My brand of conservatism takes on board what I consider to be good in the old liberal tradition. I like to think that it blends the best of conservatism with the best of liberalism. A couple of sharp young philosophers have surfaced to challenge me, however. Their brand of conservatism looks askance at paleo-liberalism and sees it as leading inevitably to the hard leftism of the present day. So a fruitful intramural debate is in progress. I agree with much of what they say, but I think they go too far in reacting against the lunatic excesses of contemporary liberalism. If I label my interlocutors as neo-reactionary, I mean it descriptively, not pejoratively. I am grateful for their readership and commentary.
I pressed one of the sparring partners for a list of theses, and he came up with the following. My comments are in blue. His remarks and my responses are of course tentative and exploratory. So keep your shirt on.
1. Natural authority and social organization:
(A) Men are natural leaders of any human group. Their natural function is to build and protect society. Some men are natural leaders of other men. Women are nurturers. Their natural function is to raise the people who will compose and inhabit the society. There are exceptions to these broad norms, but any society that attempts to act against these norms will sicken and die in short order.
BV: I agree, but with some important qualifications. I'll start with our agreement. Differences in social role as between the sexes are grounded in hard biological facts. The biological differences between men and women are not 'social constructs.' The male sex hormone testosterone is not a 'social construct' although the words 'hormone' and 'testosterone' and the theory in which which they figure are. That women are better at nurturing than men is grounded in their biological constitution, which lies deeper than the social. This is not to say that all women are good at raising and nurturing children. 'Woman are nurturers' is a generic statement, not a universal statement. It is like the statement, 'Men are taller than women.' It does not mean that every man is taller than every woman.
Does it follow from the obvious biologically-grounded difference between men and women that women should be discouraged from pursuing careers outside the home and entering the professions? Here I begin to diverge from my interlocutors. They don't like talk of equal rights though I cannot see why a woman should not have the same right to pursue a career in medicine or engineering or mathematics or philosophy as a man if she has the aptitude for it. (But of course there must be no erosion of standards.) How do our NRs, who do not like talk of equality, protect women from men who would so dominate them as to prevent them from developing their talents? On the other hand, men as a group are very different from women as a group. So we should not expect equal outcomes. It should come as no surprise that women are 'underrepresented' in STEM fields, or in philosophy.
Why are they 'underrepresented' in philosophy? Because women as a group are not as good at it as men as a group, because women as a group are not as interested in it as men as a group, and because the feminine nature is conciliatory and averse to what they perceive as the aggressive, combative, and hostile aspects of philosophical dialectic. This is surely a large part, if not the whole, of the explanation, especially given the Affirmative Action advantage women have enjoyed over the past half a century. The hostility perceived by women reflects something about the nature of philosophy, namely, that its very lifeblood is dialectic and argument. Argument can be conducted civilly, often is, and of course ought to be. But it still looks to the female nature as a sort of 'fighting,' a sublimated form of the physical combat that men are wont to engage in, even when dialectic at its best is no such thing. So there is something in the nature of philosophy and something about females that explains their 'underrepresentation.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way. Anyone with an ounce of philosophical intelligence can see that the word I am sneering at conflates the factual and the normative. Therefore it shouldn't be used without sneer quotes.
You cannot refute my point about women by citing women who like the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. Harriet Baber, for example, who is Jewish and exemplifies the Jewish love of dialectic, writes:
I *LIKE* the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. To me, entering my first philosophy class, freshman year (1967) and discovering that you were not only allowed to fight but that the teacher actually encouraged it was liberating. As a girl, I was constantly squeezed and suppressed into being "nice" and non-confrontational. I was under chronic stress holding back, trying to fudge, not to be too clear or direct. But, mirabile dictu: I got into the Profession and through my undergrad, and, oh with a vengeance in grad school at Johns Hopkins, everything I had been pushed throughout my childhood to suppress, and which I failed to suppress adequately to be regarded as "normal," was positively encouraged.
Anecdote. I once roomed with an analytic philosopher at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. I recall a remark he made about philosophical discussion: "If you are not willing to become a bit of an asshole about it, you are not taking it seriously." The guy was obnoxious, but he was right. In a serious discussion, things can get a little tense. The feminine nature shies away from contention and dispute.
If you deny that, then you have no knowledge of human nature and no experience of life. Ever wonder why women are 'overrepresented' among realtors? They excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation. I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent. I mean it as praise. And if females do not take it as praise are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues?
