This anti-typological view I am describing is all too comfortable with the conception of complete transmogrification of forms, a central tenet of evolution.  How can we speak of man in the context of such change? It is nothing more than impertinence. What is ‘humanity,’ after all, if a human being is a wholly contingent form to which time indissolubly attaches?  If a man can be anything that time and change may make him, then there is no such thing as man apart from time, the present moment. Soon enough, by this view of things, man will be no more, as he ‘becomes.’  Thought of in this way, man is no longer a ‘him,’ a person, but an object among objects, having no particular privilege. So decisively does such a viewpoint depart from the orthodox biblical conception of man, that it must be considered the philosophical offspring of the Marxist-secular theory of man. That such a capitulation is under way is not an idle concern, as several leading Protestant theologians and popular apologists, such as Doug Wilson, have embraced human genetic manipulation, and by implication trans-humanism (transmogrifying change), for just such reasons.  That Wilson et al., in abandoning a fully committed creation typology, flirt directly with the kind of trans-humanism that has become a darling of the Neo-Darwinist ‘right’ is delicious irony.  While it is true that modern genetics may be, and probably already is, producing monsters, can it recreate the homeostatic world in which they must live? It is to be doubted. Generally speaking, the evolutionary conceptions that taint creationism are unrecognized presumptions smuggled in from eschatology. As I have said, absent typological constancy, the created order is logically subject to alteration of a kind that countenances human extinction by radical transmogrification, and is subject to other effects of evolutionary change.  What remains unexamined by many creationists, or is not admitted by them, is the role that biological instinct plays in the regime of typological conservation. The denial that intra-racial reproductive instinct has a place among the processes of conservation that God ordained is the scandal of phony creationism.  In setting it aside, creationists are left open to every charge they are accustomed to level against their evolutionary ‘opponents.’ I will review the reasons for this in some detail in the following sections.
 
  Typological conservation by the practice of endogamy, arising from human reproductive instinct, which certain interests are attempting to ‘civilize’ out of man altogether, is just that premise on which racial continuity is based.  This conservation must logically extend to the orders of subspecies and race, else we suggest that God and nature unaccountably defer to the charts and tables of Carl Linnaeus.  The view that the only barrier to reproduction (or genetic survival) that is of any consequence is that of the species derives principally from Mr. Linnaeus and his scientific descendants, and not from biblical exegesis.  But God’s nature does not obey the taxonomist; rather, Linnaeus took his cue, where he was correct, from nature itself. That types of greater specificity than the species are largely preserved according to the inward law of reproductive instinct is a fact so commonly observed in as to be indisputable, and is a likely explanatory mechanism for the dominance of endogamy in human mating preference, lately under pressure both from the social developments of modern existence and ideological interests vested in remaking man in the image of their idols. 
 
  Like its ideological forerunner geocentrism, the form of creationism that is the standard fare of evangelical seminars and research institutes has become a rigid dogma and its propagandists a refractory priesthood. It is comedy that these same doctors once excoriated the inflexibility of evolutionary orthodoxy. Now they promulgate their own orthodoxy, and their own inquisition.  Tainted as this anti-typological view is by Neo-Darwinist ideas about change, it must deny that there are definable biological kinds, or, at any rate, deny that kind is a conception that has human application or importance, though such populations are a matter of common observation in the biological sciences.  All the same, genetic expression in areas as diverse as intelligence and disease susceptibility is powerful evidence that the human species homo sapiens sapiens is polytypic and not monotypic.  Well-meaning adages such as “there is only one race, the human race” are simply desiderata of cultural ‘secularism’ and Marxism. Intended to erase illusory distinctions, this way of thinking ends by erasing quite real and important ones. Recall that it was only a short time ago in historical terms that liberal scholars were at work eroding the equally ‘illusory’ distinctions between men and women. That work is nearly complete, and the Christian Church, across its many denominations, has in large measure accepted the social outcome, despite obvious conflicts with scriptural social regulation. Where conflicts arise, it is the scripture which must give way to contemporary understanding of the role of women. This process of historicizing the social pronouncements of scripture cannot be dealt with in the present essay.  Yet, such a claim (that there is but one human race) is manifestly untrue. Christianity must concern itself with what is true, not what is conveniently defended or fashionable.  There are several human races, and their genetic differences are measurably greater than those that distinguish male and female of the same race, yet ‘traditionalists’ feel no compunction in maintaining the social taboos that surround femininity, while summarily discarding longstanding racial taboos that arose from biological imperatives which date to creation itself.  It is small wonder that among Christians for whom the biblical sexual boundaries have fallen that the racial boundaries have similarly collapsed. Can the cordons between species be far behind? Zoophilia is a fact of human existence, just as is homosexuality. And yet the principled critique of homosexuality was at one time among the final barricades of the biblical faith, at which a vigorous defense was thought to be compelled by the fundamental tenets of the faith. But who bothers to defend them now? As with so many other concerns, secular society leavens the church, rather than the opposite.  There are many things to which the instinct must supply its own judgment, which is a judgment of epochs, as over against the individual and his moment in time. By instinct the species and the race judge through the man, on his behalf, and on its own. Let us take a simple example.  There is no minimum age prescribed for marriage in biblical law.  Yet we do not hesitate to invoke instinct against extremity of youth in marriage, as a last defense against what can’t be countenanced.  This is Christian discretion. But the Christian does not need to rely on such natural sentiments respecting the principle of endogamy, since, rightly understood, the Creation Ordinance of reproduction “kind after kind” inveighs against its antagonists.
 
  The stripe of nominalism I have been describing, which denies the reality of types, partakes of several logical fallacies, such as the fallacy of continuum, but its principal weakness is that it casts off observed biological boundaries.  These boundaries are two: that of fertility (most readily admitted by mainline creationists), and that of mate recognition.  When the biological boundary of the first type is violated infertility results.  When the boundary of the second type is crossed biological dead ends are the product.  In the latter case, there remain few if any observations on which counter-theoretical claims can be based.  That is, undirected hybridization is rare and results in a biological cul-de-sac.  This kind of hybridization is referred to in population genetics as intra-specific.  One of the chief characteristics of intra-specifically bred organisms is that their offspring do not ‘breed true’ and such continued interbreeding as does occur is rare.  It is why exotic hybrids tend to have declining populations in nature.  Their populations are thus limited, occupying ecological niches, because new members are few, and the characteristics of offspring tend to converge on dominant genetic traits.  To visualize this, it is helpful to think of canine breeds.  In nature, where hybridization is undirected, intra-specific breeding occurs, but subspecies and races tend to converge into a few stable varieties.  This convergence into stable types is a reproductive law that governs creation.  Thought of a different way, it is only possible to maintain a particular hybridization if intra-specific breeding among pure-bred parents becomes systemic.  This is virtually never the case in nature, where convergence of hybrids with dominant subspecies nearly always occurs. Intra-specific competition tends to create the conditions of isolation that favor convergence. With the species homo sapiens sapiens, the ‘nature’ that is created by the existence of mating taboos is being overcome by social engineering, creating dissonance between the various reproductive instincts, among them the imperative of reproduction (the sex instinct) and the imperative of typological conservation.  One point remains.  That there exist in nature examples of inter-familial, inter-generic, and inter-specific breeding does not recommend them to us as a practice, and there are clear biblical directives forbidding them.  Likewise, there are biblical directives against exogamy that are ignored, or rationalized away.  It is an arbitrary custom of recent exegesis that intra-specific breeding is exempted, quite rare in nature, though not as rare as the other forms I have mentioned.  Still, their relative infrequency speaks to a biologically marginal status, and their mere presence speaks to the corruption of creation. Intra-specific breeding also speaks to this corruption, with its various sub-optimal outcomes, and its phenomenon of convergence, a law of reproduction which works to undermine the viability of the original hybrid strain, which I have already mentioned.  It has to be admitted that cross-racial mate identification does occur.  Yet its infrequency makes it exceptional, the exception proving the rule. I have mentioned above the two types of reproductive barriers and their importance in the God-Ordained regime of typological conservation, classed as boundaries of ability and of instinct.  My opinion is that it is as vain to conjecture on the reasons subspecies and races are, in fact, primarily endogamous as it is to ask why biological forms cannot in the main cross the species boundary in reproduction.  That there are examples of inter-familial and inter-generic breeding argues that there is indeed corruption of creation in its very reproductive processes.  The regulative mechanism that quarantines this corruption is infertility for these forms of hybridization, a mechanism which man is actively thwarting with genetic engineering.  But beyond this, the instinct of endogamy and the phenomenon of hybrid convergence in nature must also be seen as God-ordained regulative mechanisms, which themselves are being undermined by the social policies of a technocratic elite.

    It is argued, quite feebly I think, that the instinct of endogamy has a purely ‘social’ origin, and that policy is able, and correct, to direct the energies of the state toward its elimination.  But where such phenomena are concerned, it is impossible to separate the social, the psychological, and the epigenetic factors, and to assign them malignant or benign ancestry.  Humans cannot be studied in this fragmentary way.  They function as wholes, connected to a set of environmental conditions that are as deeply embedded as physical traits.  Febrile theorists of both the left and the putative right, in concert with Christian leaders, have been eager to dispense with instinctive discrimination from the very outset of the modern technocratic era.  Their failure is the failure of men to fit the hopeful taxa of humanist utopians. The social experiment of racial inter-mixture among men has seen the continued presence of self-perpetuated isolation and competition.  One might be excused a bout of confusion regarding the intent behind the stubborn continuation of such a failed policy, if the end of racial preference in mating is its goal.  The absurdity of such an enterprise lends credence to speculation that inter-mixture of human populations is not the goal of such social engineering, and that racial antagonism and competition is instead the desired outcome.  That in human experience the social factors of displacement and migration tend to strengthen rather than weaken endogamy is little noted among creationists.  But man does not stand apart from nature.  He is, though at its head as steward and regent of creation, fully a part of it.  His nurture comes from it, the source of carnal delight with which God has blessed him.  And yet the ‘nature’ of civilization in which humans live is only partly their own making.  It is a vanity of humanism that it presumes man can remake himself entire, remap his destiny.  The extremes of torture and of mind control show us that man’s needs are both social and physical.  Though a man is well fed, isolation will drive him mad.  Denial of this relatively fixed range and nature of social existence is itself a denial that man is a created being, with limits, and with traits as fundamental to his nature as is nesting to the eagle.  Within this finite spectrum lie his instincts and taboos, with their immemorial provenance, which do not need justification, and cannot be eradicated without harm. Indeed, apart from Christ, man cannot be remade at all, he can only be destroyed. Liberal modernity, then, has the obvious goal of destroying man under the auspices of his supposed reinvention. The disintegrated man, an assemblage of purely biological responses, is a valuable commodity, the ideal consumer.

