Holy New Martyrs of Syria, pray to God for us!
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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?
Still Alive And Reading List
Yes, I’m still here. I’ve been reading, though less quickly than I’d like, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. I’m about half done and will begin the work of their systematic refutation when finished.
Other than that, this is what I’m reading at the moment:
St. Gregory Palamas as a Hagiorite, by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos:
A little off my usual political topics, but quite interesting so far. I’ve been perplexed by the essence-energies distinction since I first heard of it and my parish priest recommended this book to me. As of yet it has only been a hagiography of St Gregory and his theology has not been discussed but I’m only a chapter or two into it.
The Outline of Sanity, by G.K. Chesterton
Actually, I just resumed this one, after far too long without making any progress in it. There are a lot of good ideas in here. It doesn’t really line up with much of anything ‘neoreactionary’, but as I’m a paleoreactionary that doesn’t bother me overly much. I think reactionaries could use a bit of Chesterton’s back-to-the-land traditionalism; sometimes on the neoreactionary side of things I think reactionaries get a bit dry and technocratic.
Yes, my reading list is shorter than last time. For next time I hope to add I’ll Take My Stand, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while now.
This post has been short, but that was the intent. I just want to keep this thing alive, as it were, until I finish the Treatises and can get down to the real work.
Aurini Discusses ‘The Corporate Boyfriend’
The refutation of Locke is coming; please stay tuned. In the meantime, I hope you’ll find Davis M J Aurini’s commentary on the ‘corporate boyfriend’ interesting:
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.’
A New Direction
As many of you know, I wrote reactionary work elsewhere before founding this blog. Then I started up here and created the content you see before you.
At the moment, though, I find myself running out of worthwhile things to say. I think I’m rehashing and preaching to the choir. This has contributed to my spending more time on Twitter, which I think has had an unfortunate effect on my thought patterns as well, making me think in Tweets and making it harder to complete a well-thought-out blog post.
At the same time, I think the Christian reactosphere, and especially this blog, needs to deepen its roots. We have plenty of legitimate complaints about modernity and liberalism, and we can point to numerous ways traditional societies were better. We’ve built and are continuing to build social networks for sharing our thought. Now it’s time to develop the new (or rather the old) political science and philosophy. That means reading extensively in the old reactionaries: Kuehnelt-Leddihn, de Maistre, [the original] Bonald, the whole bunch. It also means reading the works of our opponents, starting with the original liberals: the Lockeans, and offering a thorough critique and a plausible alternative theory. In short, it means putting real intellectual force and work behind our ideas, a lot of which are now more or less unformed. Moldbug has done pretty well in this department, but I for one need some work.
To that end, I’m going to try to move the tone of this blog more toward lengthy philosophical posts for a while. This will necessarily mean that the posts will come more rarely, but I hope they’ll be of better quality. The first thing I’m going to do is commence my series Problems of Liberty, which will be an attempt to persuade natural-rights libertarians to accept reaction. To that end, I have started reading John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government; when I’m finished I’ll begin work on the first post in the Problems of Liberty series.
Also, I think it’s time for us to organise and connect to some degree, rather than acting as lone wolves. My two most recent projects, the Golden Circle and La Mano Roja Y Vengadora, each in its own way, attempt to do just that. So a fair amount of my blogging time will be devoted to those efforts going forward.
Finally, I think we have need of a viable alternative culture as reactionaries. We need our own fiction, our own art, and eventually our own communities and movies. As my primary vocation, as near as I can tell, will be to write fiction, I’ll be contributing to that as much as I can, starting with the alternate history novel I’m working on. The title has yet to be determined but the working name of the timeline is Southern Fealty. It’s important, though, that we not produce ‘ideological art’; my novels are not, and the rising reactionary art should not be, proselytising tools per se. Rather, it is simply art, created by reactionaries, and thus naturally reflecting our values. Great art is not message-centred; but it is message-laden nonetheless. Reactionaries need to be influencing people on a pre-rational level. Besides all which, modern art is simply atrocious and someone has to offer something better. The only ones who can do that are those who believe in Beauty, and those who believe in Beauty are reactionary to some degree.
In sum, that’s where my energies will be focused for a while. I’ll be trying to spend less time on Twitter (though I wont be cutting it out entirely), and my original-content posts will be fewer, longer, and more serious. I’ll also be devoting my time to connecting reactionaries through the Golden Circle and the translated works at La Mano Roja. And last but not least I’ll be trying to dedicate more time to my fiction, which has been sadly neglected of late. I’ll also try to start posting a Reading List Update every two weeks or so, partially to let you know I’m still active and partially because I’ll mostly be reading the kind of stuff I want to promote.
I hope you’ll all stay tuned for the Problems Of Liberty series. Until then, I remain
Your Humble Servant,
The Avenging Red Hand
A Grand Opportunity?
Of late, for reasons unknown to me, the email address associated with this blog has been receiving many emails from strangers, usually Big Important Bankers™, who contact me from their highly sophisticated Gmail accounts.
Attached is the content of one such message. My commentariat, such as it is, is encouraged to provide suggestions for how I am to answer.
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