Introduction
Despite the right’s affinity for Western Civilization, it often promotes its very opposite. Aside from tweedy professors who write books that very few read, there is little discussion of what constitutes the civilization whose last and fearless defenders we supposedly are. Maybe this is why there has been a shift from a defense of the great Western Tradition to a more general defense of “whiteness”, whose definition is broad enough to encompass everything except what might properly considered white: English Common Law, Shakespeare, altruism, and humanism. As long as your skin is no darker than that of an Italian, you are in the club, no matter your religion, ideals, language, or vision of the Good Life. For me to claim the mantle of Western Civilization, or to be its defender, would be delusional. Unlike most people on the internet, I realize I am just that: a person on the internet. What I can claim, however, is to have received a liberal education, the hallmark of Western Civilization. A liberal education, consisting of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), and the great texts of the West. Affording a liberal education is increasingly hard, especially for those already out of school, and I am blessed that my parents gave me this. Giving you a book list would come across as condescending, and, although I trust in my gremlins’ intellectual ability, each of the great books are around 300 pages and ought not to be rushed (you could spend an entire year going through the Aeneid or The Divine Comedy). A liberal education is the best way to get a grasp of Western Civilization, but a proper liberal education is not accessible over the internet.
What can be done, what could keep attention, is to identify certain topics and look at what the Western Canon has to say about them. This will not provide a consensus view, providing “the Western view of __”, but it will provide a range of thought that has historically been in play in the West. We will draw not only from philosophical texts, but also from the great epics. Those topics which we will look at are as follows:
1.) What is masculinity?
2.) What is justice?
3.) How does virtue relate to politics, if it does?
4.) What is the Good Life?
5.) What does friendship consist of?
6.) Can the good man be harmed?
7.) What is beauty?
A Preliminary Expectoration
Today’s self-proclaimed defenders of Western Civilization make a few claims that must be addressed from the start, lest they remain and, like a fly in a stew, contaminate this series.
A) “Politics is amoral”, “Ideology is a post-hoc justification for power”, “What is lawful is decided by the sovereign.” There are other dictums that come to mind, all supporting the basic claim, made most forcefully by Michael Foucault, that whatever pretensions we may have about politics, it is, at bottom, simply one group exercising force over another, and any justification for this force, be it moral, religious, or philosophical, is only that, a justification. To quote from Discipline and Punish, “Power produces knowledge…power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”1 James Burnham, among others, make a similar case, but Foucault pulls no punches in its implications. Every field of knowledge generates institutions (universities, research facilities, churches, etc.), and these institutions have power, since they can shape the lives of its participants, requiring that they perpetuate the knowledge the said institutions were founded upon. Conversely, when institutions are established, they need some justification for their existence. If they have none, why would anyone fund them, let alone dedicate their lives (as a professor, researcher, or priest would) to it? To maintain their power, these institutions create knowledge, and this knowledge is nothing other than a means for institutions to maintain their status. Readers of Yarvin and Academic Agent may recognize this line of argument.
Any refutation of Foucault, or those who share his thesis (which is most of the dissident right), could be explained way as an exercise of the will to power, since any refutation would necessitate some form of knowledge and all forms of knowledge are, according to Foucault, expressions of the will to power. Yet, any affirmation of the thesis can equally be explained away, since this very analysis of power is itself a form of knowledge, and, according to the argument, merely a justification of power. To affirm or deny the thesis is impossible. Sophistry is as easy as lying, because it is lying. It is certainly true that there are brutes who use whatever justification they can to remain brutes, but to universalize this is folly. Above all it is, madness. To quote G.K Chesterton,
“Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.”2
Everything can be explained by the thesis of power, but it is a small world. He who affirms this thesis, “moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world.”3 Those advocates of this thesis have to maintain that there is only one story in the whole world, that of getting and maintaining power. Why gain or maintain power? Even this is beyond the scope of the thesis, for any "why" is mere justification! No romance, no heroism, no genuine religious conviction...the world is too small for all of these things.
This all too commonly accepted thesis is self-contradictory, impossible to affirm, impossible to deny, and paints a world so small that it can fit only one item. Should we grasp what Western Civilization is, with all its grandeur, tales of heroism, romance, virtue, and pursuit of God, it must be abandoned.
B) “You might not like it, but if it benefits the cause, it is right”, “Where have those values or morals ever gotten you?” While the first error we looked at is found more in neo-reactionary circles, these sentiments are more often at home in the nationalist sphere. To call it “utilitarian” would be ascribing it more thought than is due. Utilitarians, nasty moral imaginations they possess, yet have some metric by which they can adjudicate all actions and intents. “Moral claims in the absence of nature, in the absence of teleology, are dubious and untenable because there can be no moral claim without the corresponding “things ought to be this way”, but if this “ought” is not rooted in something beyond human desire, then the moral claim is reduced to the mere Will to Power. Maybe this does not bother you, but it should. Why? Because if your moral claim rests upon your desire to impose it, then there is no basis for which you can protest someone with the mirror opposite moral claim who is stronger than you and wishes to impose his will on you. Sure, you can say “well, their moral claim will be bad for me and those I care for”, but they could say the same about your claim. Morality is thrown away, life becomes a contest of strength, and the right, especially when it is the dissident position, will have no foundation upon which it can justify its ideals or its rule.”4
Morality, if it something more than mere power, (and we have already examined that error), must provide the reasons why a given action is right or wrong, independent of that action’s expediency to a particular group. If it cannot, if it simply the statement of a group’s preferences, which are backed by force, then was nothing actually wrong with communists shoveling millions of bodies into mass graves to advance their cause. You can bite that bullet if you wish, you can say that the horrors of Communism were perfectly fine, but this excludes heroism, nobility, virtue, and romance, all essential parts to the Western Tradition. I will not force you to defend the Western Tradition, there are many that hate it (notably the communists), but what we are looking at is the Western Tradition, and it has boundaries.
Any other preconception can be had before this education, but the two we looked at must be left at the door. You may hold them if you wish, I do not claim to have refuted them, but they will prevent you from inhabiting the tradition and civilization you think yourself a defender of.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Page 27
Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Doorlit Press. Page 12
Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Doorlit Press. Page 12