The Problem of Abdication: A Tangential Reply to @AnomalyUK

In recent times, it has become a trend for monarchs to abdicate when they feel they are too old or sick to effectively carry out their duties. Pope Benedict XVI abdicated over a year ago, leading to the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis (of whom my opinions are well known). Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands abdicated a little more than a year ago in favour of her son, now King Willem-Alexander.

Anomaly UK has written relatively positively (in passing) of the practice of abdication by elderly monarchs. I, however, am concerned by the trend.

Historically, monarchies have always claimed divine origin as a source of their legitimacy, and many of the monarchies of Europe continue, in name at least, to do so. Elizabeth the Second is officially Queen of the United Kingdom ‘by the grace of God’, for example.

Pagan monarchies often claimed their monarchs were gods, or were descended from gods. This has the advantage of lending a divine aura to the entire royal family, so abdication there may not be much of a problem; one simply replaces one god with another. (This system has great disadvantages as well; I’ve touched on these on Twitter once or twice and I may write about them here eventually).

Christian monarchies, however, were barred from this strategy by theological considerations, so instead they claimed that monarchs were chosen by God. This makes a certain amount of sense; after all, no man can control what kind of person is born into a particular family, so it is only natural that such decisions would be attributed to God.

However, the implications for abdication in this case are severe. If the king is chosen by God to rule, then who is anyone — even and perhaps especially the king himself — to set that calling aside and choose someone different for the role?

Of course, there are times when any sane standard of practicality demands that someone else rule in the king’s stead, either by means of regency or abdication. And if a king is genuinely incapable of doing his job — for example, if he is so senile as to be unaware of his surroundings — then one could plausibly make the claim that the time has come to relinquish his divine calling in favour of a more capable successor.

However, when abdication is carried out for the sake of convenience, it seriously undermines the divine justification for the monarchical institution.

Of course, theologically, we cannot say that God’s hands are somehow tied. One can say, as a matter of theory, that in the moment the elder monarch abdicates, the successor receives the divine mandate. However, this doesn’t change the fact that God Himself is supposed to have chosen the previous monarch. And while He has also chosen the successor, abdication for frivolous causes nevertheless tends to convey the impression that the monarch is not taking his divine vocation seriously. And if he does not take it seriously, why should anyone else?

The key point here is not that a monarch must always serve till death (though in my opinion that should be the norm), but rather that he must place his calling as monarch ahead of his personal satisfaction or other trivial concerns. If he does not, he betrays a lack of respect for his own office, and that lack will be contagious.

Abdication cannot be forbidden, per se, but it should be stigmatised. When the late Emperor Otto of Austria was asked (many years ago) whom he despised most as a contemporary figure, he answered, ‘the Duke of Windsor who has abdicated.’

The Emperor had the right idea. Christian monarchy cannot survive if kings abandon their posts for light or trivial reasons, and especially not if they are praised for it. If ‘divine right’ is to survive in any useful, meaningful way, it must transcend itself and become the principle of the monarch’s ‘divine duty’, before God, to his realm and his people. Otherwise it amounts to a rather self-aggrandising idea on the monarch’s part.

In other words, ‘abdication-shaming’, if you will, is necessary to the institution of Christian monarchy, and recent reactionary embrace of abdication is, in my opinion, a short-sighted strategic blunder.

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There Are Few Things More Decadent Than Food Glorification

The ascetic life is almost entirely alien to modern man. ‘Mitchell’ of A House With No Child illustrates this point:

Should one disregard physical attractiveness, in pursuing a potential spouse? Of course not.

Will S covers the rather silly idea that one should ignore physical attraction when seeking/choosing a spouse:

Patriactionary

It is encouraging to find elements of Christian ‘Red Pill’ thinking from outside of the Christian manosphere, within the wider Christian community; recently I found such a blog post written a little over a year ago, here, by Stephen Altrogge, a Reformed writer, musician / songwriter and former pastor, in which he combats erroneous thinking encouraging relative disregard for physical attraction in relationship decision-making processes.

