The Kinist Review

  Most Americans have a special affinity for objective, scientific measuring instruments, even if that instrument is their “reason”. The ability to use instrumental reason to clear the rubbish of centuries away and delve back to the roots is by now reflexive for the North American subject. They love Ockham’s razor and getting back to “roots”. Umberto Eco astonishes (therefore) when he remarks:

America, having come to grip with 1776, is devouring the Real Past. Canned philology perhaps, but philology all the same. The Americans want and really like responsible historical reconstruction (perhaps because only after a historical text has been rigorously reconstructed can it be irresponsibly deconstructed). [1]

  George Parkin Grant put it even more bluntly:

Nietzsche’s equivocation about the relation of the highest will to power and the will to technology has never been part of the English-speaking tradition….our liberal horizons fade in the winter of nihilism, and the dominating among us see themselves with no horizon except their creating of the world, while the pure will to technology (whether public or private) more and more gives sole content to that creating. In the official intellectual community this process has become known as the “end of ideology”. The very substance of our existing which has made us leaders in technique stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism.[2]

Even more to the point:

The very procedure of research means that the past is represented as object. But anything, in so far as it is an object, only has the meaning of an object for us. That is why it is quite accurate to use the metaphor of the mausoleum about our humanities research. Moreover, when we represent something to ourselves as object, we stand above it as subject – the transcending summoners. We therefore guarantee that the meaning of what is discovered in such research is under us, and therefore in a very real way dead for us in the sense that its meaning cannot teach us anything greater than ourselves.[3]

  What is important about these comments is that they apply to virtually any North American mind or character, Left or Right, liberal or not. The new arguments for atheism are not philosophical (for instance) but are primarily empirically based constructs about the radical and brave new world we will live in without God. This is a world which is plastic, a man who is plastic, and a God who (if He is there) is also plastic in relation to our desires and our scientific technique. So, too, the new arguments in politics, religion, or any other subject. Statistics and genetics (predictably) are undergoing unprecedented elevations and refinement.

  Government Age Liberals, discredited in the realm of policy and under pressure in the realm of ideas (since it really isn’t much of one), changed their name to “Progressives”. Progressives are now learning to talk about “singularity” and “ontological materialism”. What is increasingly clear is that the value of the Machine (or of the Technique) is more and more naked and clearly grasped. In this wide awake morality play, we are enacting Neil Postman’s parable of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, who warned (in Postman’s Technopoly) of the possibility that tools would shape not just the users but also the inventors of those tools. Tea Partiers, as much as any Marxist professors, believe in historical investigation and the power of technology to deliver “better living through Chemistry”.

  There is taking place, on the North American continent (in a way more intense than anywhere else), a retreat from the classically humane or Christian positions of knowledge and feeling in favor of purely instrumental power. In Ernst Junger’s short essay On Pain, he denominated technology as “our uniform” against pain. Other prescient examples could be found, such as Octavio Paz’s remarks on the North American character as he experienced it from a Mexican formation:

...it seems to me that North Americans consider the world something to be perfected…the Puritan identifies purity with health. Therefore…his conviction that the body does not exist, or at least cannot lose, or find, itself in another body.[4]

  G.P. Grant has also remarked on the terrible violence done to body in America’s will to power, a power he described as (at the very least) “not flaccid”. In this scenario, multiculturalism and barbarism (then) are simply the compensating orgies let loose to compensate the excessive rigors of a mechanical and soulless discipline. Even conservative thinkers tend to embrace this movement towards objectification and domination, and in a comprehensive manner which does not clearly provide a rationale for resistance of any kind.  Ortega y Gassett, someone with a reputation for an independent and somewhat “conservative” mindset, ends his masterful and calculating work An Interpretation of Universal History with these capitulating words:

Well now, for transforming this world into the world which can be his and with which he can coincide, he has no other instrument than technique, and physics is the possibility of unlimited technique. From this we come to recognize that physics is the organ of human happiness and that the renewal of this science has, in human affairs, been the most important event in universal history [see the author’s Meditation on Technique, to which he alluded].[5]

  Countless examples could be mustered of this kind of shoulder shrug and bowing to Baal, from the pages of virtually anyone of reputation or note. Sometimes it is melancholy and sometimes exuberant, but it is always present.[6]  The general conviction is that “Change”, “Chaos”, “Progress”, or whatever else you call the turbulent human wreckage and wake of technological forward motion is as much a given as the fabric of the starry heavens. Culture, faith, or even civilization is negotiable. The fixed point is the technological process. 

