Intro
A historiographical idiosyncrasy of the modern right is the conceit of the white man’s burden. This stands in stark contrast to the supposed desire to spread the Word of Christ, which should have informed colonial Europeans in their escapades away from the white continent. There is this deep sense of self-absorption going on when an entire political phenomenon, whether libertarian or traditionalist, muddies waters by seeing itself as exceptional and having a mission to “civilize” the world. They may see through the lens of literal Whig history, and ultimately perceive the intent of the white man’s civilizing was a benefit for all. There may have been some bumps and potholes along the way, but it has overall been a benefit. Likewise, you know the more authoritarian and collectivist the right gets, the more they will stand by this historiography.
This is an involuntary impulse. They’re doing it out of instinct to protect the gods they’ve made of their ancestors and of the technology and infrastructure around them. And now that it didn’t pan out as well as it should’ve, they spring into apologetics for every feature of society, and reveal that it was actually not corrupted by Europeans, but by just simple mismanagement. Nay, the destructiveness of modernity was due to us being so kind and so forgiving of the blacks and browns! Women, too! It’s actually all their fault that society sucks so bad! If only we could put them all back in their place, and give back the white man his deserved positions of power would the human race be saved from this spreading rot.
There is no sense of responsibility for the decline, only the uptrend. To save themselves the bitterness of being the once winner, now loser, of history, they are jumping to every erroneous conclusion imaginable to manufacture casus belli on those who feel rightfully misled and betrayed by the white man. Is the indignance of angry masses of POCs rioting and looting justifiable? Nah. All I would like to point out here is the indignance of the right is likewise unjustifiable, lacks any real integrity, lives in the past, and seems to be more interested in making gods of itself than honoring the true God this race once dutifully spread across the face of the earth. While, again, they are often right about history, much is left out. To their benefit, the left purposefully lies about history.
Whig History
Unknowingly the right seems to be playing, at times, to the same illegitimate historiography of the leftists it despises. It views history as purely technological advancement, capitalist free markets waxing and waning in freedom, and the oppressiveness of the forms government has taken. This is a result of a distinctly protestant perspective on history. It all really goes back to Isaac Newton, and his discovery of celestial bodies and their independence from another. Through this development, the conception of reality as having one big atomizing tendency - that all bodies themselves have their own gravitational forces (gravity not being proved, but just a mystical concept) - has been the driver behind humanity’s hermeneutical demise.
It is a development so all-encompassing; it took protestant Europe by a (permanent) storm. All the way up to Luther, up to Hegel, the overriding theme of the Post-Enlightenment and Post-Reformation has been innovation of Plato. From there, it is a hop, skip, and a jump away from where we arrived by Lockean empiricism. The conflux of all these thinkers has been the internalization of the fall of the Church, and a reinterpretation of all the basic aspects of life and economy. Because, to the white man’s conceit once again, he perceives economics as a science or physics experiment - not a wretched excuse to wax philosophical. Property, labor, land use, government, interest rates, duty were all given new meanings in the lead up to the final materialization of the Post-Enlightenment and Post-Reformation in the form of the United States. Now, finally, all these revisions made to the most distinctly collective aspects of human life were to benefit only those with capital; capital attained through innovation, entrepreneurship, and hard work. As shown by the last 250 years, the trend has only taken us to corpogovernment, usury, and many sick Pavlovian conditionings in terms of entitlement, independence, usury, etc.
The worst of all of these misinterpretations might just be that of their view of “value” and how it has warped from a labor interpretation to market interpretation. Why is this? Well, the trend is independence from and away from dependence on. No longer labor should be recognized as valuable, as in the origin of value being primarily in the hands of the literal person who makes the product, but the product itself! How is this not sick and twisted? It’s no surprise this view of value is what has shipped our entire manufacturing and crafts to third world countries. And guess what? The precious value of your products has gone down! Why? Labor.
This is not a communist view. This is the traditional outlook. In liberation of the worker and serf, the capitalist only shifted the class of productive serfs to other nations so that they could now turn their own nationals into consumer slaves.
Racial Insolence
What has the world gotten out of the white man’s innovation, though? Their own insecure re-creations of Whig history. And when those of the world are affected poorly, especially those not of European ancestry here in the United States, what is the reaction of the white rightist? Generally, incredulity, or straight up shifting the blame to the lesser races.
Through technological innovation every other nonwhite race has higher diabetes rates than whites (can’t break down sugar like whitey). Likewise, alcoholism is a great problem among Native Americans. What’s the right’s answer anytime topics like these are brought up?
Incredulity and blame game: “Ah, well, we can’t blame a whole race for that. Those people just need better self-control and to go to rehab! Done and done! White man saves the day!”
There is seemingly no sense of responsibility this same white man with a burden seemed to have when “civilizing” the lesser races. And now that modernity has blown back in their faces, it’s totally not their fault - we just need more independence and bootstrapping. Right.
Cognitive Dissonance
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, and the more you act like that’s the case the more rhetorical firepower every anti-rightist faction is going to levy against you. This is why Democrats will persistently be successful as a big tent - they give the impression they want to help everyone. The Republicans give the impression, quite directly, they want to help no one. If anyone is serious about running a nation, or even just their own community, they have to start with asking the question: How does this help people? That means how do we manufacture institutions that benefit the whole of a nation. Well, it starts with having an honest Christian disposition. Not being overly compassionate in the way the left wants to be - this just leads to cynicism because people are inherently broken as individuals.
