Tag: Sam Francis

James Burnham on liberalism and decline

James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism proposes the thesis that modern liberalism is the ideology of a society in decline; its doctrines motivate and justify the contraction of Western civilization and reconciles us to it.

In the chapter “Liberalism vs. Reality” Burnham observes that liberals feel uncomfortable about power and force. Liberals are reluctant to use force against  ordinary criminals (which are, after all, just “victims” of an unjust society) but feel little hesitation to use it against those who are productive and successful.

It is not that liberals, when they enter the governing class…never make use of force; unavoidably they do, sometimes to excess. But because of their ideology they are not reconciled intellectually and morally to force. They therefore tend to use it ineptly, at the wrong times and places, against the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts.

Although Burnham ends his book by considering the possibility of a reversal of modern liberalism, the section that precedes it reads as follows:

Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution; and this function its formulas will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way: for even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished or altogether collapses, we or our children will be able to see that ending, by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as the transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions and discrimination of the past.

John Derbyshire’s hard-headed realism

Paul Gottfried reviews John Derbyshire’s latest book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, which appears to make a secular, empirical case for “hard-headed realism.”

Although We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism would appear to be a light read, brimful of anecdotal asides, first impressions can and, at least in this case, do deceive. Derbyshire’s work is fraught with carefully researched information about the failures of public education, the egalitarian assumptions informing our educational-political establishment, the feminization of American society, and the increasing irrelevance of any form of culture except for crude entertainment to American life.

Gottfried then contrasts Derbyshire’s science-based perspective with the religious and cultural (100% environmentalist) views that dominate today’s conservative and liberal elites:

Derbyshire cites Charles Murray’s research in underlining the effects of immutable differences among individuals and ethnic groups. But his tone is very different from Murray’s, insofar as he does not follow Murray in Real Education by patting public educators on the head for making modest gains with cognitively weak students. He is full of obvious contempt for the egalitarian aims and crass hypocrisies of the “edbyz” crowd, and in this respect he seems to have taken his lead from Brimelow’s battle against mendacious, grasping teachers’ unions in The Worm in the Apple.

Derbyshire’s perspective seems to call for a revival of what the conservative author Sam Francis has called counter-modernism, a worldview shaped by the secular and scientific views of the Enlightenment but without  its naive egalitarian and emancipatory tendencies. Gottfried writes:

Only by accepting the utter folly of the project of reconstructing human beings, and by acknowledging the reality of inherent human inequalities, can conservatives have anything to contribute to the political discussion. Otherwise they are merely confirming the errors of the other side, while claiming to represent an alternative.

John Derbyshire also writes for the blog Secular Right.

Counter-modernism

In my review of Jonathan Bowden’s book Mad I  discussed the possibility of “a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and  distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy, as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism.” Interestingly, Samuel Francis made a related observation in his discussion of the French New Right in a book review for the Occidental Quarterly:

The French New Right, in other words, was heading toward what I have elsewhere called “counter-modernism” rather than the anti-modernism in which it eventually became involved. Counter-modernism is itself a form of modernism and accepts many of its metaphysical premises (including its naturalism) while rejecting the conventional implications and constructs (especially social and political) that the Enlightenment and its heirs have devised. Examples of counter-modernist thinkers in Euro-American thought would be Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, the Federalist Papers, the Social Darwinists of the nineteenth century, the classical elite theorists Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, and James Burnham.

This was not to be, as illustrated by an article on Ernst Jünger in a recent edition of the same magazine. Alain de Benoist writes:

To finish with nihilism, we must live it to its end—“passing the line” which corresponds to the “meridian zero”—because, as Heidegger says, the technological framework (Ge-stell) is still a mode of being, not merely of its oblivion. This is why, if Jünger sees the Worker as a danger, he also says that this danger can be our salvation, because it is by it and through it, that it will be possible to exhaust the danger.

When Martin Heidegger is discussed for any other reason than to ridicule him or to educate the reader on logical fallacies, it is a safe bet that we are dealing with a tradition of thought that warrants little serious attention.  It  appears that the prospect of a counter-modernism that accepts many of modernism’s “metaphysical premises (including its naturalism) while rejecting the conventional implications and constructs (especially social and political) that the Enlightenment and its heirs have devised” remains largely a theoretical construct.