There is a tendency among many modern Americans to attempt to ‘think globally.’ The slogan told to children is that we must “think globally, not locally,” and that America is a diverse country, so that we need to consider a broad array of perspectives from multiple religions and cultures. This is the applied form of multiculturalism which is never really applied all that effectively.
I’m going to start this out by stating something that should be obvious: almost everything in the dark enlightenment is written in English.
While it sometimes influences people in foreign countries, the topics which we cover are primarily concerning the history and fate of the people who speak English, descended from the civilization that settled in the British Isles.
Much of Unqualified Reservations concerns itself with relating the history of the United States more closely to that of England than it normally is to American students. Most of the people who contribute to neoreaction are American, British, Australian, Canadian, or at least partly from those countries. Those who aren’t are at least partially naturalized residents.
In its rush to rule the world, Americans have forgotten who they are. The British of today are happy to be America’s crazy, gay old poodle. But it was a lion, once, before it was transformed.
This people also forms the core of what Jared Taylor calls the ‘historic American nation,’ which is mostly descended from that population with some north European admixture.
It is altogether too much to me to pretend as if I have all that much in common with the people who aren’t English. It has proven entirely too much for us Americans to be good stewards over the European continent. We have actually been rather terrible stewards, all things considered, despite good intentions.
To the extent that Americans have attempted to be stewards and peace-makers in the Middle East, we have worse than failed. We have set off the most catastrophic bout of war and mass-murder there that the region has seen in centuries. And it is likely to become even worse the more that Americans attempt to meddle in foreign affairs.
It is time to encourage the (perhaps temporary) withdrawal from the Middle East.
To the extent that our writing has any impact, it is in an attempt to rebuild and reconstruct English civilization in the wake of the catastrophes and infections which has befallen it.
If foreigners become inspired by the example, then that’s well and good, but it ought not be the primary aim. A culture is necessarily bound up with the language in which it’s transacted in. English, being the global lingua franca, has come to be used by more aliens than there are Englishmen. This confuses matters somewhat, especially because there are many people in the English countries who have decided that they don’t want to be English anymore, but still insist on using our language.
This is my tentative suggestion: if neoreaction is not English, then it’s incoherent, because most of its values are at least implicitly English, and will tend to offend people from other places, who speak different languages. To the extent that it does examine or have some kind of intercourse with foreign nations, it does so through a basically English viewpoint. As far as I am concerned, this is just stating what should be obvious, but it often gets lost and confused at times.
Considering that the cultural ailment afflicting the rest of the world has its roots in London, Washington D.C., and New York, the correction ought to be focused on those cities, also.
For most of us, it isn’t a choice. We can’t suddenly decide to be Chinese, Swiss, Italians, Germans, Austrians, or Russians, especially if our roots are here. We want to believe, perhaps, that we have a choice in these matters, but there is no choice, because it was already made before we were born. We can no more elect to stop being English any more than we can elect to become frogs or wombats. No matter what Tumblr might tell you, there are some things that we can’t change about ourselves.
On the other hand, part of what distinguishes the old order from the new one of the nation-state is the important notion of fealty and of honor. Given that Americans are subject to no-one, and have no sovereign to swear an oath to, we are left swearing oaths to dreams, hopes, feelings, and a flag which comes to be in increasingly ill-repute.
And so, not really knowing where the Holy Grail might be located, we might as well restore the Stuarts as the next best option.
vxxc20142014 says
Welcome to Duty Sir.
We’ll discuss the Stuarts et al at the appropriate time, with a fully open mind on my part.
Christopher says
What do you propose that Irish, Germans, Italians etc., who live in the Anglosphere do? It seems to me that by associating neoreaction with Englishness you are alienating a huge chunk of people who would be amenable to such ideas.
henrydampier says
I’m friendly with many of the Germans who speak with me. I’m certainly not going to turn German, Irish, or Italian friends away, along with all the Indians, Turks, etc. etc. who also correspond.
Those were the ones I had in mind when I said ‘partly naturalized.’
My proposal is that we English speakers are already focusing mostly on problems in the native English countries to the exclusion of those in foreign countries. When English-speakers try to understand foreign countries without either being there, understanding the language, or going native themselves, their reports will often become distorted.
I’m skeptical of universalism, and despite all the criticisms of universalism we see on the alternative right, the attempt to find universal solutions seems to remain almost irresistible to people.
nickbsteves says
Link snafu with “Unqualified reservations”.
henrydampier says
This is fixed. thxu
SanguineEmpiricist says
There should be a general like button for the internet.
This seems pretty much what we’re all getting at and I think admin can handle the rest for the east even though he conducts it in english.
I think neoreactionaries underestimate their influence. If we had a price metric for writing I think we could verify it has spectacular and far reaching consequences.
William Newman says
“We can no more elect to stop being English any more than we can elect to become frogs or wombats.”
Sort of. We might not change what is essentially English; indeed, we can even go on to make those qualities that do not change part of the definition of what is essentially English, so that that becomes rigorously tautologically true. But it is not so easy to know what qualities can’t or won’t change without the benefit of hindsight. The amount of change in behavior that can come with changed economic tradeoffs and changed institutions and changed knowledge is rather large, and not so easy to see in advance. The changes in Scotland from 1700 to 1900 seem to have made a particularly strong impression on thoughtful English people 1850-1950, and while some of the conclusions they drew are questionable, it is also questionable to throw around rhetoric suggesting that changes of that scale don’t happen, or are easy to judge in advance.
henrydampier says
Changing what that means is the ‘struggle’ in the title.