    It is only in Christ that man is man, and that his instincts and drives contribute to his dignity as the crown of creation.  The denial that man has a fixed nature is in the same vein as the denial that he is created qua man.  The scientific tier of typological denial must also be briefly addressed here.  The claim that intra-specific breeding carries with it genetic advantage, usually referred to as heterosis, or hybrid-vigor, is a common secular argument against intra-racial instinct in reproduction, against endogamy—as though instinct is susceptible to arguments.  Such claims address themselves to populations, and not to individuals—the very populations that are denied more than nominal existence, it seems.  The extension of this critique into the realm of sociology is manifest in the idea that endogamy has a negative survival value due to disease susceptibility. That is, there is a social imperative to racial inter-mixture. It seems odd, this approach, when we note that mankind survived this retardaire habit of endogamy these many centuries.  Where Caucasians are concerned, the diseases due to inbreeding are quite rare.  Indeed, Caucasians are the most genetically diverse of all human populations.  Calls for greater diversity in their ranks are consequently out of touch with the realities of population genetics.  Finally, disease susceptibility has merely to do with such factors as isolation or the size and diversity of the endogamous population, and not to endogamy itself.  So widespread was this canard of endogamy’s bane during the heyday of eugenics in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries that it influenced (for the worse) the thought of such seminal Protestant theorists as Abraham Kuyper, whose writing is fairly littered with eugenic fables.  Nevertheless, it is for this reason that racial, rather than ethnic boundaries are preferred in man, and why historically the exogamy taboo is the more pronounced across races than across ethnic groups or tribes.
 
  As Christians, we are instructed by the Apostle Paul that man is without excuse in his self-imposed ignorance of God, for God’s existence can be and must be deduced from the features of creation.  That is, the existence of God is ‘coercively demonstrated.’  Further, we are told that something of the character of God may also be so deduced (or induced, as it were).  Can we learn anything about God’s image-bearer man from that same nature that testifies of the existence and character of God?  I suggest we can.  One thing we learn from this nature is God’s jealousy of the pattern of his creation, and the various and splendid regimes God ordained to maintain it in all its specificity and originality.  Pursuant to this idea, I would like to undertake a simple thought experiment on the notion of typological conservation, if the reader will indulge a digression.  If God did not intend for animals to reproduce ‘kind after kind,’ in all the fullness of the meaning of ‘kind,’ as is matter-of factly stated in the Creation Narrative, and so establish the genetic conservation of creation, it is perhaps not out of order to ask why he did not then imbue his created beings with the capacity for plenary production.  That this conservation I have been defending extends to the infinitesimal reaches of biological classification we have previously established—that is, to the subspecies, the race, and the sub-race, and perhaps even to biological divisions we do not presently recognize or understand.  Now, the doctors of Neo-Darwinist creationism, defined as those who reject the conservation of kinds in its fullest extent, may insist that this instinct of endogamy, that reaches down to the tiniest of populations and the smallest of biological distinctions, is an impulse introduced by the corruption of creation, or ‘happenstances’ of isolation (as though such isolation escapes Gods will). If so, it would seem that this idea of plenary production (as distinct from re-production—that is, production by kind from ancestry that passes on defining traits to its progeny) is now in view.  By plenary production I mean only the ability of a biological entity to produce offspring of any and all kinds, and, perhaps, of no kind—that is, lacking resemblance to anything yet born, which would seem to grant the creative and generative potency over life to nature, apart from God. TO say this another way, God created, but nature creates.  Were this the case, then the ability to distinguish the created order of existence from evolutionary pathways would vanish. But it is the continuity of forms that is the final bastion of creationist apologetics. The limitation of creationism to the preservation of an arbitrary scale of types, ignoring or despising the epigenetic regulatory mechanisms of created racial types places them within the camp of the Neo-Darwinists. Their embrace of radical change within species seems to be only slightly less than that of the disciples of Darwin, Huxley, and Dawkins.  If kinds are not conserved, then there is no standard by which we might determine what has changed, and further, transformed into something quite new.  The very standard of judgment established for determining the truth of creationism is the conservation of types.
 
    The notion of reproduction necessarily entails the idea that there is an identity that is a survival of the process of generation.  This ‘residuum’ of the ancestor is simply that minimum set of traits that distinguish one kind of thing from another, a beings carnal inheritance. The inheritance can be greater, but it is never less than that which establishes identity. We have previously seen that ‘kind’ (or ‘type’) is a form of biological information that is conserved in reproduction, since the genetic boundaries so conserved prevent pan-sexual or plenary production of life.  Genetic convergence of hybrids in the wild supports this conclusion.  Only by means of re-production is genetic diversity possible, apart from random mutation or erros of transcription.  And yet this diversity is patterned within a biological order that is maintained by the created processes of nature, including mating preference.  Were it not so, all creation would fuse in a singular form, of merely numerical distinction, since all life would contain precisely the same genetic information.  This, of course, is a highly vulnerable, unstable, and cannibalistic form of life which could not long survive.  Sexual reproduction is the primary means by which the necessary degree of genetic diversity is maintained in populations, via the process of meiosis.  Nevertheless both sexual and asexual reproduction, seen in certain varieties of bacterial and plant life, transfer information to offspring which limits future generations to a predetermined form. In its most popular incarnation, creationism is highly invested in the position that no new forms of biological life are created. Yet, paradoxically, those who promote it ignore or reject the importance of racial types in the maintenance of created forms. In the view of the author, they do so unnecessarily, and by slavish prejudice against the racial position, neglect study and recognition of the instinctive behavioral and epigenetic mechanisms by which even minute divisions of creation are maintained. In the world of the anti-racial creationist, there are no stable forms beneath the species. It would be simple enough to reduce such a position to absurdity, if one had the inclination or humor.  Even this cursory exposition I’ve undertaken has shown that ‘kinds’ (or ‘types’), including the subspecies and race, form genetic and epigenetic boundaries of identity which order creation.  By governing living things in this manner, God has limited life’s dynamism to the preservation of an inherited order, while also ordaining sexual processes for the diversification of biological information, and providing adaptive capabilities that allow for change coincident with external shifts in the conditions of life—the adaptive capacity itself being a regulatory mechanism that preserves the greatest amount of genetic lineage possible while ensuring survival.  Even where change is seen, conservation rules it.  I find it not only a matter of deepest faith, but also of blessed observation, that the creation still closely resembles what it once was, and in so doing, shows forth its Creator, and not ‘process’ or any other such impersonal vehicle of change, used as a stand-in for divinity.

  A kind of ‘modernism’ is necessary, then, one may suppose, when the immediate past has become of no use to the living, become moribund, lacking the vitality and sap of genuine human culture and tradition, which is everywhere dynamic, and never a matter of a dead or academic classicism. Tradition meets authentic questioning with vigor. This is not to recommend the culture of critique, which asks no questions, as it already has lisped its answers. We must see the ‘modernism’ of Eliot in this way, as a reaction to the rigor mortis of late-Victorian and Edwardian academicism, and other rigidities that at the time formed a kind of social ossification from which all meaning had previously been drained. We cannot ask the young forever to pay homage to mummies; we must inspire the living with what filled their breasts. With modernism, cast off were those rote, rhetorical figures venerated by inartistic curators. Yet the trans-temporal character of modernism went beyond this attempt at a vitalized historicism to posit a form of cultural correspondence which held up to the world a kind of unitary world Civilization that flared here and there in various, seemingly disparate cultures. Even these very words, “civilization” and “culture” are modern artifacts, relative neologisms conjured by 19th century anthropology in the vacuum created by the absence of Tradition, since traditional man has no use for the false objectivity of rationalism, nor the “problematization” or “de-mythicization” of his own self-consciousness, as he had none. Hume saw this quite distinctly. National self-consciousness (as distinct from consciousness) is born of conflict, war, or critique (which itself is a form of war), and it is only Western man that is drawn to problematize the innocence of the mind in the pre-cultural state of being. This is why, ultimately, for Tradition to return, “conservatism,” a response to the culture of critique, must vanish along with its enemy.

  It is this far shore of modernism, this unitary Civilization where Bloom finally clung, to which I think Eliot would ultimately object, and this objection might be seen as the basis of the dichotomy between the modernism of early and more radical movements such as Lewis’ and Pound’s Vorticism—a complete dislocation into the self-referential present of the machine ethos—and the aesthetics of exhaustion and its implicit critique of hollow Edwardian self-confidence, expressed in poems such as The Waste Land. The haunted souls of the wasted land are not celebrants of any liberation from the past. They wander its deserted passages looking for signs of the living, finding none. Yet they continue on. The “eclecticism” of Eliot is more a picking over the rags and bones of Englishness (or perhaps Britishness). His poetic cosmos is the far-flung Empire in its late dissolution. Pound could not have written The Idea of a Christian Society, nor ever desired to write it. His muse was Jefferson via Arnaut Daniel via Kung Fu-tzu, a pantheon of the unitary civilization. It is perhaps worth noting that Eliot does not use the word “civilization,” but instead “society,” in the title of his profound little book.

  Progress, even the revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) progress of modernism is univocal. It moves toward unity and universality of consciousness. Progress, by overturning the old, uproots particularity, and in the great works of modernist abstraction, particularity is gone. All is shape, tone, color, movement; a space is defined where form is gone, the work referring to itself alone in the immanentized moment. Owing to this dislocation, modernist historical appropriation can be no more than pastiche, as it is a response emergent from a present obsolescence. It is an awakening to the post-cultural consciousness, a gasp in the vacuum, not the cry of the newborn. Modernism’s dictum of “make it new” can only be issued when the old has faltered and failed. It comes out of loss and longing for youth, in a culture filled with memorials of a past no one understands any longer. Modernism’s irony is that it turns to the machine for life, when it was the machine that stole breath from man’s lips to animate itself. Technique becomes parasitic; it no longer servers its masters, but is served by them. The autonomy of the rational principle is self-authorizing. No one can get permission, as there is no one to give it. All radical breaks fail, as they bring with them as hosts the disease they would cure.

  Finally, modernism falsifies by presumption that one can, piecemeal, select from former eras and cultures and uproot something vital, transplanting it into the human heart, locating the common spirit between them. Such was the great project of the Cantos, and also its magnificent failure. Never has there been a more spectacular, more ambitious tower of literary Babel. Yet the Vortex does not hold, the unwobbling pivot wobbles, absent the vital center of spirit to compose its gravity, which possesses a haecceity that is untranslatable. However beautiful the song, the mockingbird can only mock.

  Steering a middle course between the determinism of Left Historicism and the sentimentality or manufactured destiny of Right Historicism, Kinism seeks the revitalization of Tradition not by the vain attempt to unwind the cord of the mind to a point in the past, but to lay hold of the ahistorical, Christian root of Western Tradition itself, by which a New Life will manifest points of connection and resemblance to what has been.

  The authorized view I am outlining does not proceed from a single vantage, and within it there is surprising variation for that which is intended to serve as a criterion of permissible expression and thought. However, this diversity does share among its members certain presumptions and presuppositions that allow us to think of them as correlated, as acting independently or in concert to exclude and vilify rival perspectives. Yet this authorized view, in summary, is the institutionalization of a near triviality. While it may admit of the reality of a social dimension of racial attitudes, and even a psychology of race, the narrative ends there amidst the plastic taxa of the zeitgeist. Certain traits predominate, however. Race is invariably classed among psycho-social chimera, and racial thinking as a form of neurosis. Some members of the ‘conservative’ intelligentsia aver that society itself does not exist. Perhaps these would place ‘race’ within the same category as ‘society,’ that is, reifications. There is general acknowledgement among such people that race is a referent that points to no real (or at least important) attributes of the populations they are said to designate. The biological facet of race—by an edict that is at once both social mandate and a candid confession that the industry of ‘correctness’ has more than notional existence—is laughed to scorn in the salons of fashionable opinion. Still, is it merely a hollow farce on display? Perhaps we do not know precisely for whose benefit the comedy is staged, the sets painted, tickets bought and sold. It may be that for some of them the actors are also the audience. These last must be only a few. The opinion of the author is that no matter how well the principal has learnt his lines, he does not believe he is Don Quixote unless he is mad. It may be that he is mad with the ‘holy madness’ of belief, but this is a rare specimen. It is a noble conceit of democracy that we may rely on the ideological ingenuousness of the political class.

