Category Archives: Short Notes

I Dont Think I Am A Neoreactionary

I read a lot of neoreactionary blogs. I appreciate the work of a lot of neoreactionaries. I link to neoreactionaries. I am  indebted to neoreactionary Anomaly UK for his invaluable assistance with the Golden Circle. Neoreactionaries tend to be intelligent people, and I consider them by and large my allies.

However, I dont think I am a neoreactionary. The reason I dont believe I am a neoreactionary is quite simple: My attitude toward religion is fundamentally different from that of any neoreactionary I’ve ever seen.

My religious belief is, from the neoreactionary perspective as best I grok it, quite a naïve one. When I say I am a Christian, I mean it in this sense:

I am of the opinion that this world was in fact created by God, and that moreover, God is a single Essence as well as a communion of Three Persons, the Second of Whom became a man, and lived, suffered and died, and then rose from the dead, in history, in time. I am quite willing to accept that Christ’s life and death are myth, in the sense Tolkien used the term, but nevertheless I also believe they actually happened.

Moreover, I believe that, to unite people with Him in order to save their souls, Christ established a visible, hierarchical Body on Earth, whose purpose is, first and foremost, sacramental: to confer the Grace of God through the Holy Mysteries for the salvation of souls. I believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church is that Church today.

When I say I am Orthodox, then, I dont mean that I see Orthodoxy as somehow useful to my agenda, as a way to strengthen the culture or maintain social order or build a community or something, and that as a result of that I’ve adopted the forms of Orthodoxy or joined myself to an Orthodox Church. Rather, I mean that I believe Orthodoxy to be the Truth. By implication, then, other religions are, to a greater or lesser degree, false.

Of course, I believe that a society founded on these truths will probably function better than one which denies them. But you cant restore the Faith for that reason. As C.S. Lewis said, if you think you can, you ‘might just as well think [you] can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.’

Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong. No one’s actually defined sincere, exclusive, non-esoteric religious belief out of the neoreaction as far as I can tell. But I see few to no neoreactionaries professing it (though they certainly dont oppose it). For that reason I’m inclined to think I belong more to the Orthosphere, despite spending more time among the disciples of Moldbug.

Thoughts? Am I wrong? Is my religious attitude compatible with the neoreaction?

The Philosopher Prince

Rod Dreher ably defends the (perhaps surprisingly) traditionalist Prince of Wales.

An excerpt from HRH’s book, to whet the appetite:

Modernism deliberately abstracted Nature and glamorized convenience, and this is why we have ended up seeing the natural world as some sort of gigantic production system seemingly capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit. … We have become semi-detached bystanders, empirically correct spectators, rather than what the ancients understood us to be, which is participants in creation. This ideology was far from benign or just a matter of fashion. The Marxism of the Bolshevik regime totally absorbed, adopted and extended the whole concept of Modernism to create the profoundly soulless, vicious, dehumanized ideology which eventually engineered the coldly calculated death of countless millions of its own citizens as well as entire living traditions, all for the simple reason that the end justified the means in the great ‘historic struggle’ to turn people against their true nature and into ideological, indoctrinated ‘machines.’

New Spanish Blog–La Mano Roja Y Vengadora

To those of my readers who speak Spanish: it may interest you to know that I have set up a new, Spanish blog, designed to bridge the gap between the Spanish and English reactionary blogospheres. With the help of Samuel Gonzalez, a contact from Twitter and my partner-in-crime in Panama, I intend to provide a combination of original Spanish reaction (his work) and translations to Spanish of various reactionary works in English (my own and others’). The translations will probably be a collaboration; I will write the initial drafts and he will edit and clean up my inexpert Spanish.

Anyway, if you speak Spanish and are interested in the Spanish flavour of reaction, please check out La Mano Roja y Vengadora.

A Rare Moment Of Candour

While reading about the history of Jim Crow segregation in the postbellum South, I found this gem:

Jim Crow shocked United Nations delegates who reported home about the practice. “Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills,” said a government spokesman. “It raises doubt even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” (emphasis mine)

Source

A Drive-by Attack On Cathedral History

I dont have time for a long post at the moment, but I thought I’d contribute a single blow to the forces tearing down the walls of the Cathedral, specifically the ‘progressive history’ wall:

Committed to protecting the “purity of White Womanhood,” the Klan physically punished those who engaged in immoral behavior, public indecency and drunkenness, wife beating, gambling, adultery, and the failure to support one’s family. Interestingly, the Klan supported women’s suffrage since women could help restore and preserve morality and traditional values by voting for Klan agendas and political candidates.