Some excerpts:

Recently Mike McKinley and Tim Challies both wrote articles which argued that young people, particularly men, should choose to be attracted primarily to a potential spouse’s spiritual beauty rather than physical beauty. I really respect both of these guys, love their gospel work, and usually agree with them, but as a pastor, both of these articles made me nervous. They made me nervous for two reasons.

First, the articles don’t fully appreciate the place of physical attraction in scripture. Yes, scripture is clear…

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Re: Game Vs. the Reactosphere (ATTN @Aurini)

This post will be a reply to Davis M J Aurini’s post “Game Versus the Reactosphere” at his blog Stares at the World. 

The skirmish between the Game bloggers and the reactionary bloggers has been brewing for a long time, but the blog fights appear to have been started by the post “Pick-Up Artists and the Nature of Women” at Emashee’s blog tba. Emashee criticises Pick-Up Artists for many of the same reasons that I (and Michael Anissimov, and several other reactionaries) have criticised them in the past, especially on Twitter: that they are (and they admit this) ‘enjoying the decline’. They are not attempting to fight the rise in female degeneracy and sluttery, but rather exploiting it for their own pleasure. I have compared this in the past to Nero’s legendary act of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’. Emashee’s thesis, with which I essentially agree, is that women need to be controlled by men, and that they are not going to take the initiative to fix the societal problems caused by feminism.

What I am definitely not saying, and what I dont believe Emashee is saying, is that women are somehow excused from blame for their misbehaviour or that they will not or should not suffer as a result of acting like sluts. What I am saying is that ultimately it is men who must initiate the changes that will fix this situation, as we must initiate all significant social changes, because women simply will not do so.

Aurini makes a sharp distinction between ‘PUAs’ and ‘Gamers’ that does not reflect reactionary usage of these terms (or any usage I am familiar with). We use ‘PUA’ to mean ‘a man who makes a major study of seduction and uses his skills to bed large numbers of women’. On this definition, Roosh is just as much a PUA as Mystery and all our criticisms of ‘PUAs’ apply to Roosh and his ilk.

Aurini then writes that ‘Gamer’ types would theoretically prefer a traditional, feminine (chaste?) woman, but since they have so much trouble finding one, they figure they might as well get laid in the meantime. I hope you can see why this attitude is less than impressive, especially to the Christian traditionalists. It’s a bit like saying ‘Well, I cant put out the fire in the Imperial palace, so I might as well get a bag of marshmallows.’ Cynically exploiting civilisational decline for your own pleasure will always call your reactionary bona fides into question.

Next, Aurini argues that the ‘Gamers’ have been discouraging sluttery and promoting traditional femininity with activities such as the #BackToTheKitchen and #FatShamingWeek hashtags. Well and good. But the above criticism still holds. Moreover, they are still validating the sluts they meet in person, even as their online activities trend in the opposite (and right) direction.

In the section that follows this, Aurini makes what I think may be his most repulsive ‘point’, but one I thank him for making, as I’ve made it before, but I think it has a bit more credibility coming from him; viz. that Roosh is in Eastern Europe because it is more traditional. But Roosh isn’t there to find a chaste young woman, marry her, and settle down; no, Roosh is in Eastern Europe to convince women who are not presently sluts (or at least who are significantly less slutty than the women he could bed in America) to behave like sluts with him. If you think this is admirable you are quite simply not a reactionary. Aurini claims that ‘at the end of the day…this behaviour is completely in the hands of the women.’ And in a sense this is true; Roosh is not a rapist. But when you lead someone to behave badly, even if you dont use force, you become partially responsible for that person’s behaviour. Blame is not a fixed-sum game; you are responsible for your own sins and you are responsible if you give scandal to others. And if you as a man feel you must pursue casual sex, it’s much better that it be with women who are already sluts. I really cannot understand how Aurini expects me to sympathise with Roosh because he makes it his goal to corrupt (relatively) chaste Eastern European women.

