that any opponent can be diplomatically persuaded. Yet the capacity for violence is persuasive, whereas weakness inspires distaste. In his article “The Religion of the Strong Horse,” Daniel Greenfield revisits Osama bin Laden’s dictum that people naturally prefer a “strong horse” to a weak one. “Conversions to Islam,” he writes, “rose sharply after major Islamic terrorist attacks from 9/11 to Oct 7.” And the West’s conciliatory posturing, he adds, has done nothing to counter the effect. Whether one likes it or not, strength is attractive, and an aesthetic of toughness, as well as the substantive actions that come with it, are essential to any society that wishes to be taken seriously.

Even in the recent past, military service was integrated into the fabric of Western countries more deeply than it is now, and enjoyed greater reverence. To quote from Sir Peregrine Worsthorne’s treatise In Defence of Aristocracy, the US Marine Corps was, prior to World War II, a “private stamping ground for Wasp patricians.” In a limited sense, then, the WASP patricians of the time could be likened to the “warrior aristocracy” mentioned by Auden. But that venerable caste has lost much of its power since the mid-twentieth century, which has probably been for the worse.

Faced with new threats, the Free World should strive to become more warlike again, less for combat than for deterrence. This does not necessarily mean increasing the size of military forces; it can also mean combatting problems like obesity or low birthrates, which obviously reduce a nation’s fighting power. Therefore, orienting contemporary literature towards the militaristic styles and ideals of former epochs would not only raise the quality of our cultural output, but might even help to safeguard our civilisation.

*Quotations from Storms of Steel are translated by me.

The first decade beginning in the year 2000 was not meaningfully distinct from the Nineties of the previous millennium, terrorists and dot-com-collapse notwithstanding. Music was on repeat from former decades. Movies were sequels. Even the President was a sequel.

There was an economic boom in the Center Tier states, as every third row of our agricultural products were shipped overseas, largely to massive hog farms in China. In Nebraska, King Corn reigned supreme, yielding an efflorescence of prosperity unparalleled in history. It was by all means a great time to grow up in. The corn money poured into the suburbs of Omaha, new ones apparently mushrooming out of thin air by the year. Even the zoo built climate controlled jungles and deserts.

This was the time when man believed in nothing. For the Cold War was over, and the End of History had happened. At least according to elementary school textbooks, all unpleasantness had ceased and the world now consisted of various groups of smiling children in native costume. Since there was nothing to fear, very little was expected of the next generation. As a result childhood standards were extremely low.

Since the only dangers to the great American Empire came from fundamentalist terrorists, a sort of ethical humanistic atheism was upheld as the only rational position for the thinking man. Due to the dictates of an early form of political correctitude, this danger from “fundamentalism” could only be expressed in a generic and universalized way. No distinction could be made between the Christian and Islamic varieties. Therefore, as intellectual elites left Christianity, the tenor of religion slowly converged on the lowest common denominator. Hence, I eagerly devoured every new book by such thinkers as Neil de Grasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins. Even physics seemed to point to a grand panopoly of multiverses; in which every possible event was to have occurred. To a Nebraskan homeschooler, their view of the world seemed smart and sophisticated, when the only available alternative was the dinosaur riding creationism in the textbooks of my friends.

Yet the Evangelicals of the time were as modern as could be, their churches would be these vast amorphous stripmall blocks and their music insipid rock and roll with Christianized lyrics. For all their Biblical exactitude they clearly had no sense of a past and less still of a future. No one could yet comprehend the consequences of the incipient moral vacuum. At least in the Cornlands, the traditional values of America seemed an immobile pedestal of civic nationalism with neither beginning nor end. There was nary a rainbow banner to be seen.

The Internet was then a fun and interesting place where once could discover things such as an interactive dinosaur timeline or the New Horizons launch. The pinnacle of communication was the Blackberry, and Netflix was discs that arrived in the mail. There were also offline interactive encyclopedias, which were pleasant to explore. Most content was made by actual humans, and a decent percentage thereof were American. Some even posted under their real names.

Even at the age of five I developed a creeping sensation that it was all too good to be true.

Unbeknownst to most of us, industry was slowly but steadily dismantled and shipped to the Oriental nations. The last American rare earth mine closed in 2002, and the last iMac rolled off the production line in 2005. Yet there was supposedly nothing to fear. Politicans, principles and teachers proclaimed that a majority of Americans would soon have four-year degrees, in order to work in the “Jobs of the Future”. They even said it with straight faces.

The Tens were the decade when the progressive onslaught began in full force. To consider this decade, it is best to begin with the Obama election in 2008, when even the solitary electoral district of Omaha turned blue. He won in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Even people in my suburban hinterland voted for him. For no reason at all, people seemed to feel strangely … good.

