A Note On Commonality and Law
Absent the constraints of immemorial commonality, the binding force of social cohesion must be naked force, publicly rationalized by a plenary and messianic secular law. In our own time, the social and racial commonality of shared lineage has been aggressively supplanted by the idea of “American Values,” but a careful examination of these “values” shows them rather to be politically pragmatic than substantively moral or ethical. American Values are promulgated by the official organs of government and its partners in the totalitarian enterprise, applying the science of mass suggestion. One repeatedly hears sonorous terms proffered in what passes for discourse -terms such as ‘Justice’ and ‘Freedom’ deployed in the popular media. These are presumably the exemplars of American values. But absent some defining notions as to what actions and beliefs underlie these terms in the reality of practice, they are empty of moral significance.
What precisely IS justice? Economic justice is a term used grandiloquently in speeches by figures advancing the appealing idea of fairness. What, however, is economic justice in practice? When we have the temerity to ask, we are told that it involves the elimination of privilege. It is hoped that thusly, we may be led in a circle of self-referential terms, that when pronounced will fill us with the vague associations of goodness and decency, and being satisfied with such associations, we will conclude the search for meaning, having settled the matter by the sentimental impressions that such terms evoke in us. Such a state of suggestibility is referred to as “verbalism” by the perennialist philosopher René Guénon, who asserts in his monograph The Crisis of the Modern World that this is the basis of all modern democratic politics. It is, of course, easily seen that the elimination of so-called privilege is a technique of social equalization that proposes to eliminate social and economic inheritance, and further, to moot the effects of biological differentiation in those same spheres of action.
Certainly, when dealing with abstract the terms that are proffered by professional politicians and capitalists, the devil is in the details. When such terms come to be defined, the consensus that once appeared to resolve the tensions between identity groups begins to dissolve. It is very likely that the “consensus” required to hold together the modern pluralistic demos is manufactured. Beyond this illusory consensus around abstract terms (the stuff of so-called populism) only law, an invasive, plenary, salvational law can form the glue that welds together inherent antinomies. The scriptures tell us that Light has no commerce with darkness, but in a putative “democracy,” it must. The currency of democratic societies is a tense accommodation, a jagged and jarring compromise of values that is called “centrism,” but is really nothing more than the fencing-off of a hasty demilitarized zone between oppositional moral vectors.
Absent the structuring valences of immemorial cultural praxis and ethnic-racial resemblance - the rites, customs, and habituation in which ideas inhere and find daily expression- without these nexuses of assent, the overriding value of unity makes of the law an unsleeping despot. And no resigned despot, but one who takes up residence in every cottage, who quarters his dragoons in every barn, pasture, and square of every humble village, to prosecute war against the geometry of the hayricks.
