I know Williamson largely through his very helpful book Conservative Bookshelf, wherein I first discovered James Burnham and realized that liberalism was indeed the ideology of Western suicide*.
Williamson remarks almost casually about something that also increasingly strikes me, the liberal hatred for human nature. Actual human nature, not an idealized form of it. Much the same attitude toward America and the West: a supposed attachment to its idealized potential combined with a loathing of its historical actuality.
Advanced liberalism demands that people think, believe, and act in ways that it is simply unnatural for human beings to think, believe, and act ...The kind of mind-training which liberalism engages in is not to be opposed to some kind of libertarian fantasy land where every man is his own man and thinks his own unencumbered thoughts. Conservative cultures likewise choose and select and perforce (!) exclude and forbid certain kinds of ideas, attitudes, etc. It's inescapeable. But I would hold that conservative cultures tend to take their cues from actual human nature rather than some fundamentally anti-human utopian faith and dogma which every day asks us to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
*Why, for example, would the Spaniards spend 800 years trying to get rid of African Muslim invaders only to invite them back in in droves? It's the liberal thing to do. And if you don't like it, you are a racist like Hitler!
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Re Chilton Williamson’s : »A century and a half ago the United States wasted the greatest opportunity in American history to divide peacefully into two geographic sections, each left to go its own way. Our ancestors had their chance, and they threw it aside.«
Seems to me a Jungian fail to propose that family-system death can be avoided if only fratricidal brothers -- Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, South and North, Jesus and Jesus Barabbas -- amicably went their own way. (I guess the fioloque suggests that the two sons are One.) I suppose the Prodigal Son (e.g. Pascal) should have done as his calculative-reasoning Elder Brother (e.g. Loyola) and built up the livelihood (bios) system and expected the Father to die of natural causes? (Passing by in Gelassenheit where there is only nothing to love?)
It’s as though Freud were revised, omitting the Unconscious. So that, for instance, the son perceives that he has far the best of his mother’s libido, and accordingly can leave the listless marital bed to his father as rather a consolation prize. Furthermore, the son soon perceives that his mother is aging, and he will be able to date, hook up with, marry a much younger girl. So why throw any energy into “oedipal” cathexis? … And his sister’s penis envy is quickly dispel’d when she sees the agony of her brother when kick’d in the groin in a game of soccer. (Surely castration anxiety is much more debilitating than penis envy.)
… I seem to remember a remark that the American Civil War was formally and materially a repetition of the English Civil War, fought between the same planter brother and worker brother who had repair’d to America.
Strictly formally, revisionists of the American Civil War have a ready case: Jeffersonian, anarchistic democracy can’t have sign’d on to an agreement that the new revolutionary state mayn’t ever be dissolved. If the Civil War had resulted from a secession of western states in a tax revolt, and 600,000 deaths later the “union” had been preserved, Straussians would have a much greater task defending Lincoln and the East. Admittedly, the result of this greater task would be greater understanding of politics and war and the outsourcing of human sacrifice to the military.
Only race-gender-class criteria today can make a war seem just (and “class” offends only if express’d in “race” disparities; so that class privileged whites can steamroll contentedly in good conscience over low-class white Christianity while all Christianities of colour, plus Eastern Orthodoxy, curiously, are at least given the silent treatment): thus, the Allies fought in WW2 in order to stop German and Japanese fascism. That the Allies’ motives in fighting the war were all that much more just and valid is proved by the reality that Nazis were not only anti-semitic but also homophobic and anti-Negro, and wish’d to confine women to “Children, Church, and Kitchen” rather than liberating them for their own careers in the military-industrial complex of the post-War West, or maybe we should say military-interpretive complex.
(Not only fratricidal brothers but also man and woman must “go their own way,” cf “A New Life Plan for Women” last chapter of Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” … I guess the family described by Hegel will supposedly continue to instil the ethical order while each member apparently goes her or his separate way “Phenomenology of Spirit” VI Objective Spirit. It must be an ethos of repressive desublimation.) (Mary Daly lets on that infinite expanding life would be possible by women’s diligent “biophilia” if only men didn’t keep interfering and imposing their “necrophilia.” And yet who loves life if not death? And who loves death if not life?) (Today’s rad fems like to interpret women as a “class” not a gender, on unstated grounds that a class is a descriptive term for those doing a certain sort of work, whereas the purpose of a gender is presumably to engender and thus is essentialist.)
