Counter-Currents
964 words
Jonathan Bowden
This brief, privately circulated essay by Jonathan Bowden is from early 2001. I wish to thank Adrian Davies for providing it.
—Greg Johnson, Editor-in-Chief
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Any patriotic renewal for the English and British as a whole needs to concentrate on the cultural reinvigoration of national life. All of which will involve a concerted attempt to raise the present dissolution of cultural ability, taste, talent, and appreciation through proactive measures. First of all, we have to remember—in the manner of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy—that Kultur is hierarchical, mercilessly so. There exists a definite and elitist projection of culture, wherein low or folk culture feeds into middling and/or explanatory forms which then finds its full elitist flowering in high culture. The latter needs to be given to the people openly and blatantly through mass forms—on television, the radio, on the Internet, by virtue of the mass airing of advanced music in public places, etc. Muzak will and must be replaced by the musicology of Tallis, Byrd, Taverner, Purcell, Bliss, Bax, Ireland, Walton, Delius, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Smyth, Britten, Mathias, and so on.
All cultural initiatives must be evolutionary and will point away from the materialistic, the somatic, the low-grade and the non-European towards spiritual growth, mental hygiene, eugenic potentiality, and the possibility of creative genius—whilst being grounded in the reality of the senses and the erotic. On the practical front: all galleries, museums, cultural institutes, scientific institutions, and such like, must be free of charge to the general public. All cultural patrimony obtained through imperial progress (such as the Elgin marbles at the British Museum) must remain in this country. All attempts to remove the country’s heroic racial past—the dismantling of statues to heroes who put down the Indian mutiny, for instance—need to be resisted in a similar manner to the UN’s efforts to prevent the Taliban destroying Buddhist antiquities in Afghanistan.
“Censorship” must also be applied to forms which are egalitarian, anti-elitist, “politically incorrect” in their so-called “political correctness,” ultra-liberal liberal, miscegenatory, or scatological pornographic—always with the proviso that great art is possessed by the dialectic of death and sexuality (witness Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus), that periods of decadence can combine with periods of Renaissance, and that the censorship spoken of relates to the marginalization of pieces like Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain instead of a celebration of Restorationist drama, rather than the reverse.
Likewise, poetry, rhetoric, Latin, Ancient Greek, the drama (in which we have excelled as a Nation), music, dance, sculpture, painting, and drawing must be taught at school. The false antithesis between sport and artistic culture must end—there needs to be a synthesis between the mind and the body, not the converse. Our ideal must be a combination of the spirit of the artist and the soldier in one man, in many men. To that end: national competitions from early adolescence until adulthood, and then after, need to be established throughout the nation. The logic of competition and the “death by combat” of the artistic sword needs to be universally institutionalized as in the case of the world-renowned Leeds Piano Competition, for example. Several universities or advanced polytechnics need to be created in order to solely foster genius—namely creative and artistic potential often in those with a G-factor intelligence of over 148 IQ (the Mensa criterion of genius). Similarly, later genetic experimentation so as to raise human intelligence across the board by operating directly on the gene-line should not be shunned. Even though these developments are maybe a century off (minus ten to twenty years) no religious or ethical scruple should waylay the nation from developing the biological basis of talent for its own sake.
Also, a subcommittee of the Arts Council needs to be created in order to facilitate creative genius at every level. All power on such a body needs to be vested in one man—nothing can ever be done creatively with committees; all genuine culture is created in a progressively dictatorial manner. The subcommittee chairman would doubtless change every year or so—but he would be charged with providing a plethora of modest bohemian bursaries to enable people to live while writing plays, film scripts, painting, acting, sculpting, finishing symphonies, and the like. All such monies would be kept very tight; all such grants would lead to publication or performance. Private sector equivalents need to be encouraged, and all private sector donations to the Arts and creativity in general must be made tax exempt. While all artistic bodies must be based on a principle of permanent revolution—after a time all state theatre companies, performing arts organizations, and grant-in-aid bodies must dissolve their management teams and seek outside replacements—with the proviso that such groups must be solely or primarily funded by the tax-payer. If not, then the pressure of the marketplace doubtless suffices.
This revolving-door policy will guard against cliques, nepotism, personal networks, and the boosting of safe or affordable work which at the present time relates to a totalitarian liberal bias in culture—towards the work, say, of Acker, Rushdie, Pinter, MacInnes, and Kureshi, as against the relativistic iconoclasm of a Powell, a Pressburger, a Scruton, a Wyndham Lewis, or in contemporary German culture, a Syberberg.
Finally, the State and private-public partnerships must invest in ultra-modern technology so as to project the greatest images onto buildings, in public places, in the air, on trams and means of public conveyance, even in the sky—in short, all of the techniques presently used to bombard the citizenry with advertising must be used to convey images which (just to restrict it to the British tradition) could see Turner’s The Fighting “Temeraire” tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1838) floating in the ether above Trafalgar Square, adjacent to the National Gallery.