Aurini then makes several points that I either have no opinion about or agree with, and will thus skip over. I’ll pick up my criticism of his post at the second-to-last section, viz. the one about ‘white knights’.

The term ‘white knight’, as commonly used in the Manosphere, is a pet peeve of mine. I believe it originated as a pejorative term to refer to men who tried to ‘rescue’ women with the implicit expectation that this would somehow earn them sex; in other words, this was the kind of man a real-life acquaintance of mine would call ‘Captain Save-a-Ho’. However, the term has now begun to be used to mean ‘anyone who defends a woman who is behaving badly, on any level and for any reason’ and sometimes even ‘anyone who defends a woman against Manospherian attack, even when that attack is completely wrongheaded and the woman is in the right’.

To say that the men who convince women to behave like sluts share some of the blame for their sluttery is not ‘white knighting’; it is an obvious truth. Gamers tend to want everything to be considered 100% women’s fault all the time, and while I understand the impulse (because the progressive typically makes exactly the opposite error), it’s simply not correct. Unless the term ‘white knight’ goes back to its original meaning, I think it should be scrapped; it’s not useful except as a rhetorical bludgeon to help certain men escape blame for their degeneracy.

Finally, Aurini writes the following:

At the end of the day, the Manosphere is full of men speaking Truth, and daring to live by the Truth they speak.  That they fall short of an ideal is no surprise – we all fall short, at some point or another.  But don’t let these minor differences drive us apart.

I am afraid I must disagree. The Manosphere certainly is full of men speaking truth, after a fashion. But it is the understatement of the year to say they ‘fall short of an ideal’. They dont even try to live by the ideal, and moreover, they openly encourage others not to try to live by the ideal. If they were hypocrites who slept around while publicly proclaiming the need for chastity, that would be one thing. Most people wont live up to most ideals. But when they encourage sleeping around as a way of life (and when they attract a crowd that often denigrates and mocks marriage) they separate themselves from the values of reaction. And while I’m not above learning from them at times (when a person is right, he’s right), I dont feel the need to accept them as brothers or colleagues, until and unless they embrace the values reaction stands for.

I therefore stand with Anissimov, Steves, and Emashee, and against Roosh and his ilk (and if necessary Aurini as well), and I remain

your humble servant,

Arthur Richard Harrison

Barbarians Within the Gates

Neoreaction is a young movement. Moreover, it’s a movement that emerged in a rather unprecedented way. Few if any political movements in history have begun with theoretical work by a loose connection of bloggers.

Early in the history of the movement, it was small and attracted only people of genuine conviction (or at least open curiosity) and exceptionally high intelligence. As the movement grows, however, we will attract, and have already begun to attract, all manner of people we either dont want around or dont want representing us. There are entryists. There are idiots. There are boors and there are trolls.

Until now we haven’t had to deal with this. We’ve been very accepting of anyone who wants to join in on neoreaction, and this has worked out all right. However, recent events have shown that this is no longer the case. We have people on the outside asking us polite questions and we ought to be answering them, trying to raise awareness and bring people in. Some of us, however, see trolls under every bridge and respond in distinctly non-constructive ways.

These people need to be kept under control if neoreaction is to get anywhere. The image we present is important, and recruiting new people is important. If we are overly suspicious and hostile to the curious outsider we will only become an insular club with little development of thought and zero action.

All of this is to say that those of us who are intelligent, serious, and well-established need a way to regulate the neoreactionary masses, and perhaps even each other. We need a self-regulating hierarchy.

The idea of a neoreactionary wiki has been floated several times before, but as far as I know it has never actually been established. I think it should be, and could be with minimal cost and work. The wiki would include contributions from all the major neoreactionary thinkers (and probably many of the minor ones) and therefore would acquire a greater authority than any individual’s blog.

From there, we could set up a directory of sorts for the neoreaction: a list of people recognised by the community as leaders and representatives of the best in our movement. Those people would then have the discretion to expand the list, something they should do very sparingly. We could also keep the list of banned wiki editors public.

