Frederic Remington, The Lookout, 1887.
6,044 words
One of the more common tropes found in Dissident Right discourse concerns the relationship between the Left and “reality.” This discourse articulates a belief held by Right-wingers that the Left lives in denial of reality, and that this leads to deleterious outcomes for peoples of European descent. However, in another sense, Right-wing discourses concerning the Left-wing relationship with reality focuses on how particular personalities common on the Left cause them to relate to present and future realities differently than those on the Right. (more…)
4,585 words
An important question for those on the Dissident Right to ask is how humans ought to relate to nature; both their own “human nature” as well as the “outside” world. Depending on one’s religious beliefs, this might be the most important question there is. History seems to indicate two conventional approaches to this question. (more…)
5,724 words
Perhaps the best way to think about “postmodernism” from the Right is not as a problematic philosophical tradition, but as a philosophical tradition with a problem. On the one hand, “postmodernism” may be loosely defined as a philosophical turn that delegitimized traditional aesthetic and moral standards, and “deconstructed” seemingly self-evident categories like ethnicity and culture. On the other hand, it could also be defined as a school of thought which delegitimized the scientific, materialist, (more…)
Stephen Jay Gould, who taught that Western science is racism.
4,879 words
Part III of III (Part II here)
Punctuated history and continuous narratives of disruption
Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium should not be treated as an isolated scientific theory whose author believed it to be the most defensible assessment of existing facts. It should rather be recognized as part of a larger rhetorical effort to reform the philosophy of history which predicates the received historical notions upon which the social and political intuitions of white Westerners are contingent. (more…)
Samuel Morton, who established the brain sizes of the various races
5,371 words
Part II of III (Part I here, Part III here)
The unavoidability of “presentism” and the foil of “triumphalism”
Despite Chesterton’s war with the evils of his day, the modern cult of the present is sustained by a particular condition, whose nature is a mutating subject with internal logics to which the Dissident Right should keep itself attentive. To this end, it is worth considering how modern academics understand their impulse to give disproportionate causal agency to the present. (more…)
Part I of III (Part II here)
3,104 words
My last article received some critical feedback from a rather dedicated individual commenter. From what I could tell, his key concern was that any Right-wing intellectual movement was not worth the label if it could not normatively recognize that the intellectual work of postmodernist and critical theorists is lazy, unidimensional, and degenerate. (more…)
Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School speaking to student protesters in Berlin in 1967.
4,918 words
One of the realities that must be recognized by the Dissident Right, particularly in the Anglophone world, is that that those modes of thought and analysis broadly encapsulated by terms like postmodernism, critical theory, or the Frankfurt School are not inherently “Left-wing.” Collectively and individually, they are not inherently anything other than a means to an end. (more…)