  It may be that bowing down in this temple of Rimmon is in the long run the best thing to do, in some form or other. But it is fatuous and disgusting when done with such gusto by those serious scholars or committed Christians who should know better and have never bothered to search it out. There is no dignity in it, and not a little shame, when men of intelligence join the Chorus of praise for the coming Supra-Ethnic Community which is re-organized with technology by and for political exploitation groups. Now, more than ever, we need resistance. Do not be digestible. Think. There may perhaps be a way.

  As mentioned already there are more sinister currents operating in tandem with technology. Almost as purgation, or perhaps as a safety valve of irrationality in a universe a little too dominated by instrumental reason, those whose skin is properly tainted with enough melanin are increasingly held like sacrosanct bovines. The Third World is increasingly lusted for as a transplant to our backyard, although this, too, is patently a mere manipulation of man at the level of tribes and anti-tribe. It simply means more mingling of flesh in the market place, and the inverted new beast-man.

  The erosion of the Left to a more radical Progressivism or their retrenchment as disaffected neo-conservatism may herald the eventual deployment of instrumentalities not merely against the cradles of true personalism (like Serbia) but against individuals or even homeland citizens themselves, particularly troubling social classes or new minority-majorities. It is simply a matter of time before our current policy, which G.P. Grant characterized as “orgasm at home, napalm abroad”, is turned on its head. An enormous horde of chickens is headed home for the roost. America will have to be made safe for the world. Steve Sailer calls this the “invade the world, invite the world” strategy.

  Our vaunted “Christianity” will not help us much. It has become an adjunct of Progress. There is apparently no substantial or real conflict between existential evangelicalism and the radical, multicultural matrix of global saturation. In this new narrative, nostalgia may be understandable, but reaction or serious objection is heresy. Nothing is more objectionable to the modern mind than to suggest that a law of genetics or blood is the scarlet thread which links diverse fields of human endeavor in physical, mental, or moral spheres, and which to destroy is to unravel “our world”. It may be wrong to vote Republican; it is certainly ridiculous to be “Conservative,” and it is shamefull to be Reactionary. But these offenses can be forgiven. Please note, however…

  It is Heresy to object that ethnicity is still relevant, let alone that it is prime or indispensable (for our purposes, or what ought or could be our purposes). As the blog Spirit, Water, Blood stated it, “nothing [is allowed to exist] between the family and the global state”.[7] This paradox is similar to the fact that the only workable commune of history that ever existed (the family) is hated by the Leftist State which ostensibly wants a Commune. Can one imagine anything more autocephagic and demonstrably ludicrous?

  How (one may ask) are technology and the worship of color explicitly joined? What right does one have to speak them together? The New World needs citizens. Plasticity & pliability in the global new man (or what Oswald Spengler would call the ranks of the fellaheen) is a critical component of what it means to Progress. How can one have Progress without Unity, Unity Now? And what else is tyranny but the resulting division of all society into the managed and the managers, ostensibly equal? How else could it be accomplished than by an acid bath for all “natural” intermediate institutions? What is less likely to acquiesce graciously than the old bogey-beast itself, Ethno-Nationalism? It alone has the scale to oppose practical agendas.