The creation of this neoreactionary wiki would thus set up four tiers in the neoreaction:

1. Directory members. These are the authorities on the subject, the people outsiders should read first and the people whose opinions should be given the most weight.

2. Wiki editors. These are people who make contributions of various levels of significance to neoreactionary thought, and who are known and (at least tentatively) accepted.

3. Banned editors. These people have, for whatever reason, earned the disapproval of the community or the leaders. Obviously we dont have the power to finally silence them but they do not represent us.

4. The wild cards: people who dont have an account at the wiki and never have. Over time, as the wiki grows in prominence (if it’s a success), these people should probably be purged, unless they’re indubitably writers of the first order. It wont be that hard to set up an account and having the wiki will be a huge boon to the movement as a whole. That said, we cant expect everyone to be on board right away, and in the beginning this category will be large.

This wiki would give us a way to deal with the barbarians within the gates who threaten to destroy Rome from the inside. Of course, it would only work if it gained the approval of most of the current influential neoreactionaries. I hope it will and I’m prepared to have the idea critiqued and refined. I am of course willing to be heavily involved in the creation of the wiki but I dont think I have the clout to establish it all on my own.

I welcome comments, especially from the bigger NRx thinkers, and I remain

your obedient servant,

Arthur Richard Harrison

Re: Neoreaction and Dynasties (Attn: @AnomalyUK)

My good friend Anomaly UK created a post yesterday in response to a conversation I had on Twitter with Marko Sket and Carlos Esteban about “Neoreaction and Dynasties.” The discussion was about Russia, and how the situation there ought to be handled. Carlos is well-known as an advocate for the crowning of Vladimir Putin as Tsar of Russia, while I am a Romanov loyalist (and Marko seems to be one as well, or at least an opponent of the ‘Putin as Tsar’ idea.)

I think Anomaly’s mistake here is to identify me as a neoreactionary. I dont know about Carlos or Marco, but I am not a neoreactionary, and this has been the subject of a good deal of wrangling already. I’m a paleoreactionary. I have, therefore, a rather different view of monarchy from Anomaly’s. Honestly, I am surprised to find Catholic monarchist Carlos Esteban on the other side of this. He, I would have thought, would share my dynastic legitimism more than anyone.

You see, I do actually see St Nicholas II as a divinely-ordained monarch, and the Grand Duchess as his rightful successor today. This title is at least as important in the ethical sphere as any private property claim. On one level, I’m inclined to simply leave it at that. Russia was stolen, and the rightful owner is alive. So give it to her, just the same as you would (or should) return any stolen property if you are able.

However, I realise that may not be entirely persuasive. So let me add this:

Putin, as Marko points out, is a creature of the Revolution. I happen to admire him in many ways. I think he is a good leader, and perhaps the only sane head of state left in what was once Christendom. Honestly, I hope he can have a role in the Tsarina’s administration when she is restored. However, for him to crown himself Tsar has a bit too much of the ring of Napoleon to it. Russia cannot truly and completely repent of the evil of the revolution until it restores the Ancien Régime as far as possible. Think about this:

When one does wrong, there are three stages to repentance: First, one must acknowledge that one has done wrong. Second, one must resolve to avoid said wrong in the future. Third, one must undo, as far as it is possible to undo, the effects of the Revolution. As long as Russia’s rightful monarch lives, and yet another rules the country, Russia has not properly repented; she still has one foot in 1917. Putin will find it very difficult if not impossible to establish legitimacy without taking as a given that the Revolution, of which he is heir, was at least somewhat legitimate.

Would I rock the boat if I lived in Russia and Putin were Tsar? Perhaps not; there is a good chance things would get worse (I take the same attitude toward Napoleon). But would I push for that outcome over and against the real Tsarina? Why on earth would I do that?

