The Musings of a Self-Confessed Insider

3,231 words

Where do you come from white boy, what is your land
Everybody else knows where they come from
You don’t know your place, you never did, you never can
You can’t find a place in this land

 –“White Boy,” Paul Kanter and Grace Slick

The Dilemma

Professor Kevin MacDonald, who is seldom stuck for words, was stumped when asked how to take our message to “those who think in fundamentally religious terms.”[1] The moment occurred when during a radio talk show he was unable to suggest how to bring those “50 million more people on our side.”[2] The dilemma is where to begin, for as Doctor Greg Johnson said, “If you become too enthusiastic about the Bible, the chances are that you would be worse than a non-believer.”[3] The dominant religion of the West is still Christianity and before the North American New Right (NANR) can consider seriously reaching out to the 50 million Christian Conservatives mentioned by Professor MacDonald, “people who are evangelicals”[4] a basic understanding of that broken religion is required.

Seeking an Answer

A possible useful dispassionate introduction to Christianity and what it means for America today would be the late Georgetown University professor and self-described insider, Carroll Quigley. Given access to the insider’s records for two years in the early 1960s, he published his findings in his 1300 page tome, Tragedy and Hope.

Quigley viewed Christianity from the old Catholic ideal of social organization rather than from today’s ideal of individual salvation. He was in agreement with the insiders’ goals, and thought they should be less secretive. Thus he was surprised when after only a few hundred copies were sold the Macmillan publishing company suppressed the book. The insiders were not as enthusiastic for recognition as the good professor was. Incidentally, the Tragedy in the title is you, the middle class, while the Hope is our overlords.

Quigley wrote that the return to the tradition of the West is evident in many aspects of our lives. This turnabout came because the Americans have “tasted the fleshpots of affluence, are increasingly unselfish, community-conscious and non-material in their attitudes.” Quigley described this attitude as, “a kind of practical Christianity.” He then went on to describe this further and the older reader would grasp how this could work in a closed society but in the multi-cultural society of today is a death sentence for the betrayed, deracinated, white youth. In the words of Quigley,

a growing emphasis on fellowship and interpersonal relations and an increasing skepticism toward abstract power, high-blown slogans, old war cries and authority. There is a reaching out to one another, seeking to understand, to help, to comfort. There is a growing tolerance of differences, an amused attitude of live and let live; and above all, there is an avid discussion of values and priorities that include more spiritual items than a generation ago. There is an almost universal rejection of authority, of rigid formulas, and of final or total answers. In a word there is a fumbling effort to rediscover the tradition of the West by a generation that has largely been cut off from that tradition.[5]

The Strength of the West

Quigley claimed that the new Christian Civilization of the West began with the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon and, having replaced the dying Classical Civilization, may itself be dying. Our civilization has saved itself before by turning to “inclusive diversity” which “has been happening since 1940.”[6] The problem however, with inclusive diversity is that of “the problem of relationships,” with “God and Caesar or to self and to fellow man.” The typical Western solution, wrote Quigley, for “these relationships which have become disrupted and discordant” was to be found in the idea of hierarchy for “diverse elements are discordant only because they are out of place.”[7] They can be reestablished by “discussion and testing,” by relying on experience and by linking up with tradition which is “the most therapeutic action in which any society can engage.”[8] Quigley broke this outlook down to six parts and further elaborated that the strength of the West is our methodology which “is basic to the success, power and wealth of Western Civilization.”[9] This methodology which has suffered repeated attacks has always reasserted itself and is described as:

1. there is a truth,
2. no person or group has the whole truth,
3. every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth,
4. through discussion we can form a consensus closer to the truth than those who contributed to it,
5. once made, it is reformulated and we move closer to the truth,
6. Western man’s picture of the truth advances by successive approximations closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

Ever insightful, Quigley cautioned the reader that the benefits of Christianity can be “contradicted by the narrow intolerance, rigid bigotry and relentless persecutions that have disfigured so much of the religious history of the West,”[10] but that no matter how far we fell, Western man has always come back and marched on “to other victories.” He follows this statement with a nod to Aquinas who wrote that issues have to be worked through and who in his sonnet declared that both individuals and communities, if they are to survive like other living organisms, must adapt “to a changing environment of history, ideas, and social pressures.”