  The counter idea to ethnic Europeanism is the fait d’accompli behind Obama’s rationale for socialization. And the world State must do something for the individual it has already made its slave. In an ethnic state or government, man more readily finds a Super-Ego which sustains his courage against raw Power and provides him with justification for what he senses might be true but cannot prove on his own naked effort. Ethnic states always presupposed that naked man alone did not have the totality of moral resources he needed for the good life. And a brotherhood can accomplish what an atom cannot, even if only to hold the State at proper bay, to allow “room not to have to vote” and to protect the relative peace of particular communities. Ethno-nationalism ensures governments govern for the good of their current citizens, rather than at the behest of a world-utopia ideal. Hence, the animus for it comes naturally to a global unitary “state”.

  Race may be a dangerous weapon, but so is fire, and we hardly could do without that. In any case, it is inescapable – what we are seeing now is the decay of European raciality and the creation of a hybrid Race, which will naturally be “racial” as well. Supposedly, it will be advanced or better. In any case, the danger of Race is simply a perversion of that original good which it constitutes. If the Western Churches were not properly Gnostic, they would have seen this decades, maybe centuries ago. It is not Race which is objectionable (everyone knows it is important) but the visions of the Good or non-Good associated with various embodiments of that Good.

  Is the concrete and resultant hatred of white culture (which is the prime obstacle) a necessary component of technology and progress? Perhaps so. Yet even if it is incidental that white Western societies form an impediment to Progress, they are essentially the prime intermediary barrier to that Progress (not least because we created it and it originates from within our spheres of influence). We are inoculated against it, and we use it to wage war on both Nature and our adversaries.

  This is a story that stretches back to the 13th century and the scholastic schools, when the universe was conceived as a potential energy reservoir that could be understood and then tapped with instrumental reason. It is, perhaps, bred into our bones, and it is, perhaps, inimical to any collective self-awareness at the level of the heart in terms of culture, civilization, faith, or even race. As adversaries with flintlocks and Korans bedevil our Empire, we may well take inventory and pause in our hubris, to consider if we can find a doubt.  John Crowe Ransom makes a correlative point of great irony, in his essay The Philosophy of Progress, part of I’ll Take My Stand : The South & the Agrarian Tradition. Concerning the abandonment of the ideals and ideas of the heart, he notes that:

Memories of the past are attended with a certain pain called nostalgia. It is hardly a technical term in our sociology or our psychiatry, but it might well be. Nostalgia is a kind of growing-pain, psychically speaking. It occurs to our sorrow when we have decided that it is time for us, marching to some magnificent destiny, to abandon an old home, an old provincial setting, or an old way of living to which we had become habituated. It is the complaint of human nature in its vegetative aspect, when it is plucked up by the roots from the place of its origin and transplanted in foreign soil, or even left dangling in the air. And it must be nothing else but nostalgia, the instinctive objection to being transplanted , that chiefly prevents the deracination of human communities and their complete geographical dispersion as the casualties of an insatiable wanderlust. Deracination in our Westerner life is the strange discipline which individuals turn upon themselves, enticed by the blandishments of such fine words as Progressive, Liberal, and Forward-Looking. The progressivist says in effect: Do not allow yourself to feel homesick; form no such powerful attachments that you will feel a pain in cutting them loose; prepare your spirit to be always on the move. According to this gospel, there is no rest for the weary, not even in heaven. The poet Browning expresses an ungrateful intention, the moment he shall enter into his reward, to “fight onward, there as here.” Browning would have made a good American, but a bad European. All the true progressivists intend to have a program so elastic that they can always propose new worlds to conquer. If his Utopia were practicable, really, and if the progressive should secure it, he would then have to defend it from further progress, which would mean his transformation from a progressivist into a conservative. Which is unthinkable. [8]

  Indeed, part of the “strangeness” we experience today lies is the fact that the Revolution Party, now in power, has to look around constantly for new matter, or else it could begin to look an awful lot like what it really is, which is a party of Power that has relished it for a terribly long time (since at least 1900AD). The “creative destruction” must be made to appear as part and parcel of the human condition. Indeed, this is what the Council on Foreign Relation’s Walter Russell Mead has just got done defending, in God and Gold, where the argument is identically this.