  Or is it we think that the builders of our public fountains do not themselves drink from them? In certain cases this is so. Nevertheless, the planners and managers of the civic mentality I am describing, as well as of the similarly ‘enmassed’ and mechanistic political economy, and the probabilistic world in which they move, necessarily call for a more nuanced position than the gross ironies and mock hysteria of crude public discourse. The planning that is conducted daily by the technocratic bureaucracy must maintain a view that pays no obeisance to diktats that flow from those fountains of civic piety, save for the requisite merchandising of their social evolvement in the store windows of the media. This is merely a roundabout way of saying that the realities of certain kinds of work that is done nowadays in managing the masses call for polite ‘insincerities’ on subjects of great public delicacy, among which is that of race. These “insincerities” are awful enough to contemplate, without there existing, besides, a class of men who are True Believers, the ideological John Browns of the undeclared war—war, that is, for the Abolition of unauthorized thought. Unbeknownst to many of European descent, we live now in a period during which the inculcation of psychological terror (of being caught out in impermissible thought) is portrayed as psychotherapy. But the therapeutic is in fact a form of war, a covert war against private conscience. This new psychomachia is only the latest frontier of the forever war of Puritan Abolition—Puritan in the sense of adding to, and extending God’s Law, creating extra-biblical law that was carried over into public consciousness apart from the context of genuine Christian religion, and became a law unto itself. 

  Corresponding to the range of impermissible thought which is the subject of the racial psychomachia is also a range of impermissible speech and discussion. Indeed these latter two are the cardinal sins, where heterodox thought may be understood to be causative, but also venial, if appropriate atonement is made. Racial sin is a matter of degrees. That is, even relatively subtle behavioral evidence is often enough to bring a subject under suspicion of incorrect belief, while overt sin will result in more rapid indictment, and relatively greater punitive risk. Mere suspicion of racism may be enough to exclude one from certain social or economic opportunities in rarified circles of influence, whereas confession (even inadvertent) or outright exposure bring with them very grave consequences, depending on the social status of the accused. The implications of suspicion and indictment are, of course, relative to the perceived social influence and prominence of the subject. The social cost of perceived racism is higher the higher one’s perceived social station. The ‘proletariat’—what is referred to today by ideological elites as the “blue collar” segment of an industrial society—is more often the subject of mass methods of social correction than individual interdiction, where personal consequences may be relatively minor, while the ‘white collar’ man—the corporate executive, the media or advocacy guild functionary, or the minor party apparatchik—experiences consequences that are quite public, and will often end in social humiliation, personal estrangement, and great economic dislocation and loss.  That control over the tenor and content of all public discourse is in view of these methods is shown by the fact that the social consequences of perceived racism are relative to influence. It is the means by which social elites govern expression among their own ranks and ensure a high degree of ideological conformity among those who control the apparatus of public opinion formation and value education. The editorial boards and management of media outlets, programming executives, heads of governmental regulatory bodies, high ranking officials in education unions, foundation and NGO executives, members of religious governing bodies, political party officials—all of these socially influential roles, and more, are subject to the enforcement of racial taboos and other points of ideological conformity from within their own ranks and from affiliated organizations. It is unnecessary to maintain a strictly ‘conspiratorial’ view of history in order to arrive at the notion of widespread ideological conformity. Consensus of opinion tends to remain operative where cabals may fail to maintain discipline. We may refer to this as the ‘conspiracy of consensus’ and it is effected, in the first place, by the ideological disposition of post-secondary education in general (which gains access to its potential proselytes during a highly impressionable period of their development—the ages of 16 to 25 years), and in the second place, it is effected by control over the educational experiences and family origins of candidates for certain influential positions in organizations. One need only look at the degree of conformity on racial opinion between so-called ideological opponents in American politics to see such consensus at work. Where consensus is not present, the aforementioned forms of social-economic control are in place, and these latter ensure, to a great degree, the absence of dissent on racial topics in “acceptable” public discourse. 

  In this control, public social engineering has been far more successful in casting vitiating doubt upon those guilty of racial heterodoxy than of the equivalent gender sin. This is perhaps attributable to Western society’s greater acceptance of the idea of racial equality than gender equality, where the latter runs contrary to easily observable physiological distinction. In the 20th and 21st centuries, racial equality, like gender equality but to an even greater extent, is an ideology that has benefited from its historical situation, following on the heels, as it did, of certain historic social and political developments which brought the former and more traditional views of race and gender under great critical scrutiny and final repudiation. Suffragism, abolitionism, the rapid collapses of physical anthropology in academia, eugenics in public policy, the racial hygiene programs of fascism and national socialism, and finally the sexual revolution of the 1960’s , resulting as it did in the advance of sexual permissiveness, feminism, birth control, abortion, and finally, the civil rights movement—all these historical developments, which were sprung from the engineered destruction of Christian religious authority and social prestige, became an historical torrent that swept away the pre-existing order, the existing orthodoxy which had stood for centuries. Not since the French Revolution, and never prior to that, had such social change come into being so rapidly, including that introduced by the Protestant Reformation, and that, from so small a cadre of social elites and leaders. Localized ideological insurgencies which began rather inconspicuously in the teaching colleges of the industrial Northeast soon became an onslaught against the ‘establishment,’ that ubiquitous bogeyman of 1960’s dissent. Perhaps not unforeseen was the rapid transformation of this social-political ‘insurgency’ into its own, new establishment, into whose academic and social machinery the ‘nihilists’ of postmodern critique and negation threw their rhetorical sabots. And yet, whether modernist or postmodernist has dominated the academy, racial orthodoxy has remained consistent, which speaks of a higher consensus, a deeper and unacknowledged synthesis, and an acceptance of certain ideological presuppositions and ends, as over against a relatively trivial quibble as to methods.   

  It must be said that pragmatism nearly always governs pogroms, even such as the racial pogrom we are examining, no matter the ideological fervor. The internment camps of Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union were models of pragmatic efficiency. IBM, exemplar of scientific management, supplied some of the first computers to Nazi Germany to track prisoners in its Konzentrationslager. I use these examples to point to the fact that it is far cheaper to control outward expression of taboo thought, to isolate it, to deprive it of life, than to undertake a full program of ideological determinism. It would take us too far afield to enumerate the examples of thought taboos, but most prominent among them is the proscription against discussion of the causes of social inequality that lie outside of authorized explanatory rubrics. Any that hint at inherent incapacity that unfits a member of society for certain aspects of full participation in Western industrial life are formally verboten, even while certain maverick researchers quietly add volumes of evidence to support such theories, and, most paradoxically, the Federal government itself funds research into population genetics. That is, the work of racialization of populations goes forward while the existence of that upon which it works is formally denied. Such rank hypocrisy is unremarkable, certainly, but serves to show the dual reality of racial thinking by members of the scientific and political communities. In Soviet Russia, the reader may recall that while the theory of genetic determinism was politically denounced, the very same figures quietly dictated that research be conducted into genetic methods for producing the ideal “socialist man.”  In contemporary times, the mere existence of genotypic populations among humans is also formally denied by the majority of scientific pedagogues and by nearly the entire state and national political establishment, while government funded research into racial genetics continues apace. To speak of a ‘human population’ as having more than notional, linguistic existence, used to point to artificial selection of membership, is to expose oneself to searching critique and eventual defamation. Of course, such a critique partakes of the fallacy of continuum, but we will not try the matter here at present. The field of research that examines the role that biology (and biological variation among different populations) plays in behavior—referred to by its practitioners as sociobiology—is one such verboten field of inquiry. Sociobiology is the Copernican Theory of modern sociology. It is the thought that cannot be thought, the notion that cannot be confessed. And still, the public archives are replete with information that points to energetic engagement with the realities of race and its implications for public policy and national security. Former Vice President #### Chainey, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other prominent neoconservative leaders, writing in the manifesto The New American Century make chillingly casual mention of the political use of race specific bio-weapons by some imagined enemy, and perhaps therefore betray their own consideration of such methods. But we need not wait for some future technological terror to see genocide at work in the designs of powerful futurists. Social and political technologies are themselves effective in limited areas, and function in a far more subtle fashion.
 
  In spite of this emphasis on cruder, but more cost-effective, methods of ideological control of racial expression in Europeans, mass industrial psychology also plays an important role in the apparatus of social conformity. While psychological methods have seen rapid advancement in recent decades, their gains are as yet unsure, and their cost relatively more prohibitive. But we should not mistake these problems for dead ends. Modern scientific research into methods of mass persuasion began as early as the turn of the 20th century, with great energy having been invested by a range of prominent figures, such as psychologist Edward Strong at Columbia. Public Relations pioneer Edward Bernays was later to translate the theories of Le Bon, Trotter, and Freud into public relations and propaganda practice. Bernays referred to his methods as the “engineering of consent,” a theme later taken up in the writings of liberal linguist Noam Chomsky. Speaking of the regimentation of mass man, Bernays writes in his groundbreaking book Propaganda,

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”

Bernays placed his new methods at the service of clients in both government and private industry, and figured prominently in the propaganda regime of President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information to influence public opinion in favor of entry into World War I, as well as during the Cold War in shaping public opinion against communism. Sitting with Bernays on this committee was the influential journalist Walter Lippman, whose view toward the necessity of a benevolent, enlightened despotism had a profound influence on him. Bernays is quite candid on the perceived necessity of propaganda and thought control in modern mass societies, and is worth quoting at length, again, from his Propaganda (emphasis mine),

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. 

Some of this is bravado, of course. Bernays is keen to emphasize the effectiveness of methods which were at the heart of his evolving tradecraft. He proceeds beyond the conventional limits of Plato’s critique of democracy to an insistence that such techniques are not only necessary, but also necessarily covert. This is a denial of democracy itself, disguised as the means of democracy’s salvation. It is an argument in favor of the shadows lurching across the walls of the cave of illusion. One is reminded poignantly of Strauss, whose Machiavellian pragmatism became the reigning ethos of neoconservative politics, which continues to exert powerful influence. Nor could such a philosophy of control be confined to the Platonists of the so-called Right. This enthusiasm for methods of mass psychological control by the technocratic elite cannot be dismissed as afflatus, if merely for the reason that important figures in government and industry believe in their effectiveness. This conclusion is not unsupported. It was the potency of Bernays’ campaign to convince U.S. citizens that the purpose of entry into World War I was the spread of democracy abroad which convinced him that a wider role for the fledgling science of propaganda (which he translates into the euphemism ‘public relations’) was possible. We are therefore naïve to believe that such devices of public influence were subsequently abandoned, or limited to generating public support for foreign wars or Ivory Soap. The shaping of public opinion touches most importantly, writes Bernays, on those areas needful for the functioning of planned human societies of vast scale. Racial attitudes have themselves been the subject of this ‘engineering of consent,’ and finally, consensus. It is not implausible that there exists a symmetry, even a kind of continuity, between the thought of the early Friedrich Nietzsche, Freud, and Bernays on the subject of the need for a kind of consciously cultivated public mythology in which citizens, seen as wards, are protected from the chaotic urges and denuded truths of the subconscious mind. It is impossible then that we should miss the connection between Bernays, Leo Strauss, and the later neoconservatives, themselves propitiating the jealous god of race denial, acting as conscious collaborators with the left in this area.