Perhaps it was really the Audacity of Hope floating through the summer air. However, the collective silly grin gracing the countenances of the populace was more likely the result of watching cats riding ceiling fans, displayed on the screens of those funny little glass rectangles arriving from the shores of Shenzhen in a slowly but steadily increasing torrent.

The Nebraskan is a natural conformist with no inherent immunity to peculiar ideas. It is therefore utterly unsurprising that he would be powerless to resist the tidal wave of progressive digital involution which was the Tens. I will always think of the Tens as the decade most characterized by pure, unadulterated evil.

I was not acutely aware of the social upheaval which defined the early Tens, but the cultural changes resulting from the advent of smartphones were all too clear. Everyone I knew slowly but surely dropped off the radar, and the neighborhood became markedly quieter. It was obvious why.

Around this time the I Pad began to make its appearance, largely replacing the ubiquitous laptops of the previous decade. Unlike real computers, children could operate these tablets with no skills whatsoever. The tablet and smartphone would become the principle vectors of digital involution. And according to the millennial hive mind, there really were no downsides to be good. I pads would make your children smarter, social media would yield worldwide democracy and Uber would replace driving.

Some attribute the antisocial characteristics of my generation to the economic downturn of 2008. Still others blame vaccines. Some progressive sorts might even blame their sedentary habits to an indoor lifestyle driven by the consequences of climate change. Yet none of these hypotheses can explain why these societal alterations occurred in the early Tens and not before. Deep down, we Zoomers all know it was the I Pads.

Yet people did not just choose to use smartphones, they also wanted to live inside of them. It is the only logical explanation for the architectural changes which were suddenly changing the face of America’s cities for the worse. Seemingly out of nowhere, we were suddenly plagued with an infestation of alien pod structures that all looked something like this:

It was around 2015 when the progressive tide really hit the middle states, rainbow banner and all. One particularly comical aspect of the social engineering was Michelle Obama’s school lunch initiative, notorious for delivering truckloads of expired vegetable matter to recalcitrant pupils. I am certain that this policy lead to the inception of millions of lifelong Republicans.

While the election of 2016 was certainly the best spectator event of the century, it did not seem to result in any noticeable cultural change. If anything the prevailing forces of the decade settled into the political stalemate which still persists today.

As so many of us were conditioned to, I did attend college. While there were already doubts swirling around the value of the liberal arts degree, the technical fields were still considered to be the golden road to success. “Learn to Code” was the order of the day. As software development already seemed more than a little fake, I majored in electrical engineering. While there, I learned a fair number of valuable facts regarding mathematics, science and engineering. Perhaps more importantly, I discovered how business actually worked.

While David Graeber has developed an intricate taxonomy to classify what are now known as the BS Jobs, there are really only two kinds. The first type I call Fractional Employment, in which a necessary yet simple task is divided among workers for tax purposes, and the second is the true Phony Sinecure; the job which exists only to benefit the local employment statistics. During this period, I was employed in both sorts of position.

The first one was certainly not the worst in the world. Controlling a nationwide network of sensors and radios had an appeal all its own. A warning sign was apparent on my first day of work. Eager to apply my newly acquired abilities in calculus problem solving, I asked my manager whether Calculus I, II or III would be most applicable to the position.

He chuckled in response.

Within weeks it was apparent that the vast majority of the various routine software updates and network changes were of a mind-numbing simplicity; a reasonably bright twelve year old could have accomplished them with ease. Yet grown men, smart and ambitious enough to obtain engineering degrees sat there clicking the buttons and eating the donuts for the entirety of their working lives. What’s more, they seemed to enjoy it. Something did not add up. Some of the other jobs were even more peculiar, consisting primarily of endless meetings in which the best color of interface buttons was debated interminably. As I later discovered, many of Nebraska’s white-collar positions were created to convince tax assessors and potential investors that the Cornlands contrary to popular impressions did in fact possess the Jobs of the Future and a vibrant tertiary economy capable of supporting indoor dog parks, Uber Eats, and ten dollar avocado toast smoothie delivery. Unbeknowst to the donut eaters, a tax bill passsed in 2017 would compel the “Innovation” Tax Credit to expire in 2022, bringing America’s tertiary economy along with it.

Such were the twilight days of Cubeland. It was a worthwhile experience, if only for the historical value. I cannot really condemn those denizens of the isle of the Donut Eaters. Their lifestyle is indeed rational given the available incentives If you are offered such a position, by all means take and enjoy it, but be sure to save for the inevitable change in corporate tax policy or executive’s whim. Hold no false dreams or illusions regarding your true purpose in the grand scheme of things. Also, prepare for the more rigorous careers which will eventually prevail in the coming decades.

The secular humanism of the age was dying along with it. I was convinced of its inadequacy in an argument between three very intelligent homeschooled brothers and the Atheists Club of my university. They were thirteen, fifteen and sixteen respectively, and were even for homeschoolers remarkably well read.