  It is comforting that apologies for Progress and Democracy are now mandatory composition and reading for the informed public. It means they are not secure. Meanwhile, we could do worse than begin to vivisect the reigning gods with the means available. Christopher Lasch theorized that the psychosis behind eternal Progress lay in the misconceptions of Memory. For the progressive, memory has one mode, and one actual mode that is also the only one possible ~ that of Nostalgia. In True & Only Heaven, Lasch argues that those who engage in nostalgia and those who hate the past are both committed to a view that Memory is essentially ineffectual. Memory (at best) can function as a Thomas Kincade-glow when remembering “Things Past”, and at worst, can be the Satan which prevents the entry into the Paradise of Futurama.

  Any conceiving the Past in any other terms (such as the ones Wordsworth was habitually and inspirationally accustomed to employ) are by nature “reactionary” and “nostalgic”. Because, of course, this is the only possible function of Memory ~ a useless appendage which looks backward to times no longer in any way relevant to the evolving human animal. The gesture is a purely pleasurable one, or the pleasure may be only a gesture. Anything else and the whiff of Fascism, much like a monk smelling sulfur to warn of the entry of Satan, is detected. Keep it to yourself, or on the walls at Cracker Barrel. This way lie Dragons.

  If Lasch is correct in this, then this meta-Memory failure quite likely has psychotic roots in the personality of the individual. In this sense, a “progressive” is (literally) someone who is unqualified to decide public matters. This psychosis also explains why, under their auspice, the Res Publica always becomes the Res Publica. A liberal or a progressive (or whatever they mutate into next) is (politically and probably personally) non compos mentis. 

  Of course the Past is much more than mere Nostalgia. Intellectually, any fool can see this, at least when their mind is not enshrouded by the screaming synapses of pure fear unleashed when the Nazi-detector implants are triggered. University educated people have especially sensitive levels. In fact, education today in America is primarily one designed to provide more and more sophisticated versions of these implants, an entirely negative proposition. Many models exist, but the idea behind them is the same. To squelch our natural interest in “things past” and to terrify us of following that backwards path in the mind (note the connotations of being “backward”) which is intangible and precious to the subjective consciousness. Why it is, we do not understand. Implants do not permit such Crime-Thought. What they do permit (barely), is Nostalgia. And people revel in it. This blows off steam, and has the additional advantage of reinforcing the general mis-Idea that Nostalgia is all it is good for, and really a rather crummy and pathetic thing to start with. Or at least to end with. We all feel wistful, condescending, and generally self-indulgent when dealing with “the Past”. It is something allowed the peasants, or indulged in as a peasant practice.

  Although Lasch explores Burke’s distinctions between action and idea on the one hand (no matter how “conservative”) and habit/custom on the other (no matter how misunderstood), we may safely leave infra-conservative debates to another day. Conservatives of all stripes view Memory as a spiritual connection of more than ordinary importance. Our enemies view it as psychosis. One of us is wrong and not a little insane. The babble of Progress directly opposes any conception of the good life beyond material comfort, and in the end, not even that.  One the other hand Memory forces us, not only to forethought & prudence (two very illiberal virtues) but also to contemplation (which is virtually unsuspected in its very existence) and elective affinities in the form of higher love’s (man’s natural state). In fact, Progress might be alternatively defined as the “absence of memory and the pure presence of sensation”, or (towards the end) “stimulus”. Isn’t this what they say our Economies need to survive? The synonym is not a coincidence.

  When society descends to importune fumbling in the dark with desperate measures, because the high priests of Baal know nothing else can possibly save us, we are in the region of ad hoc political empiricism carried to the extreme use of societies as lab specimens. This is not Freud’s wisdom of the “second-best” (the “excluded middle” of classical liberalism) it is a descent to the radiant abyss. Life, in any case, is an emergency of metaphysical dimensions, and even purely physical emergencies are not “managed” with “second best” or experimental remedies. Not forever. This is known intuitively, or not at all. Some of us still know it.