  In commerce, racial barriers to marketing have long been recognized as limiting, at particular times, the growth of markets. Marketing firms, pursuing a strategy adopted from the social sciences and referred to as ‘social norming’ or ‘social norms marketing,’ have sought where possible to undermine what are perceived to be racial stereotypes by calling them into question through irony and other devices, and by presenting support for interracial social integration as normative among one’s peers—this, in order to lower barriers to market entry, and to immunize corporations against criticism from opinion makers among racial minorities and their advocates. It will be worth our time to detour briefly into the thinking behind this technique, and its application to attitudinal normativity in racial matters. The premise that underlies social norming is deceptively simple: one tends to behave according to the perception of how one’s peers behave. Since journalism and marketing heavily influence the formation of opinions and attitudes about one’s peers, it is said, a corrective program must be undertaken to report ‘positive actualities.’ Seen most often in the context of ‘public health,’ social norming insists that reality is far better than is commonly portrayed in the media, and a return to ‘accurate’ reporting of peer behavior will result in the spread of positive peer reinforcement of healthy behaviors. It is not difficult to see the possible application to other behaviors than those which directly influence biological health, to reinforce specific psychological outcomes. Often enough, what is called the portrayal of actualities is rather more the portrayal of what is hoped for or wanted. We are told by social scientists that media portrayals of the behavior of college students, being largely negative, tends to reinforce negative behavior, and that such portrayals run counter to actuality. Bad new sells, it is said. But, as in other things, the devil is in the details. When one examines in detail what is counted as healthy behavior, one quickly sees the reality of the degeneracy and debauchery portrayed in the media. An article in the newspaper USA Today in 2002 cheerfully informs us that adolescent and young adult behavior is rather the opposite of what most of us think, and, as evidence, gives us a list of ‘unhealthy’ behaviors in which “most” children do not indulge, enlightening us, quite seriously, and in reverent tones, of the following:
“Nine out of every 10 college students have never damaged property because they were drunk or high.”

One is tempted to clap mockingly and shout “bravo children!” We perhaps detect a slight decline in expectations to arrive at such positive news. Social norming dictates that public communication on the issue of young adult behavior emphasize this overwhelmingly encouraging statistic. 90% do not damage property when drunk or high. On the other hand, we might justly point out that we may find the fact that 10% of student who do damage property when they are ‘in their cups’ is none too hopeful. We are further not informed of how much property damage is done by said children when (presumably) sober. Still further, we find it odd that our standard is set at the level of property damage, rather than at the imposition of nuisance, and risk. Our strict materialism deems we never pass moral judgment unless property has been damaged. The offense to sensibilities be damned. And another:

“Three out of four have never blown an exam or school project because of drugs or alcohol.”

This means that fully 25% not only have, but were willing to admit it to surveyors. For all these data are, of course, gathered from surveys.

  We need not further reproduce examples to underscore our point. Social norming has as much to do with the authorized interpretation of facts as with any dedication to accuracy in journalism or public communication. We have taken this detour into the implementation of social norming in a public health context to give the reader some notion of how it is implemented in the practice of molding public opinion on topics that affect the functioning of the ‘democratic’ industrial political economy of the U.S., the pretense of accuracy is effectively discarded. Reportage on crime is to exclude the racial profile of the perpetrator, such that the racial actualities of violent crime are hidden from public view, with the purpose of, by misdirection, portraying a more positive view of minority behavior to other minorities than is actual, and preventing members of the (as yet) racial majority from the ‘negative stereotyping’ that is thought to be the result of reporting violent crime transparently and accurately. Of course, members of the industrial media and other powerful institutions will invariably overestimate the degree of influence they have over the formation of public opinion in this area, where one’s personal experiences are often as important in the development of one’s view of racial equality than the methods employed by those who would promote an authorized view. It is a tacit recognition of this fact that personal experience, or what is derisively described as the ‘merely anecdotal’ is strictly inadmissible in permissible discussion of race. Yet when crime statistics are also marshaled to the defense of common sense, these are also forbidden. Such verboten evidence has been referred to by integralist and ethno-nationalist writers as “hate facts.” Indeed, no evidence whatsoever is permitted in the court of racial judgment, a juridical process that, as a result, is as prejudicial as that which it condemns. Increasingly, desirable social perspectives, along with their behavioral counterparts, are addressed under the heading of ‘public health,’ and within the special province of mental health. This diagnostic technique, this movement of the inner values and beliefs of men into the therapeutic context is a topic about which we will have much to say. 

  The principle of social norming is at work not only in marketing, but in journalism and other areas of social influence where the publicizing of the desired behavior as normative (an actualized “ought” value) tends to reinforce the desired behavior. For marketing firms, creating desirable normativity and reinforcing existing normativity are interrelated activities. Through linguistic connections between ideas, often multiple values can be targeted by the same tactic. If a psychological trait of a coveted demographic can be manipulated to commercial benefit, then a company is also benefited when it influences the formation of values that it can later manipulate, more especially when these values lower the cost of obtaining customers or new markets. This is to say that markets are created as well as manipulated. In industry parlance, this is called ‘creating need.’ But in the more advanced methods in contemporary use, the need that is being created is the need to form identity, to perceive oneself as fitting the pattern of life exhibited not by ones actual peers, but by one’s desired peers. This technique puts social idealization to use in identity formation, a process which is continuous and occurs throughout the entire lifespan useful to marketers. The drive to gain entry into the circle of desired peers functions by direct access to deep unconscious human drives and aspirations. This is the quite visible linkage between the aspirational persona and guilt. Indeed, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that today the product that is being sold is identity itself, with the corporation or brand simply associating itself with this identity as a means for its realization in the “consumer’s” life. This view is perhaps borne out by recent techniques in advertising where the product has disappeared almost entirely from the advertising content, and even the brand itself is the merest of suggestions. This brand minimalism combined with indelible idealized identity is the technique behind some of the most iconic campaigns of recent decades, by companies as diverse as Benetton and Apple. Both are selling identities which envision and participate in the manifestation of a post-racial future.

  Identity formation is the psychological locus where social norming of racial attitudes is most effectively targeted in Europeans. In contrast to media portrayals, common observation tells us that racial social integration is rather less normative in reality among certain demographics, which leads the intelligent observer to question whether marketing firms are following market trends or setting them. Manipulation of guilt formation among Europeans is a proven approach. Thus, for the marketer, ‘is’ (actual behavior) becomes ‘ought’ (normative behavior), if ‘ought’ can be made effective in influencing desired consumer behavior. If indeed racial identity and insularity factor into difficult marketing or publicity barriers for firms, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that the goal of undermining and eliminating those barriers is an objective of their marketing efforts. This is reflective of a general tendency in contemporary thought, across a broad spectrum of leaders in various spheres of activity, which is that even though race may in actuality exist, it must not be permitted to exist in any real sense, much less be acknowledged to exist among a significant plurality of Europeans. That is, in the world that the future will bring, race must not exist for the European. There are powerful political and economic incentives for the emergence of such goals. Both industrial concerns and Western governments have allied themselves publicly with this vision of a deracinated future—a future that marketing has helped to create as much as it has reflected its concurrent creation.
 
  It remains to be said that, for various reasons, racial messaging varies by target demographic. Where the target demographic is largely ethnic minority, racial insularity and exclusivity is very often emphasized. If one lives in a predominately black marketing region, often whites actors or spokesmen will not appear alongside blacks in advertisements. The opposite is often the case where the advertisement targets Europeans. This variance in method is at once both simple and powerful, while defying more simplistic “divide and conquer” theories of commercial or political expediency. This duality of marketing approach is reflected in the co-operation of hyper-segmentation of markets alongside cross-cultural messaging, and shows that the desire of marketers and social engineers is that European peer identification form across conventional ethnic boundaries, whereas minority peer identification form within the desired micro-segment. This approach of course enters into disputed territory where the question remains whether marketers help to create the social reality they exploit, and it is our contention that such is the case, through the targeting of psychological potentialities, inchoate psycho-social lines of force, rather than fully self-conscious desires, most especially in younger, more socially mobile demographics. This approach has been carried out for decades. 

  Minority ethnic populations are less politically or economically useful as fragmented sub-populations unless they can be correlated with broader movement. It does not benefit a political public relations campaign to isolate and target a demographic that will undermine or negate its efforts among other demographics unless it can achieve all of its goals on the basis of the isolated demographic.  In such instances, which are the vast majority of cases where mass appeal is desired, the divide and conquer strategy must also make use of a broader message of unification around “higher ideals” in order to gain the necessary leverage in other demographics. Marketing and public relations effectiveness is inversely proportional to the number of distinct populations, and therefore distinct messages, which tend to raise the cost of campaigns, which are incurred in the development of messaging, rather than strictly in exposure, which can avail itself of economies of scale in promulgation. In fractional marketing, the levers which affect the behavior of smaller and smaller populations become more and more obscure, their targeting more tenuous. It is largely for this reason—that is, so that they might be brought to bear en masse—that the ethnic solidarity and insularity of minority populations is rather emphasized than de-emphasized, more especially since the cosmopolitan attitudes that obtain among the more educated and wealthy Europeans are in the main irrelevant for all but a tiny fragment of their number.

  A brief survey of advertising and public relations content shows this to be the case, where disproportionate appearances by minority actors is the rule rather than the exception. This approach is used to reinforce the perception of the audience that social identification and peer group formation ought to cross racial boundaries, and rather follow socio-economic status, or even in some cases political affiliation, where demographic groups stratify along the price-demand curve, and so serve to optimize revenue. Among wealthier and more highly ‘educated’ Americans, the sense of belonging to a racially inclusive peer group is a powerful motivator, freighted as they are with a legacy of perceived culpability in racial injustice, particularly in the age groups that have been exposed to integrationist propaganda during the belief-forming period of their lives. We have written at some length on the uses of social norming theory in the imposition of desired racial attitudes. It must be noted that many social scientists place the theory of social norming as over against that of market norming, and many—it is impossible to know what proportion—suppose that there is a not merely a notional distinction, but an actual conflict between the two approaches. But when marketing science makes increasing use of sophisticated research on identity and peer group formation, we think it reasonable to suggest that market norming and social norming have now become one unified approach in the actual practice of modern public relations. That is, normative behavior in the market is influenced by, and often governed by, emergent social norms concerning race and other oughts of the social sphere.