The Great Debate occurred one winter’s day on the second floor of the Mathematics Building. The leader of the Atheists Club was explaining the tenets of his philosophy. Good was a concept definable by man; whatever provides one with the greatest happiness. The oldest homeschooler countered with the following scenario:

Imagine aliens come to the planet Earth, and promise the world eternal happiness. The presidents, the kings and all the leaders of the world eagerly accept, and the aliens proceed with their plan. It is accomplished by rewiring all human brains to have permanently activated pleasure centers. According to the tenents of your secular humanism, the best possible world is now at hand.

The Atheists Club students immediately attempted to articulate a condemnation of this repulsive dystopia from their principles of ethical humanism. Slowly but surely, their arguments came apart. From that debate, I determined that right and wrong must have an ultimate Author, leading to my subsequent conversion to the Catholic faith. Several weeks later, I found out that this very same club was promoting a film defending Satanists. Somewhere, the evangelicals of the Bush years elated in their vindication.

2020 was perhaps the strangest year yet. The pandemic year was by most metrics quite unpleasant, yet the general cessation of public life yielded a glimpse of the world to come. While certainly feasible for at least a decade prior, this was the year when remote work first became known as a possible way of life for the general American public. Remote schooling lead parents to see the content promulgated in public schools, unveiling a decade of educational degeneracy hitherto hidden from the public eye. Hence, it can be said that the monoculture died that year. While in the coming years, many would pretend that nothing that happened, everyone knew that the old world was over, even if they could never bring themselves to publicly admit it.

.

The Twenties are a decade for the founders. This is by all means a more vital and culturally potent era than the dawn of the century. The various delusions of the postwar order are rapidly dribbling away. Even the factories are beginning to return. Christianity is no longer perceived to be the opiate of the masses, and has revived in new forms; most prominently in the more rigorous denominations such as Calvinism and Catholicism.

Yet there will be no return to the easy prosperity of the opening years of the New Millennium. We are now entering those hard times which forge strong men. The dangers of digital involution are now widely known, and increasingly large sections of the population are altering their way of life to avoid them. To this end, many are attempting to build parallel societies. Of their number, many will fail. Those who succeed will count themselves among the august figures of history. Who knows, some may even become the progenitors of the next civilization …

Will you?

This article is part of the mathematics sequence of the Tom Swift Academy.

Just as the concept of the derivative can be extended into the third dimension, so can that of the integral. This is accomplished by using multiple integrals over a given area, taken with respect to x and y.

The first uses of multiple integrals were found in the eighteenth century, when calculus was shifting from a field of theoretical speculation to one of precise practice. While the polymath Leonard Euler first advanced the concept of the double integral in De formulis integralibus duplicatis, much of the theory behind the integral would only be developed in the early nineteenth century by Cauchy.

In those days, mathematics was already a tool for the great armies of Europe, and the mathematician was already closely allied with the engineer. Cauchy was one of this new breed of men; he administered many of the infrastructure projects for the armies of Napoleon.

In later years he formalized the foundations of multiple integration. This would in turn set the stage for some early advances in electromagnetism. But that is another story entirely …

Read more

This article is part of the physics sequence of the Tom Swift Academy.

Mechanics is the study of force and motion, assuming its current form in the age of Galileo. Perhaps it above all domains of physics exemplifies the Faustian ethos of our era, being closely tied to the Cartesian notion of functions, and the trajectories of celestial bodies in free space. Indeed, the study of mechanics was a fundamental impetus for the development of calculus, as can be shown in the following mathematical formulae.

Read more

Those regions reached first by Irish missionaries became home to independent monasteries, which due to the scarcity of labor emphasized technical advancement , and the written word. The Benedictine monasteries of the North were for the most part constructed according to the St. Gall plan, originally devised by an Irish missionary.

These regions were far less prone to centralization, and indeed in the High Middle Ages developed into free cantons. There was little impetus towards technological development during the Roman Empire due to a bottomless supply of slave labor. However, during the Dark Ages, the profound labor scarcity and the barren lands or seemingly worthless swamps assigned to early monasteries compelled the development of early forms of automation. It was these monks who pioneered the use of wind and water power, and first purified high-grade alcohol. The production of Bibles, and the cultivation of literature more broadly, was a key mission of the Northern Catholics. In the monasteries of Ireland could be found works of Greek philosophers lost to Rome for centuries. In many regions, particularly within Ireland, these monasteries became the nuclei of cloisters, in which laymen and their families also would dwell. There were even legends of isolated Irish monks who had been blown off course to Hvítramannaland, a large and mysterious island in the West.