Because Quigley regarded Christianity as a philosophy that affected the very foundation of society, and because he viewed America as an extension of Europe, he could trace the middle-class outlook from its birth in “the Netherlands and northern Italy and other places in the medieval period.”[11] Today’s middle-class first appeared “chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries” when into this Evolean paradise the upstarts forced themselves between the large peasant class which supported the very small nobility and upper clergy. The emotional security possessed by the old upper class and the peasants with their ties to the land was lost to this new “commercial peoples concerned with the exchange of goods, mostly luxury goods, in a society where all their prospective customers already had the basic necessities of life provided by their status.”[12]

Describing the America of today – the world’s first middle-class nation – Quigley wrote that this new insecure and precarious class “had no law (since medieval law was largely past customs, and their activities were not customary ones) in a society that highly valued law. Quigley gave Antonio from The Merchant of Venice as an example for how a single venture could make or break a man. The insecurity of the new class was exacerbated by the fact that “the prevailing religion of the day disapproved of what he was doing, seeking profits and taking interest, and could see no way of providing religious services to town dwellers because of the intimate association of the ecclesiastical system with the existing arrangement of rural landholding.”[13]

Most importantly this insider instructed his reader that “psychic insecurity became the keynote of the new middle-class outlook.[14]” Thus to reach Professor MacDonald’s 50 million it is important to be cognizant “that the only remedy for the insecurity of the middle-class seemed to it to be the accumulation of more possessions that could be demonstrated to the world of the individual’s importance and power.” With the “commercialization of all human relationships”[15] one challenge for the NANR is convincing the “acquisitive society” of the necessity to repossess their family and country if they are to maintain their middle class prestige.

The contradiction Quigley pointed out was that while so many claim to be Christian, their life actually denies the fact. In today’s world where credit is more important than intrinsic personal values “the established values of the Christian outlook, such as love, charity, generosity, gentleness or unselfishness” are displaced by the “middle-class qualities (that) included decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy and insatiable ambition.” The middle-class outlook “had a considerable religious basis, but it was the religion of the medieval heresies and of Puritanism rather than the religion of Roman Christianity.”[16]

William Bender, Chairman of the Harvard Admissions Committee summed up the problem by stating that the student who comes first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or may just be a compulsive worker or even have overly focused on his grades as a way of compensating for his inadequacies in other areas. Sadly, the more imaginative boy with a desire to explore and read the unrequired books will be seen by his teachers as troublesome, undisciplined, and rebellious. The system “rewards the glib facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind.” As Quigley wrote regarding the aristocrat, “the aristocrat plays for the sake of the game or the team or the school. He plays whether he is much good or not, because he feels that he is contributing to a community effort even if he is on the scrubs rather than a star.”[17]

MacDonald’s Difficulty

If Quigley really did have access to the establishment’s records then understanding his idea of Christianity is essential if the West is to survive; and here we see Professor MacDonald’s difficulty in finding a way to reach the 50 million. According to Quigley, “very few people, even highly regarded experts on the subject, have any very clear idea of what is the tradition of the West or how it is based on the fundamental need of Western Civilization to reconcile its intellectual outlook with the basic facts of the Christian experience.”[18] Quigley summed up the difference between the Orthodox Christianity of the medieval two tier Europe beloved by Evola and the new Puritan middle-class that fully flourished in America as follows [19]

Orthodox                                                         Puritan

Evil is absence of good                                Evil is positive entity

Man is basically good.                                 Man is basically evil.

Man is free.                                                     Man is a slave of his nature.                   

Man can contribute to his salvation      Man can be saved only by God. 
by good works.

Self-discipline is necessary to guide      Discipline must be external and total.
or direct. 

Truth is found from experience              Truth is found by rational deduction revelation, and interpreted from revelation.
by tradition. 

The Puritan strain of Christianity which reigns today led Professor MacDonald to say on Radio Free Mississippi that “White People have to believe that their cause is ‘moral,’” and “We have to have a sense that what we are doing is morally OK, is legitimate. Without that White People are easily intimidated.” To further complicate the matter, Quigley wrote that the influence of the middle class became so pervasive that the word “morality” came to mean sex in spite of the fact that Catholic doctrine regarded pride as the worst sin.[20] But that is a knot I am happy to leave to others.

The Strength of the West

Where Western society “has done better than any other” was “in its ability to develop mature and responsible individuals prepared to stand on their own two feet, make decisions, and be prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions and actions without whining or self-justification.”[21] This was the ideal that Christian tradition established long ago and which Quigley was keen to maintain, with or without the Christian Faith.

Traditionally, Christians have regarded human nature as being essentially good and that “it can be formed and modified by social pressures and training.”[22] Man is created in the image of God, and with God at the top of the social hierarchy acting as a higher reference we are “fundamentally free creatures able to move, at their own volition toward God or away from him.”[23] The hope of course was that the goodness of human nature would blossom as it moved towards the full goodness of God.

Opposed “to this Western view of the world and the nature of man” was the Persian influence that came in during the “Babylonian Captivity of the Jews” but more fully through Greek traditionalism and finally through “the Arians, the Manicheans, Luther, Calvin and the Jansenists.”[24] A view that sees man as intrinsically evil and that control is preferable to freedom.