  Such efforts to shape public opinion as Bernays describes are by no means confined to the past. The current scene is rife with activity in the field, with serious research being conducted in cognitive and so-called ‘consumer’ psychology, apace with strengthening external regimes, toward lowering the threshold of mass psychological control. Commercial research into such areas as attitude and identity formation, carried over into other spheres, holds out to technocrats the promise of a society where social dissent, and the consequent economic cost, is greatly minimized. Even where so-called ‘disruptive’ currents in commerce are sought as a function of market generation, the desired end of these is that they become mass phenomena. Such impatience with the limited scale of niche markets is merely a function of scientific management practice (or so-called Taylorism), whose ethos of optimization and increase is inseparable from its methods, which have now become commonplace in fields as seemingly unrelated as entertainment and government policy, where the latter is increasingly the subject of close methodological study. The public may be unaware of it, but a relentless campaign to gain public approval of predetermined policy objectives is being constantly carried out with public funds. It is no longer thought that government policy should reflect the desires of majority of the public, or even the more limited group of a particular ‘constituency,’ but rather it is generally accepted that the public is to be converted to acceptance and even enthusiasm for the predetermined policy. Thus the conscientious psycho-marketer, technocrat, or ideology worker will always pursue both inner and outer methods, psychological and sociological remedies for undesirable expression: ranging from economic pressures to public opprobrium, to be implemented in a variety of settings, from school to church and workplace. Such undesirable expression is now treated not as a matter of political rights, but as a public health concern. Often the limitations imposed by actual conditions will dictate that incomplete, or indirect, methods are used in the eradication of socially ‘undesirable’ opinion. At times these methods will even be unconscious, unintentional. Where present methods of control tend in the main to curb the outward expression of impermissible beliefs after they have been formed, future methods will seek to prevent verboten belief-formation, and further, belief formation itself, with such a practice being devoted primarily to the application of more advanced methods during childhood education, through its conduits of peer-graduated primary and secondary school, and the electronic media to which they are increasingly exposed, with its Benthamite panopticon of ‘entertainment,’ which is simply the camouflage that disguises the mechanisms that observe and tabulate their behavior for future exploitation.

All our modern prurience is nothing but the desperate inventiveness of a ‘civilization’ which finds itself exhausted before its prize, with nothing forbidden, nothing sacred, and no taboo remaining to transgress. As a matter of course, this necessitates the invention of new taboos, new sins, such as ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia,’ which were never before sins, in order to preserve our delectation of transgression. We now maintain our admiration for the coquette only long enough that the whore might still elicit some mild surprise. Were a novel and self-conscious fertility cult to arise, we would derogate our “Lydian Women” to the status of mere harlots, lest something of any earnestness, much less sacredness, be thought in connection to bodies. 

After all the furor of the intelligentsia had finally expired, this concupiscence turned out to be not the glorious liberty of the ‘transvaluation of all values’ leading to a truer mythology grounded in the terrible grandeur of power, but only the prison of banality. The wages of perpetual transgression was merely impotence, and that not only of the body. This is the lesson of Demian, the progenitor of the high fashion of nihilism, who, in spite of ‘hard truth,’ trudged off to a drearily ‘bourgeois’ war.  If belief is a form of spiritual potency, then the politics of mere power has sapped the manhood of the West. And if the phoenix of China is taken as our example of that which is manifestly not-West, and said thereby to retain a vestige of its ancient (and unquestioned) virility, perhaps we have prematurely concluded in favor of man’s present existence on Ge, our temporal abode. Perhaps, after all, there are no more men.

If man is “incurably homo religiosus,” then the dissociation of political life from religious life in function is obtained only by coercion or psychological manipulation, of a more or less purposeful, even formal variety. If by manipulation, the thing is accomplished through social technique which seeks first to establish conditions by which men can be made somewhat more plastic than they are in the ordinary course of life; second, it tries to accelerate the pace of social change in the modes of life, as made possible by technical development, and in the third place, to use this newly obtained plasticity to alter the religious constitution of man qua man—or more simply, man must be made infra-human, or non-human, in part. He must be sunk to marine depths, where it is hoped that he shall emerge with frightening new form and powers, brought on by adaptation to inhuman (or ‘transhuman,’ as it were) milieux. He is to become a monster of the lightless and chthonic depths, and his ascent sees his nature shed, an exoskeleton. When he surfaces at last, he is caught up in the nets of faction; he is Criticus: beguiled by his own false and falsifying innocence because he has been purged of his ideological error, liberated to the unalloyed political will. Accordingly, new man must first be purged of the fatal conceit that there was ever any such thing as ‘man,’ and then taught that the destruction of man, being the destruction of a delusion, is wholly salutary. In all this we see a consistent viewpoint emergent: the treatment of man as a plastic entity is not for the purpose of developing within him a new and better nature, such that he functions perfectly in the ‘enlightened’ society. Rather the objective of such treatment is to break man entirely, such that in this broken state, he is unable to recognize his brokenness, his inner poverty, his hopelessness; it is to disintegrate him, and to make use of the various elements, the fractured and instincts and responses that are mere components of the fully human personality.

The infantilization of man—the negation or removal of psychic continence, the self-integrating and manly discipline of thought and feeling—we presently witness in such profusion and immediate detail in our daily lives is but one station in the descent to bestiality. This is the end of population management by technocracy, and the evidence that it is at work in our civilization is present in all the facets of life, from public education to industry. In education it is referred to as ‘socialization,’ whereas in industry it is referred to as ‘human resources management.’ In the movement toward ‘depoliticization,’ or the confinement of politics to its proper and traditional boundaries, there are two antipodes, that of liberty and that of the total control born of technocratic management. At the last, technocratic power must dispense with genuine politics, all while maintaining the pretense that a political order exists and continues to function distinct from economic modalities. Increasingly, like its twin communism, capitalism sees all aspects of life as rightly subject to critique. In the capitalist system, this is referred to as scientific management, and the form of its critique is called ‘productivity;’ it is management not merely of the corporation, but of society itself, as its techniques penetrate all of life. Wherever it reaches, the less productive must be supplanted by what is more productive, to which process there is presumably no fixed terminus. And yet, like the technique of democracy itself, I am now reminded by a passage of Ortega, productivity is not an end, cannot be an end. The greater question of what we shall do with the process of management, what is worthy of doing, that is not a question which Capital or Party can answer. That is, they cannot not address the ends for which politics exists. It is therefore ideology which is always brought to bear in times of thorough politicization, for ideology supplies ends without reference to the transcendent Order. Its ends are human ends, if there are humans to form them, and subhuman if there are none. In this arrangement, that which cannot be imposed by economic means is left to government. And the imposition of ideology pierces even economy, and enthralls it to political goals. In the communist system, of course, politics is similarly the tool of pure power to wield government against enemy classes, and thus is also forced by the nature of power, which must disguise itself, to undergo the cosmetic arts of rhetoric. Thus Capital is always “freedom” or sometimes ‘virility,’ and Party is always ‘love’ or ‘virtue’ in name. 

To the extent that the nature of man is fixed in respect of its potentialities—if we fools may hazard that such a thing as man (yet) exists, and is not on the one hand ‘delusion,’ or on the other ‘reification,’ such as ‘society’ or ‘race’ are said to be—plenary law, or the effort to extend the reach of civil law into every corner of life, is the resort of those factions whose aim it is to bifurcate man, such that the separation of religious and political-social consciousness might be accomplished. Perhaps bifurcation is a euphemism, where there term fragmentation might be a more felicitous expression. Where subtlety fails in this endeavor, more primitive means are ever close at hand. There are many means of breaking men. There is internment, isolation, torture. There is also the slow degradation brought on by the absence of truth, or hope. Is there a distinction? The author thinks not. The Apostle writes that reason seeks to answer for hope. Reason and hope are conjoined. Pessimism must only abide for a season. But perhaps it is our season, who cannot see the end, only the hope of the end.

For disintegrated man to be of use to scientific management and to be well fitted to the social ends it borrows from ideology, him whom we call ‘man’ must either be a clever facsimile, in an environment in which humanity still otherwise exists, or he must be bestial in an environment in which bestiality is the dominant modality of existence. In the former case the methods of influence or outright control are subtle, in the latter they are clumsy and often grotesque, but similarly effective. Though readily effective, the potency of visibly forcible measures are (and must be) short lived because these inspire a predictable recalcitrance or they damage the ‘resource’ beyond usefulness. Thus we see the late ubiquity of psycho-suggestive techniques that obviate and supplant juridical-legal approaches subject to political counteraction. These are often as not couched in ironic or ‘transgressive’ interpretive terms, by which long-acknowledged perspectives on civil government are subverted, by which inherited values are put to shame, or where the pure social will of elites is effected under so called “color of law.”  Finally, I am suggesting here that there is (within the planning of the economic-political elite) an optimal point between the utter destruction of man (as in the Nazi konzentrationslager or Soviet lagerya) and the unmanaged state which threatens technocracy.[1]

In the old Indo-Aryan cosmology, this expropriation of the territory of the spiritual that I have just been speaking of is figured in the struggle between the royal and the sacerdotal powers—a conflict which can only arise as a result of a kind of amnesia concerning the source of its authority on the part of the royal power, which, ab initio, was willingly subject to the spiritual authority. This is a mark of modernity, that the royal administration acts under its own authority (even where it maintains the pretense of acting as a delegate), and has absorbed into itself the juridical power of the magistracy. This is not the mixed government of the classical res publica. A correspondence in the Israelite annals is readily to be located in the rejection of a temporal king by God, and in the often adversarial relation between prophet and king. Examples are replete, extending to the reaches of recorded history. The original sphere of political action, then, lay in administration, the interpretation of spiritual precepts into the politics of social organization. In the spiritual society, the historical-political criteria of reference were always secondary.

In the Christian era, the rebellion of the royal power was already well advanced by the 13th century, though its manifestation in the outward subordination of spiritual authority took a number of decades to mature into full politicization of being by the relative weakness royal estates, such was the great inertia of the high spiritual culture that had developed in the West. But further, the usurpation of royal administration by the religious agency set the stage for compensatory reversals which have far outstripped the original (and quite real) offenses of the church, and resulted in a broad social ‘secularization’ unknown in the pre-modern world, where by secularization we intend to indicate the promulgation of humanism under the guise of an unreligious civil administration. The maturity of the Enlightenment polis in its insurgency against the royal prerogatives of the ancien regime is the purest possible historical expression of this logic of political devolution. Though ‘corrective’ in a limited and narrow sense, it cannot stand as a paragon to us for the simple reason that no society can function upon a purely material basis for any great length of time. Though the attempt was made to place religious expression on an immanent and fully human footing, the absence of genuine spiritual transcendence portended the transience and final failure of such comical schemes as detailed by Aulard, which Tocqueville saw as largely ineffectual. In this view of the process of materialization, Authority, mistaken for power, devolves first upon the royal house, and finally completes its descent in the rule of popular faction, on the basis of almost wholly material principles—with the latter manifestation being invariably a masque of plutocracy, accomplished through the techniques I have mentioned. In contemporary times, the politicization of abstract social goals advanced by such factions has resulted in an almost wholly material expression. For example, the shibboleth of ‘equality,’ whose pronouncement identifies members of so-called progressive factions, is invariably defined as some species of equality of material outcome. The immateriality inherent in the principle of equality before the law is discarded, as is all immateriality.