In the Mediterranean regions, Catholic society developed quite differently, along a path of hierarchy and centralization. These regions overproduce in art and architectural megaprojects and underperform in literature and propositional theology. As the Middle Ages progressed, nations like France and Spain became highly organized and militaristic, although Italy itself became somewhat of an exception to this rule. The empires of the Age of Discovery gave these new centralized states wealth and power, which the free cantons of prior ages could not hope to match. Hence the memory of the old Irish missionaries faded into obscurity. Due to the comparative wealth of these regions, cathedrals were erected thanks to the generosity of royal and aristocratic patrons supporting artists and craftsmen on a massive scale. Hence Catholic art and architecture was to develop to its highest level in the Mediterranean regions. Yet here the Church never had to defend or justify its existence, while the Protestant Reformation roiled more northerly lands. Therfore, no Thomas More or Erasmus arose on the Mediterranean. Perhaps the most noteworthy intellectual from this region is St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose order was one of the centralized and effective Catholic organizations for centuries.

The Church in Latin America was established by the Spaniards, and hence exhibits the characteristics of the Mediterranean region. Here the Church is very centralized and hierarchical. Hence, church architecture in this region is arguably superior to North America, but education and independent institutions remain weak. The Jesuits were quite powerful here, at one point operating a de facto independent state the highest levels of eighteenth-century culture in what is now Paraguay. It bears noting that due to this centralized structure, Christianization in many of the more remote regions only progressed to a superficial level.

The Catholic Church in the United States is noted for establish a comprehensive system of education, as well as building a very robust parallel society in the century before Vatican II. It bears noting that most of these universities and institutions were established by Irishmen. They had been accustomed to operating Catholic education in a clandestine way, in places where it had been entirely illegal. Hence it is unsurprising that they were able to create one of the most robust alternatives to public education in America today. There was often a period of conflict and readjustment when the United States assumed control of former Mexican territories in the Southwest. This is documented quite well in Death Comes to the Archbishop, by Willa Cather.

In an age of increasing instability, centralized organizations will be at a profound disadvantage. Even Catholic institutions are not wholly immune from the sclerotic monoculture which has infected far too much of America. In order to defend against these tendencies, it would be certainly be worthwhile for Catholics to study the independent and decentralized structure the Irish church assumed during the Dark Ages. The model of the cloisters will be perhaps quite useful for the coming age. For these reasons the medieval Irish model of Catholic self-reliance is likely to become increasingly relevant. The initial phases of this are already in progress. Homeschoolers represent one of the most vital currents within the Church. Meanwhile, organized institutions such as the Jesuits struggle in vain against the deadly progressive tide. Perhaps our eventual goal should be to develop a social order not unlike the free cantons of the Middle Ages. We Americans live in Hvítramannaland, after all …

There are many reasons one could learn Latin. It is often learned by Catholics for religious reasons, by scientists to understand the etymology of technical terms, and by the thinking man to understand the classics. The truth is that it is not something one can do without. For the vast majority of the first millennium and a half of Western classics were written in Latin, and cannot be fully appreciated without comprehension of this language.

There is much to read in Latin. While many Roman works were written therein, such as the engineering treatises of Vitruvius, other societies used Latin as well. From the works of Thomas Aquinas to Adam of Bremen’s account of Leif Erikson’s journey to Vinland, the great bulk of Western culture was once written in that language. Thus those who learn Latin broaden their perspectives more than the students of any other language. All of these works are in the public domain, and available freely on the internet. Project Gutenberg is a good place to start. There is also levity in Latin. In the High Middle Ages, the entirety of student life was conducted in the language, including off-color anecdotes and drinking songs, as the Carmina Burana attest. Throughout the ages, college humor springs eternal.

Alphabets define the boundaries of civilization. Where the Roman alphabet is seen, so is the Latin language and the Catholic religion. In such realms, knowledge of the Latin classics was at one point considered a prerequisite for entry into cultured life. This provided an intellectual unity throughout the West unparalleled in later centuries.

For the neophyte, I strongly recommend Henle’s Latin Reader, traditionally read by schoolboys at around the age of fourteen. As such you learn many interesting vocabulary words like scutum and gladius. It is not tedious like Wheelock’s but organizes its grammar lessons around short action-oriented excerpts from Caesar’s Travels. Upon completion of this volume, I strongly recommend that you read that and De Bello Gallico. The prose is terse, bracing and highly informative. Who else writes sentences like vene, vidi, vici?

Catholics will find this level of Latin sufficient to read St. Jerome’s Vulgate, the first Latin translation of the Bible as well. It bears noting that most of this version of the New Testament, while a translation from the original Greek and Aramaic, was written at a level understandable to the average resident of the Roman Empire. The Apostle certainly knew what they were doing.

Works like the Aeneid represent the highest flowering of the Latin language. They use irregular grammatical structures and a level of verbal expression far beyond what readers will encounter even in English, and are some of the most beautiful works in Western civilization. They are certainly well worth the effort.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of the Latin language is the fraternity it provides between the ages. He who masters Latin becomes a member of a brotherhood with members hailing from countless centuries. Those who enter count neither Caesar, nor Augustine, or even Newton as strangers. Indeed, newly minted Westerners from across the ages would adopt the culture of the Empire with a fervor, even to the extent of taking Roman names, as Swedes and Germans did in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, and American freedmen would in the nineteenth century. For it is those intrepid few who master Latin who can truly consider themselves heirs to the West. It is not hard to become one of their number. Will you?