If the right wants to construct a way forward, it is pertinent it gets out of the woods of individualism. This notion is so internalized, that even as they seemingly want to knock corporate America down a couple pegs, it still can’t get over the perceived seniority of the market and its selfish interpretation of property, land management, and unions. If the right is to really take its Christian beliefs to a logical conclusion, the correct way forward is how government can affect change in our lives that benefits people healthfully.
Directly, this can be done in cities by using government and certain rich Christians to buy out the spiritually destructive businesses and misuses of land and turn them into societally beneficial businesses, constructive industries, parks, charitable organizations, etc. The current leftist visions to benefit cities are just lazy. They think too much in terms of servicing indulgence than to actually make cities genuinely wonderful places they could be.
These types of useful endeavors we could be engaging now require little theorizing, and definitely requires no fixation on waxing on friend-enemy distinctions. If you’re too busy trying to find who your friend or enemy is, then it might be a little embarrassing for you to just check out the beatitudes, Luke 6:35, and Ecclesiastes 10:20. It’s a laughable characteristic of the modern right; how they take basic pagan mindsets of the left, and then remanufacture them into niche philosophical quips. “The left acts this way; therefore, we must put a word or phrase to it and become it. We get it.” The cope for this mindset is always that they’re better than the left because they like beauty and cool old architecture or something. Cool cope, but if you’re just busying yourself with pastiche, you’re not serious.
Coda
The unseriousness of the right is founded in a genuine sense of a loss of identity. White Americans (not going to speak for modern Europeans, I don’t understand them) had the luxury of disassociating from a soma, as their entire history has been coming to terms with a new ecology (America). They had no real reason to collectivize because, at least up until the late 19th century, there was enough land to go around. This is no longer the case, and the greed and manifest destiny essentially ran out. Not because there isn’t still enough land, but that land is owned and accounted for. It is major misstep to idolizing what is quite clearly a history of unbridled rapacity. While I am in no way shunning American heroism, and a justifiable mythos, one can’t help but find a bit of sympathy for those wronged by the American Empire. Taos Revolt, Reconstruction Era, Nagasaki and Hiroshima and unresolved disputes with Native Americans as examples off the top of my head. There seems to be a lot of perceived undue blame on the white race, but then these same people are quick to judge every other race and special interest group.
Now that the white American - the white boy - no longer has connection to his European heritage, and was satiated by capital alone (being a bit generalizey, I know) he had no unifying factor between his fellow white American other than perhaps being a freemason and speaking the same language. He didn’t have to bootstrap like other races in America. While the black man was removed from his home just like the white man, he didn’t have the luxury of capital, and was quite literally able to ferment with his culture because that is all he had. There’s a reason Ellis Islander whites had a distinctly collectivist experience than compared to sons of the American Revolution.
In the process of building civilization through colonization, Europeans and Americans civilized the world at the expense of those places’ cultures, but perhaps to the greater cost of their own. When the white man goes tyrant, it’s his own freedom he destroys. In trying to figure out where it all went wrong, it’s much more appropriate to point to the development of liberalism and individualism, and how the post-Enlightenment perception that we are all against all and society ought to be modeled off of that supposed truth. In doing so, everything inhuman became the default, and everything human became set aside. All that was made to benefit the collective was now made to benefit the individual if he was so honorably bestowed it upon him by the state or corporation. Property was now to benefit the lord and the lord only. Labor was now to benefit the lord and the lord only. There was no inherent good in using government and power to benefit all for the sake of saving their souls, and leading them to a Christian life.
This is why I think it unwise to wax on and on about how the white man was wronged, how we are surrounded by enemies, how there is no benefit to be had by the government as a force for good. These are the thoughts of a fool. They are no different than the misguided anger of a cosmopolitan black nationalist raging against how everything is working against them.
“When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.”
Pope Gregory XVI
Great piece as always!
Not much to add other than the fact that most people don't seem to think that the modern world is a result of their sins and the sins of their ancestors. I find it hard to believe that most people read the Bible and skip over the parts about God being a God of vengeance who punishes the 4th generation. Maybe everything that's happening to white people was done to those under their rule. But if you think railroads and or muh democracy make up for all the sufferings of colonized peoples then your are hopeless. This isn't a problem with just white people, brown diaspoos like myself engage in the same behavior. We'll post shit about our "great history" and get into flame wars with other ethnicities over whose group is better(even though most of us are wagies in the West lol). All of this shit is gay and reduces the Image of God in other people. To avoid adding more to my longwinded comment, I'll just say that Christ said that those who don't hate their mother and father aren't worthy of him. How does whitewashing the sins of our ancestors and taking pride in them, while at the same time putting down others make us worthy of Christ?
This was good. I was thinking that deconstruction isn't inherently a bad thing if you revere what you deconstruct so that you can build more on top of it as you put it back together. I wonder what compels the soul to eternally deconstruct without regard for building anything to replace what is torn apart. It made me realize that "deconstruction" is inherently an Enlightenment problem, but I can't put my finger on why. When I personally "deconstruct" something, it gives me awe and wonder at how something works, but for others, it depresses them. Is it a mindset or something more?