It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'underrepresented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination. Men are 'underrepresented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms. It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy.
Blacks are 'overrepresented' in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out? Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball. Jews are just terrible. Chess is their athletics. Jews dominate in the chess world. Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?
Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ? To a liberal-left dumbass, yes. For they are incapable of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.
As it seems to me, I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs: How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women? One of the NRs claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why? To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous. It has a definite content. That it could use some spelling out is not to the point. What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against. Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Sharia and hold that it takes precedence over the U. S. Constitution. You ought to be discriminated against. The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. This is a point that Dr. Ben Carson made recently in connection with eligibility to become POTUS. But the scumbags of the Left willfully misrepresented him.
(B) Real authority is based on personal relationships within which this kind of natural social organization develops and comes to be understood. The institutions of society should reflect this kind of real authority. It is wrong and very dangerous to try to force other structures on to human nature, e.g., the ludicrous spectacle of pregnant women in Europe pretending to be 'defense ministers', reviewing the troops.
BV: My objection is that this is an extreme statement. Taken without qualification, it could be used to justify slavery. A society consisting of slaves and free men is in one obvious sense a "natural social organization." The naturally powerful dominate the weak and enslave them thereby exercising "real authority" over them.
(2) Aristocracy, for lack of a better name: Rule of the Excellent. Democracy in anything like its current form is clearly not an example. Monarchy of some kinds might well be. But in any case, the ideal for me — which I'm not presently able to articulate in much concrete detail — is a situation where those who are motivated by a love for their community rule. But I doubt that there is any technique or system that ensures this situation. It's just something that may happen from time to time in the organic development of a culture, perhaps. Or maybe God helps to set up the right preconditions.
BV: Rule of the excellent sounds good! But who are the excellent? Those with titles and/or inherited wealth and the power it brings? The stronger? Does might make right and fitness to rule? Granted, pure democracy would be disastrous. There must be principles that are not up for democratic grabs. But concentrating power in a monarch is just as bad. A system of checks and balances is best. Power corrupts, etc.
(3) Racial, ethnic and national differences and inequality:
(A) Not all human biological groups have the same abilities or interests or psychologies. We should never expect that all races will act the same, achieve the same things, etc.
BV: This is an important truth. The fact that leftists denounce those who express it shows how evil the Left is. Not only do leftists suppress free expression, they suppress free expression of what is obviously true. For the Left it is the narrative, not the truth, that counts. If the truth fits the narrative, then leftists embrace it; if the truth contradicts the narrative, they reject it. Part of their narrative is that everyone is equal or to be made equal. At the same time, their narrative is in the service of their will to power. Power is what they want, the power to level and equalize. In order to achieve this, however, they must be unequal in power to those they would equalize. Herein lies one of the contradictions of the leftist project.
But the truth of (A) is consistent with a framework of equal rights that protect all regardless of sex, race, or (non-destructive) creed.
(B) It is perfectly legitimate, then, for members of a given race to wish to live and work among their own kind.
BV: I tend to agree. As I like to put it, no comity without commonality. One cannot get along with people who do not share one's values. This is why unrestricted legal immigration from Muslim lands, of people who make no effort to assimilate, is insane. I would add that people have a right to their likes and dislikes. More importantly, we have a right to our culture and its preservation, and a right to defend it against those who would destroy it. On top of that, our culture 'works' while theirs doesn't — which is why they won't stay home. They won't stay home and they bring their inferior religion and culture with them. Or do you deny that Islam is the saddest and poorest form of theism?
But skin color and national origin cannot be the sole criteria here.
I would have no problem with living next door to a Muslim like Juhdi Jasser or blacks like Ben Carson, Juan Williams, Walter Williams, Condoleeza Rice, Shelby Steele, Herman Cain, Jason Riley, et al. and including mulattoes like Colin Powell even though the latter amazingly, and presumably in the grip of tribalism, refused to condemn Black Lives Matters, that thuggish outfit that undermines the rule of law and demonizes police officers. That refusal is as absurd as if I were to refuse to condemn the mafia. "Look, I'm Italian; I can't condemn my own kind!" (The 'tribalism' of blacks, Hispanics, and women is another topic we need to discuss one of these days. And now it occurs that the NRs may be guilty of some tribalism of their own.)