The falsification of spiritual authority by the now fully ‘secularized’ political power is an act of unselfconscious restoration of the simulacrum of the vertical axis mundi, the communication between the temporal and extra-temporal orders, an attempt to restore faith in the legitimacy of a power whose actual reach is solely on the horizontal axis of existence. I am speaking now analogously in the spatial-directional terms of mythology. By way of historical examples, this falsification is ordinarily an initial act of the fascist state, wherein it apotheosizes itself as the political incarnation of the herrenvolk. This is to be sharply distinguished from the idea of the volkstaat, which involves neither the cult of personality, nor the act of apotheosis necessary for the development of the fascist incarnational state. Here we anticipate the argument of the alienist in his fanaticism for a rationalistic basis of life, wherein both spiritual transcendence and human particularities are denied in the thrust toward abstraction and commodification. By transcendence we mean simply appeal to God as the source of being, whose word is constitutive of law. Commodification ends in a body which is featureless, lacking that haecceity by which it can be fitted into a genus, a relation to its aboriginal kind—a process about which we’ll have much to say at length. That is, it is claimed to be an ousia, to which all essential attributes are to be designated and assigned by the state, as befits its needs, capitulating as it does all that is ‘human.’ As the persona is fitted to wholly material ends through the agency of politics, so the body is denatured, stripped of its inherited psychological and familial framework, to be viewed as nothing more than an amalgam of processes that serve no end other than the facilitation of political existence, which itself serves the ends of technocracy, its so-called ‘rational’ teleological ethos.

[1] It remains to be said that the Nazi and Soviet methods of sterilization by internment were developments upon a model employed by the British in the Boer Wars.

Next: Politicization and Sexual Being

”It is then, the false and unreverent writing or speaking of malicious men against your Parents and Predecessors: ye know the command in God’s law, Honor your Father and Mother: and consequently, seen ye are the lawful magistrate, suffer not both your Princes and your Parents to be dishonored by any; especially, sith the example also toucheth yourself, in leaving thereby your successors, he measure of that which they shall meet out gain to you in your like behalf. I grant we have all our faults, which, privately betwixt you and God, should serve you for examples to meditate upon, and mend in your person; but should not be a matter of discourse to others whatsoever. And sith ye are come of as honorable Predecessors as any Prince living, repress the insolence of such, as under pretence to tax a vice in the person, seek craftily to stain the race, and to steal the affection the people from their posterity: For how can they love yo, that hated them whom of ye are come? Wherefore destroy men innocent young sucking Wolves and foxes, but for the hatred they bear to their race? and why will a coult of a Courser of Naples, give a greater price in a market, then an ###-colt, but for love of the race? It is therefore a thing montrous, to see a man love the child, and hate the Parents: as on the other part, the infaming and making odious of the parents, is the readiest way to bring the son in contempt. And for conclusion of this point, I may also allege my own experience: For besides the judgments of God, that with my eyes I have seen fall upon all them that were chief traitors to my parents, I may justly affirm, I never found yet a constant biding by me in all my straits, by any that were of perfect age in my parent days, but only by such as constantly bode by them; I mean specially by them that served the Queen my mother: for so that I discharge my conscience to you, my Son, in revealing to you the truth, I care not, what any traitor or treason-allower think of it” p. 21

Thinking in terms of “parents and predecessors” is not an easy task for modern Americans, but James’ wisdom contravenes today’s political correctness that usually depreciates obligations to family, “For how can they love you, that hated them whom of ye are come?”. Much of the Basilikon is devoted to attacks on democratic forces which James, in broad brush terms, considers Anabaptist and Puritan. Eventually “treason-allowers” would overrun the Stuart throne, perhaps starting with the democratic leveling of the church by puritan-congregationalists, followed by the self-summons of parliament, and finally culminating in the murder of king Charles and archbishop Laud. Republicanism and the democratic impulse hardly vanished after the Restoration. What meanwhile girded the monarchy’s supremacy-in- the-church was not political expediency. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I & VI, and, to some extent, even the later George III were strong sovereigns. Rather, stability was secured by those divine blessings joined through the Godly honor of parents, “that thy days may be long in the land the Lord thy God giveth thee”.

“Neither deceive yourself with many that say, they care not for their Parents curse, so they deserve it not. O invert not the order of nature, by judging your superiors, chiefly in your own particular! But assure yourself, the blessing or curse of the Parents, hath almost ever a Prophetic power joined to it: and if there were no more, honor your Parents, for the lengthning of your own days, as God in his Law promiseth. Honor also them that are in loco Parentum unto you, such as your governors, upbringers, and praeceptors” p. 41

There is little that better sums the course of the cultural politics for the twentieth century, especially as it concerns the ever-expanding “civil rights” movement, than the “inversion of the natural order”. However, when England inverted family-based government, the King was the first causality. James provides several reasons for the superiority of the monarchist system, but foremost is Monarchy’s conformity to divine pattern, followed by an evolutionary custom, and finally the law of nature. James describes monarchy as that “form of government, as resembling divinity, approacheth nearest to perfection” p. 53. The divine aspect should be self-evident given Christ the Son and God the Father are both Almighty Kings. James makes a further case by speaking of tradition or fundamental law, and this is where a discussion on Providence determining the laws and habits of various tribes begins. James points back to King Fergus for the principle of overlordship in Scotland. Thirdly, by Nature James meant, “through the Law of Nature the King becomes a natural Father to all his Lieges at his Coronation: And as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for the nourishing, education, and virtuous government of his children; even so is the king bound to care for all his subjects” p. 55. Also, “The King towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children, and to a head of a body composed of divers members: For as fathers, the good Princes, and Magistrates of the people of God acknowledged themselves to their subjects. And for all other well ruled common-wealths, the style of Pater patriae was ever, and is commonly used to Kings” p. 64.  Of course, this is the patriarchal form. 

However, all three characteristics went out the door with the permanent summons of a universally enfranchised parliament, the repeal of religious test acts, and unlimited session of legislation came to fore. John Keble warned the danger of atheists, dissenters, jews, and muslims gaining footholds in representative government, thus having say over the established church while instituting laws that eroded the three legs of Kingship and like patterns in the society. As the trend developed, something of God’s judgement could be seen upon England’s country as Keble’s prediction proved correct. 

The remainder of the Basilikon provides insight into proper civility. For the choice of right youths invited to court, James warns Henry the danger of selecting boys from households well-acquainted with wickedness, infusing not only the mind but eventually the flesh, aka. household curses. This sounds like a derivative of Augustine’s original sin, or how actual sin harms both body and soul. We pray for body and soul, and holy communion is assumed by Anglicans to feed and restore both. Anyway, James’ admonition probably lends commentary to the idea of hardened wickedness in the course of providence,

“In fide parentum, as Baptism is used: For though anima non venit ex traduce, but it immediately created by God, and infused from above; yet it is most certain, that to the posterity, and run on a blood (as the Proverb is) the sickness of the mind becoming as kindly to some races, as these sickness of the body, that infect in the seed: Especially choose such minors are come of a true and honest race, and have not had the house whereof they are descended, infected with falsehood.” p. 31

James extends the same advice regarding Pages to the choice of wives. Here, the reciprocal nature of the fifth commandment arises, namely, the thought of posterity in marriage as well as a notion that virtue extends to race or body rather than something entirely spiritual,

“And lastly, remember to choose your wife as I advised you to choose your servants: that she be of a whole and clean race, not subject to the heredity sickness, either of the soul or the body: For if a man will be careful to breed horses and dogs of good kinds, how much more careful should he be, for the breed of his own loins? So shall you in your marriage have respect to your conscience, honor, and natural weal in your successors” p. 36

More can be read about fifth commandment injunctions as taught by old Anglican divinity here. 

Quotes are from:
McIlwain, Charles Howard. The Political Works of James I Harvard (1918)

Charles is the author of Anglican Rose, a web blog where Continuing Episcopal worship and polity are explored. He would like to dialogue with any kinist interested in historical Anglicanism and original Protestantism. Charles currently lives and works in Northern California.

This inversion of the definition of special privilege amounts to the use of sophistical method in the development of a rhetoric of race, which white liberals employ in order to undermine the social and intellectual legitimacy of any of their peers in whom racial thinking might be manifest. More directly, those who use such inversions in rhetoric are sophists, like ancient Thrasymachus.  In this connection, the term “white privilege” is deployed in much the same manner as once was “the Jewish question.” Its use is itself an act of critique, the presentment of an aporia for solution. It is a “probematization” of a state of nature, since the question is never one such as,  “is there such a thing as ‘white privilege, is it harmful, and, if so, to whom?” Instead, it is an imperative statement of the form, “something must be done about white privilege.” It assumes what it has to prove, petitio principii. The salient question is rather, what, if any, difference exists between the ethical status of “white privilege” and the privilege exercised by other majority peoples throughout history who have obtained socio-economic, and therefore political, dominance? A related question is, why is black racial consciousness, presumably encouraged for the sake of opposing that of whites, of a different order and essence than that which it combats? It is readily observed that black racism must be treated differently by the liberal than white. As we will see, it must be granted the status of a therapeutic in order to privilege it, that is, to exempt it from the logic it employs in its own critique of white privilege. Among black intellectuals, Thomas Sowell (almost solely) is to be credited with the repudiation of this sort of sophistry. The motives of liberals in this subversion and inversion of nature and history are many and complex, no doubt, but all, at some level, seem to involve the notion of “social justice,” which I would like to talk about for a moment.

Examining the linguistic construction “social justice” one detects the presence of something like a sleight of hand. The posterior term is conditioned by the anterior: it is a peculiar form of justice which is indicated. In fact, in usage the metonym “social justice” does not refer to impartial and objective criteria of justice. It cannot make any such reference if it is to function as a fillip of the special rights by which an oppressed minority social class intends to obtain redress. By its very definition, social justice is not justice (either by the standard of equal treatment before the law, or by some objective moral criteria that we presume would be equally applied). Instead it is is only “justice” for some, and the class for whom social justice is justice proper is precisely that class which claims that it is just. That is, it is a self-authorizing identification that does not require the consent of other populations. Thus, social justice does not refer to transcendent values at all, but is rather a cipher that stands in discourse for the power emanations of a self-identified social class, or the very in-group determination that is denied legitimacy for whites. For this reason—and owing to the fact that it is consciously utilized in this way by minority intellectuals and their enablers in the European auto de fé on racial privilege—the term must be treated as a pure inversion, a potent example of Platonic irony, and an inquisitorial device.

The academic justification for the implementation of social justice, over against mere justice, is this: the institutions of the United States are not conceived to be the possession or birthright of a people, but are somehow the result of wholly impersonal forces which shaped the country (the term “nation” cannot be applied in this connection). From this perspective the culture of the country is merely an historical happenstance to which any and all may apply for domination and control. In his manifesto of white racial consciousness, The Dispossessed Majority, Wilmot Robertson put it this way,

“The most truly disadvantaged are those [...] who stubbornly go on believing that a set of highly sophisticated institutions developed by and for a particular people at a particular point in time and space is operational for all peoples under all circumstances.”

We may add further to the point by saying that such men, it seems, insist that these institutions be made serviceable to all, in spite of their irreconcilability to them, and that Archimedes’ lever be used to accomplish the feat. That is, no exertion is too great, no public policy too sacrificial of the interests of the (still) majority, the historical settler people of North America, and the builders of its unique civilization. Serviceability to the minority not sufficing, it is also to be declared their own inheritance, their property. As though they were genuine heirs themselves of the world their fathers didn’t create—heirs not by the edict of those creators of the European world, but by a latter day judicial fiat. By this means, the “posterity” to whom the blessings of constitutional liberty belong is an indefinite host comprised of those who are willing to expropriate it from its heirs. A fellow author refers to this horde as “neo-americans.”  It were as though the culture and institutions of North America had been deposited intact on the continent by foreign gods, or extraterrestrials. In order to arrive at this conception of culture as a-historical object, as the universal possession, mentioned previously, history must be detached from culture and institutions, déraciner. Such a procedure is highly problematic, in that it assumes that institutions are not historical, that they do not attach to a peculiar people—and further insists that any person, regardless of social heritage, is a fit participant in, and more, a caretaker of, such institutions. Events put the lie to such an assumption, when the institution of the courts, and the laws they promulgate, are already under irrational and self-contradictory pressures in order to address supposed inequality. To gain its prize, minority racial politics must destroy the integrity of the institutions it claims it is fit to defend. In this method, culture must be cleansed of its ethnic sources—or, rather, certain ethnic claims on historical precedence must be denied, while others must be advanced, on the basis of the in-group determination we have just examined. Allowed to be completed, this course of action would end in nothing short of the destruction of culture itself, and its replacement by the ersatz unities of a purely economic existence. Such we have seen come to partial fruition in our own time. 