Admittedly, today a “tax revolt” by western states sounds already racist, heteronormative, and conservative Christian or libertarian, and accordingly such a motive for secession from “the more perfect union” feels in our psyches or consciences already link’d to and at least sympathetic with such institutions as slavery. But that result is from the history of race and gender etc since the Civil War. I merely mean that because the popular interpretation of the Civil War -- on which the North has coasted, admittedly -- is that it was fought to liberate the slaves, it is seen as a just war, just as the Allies finally fought against Hitler not because he declared war but because Americans and British and Canadians et al saw the need to shut down the death camps. … As soon as one comes to doubt that the Northern powers and principalities invaded the South, one doubts the justice of the Civil War -- even when one still thinks and feels strongly that slavery is a terrible injustice.
Yet in terms of the Gods’ and Goddesses’ “terible love of war,” perhaps the immolations caused by “liberalism” or Marcusean desublimation are much preferable. Conservatives complain of the “birth dearth” among whites that the cultural revolution has caused -- not only among the educated class but also in the lower middle class. But isn’t this preferable to the deaths of large numbers of sons of Baby-Boomers in war or military aggression? … Perhaps rather than doing their “immoral” anti-civilizational action on the battlefield, the Greatest Generation arranged for us to do immoral anti-civilizational action right in our own personal lives. Does Marcuse de Sade’s “desublimation” even in its compulsory (BGE ¶188 Zwang) “repressive desublimation” version for us achieve the valuational correction -- the renaturalization of human nature? (cf Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, p. 61 and passim) -- that sublimational eras had to work out in military violence? … I wouldn’t want to impose porno-style sex upon my wife, but perhaps if given a choice I should will myself to do such sex, after having had a vasectomy in order not to burden the world with intelligent white children, rather than sending a son into a poison gas attack at Ypres, or to die of typhus in a Confederate prisoner of war camp outside Atlanta.
Maybe rather than some sort of military festival of death “gradualism” in the ruin of America is preferable -- shipping good union-wage jobs to foreign lands, transforming the learned professions into semiotic expertise hypertrophy (our version of rote-memorization of the quran; which can’t do valuation. cf Unschätzbar BGE ¶188), changing Christianity into a politically futile and morally demoralizing protest mysticism, replacing marriage and family with more or less random and usually child-free “expressions of sexuality,” and so on. But this can’t be directly affirm’d, since in that case we would not be affirming that all this “shouldn’t have happen’d” (again, cf Bataille, passim).
That fratricidal contention within the son, and the war between the sexes are necessary does not mean that the fratricide and war aren’t real. Necessarily and more than necessarily, the son or ego is for hatred or negation, but this doesn’t mean that the negation isn’t negation or that hatred isn’t hatred.
And the ruin must be seen with what is built up via the ruining. The outer Self is ruin’d in the world, in order to build up the inner man of this world (St. Paul, 1Corinthians 4). The ruin isn’t directly the edification. Desublimation isn’t refraining from sublimation but is a morality, hostile to the institutions of sublimation and especially to the natural inclination to sublimation.
But the cultural morality of repressive desublimation would be all counter-culture -- with left- and rightwing versions, Christian and secularist versions, even neo-Islam is a statement of resistance, not conquest.
The Church too would be a counter-cultural presence; the only defense I’ve seen since the V2 Council of priestly celibacy that it is serviceable as a counter-cultural witness. Mr Williamson a “paleo-conservative” calls for a conservatism of “Resistance!” against elites et al, as much as his leftwing brothers call for “Resistance!” against the 1%. Man and woman "resist!" each other, and the brothers "resist!" each other!
John Galut of Ayn Rand "Resists!" ... How to remain loyal to the Terah dark sun in the lunar sky when Naturing begets only resistance? Natura naturata is essentially only resistance against natura naturans? ... »Every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller, already a bite of tyranny [or resistance?] against "nature"« (BGE ¶188). ... After the sacrifice even of the comforting, holy, healing, in a worship of the stone personnel, the personnel of stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing (BGE ¶55) we the stone personnel must sacrifice even "resist!"?
Stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing are thus revalued into non-stupidity, non-gravity, non-fate, non-nothing? ... But the black stone, the cube, the kaaba, is deceit (Ephesians 4:14. nt2940 kubeia). We should remember from Plato that lots are arranged. Predestination isn't random. The educators have been educated (3rd thesis on feuerbach)
Cain and Abel were frenemies.
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