  Progress, however, means that the forces of history cannot be judged from the outside (or, as it turns out, from the inside, either). “Only the event shall tell us in its hour,” wrote the melancholy poet Matthew Arnold. What event? What hour? If Hegel is right, there is literally nothing outside of History (which will be told by the tyrant’s philosophers) that could judge it. History is literally closed in upon itself in the subjectivity of whatever narrative has more “resonance” at some random polling point of mass forces, which begin to collide like tectonic plates. Perhaps the twittering shall be siphoned and fed into gigantic machines for input. Who knows? It might as well be. History, for the modern Hegelians, is its own justification, but it is a History that (of course) has to be constantly interpreted and re-interpreted by therapeutic elite managers working on government grants. This is a paradox, the problem of the philosopher-tyrant understood so well by Plato and Strauss and others. In theory, there is nothing that could not be justified under this construction of reality. And there would be no escape from it.

  While it seems unlikely that such an orchestrated global tyranny could be accomplished, it might be possible on a growing basis were the masses themselves (say, through bastardized religion and comfort) persuaded that existential slavery with limited religious freedoms and optimal consumer benefit was the “best of all possible worlds” for the “new men”. Isn’t this what W.M. Mead is saying?

  In David Cayley’s George Grant in Conversation, Grant clarifies that “nostalgia” for the past is an easy smear against “reaction” because we literally have no other recourse than to dig into history for precedents. Where are the modern monuments to what is good, beautiful, & true? In days gone by, people would go down to the public square, a place that was still alive and not a museum, and see the union of past, present, & what is to come. Today, the past is buried, and the future with it. Any good we grasp now will come from the dead, by necessity. This is the last revolution. 

  So it is memory which teaches us to hope. A memory of a time in which Progress (and its hetaerea, Technique) was not God, and in which it rather meant meaningful moral development of the whole human person, with accompanying benefices from Providence of natural goods earned through faith, sacrifice, and hope, shared in communion through Love. This may not have been what it always perfectly embodied, but it was what it invariably ideally meant, and (even more) what men agreed that it meant, and it always gave other men a standard by which to judge their rulers. Whether or not Edmund Burke was right, or rather Wordsworth, is a discussion which can wait. For now, men of good will can agree that the ideal of Technique is not an idea or standard at all, but rather an Orwellian term which covers an astonishing absence of meaning and mind. What Technique by any other name means is Power, and the empowered are eager to dispense with the remnants of the West. Then and only then, can Paradise be entered. Will they show restraint when given that choice?

Endnotes
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1.  Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. New York: HBJ, 1983. p.62

2.  Grant, G.P. Technology and Empire. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1986. Three extraordinary essays worth reading in full.

3.  Grant, G.P.  “Role Conflict in the Humanities” quoted in Conversations with George Grant in Conversation. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1985.  p.134. Some very good thoughts on Plato’s eternal relevance to even today’s declensions.

4.  Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grover Press, 1961. p24.

5.  Ortega y Gasset, Jose. An Interpretation of Universal History. New York: Norton, 1973.

6.  I note here that Guillame Faye (proponent of “ArchaeoFuturism”) is a contemporary thinker of note to both embrace technology in an extreme way and yet to self-consciously insist upon the coming pre-eminence of conservative, even ancient, ideals. Faye sees the contradiction as only apparent. One must act and think like “a hoplite, in front of a computer”. Julius Evola’s metaphor of “riding the Tiger” is also valuable here.

7.  Many will recognize Robert Nisbet’s formulation of “intermediary institutions” in this remark. Family, Church, and Local Community were barriers or buffers which allowed force to be generated from individuals upwards, organically. In a multi-ethnic Empire, engineered and dominated by technology deployed for endless power alone, this is a simple impossibility. Larger “intermediary institutions” may be required, such as ethnic blocks. Indeed, this is precisely what many ethnicities are utilizing on American soil under the guise of individual rights.

8.  Ransom, John Crowe. “The Philosophy of Progress” in I’ll Take My Stand. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1978. 6-7.