It often seems that the great institutions of the West are being hollowed out by an unseen force. Frequently, institutions, publications and organizations will promote the same twisted message, seemingly arising from nowhere. This is the result of Universalism. Universalism is not a religion in and of itself, but rather a tendency which modifies a preexisting one. When Universalists profess a predilection for tolerance, it soon becomes quite clear that they only tolerate other Universalists.

Certain beliefs are often associated with Universalism, among them the absence of absolute truth, the validity of all religions, and the infinite malleability of man. Even their Heaven has no standards for entry. Its roots reach back to the early days of Christianity. Many heretical Christians of the Late Imperial era espoused such principles, such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. However, the early Church recognized the dangers of Universalism, and condemned the heresy strongly in the Second Council of Constantinople. Through countless historical eras, it can be observed that any society adopting Universalist precepts will invariably implode. Unfortunately, there is no better example than our own.

The world today runs on the values and ideas of the American North. Those once included thrift, curiosity and a strong sense of civic virtue. During the height of American Puritan culture, the Northerner grew rapidly in numbers, wealth and scholarship, unparalleled by any other society. However, the seeds of his destruction were sown when he adopted Universalism in the middle of the nineteenth century.

One of the best examples of this change was the alteration of the Harvard curriculum under President Charles W. Eliot. He abolished the mandatory study of Greek and Latin, thereby depriving his students of their classical heritage. And so from then on would American education be an ever-shifting morass of academic fads. It bears noting that during this period, New Englanders would be one of the first populations in the world to undergo the demographic transition.

Many precepts of Universalism found their way into founding documents of the United Nations. One early document asserts as scientific fact the idea that all differences between nations and societies cannot be biological in nature. Although this was disputed by many prominent anthropologists of the time, it was defended on the basis that its opponents must be bad people. Another example of this Universalism is the assignment of the heavenly bodies, and indeed the vast unexplored bulk of the universe as the “common heritage of mankind” thereby retarding the progress of space exploration, by rendering any riches obtained from them the property of the commons.

The changes occurring within the Catholic Church in the 1960s are a prime example of Universalist infiltration. Prior to this era, the Catholic percentage of the United States increased by the year. Indeed, much of the midcentury population growth of America can be credited to them. It is not well known, but by that point, many Protestant groups had already adopted Universalist principles, and had already undergone the attendant decline in fertility rates. During that time, the Church ceased to view itself as the bearer of absolute truth, and instead professed to be only one of many valid religions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of Latin was abolished as well. Strong Universalist messages can be found in music adopted by the Church during this period. Unsurprisingly, almost immediate upon the adoption of these changes, the Catholic Church began to lose members, eventually spiraling into decades of decline. For no one will believe an institution which doubts itself.

As the New Englander is the purest Universalist of them all, he has been destroyed the most by the precepts of this system of belief. His churches have been debased above all others by the wages of liberal modernity. If he can be made to see the error of his ways, and return to those of his forefathers, it would be an immense asset to our civilization. The old Northern virtues are essential to the welfare of America. It is therefore a necessity to preserve them.

Every day, the Tom Swift Academy advances forwards. New topics are added, and new subjects introduced. As always, our prime directive is to build the future that was meant to be. To this end, informational films have been produced according to the best educational and design principles of the Space Age. This brief report contains a fast look at some of our new material.

This informational film is one of the best depictions of the technical culture of midcentury America. Here, engineering is depicted as a heroic pursuit critical to advancing American infrastructure and securing national defense. It is broadly optimistic regarding human progress, and portrays a confident civilization.

To date, this is the most developed portion of the Tom Swift mathematics curriculum. Our first lesson on derivatives contains all of the essential features that our academic units will eventually contain: simulation, calculation and exposition.

This mathematical simulation is a glimpse into the future of Tom Swift. In the coming months, Tom Swift will be releasing original animated simulations of key principles of physics and mathematics. These will be broadly aligned with the Tom Swift Curriculum, but eventually will include narrative segments designed to be a complete curriculum. It will be possible to use them as a fully independent video course, and when funding permits, they will be available as physical media, as Tom Swift always stands in opposition to digital involution.

Fortune favors the bold. What are you waiting for?

Subscribe now

There was a time in which the personal computer was hailed as the next frontier of scientific and creative development. It was predicted that software tools would make it possible to do what once took dozens of workers to complete. However, the reality for most computer users today is profoundly different.