Control, and not equality, is of course the positive objective of social justice, since it is the sole means by which such false justice may be obtained. Were it justice proper being sought, coercive methods in its attainment would be superfluous. The logic is stark in its irrationality: only thieves oppose laws against thievery, hence only racists oppose laws to correct the effects of racism, therefore their opposition is mooted by moral necessity. Presumably, there is no limit to the moral necessity which demands satisfaction; it is merely a matter of determining the identity of the plaintiff in the case at law against the world itself. Used in this way, the definition of racism appropriated by minority interests can make no moral reference, or it functions to undermine the very logic of redress. Another way of saying this is that the very criteria used to determine membership in the group that is the beneficiary of social justice are themselves “racist,” in that they use external, biological attributes. It will be seen that the functional definition of racism is pragmatic rather than moral: a racist is whomever opposes the aims of the minority, whatever they may be, as articulated by its self-appointed rhetors. The question that must be asked is, who determines this moral necessity that moots the wishes of the majority? My tentative answer is that who determines this necessity is a matter of actual control, that is, positive law, and not a moral question at all in its present application.

There is a hidden implication of this logic that reveals itself on examination: to refer to a form of justice, unsupported by reasoned argument, which is not recognized as such by a majority or significant plurality is to imply that this population is non compos mentis. That it does not know what is right by the use of its own faculties. It is to imply that there exists a psychological malady unknown to them which prevents the apprehension of what is really just. Reference to the diseased state of the subject who is to be coerced is, of course, implicit in the manner in which racial politics is lately conducted. Racism must be classed as a disease or it becomes merely another idea advanced by yet another interest group. The confinement of “racism” within the diagnostic space privileges it within the wider social therapeutic, and gives its cure the approbation of “medicine,” and more generally, that of “science,” that unassailable procedure which has the object of curing the superstitions of others. White liberals have read their Foucault, and have appropriated the consciousness he “problematized.” This is where the postmodern therapeutic of equality becomes what it claims it opposes, an architecture of mere force, whose justification is said to proceed from Reason.

The cultural Marxism that decries “privilege” advances by the rhetoric of moral presumption and bombast, and such rhetoric is used to assert, in the face of contrary evidence, that there is consensus on a matter about which there is no consensus. It is a baldly counter-factual claim that degrades and poisons those who accept it on its face as truth, by virtue of the unassailable privilege in discourse of those that proffer it. That is, it is a privileged rationality that attacks white privilege. It is used to avoid rather than to foster investigation of moral value, and is of the same substance as the ever-present testaments to the vox populi by the propagandists of totalitarian regimes, who wish to gain false propriety by lies concerning popularity. It is a means of disguising the fact that legitimacy has been in fact abandoned as an objective, it hides the bludgeon beneath the judge’s robes. It is indeed a paradox that minorities would avail themselves of justice (here meaning only dominion) by means of privilege, a position which justice itself demands they subsequently divest themselves. The point is hardly worth argument. Or is it to be supposed, alternatively, that white self-divestiture is to be the final step in a social evolution where utopia consists in the relegation of whites to a position of abject socio-economic subjugation -a permanent reversal of fortune? And is it a measure of our development as a race that we would accept such a position with equanimity, even where we are empowered by God (through nature) to effect a different end? I confess that I have yet to see an intellectually satisfying defense of the means by which inequality will lead to equality by some series of recognizable steps. Such a claim is an open sartorial fiction.

And let us be frank, special exceptions proving the rule, no people who once gain control do so in order to voluntarily relinquish it, once some specific social value for which dominance was obtained is achieved. Such behavior is unexampled in the human annals, aside from Christian charity, or its perversion, since none will expend such effort only to bestow its rewards arbitrarily as a matter of moral “necessity.”  Rather, in the ordinary course of things, “privilege” is obtained by the mere fact of dominance, and not as a collective, self-conscious program of oppression. There are many ways in which dominance is obtained. Socio-economic and political dominance in a people’s native land is of the course of nature. And it is to be relinquished to a foreign minority by virtue of the bad conscience of the few imposed involuntarily on behalf of the many? Certainly not. And this end could not be accomplished but by the energetic support of an elite that is intransigently anti-democratic. Under ordinary circumstances, loyalty to a foreign population or government by a native is considered treason. But treason is the means by which the fact of native social dominance is called into question. 

It is a liberal conceit to intentionally confuse what is a mere fact of history with acts which confer collective culpability. It is only by a self-contradictory edict of genetic guilt that whites are burdened with culpability for past inequality. Such a legal device is further un-Christian. Deuteronomy 24:16 forbids the inheritance of guilt. That sins may be visited on offspring is a matter of sin’s effects, and is not a juridical principle. Even today, the law respecting voting rights is different for states which have “an historic pattern of discrimination.” This is guilt inheritance, and it is special privilege. Further, the theonomist notes, it is a violation of Leviticus 24:22, where we care to insist that our laws reflect a Christian heritage, or anything more historical than mere convenience or power. That is, where we care to have any law other than positive law. In this process we glimpse the unacknowledged reliance that secular-political schemes of social justice have on the poisoning of the Christian conscience. Indeed, such reasoning cannot logically proceed by a sociobiological rationale, which tends to obscure not merely the question of why the summum bonum is what is claimed, but for whom it is a summum bonum in the first place. In such a scheme, humanitas is subordinate, and group preference cannot be displaced. Thus by sociobiological arguments it is impossible to argue that group dominance is “unfair.” By such reasoning native dominance is simply a fact, not a subject of moral critique. It is only by virtue of the capture and torture of the Christian conscience, that all that attaches to white ethnicity must be aggressively rooted up, while the chauvinism of its accusers is left to flourish. Without white Western legal traditions stemming from Roman law, and the Christianized common law, such arguments buttressed by the idea of fairness are quickly seen to be ridiculous.

In contemporary politics, the same opprobrium toward in-group thinking that white liberals display is not applied to blacks, whose preference for Barack Obama is simply because he’s perceived to be black. It is obvious that, since Obama is bi-racial, the emphasis of the President’s hyperdescent is evidence enough that his “blackness” is a consciously selected attribute by his supporters. Obama’s white mother is known to have been disappointed in his cultivation of specifically black bona fides, which give the lie to liberal claims that their position abandons the entrenchments of specifically racial politics -a ruse which seems perpetually present in the electoral politics of the left. We may only conjecture that perhaps she herself suffered the psychological pangs of the treason he committed: to use the historical institutions of the West to attack its native peoples. When white liberals decry racism per se, rather than specifically white racism, then we’ll have the first evidence that they are serious enough about the question of race as an intellectual proposition to at least bother with logical consistency. But as long as black racism (and the interracial crime it so amply underwrites) is formally denied existence along with the historico-ethnic sources of American culture and institutions, the outcry against “privilege” is hardly worthy of intellectual attention. It remains to be recognized, however, that such absurdities have genuine power to persuade, by means of emotive sympathy and the unassailable infra-rational instincts that are turned to this purpose. Meantime, the tools for dispelling such absurdities are, in the long run, not primarily political.

“The Glory theophany, in which God was present as Logos-Wisdom and Spirit-Power (Gen. 1.2), stood as archetype at the creation of man as God’s image. As Genesis 2.7 pictures it, the Spirit-archetype actively fathered his human ectype. Image of God and the son of God are thus twin concepts. This reading of that event in terms of a father-son model and the coneptual bond of the image and son ideas are put beyond bout by the record of the birth of Seth in Genesis 5:1-3. There, a restatement of Adam’s creation in the likeness of God is juxtaposed to a statement that Adam begat a son in his own likeness. Unmistakably, the father-son relationship of Adam and Seth is presented as a proper analogue for understanding the Creator-man relationship and clearly man’s likeness to the Creator-Spirit is thus identified as the likeness of a son derived from his father (p.23).”

In the footnote found at the bottom of the page further expounds Kline’s idea of “glory-likeness”,

“34. For the connection between the divine image and fatherhood-sonship see Romans 8:29; Hebrews 1:2f.; James 3:9; I John 3:2; cf. Luke 20:36. By setting the image-likeness formula in the context of sonship, Genesis 5:1-3 contradicts the suggestion that the image idea is a matter of representative status rather than representational likeness or resemblance. For Seth was not Adam’s representative, but as Adam’s son he did resemble his father. The terminology “in his likeness” serves as the equivalent in human procreation of the phrase “after its kind” which is used for plant and animal reproduction and of course refers to resemblance.”

Thus, Kline gives something of a working definition for ‘kind after kind’ by which ‘resemblance’ normally denotes something genitive as the physical similarities between father and son. Physical attributes of genetic lineage obviously involve more than bipedal or mammal qualities but those immediately familial and particular. The degree the image conforms to, say, a familial progenitor or father, naturally, the greater the parent is otherwise glorified, witnessed, or declared. When family relations are relatively displaced from specific physical qualities pertaining to likeness, God’s royal glory-image or language of Incarnation as given to mankind through nature is more or less denied. Therefore, modern redefinitions of family away from divine patterns of male-female, father-son, or ancestor-descendant obscure the personal and promisary aspects of God, having probably greater affinity with deistic concepts. Kline provides three sorts of “image-likeness”, two of which are popular and safe for contemporary expositors—“ethical” and “official”—being reductionist characteristics nations and families are often reduced in modern definitions,  but a third sort—formal/physical likeness—having bearing upon family and tribal relations of men. Also, Kline hints that such physical likeness among sorts of men can experience relative degradation (perhaps even deracination) when struck by providential disfavor:
“

Both image and glory mean likeness. Moreover, such is their equivalency that where all that constitutes the glory is gone, no vestige of the image remains. Though the image-likeness is terminable, it is otherwise constant. The glory aspect of man’s God-likeness, on the other hand, is variable; it is subject to degrees of reduction as well as to termination and it also may undergo instensification and expansion in the historical-eschatological process.
Under the concept of man as the glory-image of God the Bible includes functional (or official), formal (physical), and ethical components, corresponding to the composition of the archetypal Glory. Functional glory-likeness is man’s likeness to God in the possession of official authority and in the exercise of dominion. Ethical glory is reflection of the holiness, righteousness, and truth of the divine Judge (not just the presence of a moral faculty of any religious orientation whatsoever). And formal-physical glory-likeness is man’s bodily reflection of the theophanic and incarnate Glory.”  p. 31

What does bodily reflection to incarnate Glory imply? Kline says it is the fully resurrected body of man (p. 33), but he gives no further details to its glorification. However, following a speculative vein which Kline avoids tapping, it seems the resurrected body would be restored not only to an ethical innocence but also physical purity of prelapsarian Adam-hood, including not only the absence of physical decay but perhaps dark color. We might speculate upon biblical color schemes of light v. dark, noting Adam and David’s ruddiness against the swarthiness of Canaan and traditionally conceived “blackness” of Ham, but these are only theological opinions perhaps not rightly pressed too far.