I would welcome that sort of diversity. Diversity, within limits, is good! It is just that leftists, being the willfully stupid stupidos that they are, make a fetish out of it and fail to realize that there is a competing value: unity. But going to the opposite extreme is also bad. See how fair and balanced I am? [grin]
(C) For whites, there are no important benefits to 'racial integration' or 'diversity' and there are some very profound and irreparable harms. Therefore, whites should be race-conscious and reject the false racial guilt that has been programmed into them over the decades by anti-whites, Leftists and hostile non-whites.
BV: This needs some qualification. Popular music has certainly benefited from something like 'racial integration' and cross-fertilization. Think of jazz, blues, rock, etc. This is a huge separate topic. It would be interesting to study the degeneration of black music from the Negro spirituals on down to soul-destroying hip-hop and rap crap. Arguably, one of the reasons blacks will always be on the economic and social bottom of society is because of the base, crude, degrading, and outright evil 'music' they produce and consume. What you pump into your mind is even more important than what you pump into your gut. A diet of dreck is destructive. Of course, the whites that produce, partake of, and profit from this evil shit can't be let off the hook either. (Didn't Bill Bennett go after Sony a while back? By the way, conservatism is not equivalent to support for big corporations!)
Should whites be race-conscious? I have always held the view that blood ought not matter, that race ought not matter, that we ought to try to treat each other as individuals and not as tokens of a type or members of a group. I have always held that before we are men or women, white or black, Gentile or Jew, we are rational animals and indeed spiritual animals made in the imago Dei. We are persons and equal as persons to be treated as ends only and never as means (Kant). We are brothers and sisters with one and the same Father and it is this metaphysical fact, if it is a fact, that underpins our normative equality. Remove this underpinning and the normative equality collapses. (Or can you think of something that could be put in its place?) Empirically, of course, there is no equality among individual or groups. Life is hierarchical as Crazy Fritz liked to say. Nietzsche, who gave aid and comfort to National Socialism, drew the consequences of the death of God quite fearlessly: no God, no truth, no moral world order, no respect for persons as persons. It's all power at bottom: "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" (Is this why some leftists love him so much?) Nietzsche undermined key supports of our Western heritage with its dual rootage in Athens and Jerusalem. But for my neo-reactionary sparring partners I think I hear the strains of Blut und Boden perhaps supplemented with Blut und Hoden (blood and balls/testicles) with the Horst Wessell Lied playing in the background. I don't mean to be disrespectful to them, but there is a danger here. The danger is that in reacting against the commie Left you end up a fascist.
Does blood matter? Well, it does matter for many, but should it matter? Perhaps the question is this: Is it morally justifiable to tie one's very identity to one's race or ethnicity as opposed to tying it to being zoon logikon or imago Dei? Unfortunately, there are women who identify as women above all else; among them are those who will vote for Hillary because she is a woman! That is despicable. It is as if I were to vote for a man because he is a man. And if we do identify racially, ethnically, sexually, how do we live in peace with one another in a world in which distances have been technologically shrunk and buffers removed?
Dennis Prager harps on the differences between the sexes, differences deeper than any 'social constructing/construing' can reach; but he also maintains that blood does not matter. Is that a logically consistent position? Can one be a sex realist but not a race realist? Is Prager's conservatism at odds with his liberalism? I put the question to myself. Further: Is there a Right race realism and a Left race realism? The above are not rhetorical questions.
(4) Transcendence: There is ultimately no reason to do anything or care about anything unless we can tell some (believable) story about ultimate things. Hence any viable society must have such a story. (I think Christianity is the best.) Right now we in the west are quite literally dying for lack of one. This story should be the basis for political society. (I am not advocating an Iranian style theocracy; but think of how Christianity continues to color everything in our society even though it is explicitly rejected and denounced. Once the Left has really rejected Christianity it will just curl up and die.)
BV: I agree that Christianity is the best of the five great religions. It is supreme among religions. Islam is the worst, the adolescent punk of religions, still 'acting out' after all these centuries, still pissed off over ancient grievances, still angry about the Crusades which were a defensive response to Muslim land-grabs!
We are push-overs for the Islamo-fanatics and their leftist enablers because we no longer believe in ourselves or our great heritage. We have become soft and weak and unwilling to defend the conditions of our soft and prosperous way of life. The abdication of authority on the part of university administrators and professors is just one proof of this. Another is our unwillingness to assume the burdens of procreation. We do not believe in our values and principles sufficiently to transmit them into the future.