Over the past twenty years, computers have been altered from tools of production to means of consumption. A major component of this change was the development of tablets and smartphones, machines which offer no programmatic access to the terminal. Thus was the median computer user no longer a thinking man but rather a member of that vast unreasoning multitude which finds itself easily amused. It should be noted that the idiocy of the short-form video watcher is not purely inborn, but rather amplified through decades of exposure to increasingly debased content.

In the great ages of the Cold War, the computer was key to miniaturized control systems, and to all sorts of innovation within the physical world. Even the early computer age of the late Seventies and early Eighties which succeeded it was one defined by the work of inventors and independent mechanics.

Computer clubs lead to the rapid development of new systems and configurations. Therefore the first microcomputers were seen as an extension of the physical and mental faculties of man. It was not for nothing that Steve Jobs termed his product “a bicycle for the mind”.

The rounded corner was the first step in this transformation. Introduced by Steve Jobs in the early Eighties, this change in design was implemented to make early computer users at ease with their new machines. However, informality when dealing with the them is quite unwise, and lead to a far reaching alteration of the balance of power between man and machine. For you see, a computer is not like you. It can never be your friend; only your master or your slave. It is indeed very imprudent to allow it to become your master.

Yet this feature multiplied in computer systems, and marked a profound shift in the telos of interface design. It began to invade even newspapers and physical books, in order to make them seem more like computers, and therefore more relevant. Space began to resemble cyberspace, in what was an early iteration of digital involution. It even began to show up in the design of physical buildings. To a certain extent, it will always represent the worst of the seemingly invincible 2010s drive into digital tyranny. It was only the first of many changes to the user interface experience. Independent desktop applications were replaced with subscription services, consigning users to a new form of digital serfdom. Emoticons have partially replaced the written word, a reversion from a true alphabet to the proto-language of primitive societies. Flat design replaced a more representational form of computer interface. So arose the stifling minimalism which crushes so many of our internet and even physical environments today.

Perhaps these effects have been most catastrophic in the realm of educational materials and media. Too many of the educational products of today are low budget, poorly made, and are utterly uninspiring. However, this unpleasant state of affairs need not persist. Artificial intelligence makes high quality representational art available to even the most modest of budgets. It is for these reasons that Tom Swift has developed a line of educational films complementary to the scientific and technical articles of the Tom Swift Academy. These films will be combined with interactive applications designed based on Space Age principles. Here is one of them:

I am somewhat concerned that my generation believes the right things for the wrong reasons. There is a fair amount of evidence that we are more likely to reject the universalist dogma than any other, but many suggest that this is due to stupidity acquired through digital involution; the end result of countless hours of short form video. For it often requires a considerable amount of intelligence to even understand what a progressive is talking about. Thus the simple-minded video watcher is in a strange way protected from those arguments that could only exist in the world of text. Needless to say, smartphone addicts do not a civilization make. To solve this problem one must devise a program of study dedicated to strengthening the attention span of this generation outside of the confines of the progressive mindset.

The Internet is often perceived to be a wasteland blasted by the wages of artificial intelligence. Even Wikipedia rarely rises above the level of a third-rate encyclopedia of decades past. Yet even oases of civilization and high culture can be found there, if one knows where to look. Some of the best places to look are the repositories of the public domain.

There is a wealth of content in the public domain. At the time of this writing, this includes all literature, films and music produced before the year 1930. Much of this comes from the great ages of Western civilization; the “Old World” or the Age of Discovery. Therefore, it is largely imbued with the right ethos and mindset for those who would seek to rebuild a superior society. In most of these works is indeed a lost realism regarding the state of mankind, which is well-nigh impossible to find in the literature of today. The literature and historical worldview prevalent before the first world war also contains a certain optimism regarding technical progress which has largely been lost. This includes everything from the journals of great explorers to the Principia Mathematica, to the adventure novel series which is the namesake for this publication. Many Christian publishers have invested greatly in the republication of great literature, and can certainly be commended for their efforts. While this has ensured the survival and re-publication of such classics as The Lord of the World, or the works of G. K. Chesterton, there are as yet few analogous publishers for other sorts of archaic historical and scientific works. Unfortunately, the scientific community today seems largely incurious and apathetic towards its own heritage. This attitude is almost certainly one of the causes of the seemingly intractable reproducibility crisis.

Much of this corpus is available on Project Gutenberg, a website devoted to free downloadable files corresponding to at least seventy thousand publicly available volumes. It is aptly named, as it might soon have a similar effect on our era as Gutenberg himself did upon the Late Middle Ages. The progressive consensus will be broken only by the recovery and dissemination of the antediluvian works; the intellectual class will not be persuaded by memes. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to call this body of work produced before the advent of universalism the Arsenal of Civilization.

However, this database is beset by certain limitations. Project Gutenberg is at present only searchable by author and title, and is hence unsuitable for casual browsing. While it does make a limited attempt to classify works by subject, this system is as yet crude and relatively primitive. For this reason Tom Swift will organize a better interface for accessing the database. It is also possible for any user to mirror this repository, thereby protecting it from any agents of bad character seeking to modify the corpus for ideological reasons.