Curiously, against over-scrutinizing physical differences in mankind, Kline says gender was not essential to man’s image-likeness. However, he then defends distinctions in gender for nearly two pages afterwards, saying gender-creation pertained to royal dominion rather than formal or biological features elucidating Godhood (p. 33). This may be the case, but Kline does not explore traditional accounts of maleness supposedly essential to priestly and especially sacerdotal vocations. Nor does he touch antique ideas on the woman as weaker vessel—both physically and ethically. That said, “likeness”— be it physical, official, or ethical—are features usually inseparable from Incarnationalism and likewise genitive descent in general. ?

  The breakdown of moral consensus leaves us grasping for any type or pattern to which obligations of fealty attach. The idea of cultural hegemony and destiny is of course a “racist” conception. It presumes that there is something called “culture” which is not merely notional, not intuited directly from the ether, nor the product of rational necessity. It presumes that a self-identified population has the right -perhaps the duty- to resist the surrender of the public square to a demographic contest of artificial selection, a selection effected by law and fashionable ideas. It presumes instinctive objection to the idea that the patterns of life we inherit must be viewed as merchandise in a market of ideas, rather than the subject of an unquestioned tradition, a milieu which we breath unconsciously, and make a part of ourselves, rather than an act of critique and assent.

  This cultural marketplace is what neoconservatives refer to when they make public appeals to civic religion, to “freedom,” to notional culture as contest or agon. This is a deeply liberal appoach to culture, and one which had its nativity in Vienna and Manchester. Those first Magi of market dominion worked a charm on conservatism, teaching it that there was nothing, no useful datum, which a price could not embody. Spengler was no fillip to the supremacy of the West with his notion of a plurality of relative cultures, relative civilizations. Toynbee, a globalist, following Spengler’s lead, finally interred the idea of monistic civilization. We are comfortable with the West manifesting one pattern of being among many. Perhaps then, we are distinctly uncomfortable with the notion that this pattern of being participates in a kind of social dialectic by which it antiquates and becomes obsolescent, in favor of a cult of the foreign, or worse still, the Universal, attended by its prescribed shibboleths, to let us know when to clap. To soothe our betters, assuring them that we are sufficiently reformed, sufficiently modern. Yet, if Toynbee concluded that the sun of the West was quickly setting, then at least it had seen by its own lights. But now, it is said there are new stars to steer by. The tyrannical Sun has been cast down.

  Of course, to divorce culture from the historical context that connects it to a people of common descent merely denatures and enervates the very notion of culture itself, and prepares it for transmutation, initially, into the delusion that civic equality both can and ought to be a basis for peaceable coexistence with exogenous elements, who do not come to us tabula rasa, but as men possessed of a history that clings and persists in them, and seeks expression in the world. Finally, the notion of culture is subjected to an even more radical critique: one that concludes that it doesn’t really exist, that it’s a reification, an empty signifier, with nothing signified -that consensus and mutuality are impossible, or further, that, should they exist, they are symptoms of weakness, or worse still, Reaction. What on the left we hear referred to as ‘Reaction,’ on the right we hear called ‘Collectivism,’ that is, the preservation of mutuality.  At which point in its declension, culture finally succumbs to mastery by the market, and who we are is determined by prevaling material conditions. Market segmentation is market fragmentation. It is as much social engineering as it is market response. Locating and conditioning the individual is the last frontier of the ‘free’ market. In a material culture, this portends utter dissolution. We become ‘untethered,’ nomadic hunter gatherers in a shifting landscape of transient loyalties, and branded identities.

  The idea of a unitary world civilization is a modernist, liberal notion, and one that is rooted in 19th century, fin de siecle rationalism. Our Kouros may have been borrowed from the cosmogonic crypt of Egypt, but we made it our own, and transformed it into the Suffering Servant, the Kinsman Redeemer, and a True God possessed it, and we knelt before it, for a while. The monadology of culture is the rationalism of Cecil Rhodes, the reformer, the bringer of culture to benighted Africa, the founder of universities, builder of bridges. Globalism is merely Rhodes exhumed, and given a Nehru jacket and Tandoori to eat. But those whose white gloves served at high tea, they refashioned their household gods from the clay of the riverbanks. We are the memsahib who threw off her great name, her title and corset, but who was found with her throat slit and her liquor cabinet ransacked. She is become a manque of noblesse oblige.

  In “diversity,” it is only our God, our songs, our fathers which must be given up. Their might was their shame. Their victory their defeat. Indeed, the word ‘we’ is stricken, pulled off the tongue, along with ‘anschluss,’ ‘kulturkampf,’ ‘degenerate’ and ‘selection’. By its [rationalism’s] ‘wisdom’ there will be a world culture, simply not the English one. But when the bad conscience of the West has been exhausted as a means of divestiture of the hegemony of culture, what is the next act of the drama? I assert that there is no asymptote. The converging lines must cross, and all that we ‘know’ is tipped over into oblivion. Divestiture will not be enough. Only non-existence will suffice, at which prospect the world citizen of the capitalist demos merely shrugs as he lights a candle before his ancestral gods. Yet how long before they too are sacrificed to the Molech of Unity? 

Lancelot Andrewes’ catechism (A Pattern of Catehistical Doctrine) on the second table contains an enlightening argument regarding such degrees between men, and the consequent manner of their love. Andrewes’ argument consists of two parts. The first part argues communion with God as the necessary precondition to brotherly love, and, therefore, any concern to the neighborly good of others first impinges upon our personal reconciliation to God. Once we have this peace, a greater unity can then be entered amongst men by the mutual bond of Christ Jesus. Andrewes outlines the order of these conditions:

It is certain there are degrees; for to omit our duties to our parents is worse than to omit the same duties to a stranger. Now where there is a greater duty, there must be a greater affection, and so greater love; and the order of our love must be thus,
a. To God, for He is that bonum, ‘good’, by the participation whereof all other are bona, ‘good;’ and to which all other give place, as in polity to   bonum publicum, ‘the public good’.
b. Our own souls, for we are unitas, ‘an unity’, or one entire in and with ourselves, and cannot be but united with our brethern.
c. The souls of our brethern before our own bodies; for any man’s soul may directly be partaker of the universal good which is in God, but so can no man’s body but by participation with the soul, and therefore the soul is to be preferred. (p. 172)

Hence, once the eternal needs of man’s soul are met, then the temporal aspirations in right order follow, starting with our bodily well-being. Andrewes ranks outward ties:

“d. Our own bodies before other men’s
e. The bodies of our neighbors; and among them:
      first to them that have need; and of those:
      first to the household of faith, Gal. vi.10; and of them,
      first to our countrymen, ps. cxxii.8, “brethern and companions”; and of these:
      first them which are nosri, “our friends and acquaintance,’ and of them,
      first to our own, and, namely, them of our household, 1 Tim. v.8, and our kindred; and
      first the wife, Gen. 2.24, “they shall be one flesh;” “am not I better to thee than ten sons?” 1 Sam. 1.8.
Thus much the subject of our neighbor. “(p. 173)

Recall, Andrewes’ argument begins with the existance of God—and communion with Him as the very substance of neighborly love. Egalitarianism tends to reverses this order making communion with God ancillary or a secondary to universal brotherhood. Not only this, but modernism also displaces the immediate and natural obligations of man for an abstracted “bodiless” mankind that has no necessary ties to either person, spouse, or family. Notice the degrees posited by Andrewes are in contradistiction to egalitarianism—i.e., 1). first, the dressing and feeding of our body, 2) then our spouse, 3) then providing for our children, 4) caring for extended family or ‘kindreds’, 5) friends and those we know, 6) compatriots, and, 7) finally, our church. Notice outward ethics, or the second tablet, really depend upon concentric relations and living these out. The reverse would otherwise make a man a louse, commanding him to love the extraordinary over the familiar. Also, we might suppose the church (#5) is further ordered between degrees of ecumenical, province, and parish since what wreck the greater church would be if all her individual local parts were in destitute?

Some implications to consider: If degrees of love exist, then do degrees of hate also exist? Andrewes reminds us, “every sinner, as he is a sinner is to be hated; every man, as he is a man, is to be loved: let us love men so that we love not their sins, and love them for that which God made them, not that which by sin they made themselves”. So, perhaps hate varies, following kinds of transgression, and the hatred of sin is really pastoral implying a range of discipline according to the offense. Likewise, if love has measuring upon the earth, then why doesn’t it also have a measure in heaven? Such ideas suggest the church as an ordered society rather than a primitive, unformed mass or assembly. We see perhaps something similar with Mary as the mother of God and John as the most loved disciple—the bonds of spousal, kindred, and brotherly affection lasting or descending from the heavenlies. Andrewes’ exposition on the second tablet reminds that affections should have right ends, as God would have it, “So that our love must be toward neighbor, not as always it is towards ourselves, but as it ought to be; nor as an evil man loveth himself, but as a man’s heart well regulated affecteth his own self.” (p.176)

The degrees of love was a common understanding in the 17th century. Here is a near verbatim quote on “the method and order of love” in Bp. William Nicholson’s A Plain and full Exposition of the Catechism of the Church of England, 1655 (pp.102-3), written together with the Reverend Jeremy Taylor. Nicholson notes how Godly love is impartial yet effected through degrees of proximity, and this seems consistent with own mandate for mission:

1. That we love God first and most. The high priest carried the name of God on his head, but the names of the Israelites on his breast-plate and shoulders. That great and fearful Name must be in the highest place; the love super-eminent we bear it; and then for God’s sake it must descend to our neighbor, as the breast-plate and shoulders. Ex Deo natalis amoris, ‘Love’s birth is from God’.
2. The next step is, that we love our neighbor, i.e., every man, be it a friend, or be it an enemy. If a brother, there is in him proximitas originis, a nearness of blood; if an enemy, proximitas naturae, or scietatis, a nearness either in nature in general, or some bond of civil society.
Now in this love of our neighbor, heed would be taken of two things:
1. That our love be not erroneious, that we take not our neighbors’ sin for our neighbor, and love their sins because we love their persons… “Thou shalt rebuke thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him” [Lev. 19.17]
2. That we look to the degrees of proximity, and accordingly extend our love before another, as they stand farther off, or are nearer unto us. And the order is this:
  1. The nearest conjunction among Christians is that of the Spirit of grace, of religion, and these are to have the first place in our love. “Do good to all men, but especially those who are the household of faith” [Gal. 6.10]
  2. Among these, if there be no disparity, then those first who are nearest unto us either in friendship, blood, or some other way.
  3. After, as they stand nearer or farther in relation.
    1. The husband or wife. Parents.
    2. The children, and those of the family.
    3. Our kindred.
    4. Our friends or acquaintance, near neighbors.
    5. Our countrymen.
    6. Societies of men before any particular. But this is not perpetual, and may be broken by many accidents, and intervenient occasions.

If there be no disparity in faith, then family relations take priority over universal man. Note: kin and kith (tribe) fall between the family and countrymen.