Interestingly, Quigley believed that without the influence of St. Augustine these heresies might have died away. America as a whole missed the Catholic experience and went straight into the world of Golding’s Lord of the Flies in that “the world and the flesh are positive evils and that man, in at least this physical part of his nature, is essentially evil.”[25]

Blood 

The theme of Counter-Currents is not yet taken seriously by the comfortably affluent, but Tom Wolfe, America’s best known trend spotter wrote in his latest novel, Back to Blood:

it’s back to blood! Religion is dying. . . . Why keep pretending . . .  that leaves only our blood . . . the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us. La Raza as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race’ cries the whole world. . . . All people everywhere , you have no choice but – Back to blood?[26]

Blood is also a theme found in The WASP Question where Andrew Fraser toyed with the idea that the American Revolution “suppressed the ethno-religious loyalty owed by all British colonials to the blood and faith of Old England.”[27] He is suggesting that the old “Orthodox Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon era had fused blood and spirit,”[28] but fears that, “Lost altogether is the primordial understanding that Anglo-Saxon identity is inseparable from the blood faith of a Christian People”[29]

The subject of blood becomes extremely uncomfortable for most people when approached from a Christian perspective. We have all rattled off the old songs, here and here but our toes still curl when are asked if we are washed in the blood or even simply, “Are you saved?”

The evangelicals have grasped the importance of a blood contract,[30] but they have failed utterly to realize the importance of blood in the creation and the mandate not to adulterate the separate streams.

How to Bell the Cat

Quigley discussed a Christianity upon which the social order was built. Conversely, the evangelicals are dedicated to individual salvation to the exclusion of the social order. Professor J. I. Packer, who is considered to be one of the most influential evangelicals in North America, described the evangelistic message as the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified, sin and grace, human guilt and divine forgiveness, everything except the social order.

E. Raymond Capt, an Identity Christian wrote in his book, The Stone Kingdom, that the word salvation appeared in the New Testament 45 times while the word Kingdom appeared 205 times. Jesus Christ himself only spoke of salvation twice.[31] Canfield’s The Incredible Scofield gave 139 references to the Kingdom. The challenge for the NANR is how to influence the 50 million evangelicals into taking an interest in “the kingdom” – the reward given to the faithful servants in the parable of the talents[32] – while not offending them in their drive to save souls.

One approach would be to bluntly remind them that their God halted the plague which had already killed 24,000 Israelites before Phineas killed the Israelite prince while in the act of mixing his blood (sperm) with an alien.[33] A kinder, gentler approach is that of the nonviolent Counter-Currents method of slowly raising cultural standards back to their historical heights in which only the indigenous population are comfortable. The approach best suited to answer Professor MacDonald’s dilemma of not knowing what to do is best answered by Jesse Livermore, the greatest stock operator of all time, who would basically agree with him and advise him not to do anything. After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars Livermore said,

I want to tell you this. It was never my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight. It is no trick at all to be right on the market. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn.[34]

An example of the results of sitting tight and allowing the enemy to do our work for us would be the Anglican priest, the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser who “is especially averse to evangelicals. For some reason he seems to harbour a deep contempt and publicly sneers about their belief in ‘Cheesus.’”[35]

Quigley did not envision a return to our Christian past but instead hoped to recapture its ability to raise mature and responsible individuals. This present weakness of ours to transmit our culture “can be remedied only by some reform in its methods of childrearing.”[36] The other alternative that Quigley envisioned was a “new despotism to preserve, by force instead of conviction, petty-bourgeois values in a system of compulsory conformity.”[37] This failure of society to share its symbols of continuity with its youth Quigley would describe as a “rupture of tradition.” A rupture that has today’s philosophers “babbling” and the younger generation “fumblingly” looking for meaning in Christ’s message of love not realizing that “the meaning the present generation is seeking can be found in its own past.”[38]

Evola was another who suspected that the Christian Age was ending. The aristocratic Evola did not lean to Andrew Fraser and his Patriot King but agreed with Quigley that the Christian Age was over, “Nowadays things have deteriorated in the sense of a rapid, disturbing collapse of every valid element in Catholicism.”[39] Unless the evangelicals take an interest in the social order Christians will not have a say in the resurrection of the West.

In the manner of sitting tight the habit of the Christian God is to make an offer and wait. The Contemporary English Version translated Deuteronomy 30:15, “Today I am giving you a choice. You can choose life and success or death and disaster.” In a similar manner, Counter-Currents, stands knocking at the door of society. Will the Christians get involved? Perhaps, perhaps not, but either way the future shape of the country will be decided. Whether the 50 million participate or not a process is in motion which in the words of Carroll Quigley:

Once this process has been established, the adults thus produced can be relied upon to adopt from our western heritage of the past a modified ideology that will fit the needs of the present as well as the traditions of the past. And if Western culture can do that, either in Europe or America, it need fear no enemies from within or from without.[40]

Notes

[1] Kevin MacDonald, http://wwwradiofreemississippi.org ^[2], December 10, 2012.

[2] Kevin MacDonald, http://www.oraclebroadcasting.com ^[3], December 7, 2012.

[3] https://counter-currents.com/2013/02/the-trial-of-socrates-aristophanes-clouds-part-3/#more-36850 ^[4]

[4] Kevin MacDonald, www.radiofreemississippi.org ^[5], December 10, 2012.

[5] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 1966), 1233.

[6] Quigley, 1228.

[7] Quigley, 1233.