Yet there is a certain value to the physical volume that cannot be ignored. The human brain does not process pixels nearly as well as it does pages. There is also a certain soulless quality to any media flashing across the liquid crystal display that is best avoided as much as possible, especially at younger ages. Our culture would be greatly enriched if this material were to be printed into proper books, and distributed where the youth might read it. There are many services around the internet, most notably amazon KDP which will print books made to order for a nominal fee. I propose that the treasures of Gutenberg be disseminated to the public in this way, and that a website be constructed to perform this process more effectively.

In the presentation of these volumes lies a great opportunity for artists. Illustrating these books, and publishing them in useful collections would render them far more appealing to the general public. One could design animated trailers to promote them. There is much material here which would make excellent films. Remember, it is all available for the taking, to make use of it in whatever way you can imagine.

The Gutenberg corpus could if properly catalogued and disseminated form the foundation of a private library system dedicated to the great principles of the West. I have already written at some length how such a system could form the cultural basis for the next civilization. Some have suggested bookstores based on similar principles as well. These private libraries would be especially meritorious in regions where the population is too low to maintain independent schools. In such cases they could serve as centers for education and intellectual discussion. For these reasons I believe that the initial progress of the next civilization will be directly proportional to the knowledge we retain from the last.

So go to Gutenberg and start printing today. Print and preserve these books for your children and your countrymen. Why buy the overpriced paperweights they dare to call textbooks? Build your own library for pennies on the dollar! The next civilization begins with you!

Upon my waking, I fell forward hitting my head hard, shivering compulsively. Face down I lay, not five paces from the open refrigerator door. I had fallen into a room which appeared to be a kitchen. From the looks of it, it was part of a manorial home in the Gothic style. The great house was busy with the sounds of a family reunion. I walked out of the kitchen, which seemed to have far too many test tubes and laboratory apparatus, into a hall. There were at least three generations gathered there, with far too many children to count. The faces of the grandparents bore an uncanny resemblance to my old college friends. Suddenly, I saw that unmistakably, the hall connected the two houses on the property in which I had fallen asleep. Without thinking, I ducked into a side closet. It opened up into an odd room with escalators going up and down many levels, as far as the eye could see. I followed the escalator downwards out of curiosity. In the escalator parallel to mine, I noticed a girl in a pink dress standing. As she turned her head, it became apparent she had a second one. I kept descending the escalators, assuming what I saw had been an illusion. At the bottom, I reached a giant, fluorescently-lit circular area somewhat resembling the interior of a badly maintained travel plaza.

Read more

While the advent of differential and integral calculus made classical physics as we know it possible, many problems would not be solvable until the Cartesian system was extended to the third dimension. This was accomplished by Newton and Leibniz in the most rudimentary form. However, a full development of this branch of mathematics would have to wait until a new era.

The eighteenth century saw the development of calculus from the mathematical underpinning of theoretical physics, to a tool fundamental to navigation and military logistics. The field was analyzed with a new mathematical rigor, leading to the analysis of infinite geometric series and the advent of many new applications.

The great ideas of the Enlightenment were often advanced not in universities, but in free and open discussion, in what were known as salons, often organized by aristocratic women. One of this was organized by the Madame Sofie de Grouchy, later to be the wife of the Marquis de Condorcet. In our age of increasing instability and academic decay, this system of inquiry may very well again prove to be meritorious. It is also in this age that calculus was integrated into the mathematical curriculum used to educate engineers. This Newtonian synthesis was especially advantageous in military engineering, and therefore was critical to the advances of the Age of Discovery.

Thus were many unique characteristics of three-dimensional calculus developed within the salons and coffeehouses of the Enlightenment. One of the primary developers of this form of calculus was Leonhard Euler. Leonhard Euler was a true polymath, responsible for many different fields, including the calculus of variations. Perhaps his most rigorous contribution to calculus was his extension of its laws to exponential and trigonometric functions.

The Marquis de Condorcet is an unusual figure indeed. He was one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, sympathizing greatly with the rationalistic and anti-clerical view of progress first espoused by Voltaire. In his view, mankind was to advance through ten ages of increasing societal elevation, the last being a state of true equality. I shall leave it to the perfect hindsight of our twenty-first century readers to determine whether this turned out to be truth, or merely a pleasant delusion. Perhaps this affinity for the new and rational led him to employ the first mathematical symbol that did not appear first in an ancient language, that of the partial derivative.

Read more

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is true in physics, but also within the behavior of man. Once it becomes obvious to the majority that civilization has taken a wrong turn, a reaction is all but inevitable. The wages of digital involution are becoming increasingly apparent even to the eye of the untrained layman. It is now a common belief that the large segment of our most recent generation primarily raised by tablet computers is fundamentally incapable of maintaining our current level of civilization. Slowly but surely those sections of society with the intelligence, foresight and wherewithal to reject unlimited digital entertainment are beginning to do so.