Here is the problem. We need a believable narrative about ultimate things. And we may need it as a support of our politics, though this is not obvious to me. (Politics rests on normative ethics which rests on philosophical anthropology which is the metaphysics of human nature and from there we enter the entire constellation of metaphysical questions.) We need an account of the ultimate why and wherefore to keep from lapsing into the somnolent nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man. I use 'narrative' to hold open the question whether the account must be true to be life-enhancing. A narrative is a story, but a story needn't be true to be a story, whereas the truth needs to be true to be the truth, and it is at least a question whether a narrative must be true to be life-enhancing in the long run. (There is of course the temptation to go pragmatic here and say, with William James, that the true just is the good by way of belief.)
To get to this believable narrative about ultimates, however, we need open inquiry and free discussion, values my neo-reactionary interlocutors seem wary of trumpeting. (They seem to think that any truck with liberalism leads inevitably to the insanities of hard leftism.) We need to arrange the confrontation of different sectors of culture that are at least partially hostile to one another. For example, philosophy and religion are clearly at odds, but each needs the other and each profits from dialogue and some 'fighting' with the other. Philosophy and science are at odds to some extent as well. Left unchastened, science can transmogrify into an absurd scientism, just as religion, left unchastened, can turn into fanaticism and fideism and an embrace of the irrational. The religions need each other too. Judaic legalism and tribalism profits from Christian critique just as the excesses of Buddhist metaphysics (anatta, anicca, dukkha) are curbed by Christian personalism and its eminently more balanced view of impermanence and suffering. If there were some real philosophy in the Muslim world, Muslims would not be so bloody (literally!) fanatical and murderous. Philosophy induces a certain healthy skepticism. And so on. Science versus religion. The vita contemplativa versus the vita activa.
Note that if it is salutary to have a dialog with Buddhism and Hinduism and Taoism and perhaps even witj some of the more respectable strands of Islam such as Sufism (its mystical branch), then we cannot be blood-and-soil nativists: we need to be open-minded and 'liberal.' Being an aporetician, I am driving toward the articulation of a problem: We need a believable, action-guiding narrative. To be believable it must be coherent and rationally supportable. To arrive at such requires the examination and evaluation of competing worldviews. But bitter and protracted disagreement is inevitable. We won't able to agree on the best overall action-guiding narrative. We will splinter apart into a plurality of positions. This weakens us over against the Muslim fascists who would impose a worldview by force and a crappy one at that. Same with the Left: they have no compunction about using the awesome coercive power of the State to bring people into line with their destructive agenda.
(5) Non-neutrality: There is no system of abstract principles neutral with [respect] to the good, e.g., principles about Harm or Equal Freedom or Autonomy. Hence there is no way for the state or any other authority to act on neutral principles. We are always already in the fray, fighting on some side whether we know it or not. The only thing anyone can really do is to try to figure out what is Good and then go from there.
BV: Agreed, we need some substantive theory of the Good. (By the way, aren't all supposedly neutral principles also committed in some substantive way or other? Give me an example of a purely neutral, purely abstract principle.) Trouble is, we disagree about what the ultimate good for man is. The visio beata? The bios theoretikos? Submission to the will of Allah? The maximum of autonomy and self-determination? Pleasure? (Nietzsche: "Man does not seek pleasure; only the Englishman does.") The greatest material well-being of the greatest number?
And of course we will disagree about the metaphysical underpinnings of any theory of the human good or any theory of the purpose of human life.
I suggest that what we need to do is battle the totalitarian forces that would squelch free inquiry: radical Islam, the Left, and the scientisticists (to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch), many of them New Atheists. We need to be intolerant in defense of our space of toleration. We need to be intolerant toward the New Atheist suppression of religion by the Dawkins Gang and their ilk while at the same time tolerating decent atheists. In conjunction with this: defense of our Enlightenment culture by means of a stoppage of illegal immigration; a moratorium on legal immigration from Muslim lands; the destruction of ISIS and other terrorist entities; a vigorous defense of Israel; a more robust confrontation with leftists and other destructive types, especially those who are destroying the universities. That for a start. And of course, when dealing with evil-doers, the threat of physical violence must always be 'on the table.'