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9 comments
…which at the present time relates to a totalitarian liberal bias in culture—towards the work, say, of Acker, Rushdie, Pinter, MacInnes, and Kureshi…
The late Jonathan Bowden rubbishes the rubbish known an Rushdie.
Good to know that.
One of the most repulsive aspects of the MAGA-style Zionist alt-lite that is now on the rise everywhere is the complete rejection of the Arts. Marxists have infiltrated the Arts, hence the Arts are bad and ought to be gutted, amputated, atomized. To say this is moronic doesn’t begin to describe it. In practice all this does is cede this most vital aspect of culture to the Marxists who have wrongly occupied it, instead of fighting to take it back, cleansing it, and taking all of its energies which had in the past been used to undermine classical white European culture and instead strengthen it. Bowden is right on the money here, obviously. Institutions ought to be reclaimed and used as bulwarks for the right as the had been for the left, instead the Trump/Musk alliance wishes to destroy intitutions which they see as corrupt, chipping away at their own foundations of power.
Yes and No. You are correct about the arts: just because enemies and savages occupy and use them to produce non-stop propaganda and miscegnationist filth, that means we should embrace philistinism and abandon them, potential source of power though they are?
OTOH, that does not mean that all state institutions should simply be reconquered (even if that were possible, which in the current configuration of forces, it is not). Many that have fastened onto Western nations are either inherently, or else, at present, irredeemably leftist, and should simply be abolished. It requires the art of political judgment to know which can be salvaged, and which must be destroyed.
I enjoyed the “all genuine culture is created in a progressively dictatorial manner.” I’m making a map for a computer game I play and while I am excited to send out alpha versions for people to test I enjoy the fact that I have the ultimate decision on whatever input they have.
I recall Frank Zappa saying something along the lines that having the old guard cigar smokers as producers (the elite) allowed for better and more experimental music (the low and the folk) to be produced. It was, in his mind, the younger executives with that blend of low/folk and elitist that ruined the business. This dovetails with what Bowden says about low/folk culture flowing to elitist culture. If I am reading that correctly. I would appreciate to read how others interpret this. There is a an article here on Zappa and the decline of the music industry https://www.openculture.com/2016/09/frank-zappa-explains-the-decline-of-the-music-business-1987.html
While the free admission to museums is a lofty goal, in the context of white advocacy I find that the high prices help keep the patronage of museums majority white.
Camus has proposed the opposite. That museums should be empty but for connoisseurs ingesting the refined high art in peace and tranquility. He hated the idea that they were tourism boxes to check as the masses attracted McDonald’s and pizza slice shops across the street and people in a frenzied coming and going and crowded galleries and museums filled with distracting energies and people.
I always felt the same at the symphony hall. You could see the banker who was there as an obligation taking a seat from someone who might otherwise be there and enjoy a command performance. Some things aren’t for the masses and are definitely cannot be enjoyed in a mass setting. Transmitting and sharing this transcendent culture with the volk is important, but it is as important to transmit to them how to ingest refined art as much as to have them see it. Reverence and how to ingest is as critical for the cultural transmission, (since this helps cultivate the admirer/ingester of art), as seeing the work itself. Europe’s elite patrons were as trained to appreciate and understand as the were the geniuses they patronized.
This is very important for us to understand. Throwing open museum doors is not an act of cultivation. Cultivating within the audience the means to further cultivate themselves is essential.
Very well said; I cannot better your comment. High art should be exhibited only in such ways as to be maximally appreciated by those whom the artist had as his intended audience. But this maxim in no way contradicts or precludes the possibility of spiritually and/or racially healthy mass-art (eg, the novels of Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Jean Larteguy, Fredrick Forsyth, or Tom Wolfe, and the Flashman series of George MacDonald Fraser; films like Deathwish, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Braveheart or 300).
Our struggle for racial life and honor is fought on every plane of existence – the endless condition of Western modernity from which there is no escape, save victory.
If someone or a team had the Gofunds, skill, and creative vision of the guy who made Stardew Valley, I believe a video game that creates an Imperium from scratch in White Sim City style could be a smash hit.
What I read here is truly gold and I will use what’s here to debate in university and totally dominate leftist. The suggestions and policies that are needed to recover our civilization are much better in this 900 words than entire books
Old fartgeezer republicans in the mitt romney, bush, crenshaw, hannity milieu have no creative nor artistic energy at all and they scoff at its importance. Homo economicus good goys. Maybe johnny ramone and ted nugent?? The elite centers of high cultural diffusion should be closed bubbles or held to much higher standards that simply says No to the unworthy. By exclusivity not begotten by money or connexions, this may have the fortuitous effect of encouraging social betterment and produce creative gains by keeping people interested in what’s behind the locked doors. Inwardly undiscovered talent will endeavor and the noteworthy will strive for upward greatness where once nepotism and anti-White blockages kept them out so hack fools could be rocket-boosted up to places they don’t belong.
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