Why We Must Legislate Morality

In liberal societies, one commonly hears that we cannot or at least should not ‘legislate morality’, especially ‘religious morality’. Generally speaking, this contention is justified with an appeal to concepts of fairness and freedom. The argument, as often presented (and as presented by a student in my college Political Science class recently), takes more or less this form:

‘We cannot legislate based on religious concepts of morality because our society is diverse and pluralistic, and everyone doesn’t follow the same religion. Thus, to legislate based on one religion in particular would be unfair to those who don’t follow that religion [and presumably would interfere with their freedom to practice some other religion, or no religion at all].’

The problem is that this statement is deeply lacking in self-awareness, and additionally, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of state and legislation. This will be easiest to understand if we deal with the latter first.

Upon any amount of reflection, it should become self-evident that the nature of law is, fundamentally, to impose some kind of standard upon those who might dissent from it. This is why law is law, and not a book of suggestions. A law you cannot be forcibly punished for breaking is effectively no law at all. Law is always imposed. That is in its nature. Law cannot, ever, apply only to those who agree with it. There would in such a case be no need for law.

Moreover, most laws exist to impose a specific kind of standard, namely: a moral standard. Obviously, there are fairly trivial laws like traffic regulations, which exist to enforce a standard that is not per se moral, but largely practical. (One could argue that even if the concrete prescriptions of the traffic code are not individually and inherently moral, the need for some kind of ordered framework is a moral imperative when you have as many people driving as a modern country does, but that’s outside the scope of this post.) However, weightier laws are all moral in one way or another. Laws against murder, theft, rape, etc. are all made because legislators believe that these things are immoral.

‘But wait!’ the liberal might object. ‘Everyone agrees those things are immoral. It’s not like imposing your religious opinion about homosexuality or abortion or alternative sexual identity.’ But that is where the liberal is wrong. Everyone does not agree with the laws on murder, rape, and theft. At the very least, there are many, many people who would like for there to be an exception to these laws for their particular case. In a more principled way, there are people like ‘Afghan refugee’ Esmatulla Sharifi, who, according to the lawyer who defended him at his multiple-rape trial, ‘was confused about the nature of consent.’ 

Again: if these standards were truly universally accepted, we wouldn’t need laws to enforce them. True, the wrongness of murder and rape is broadly accepted, but the few dissenters must still have the values embodied in the law imposed upon them.

Moreover, all moral standards are rooted in a moral code. And which moral code is correct is the subject of debate and disagreement among philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people around the world and has been for thousands of years. And during those thousands of years, legislators have made laws based on their particular moral beliefs. And liberals, despite their rhetoric, dont want to change that. The classical liberals didn’t want to change it, the modern liberals dont want to change it, and the atavistic throwback liberals known as ‘libertarians’ dont want to change it. Rather, each of these groups simply wants to legislate its own particular moral code.

On its own, this would be in a sense unobjectionable. I do not agree with the liberal moral code, but of course I have to expect that like everyone else, liberals would act based on their beliefs. The problem is that they attempt to sell the idea that their moral code isn’t really a moral code, while yours is, and therefore that their moral code is a priori a superior basis for legislation, which it is not.

Libertarians are especially bad in this regard. ‘The government should not enforce morality,’ they say, ‘just property rights.’ But property rights, as conceived by libertarians, are nothing but a system of morality (even if not a complete one). And that system has no a priori privilege over other systems. The claim that libertarians do not want to impose their morality on you is absurd; of course they are going to impose their property rights, as they perceive them, on others who perceive the issue differently.

In short, it is no less ‘unfair’ to impose a moral code based on an ideology on those that dissent from that ideology than it is to impose a moral code based on a religion on those that dissent from that religion.

The problem here is one of names. Just as progressivism is a religion that brands itself as a non-religion in order to get around objections to an established church, the liberal moral code is a moral code that brands itself as something other than a moral code in order to pre-emptively disqualify its competitors. You cannot win as long as you allow the enemy to set the linguistic frame. ‘Separation of church and state’ is nothing but more progressive verbal witchraft.