The increasing prevalence of digital involution is motivating even moderate sections of society to create their own cultural enclaves based on older forms of communication technology. The broader public is becoming more aware of the perils of digital involution, and a significant fraction thereof is beginning to question the default use of smartphones and tablet computers. While this is now seen mainly as an eccentric choice, I predict those eschewing various forms of modern communication technology will increasingly form separate cultures. It bears noting that nearly fifty percent of the youngest generation wish that social media were never invented.

Throughout history, a few parallel societies such as the Amish have adopted restrictions on entertainment technology in order to preserve their existence. Such societies have performed quite well, and are still able to expand in modern times, having largely escaped the degeneracy eminating from the monoculture. Few realize the rapidity with which Amish are spreading in the United States. Not only their numbers but also their industries are growing; many have expanded beyond agriculture into many types of manufacturing, including in one case aerospace components. Indeed, German speakers are one of the fastest-growing demographics in America today, although it is hardly noticed within the wider monoculture. While many traditionalist groups such has the Old Order Amish have developed a sustainable society, cultural restrictions prevent them from entering more advanced fields such as engineering or medicine. At the same time, more and more of the educated elite are becoming dissatisfied with the increasing digitization of society. For this reason I predict the formation of new cultural groups based on the level of technology they consider to be a social good. The first group is what the wider world usually considers to be traditionalists. It includes such cultures as the Amish and Mennonites who reject most modern technology and higher education. Their standard of living will roughly approximate that available at the beginning of the twentieth century. As such groups do not use the Internet very much, their is little contemporary documentation of their way of life. A. M. Hickman i s perhaps the best resource regarding these cultures. The second, here termed the Retroculture for want of a better one, is comprised largely of members of more moderate religions, and seeks to preserve values and culture roughly approximating the middle of the twentieth century.1 The third group, now known as Digital Minimalists, is mostly secular and technically adept, and live in a way similar to that of the turn of the millennium.

Certain occupations are incompatible with a fully tertiary economy. A society in which regular relocation is normal is unlikely to support the construction of durable buildings, and hence occupations such as stonemasonry. Hence, it is likely that such jobs will be taken by either traditionalists or members of the Retroculture. Apart from such examples as the Amish, this facet is rarely studied. Manufacturing is not typically suitable for a purely modern way of living. It often takes place in the sort of places modern people do not want to live. I therefore predict that the moderate traditionalists will in time come to dominate this sector of the economy. I predict that moderate traditionalism will appeal mainly to religious groups like Catholics and Lutherans.

Members of the Retroculture have already developed habits distinct from modern man. These are your classical Christian homeschoolers, Hillsdale college attendees and the like. The moderate traditionalist does travel, but usually overland, often to the Civil War battle sites and reptile zoos that fell by the wayside when the interstates were constructed. He prefers campsites to hotels, and road travel to international destinations. He buys DVDs and physical books, and often distrusts the increasing prevalence of streaming. He does not place a social premium on college, and will only send his children there if it seems conservative or profitable. In time, this group could revive jobs that no longer exist such as stonemasonry or organ-building. It is my opinion that this group is largely an underserved market. A discussion of businesses that might appeal to this group is available here. Whenever one begins to consider the great works of Western civilization, it bears noting that college degrees were largely unnecessary. As the economic situation worsens, the happiest will invariably be those who always spent less to begin with. For these reasons moderate traditionalism might soon appeal to a much wider section of the American public.

Digital minimalists will accept most modern technology and societal change, but reject the widespread use of smartphones and tablet computers. Their motivation for avoiding digital involution is largely rationalist and secular, formed from personal experience and the work of such psychologists as Jonathan Haidt. This group has emerged but recently, but already includes a good number of the elite members of society. Even within the most progressive sections of the West Coast, families are raising children with landline phones. As is well known, many members of this technocratic elite have already been sending their children to schools which minimize exposure to digital technology.

That remaining element of society which places no restrictions upon the use of technology is unlikely to have a good outcome. There is already a new epithet formed to describe them: the “ferals”, due to the distinctive behavior of their children. Those too ignorant or weak-willed to resist digital involution will likely live their lives in the pursuit of dopamine, replacing their natural human impulses with various forms of electronic stimulation. Thus shall the so-called I-pad kids sadly go the way of the Neanderthal and Irish elk.

Therefore, it is a moral duty to fight the force of digital involution whenever and wherever possible. I personally believe in attempting to save from digital oblivion all who can be. To this end the Tom Swift Academy was created; as a path from the blasted wastes of the Internet to true learning and high culture. Therfore if there is to be another Heroic Age of Invention, we must ensure the bright minds of our generation are adapted to the physical, rather than the virtual world. The next civilization is ready. Are you?