It should appear clear to anyone in the vague category of the right wing to acknowledge the fact that there is a vacuum in the realm of intellectual thought. What gets disseminated in it’s respective realms are often outlandish claims based on personal anecdote or something akin to foreboding prophesying. There are examples from the Bigfoot like mythos of Qanon and the incessant and absurd accusation of secret fantastical creatures such as reptilians and whatever derivative may stem from such a belief structure. To someone formulating their stance on these kinds of claims, they are of course filtered by simple scrutiny, to other holding more or less an wavering or shrouded intellectual probity, they are distraught to know these beliefs hold the principle of why they are categorically in the right side of things, in contradistinction to whatever they claim is the beginning of the left. Of course the latter begs the question and is in my assessment the focal point as to why in general the right is lacking what historically could be called proper doctrine or framework.
Unlike the difficult battle certain Philosophers faced during the counter-enlightenment1, today we have no clear picture of what is being argued, and the premises held by early antagonists to the moderns have been entirely lost. This slow abandonment of premises is what ultimately leads to a sort of blind reaction, one that is knee-jerk and full of bias and personal vendetta, conviction without sound logic. If we contrast those currently held up as sort of mouthpieces of the general right, we see those entities like Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson, ever so treading upon the controversial without doing anything except opposing it arbitrarily. In the past, we had reactionaries, but we knew what was to be defended and why, we understood where the attack was coming from and why.2 In these days, it’s certain that what the general right considers to be their point of departure, is in truth an alien and entirely modern one to the protectors of the ancients.
To properly understand why this is so, we have to look back at our ancestors for answers. We aren’t to spurn them for lacking modern perspectives or judge them as incompetent for lacking supposed knowledge of medical goods and the like. If we trace back, it’s most clear that the issue of true departure was in fact the abandonment of ancient thought.3 It was the catalyst for all that comes after. The world before the enlightenment was very particular, it is at this point a self evident fact that a certain kind of framework was held of which all else flowed. This framework is that to be of the ancients. The basis of civil law, philosophy, theological doctrine and the ordering of society all was founded on this framework. Without acknowledging this universality of belief, the principles of which everything flows, we cannot understand what the right even is, save for the reaction itself. When the right fights something like the upsurge in the societal phenomenon of genital mutilation and sex dysphoria, it usually ends as a disagreement based on certain normative “values” of which are by no means universal. In other words, they argue from a point of the moderns, which is a course set to fail. Where the clear principle is the natural law and objective moral law as per the ancients, there is instead relativism and utilitarianism, and these systems are of course already in contradistinction to the ancients. And why is it that the right adopts something already contrary to the principles of the ancients? I don’t believe most even grasp the depth of what goes in since it takes quite the historical man to view philosophy properly, but in short, it is the rejection of the ancients which engendered the force behind the now arbitrary conservative object. If we reduce the current perspectives of the right to their objects, we find that the only claim proper to protect and validate them is the universal frameworks of belief of which all things were based upon. To give another example, homosexuality which is hardly even argued against by the popular right wing, is once again not on the appeal even to universal natural law (since even the Pagans knew this was a heinous abomination) but rather some barbarian form of arbitrary conservatism. This is why that particular issue is so very polarized in the general right wing sphere.
Without the mainstream right acknowledging that what they fight requires a contrary universal claim, that is, the categorical rejection of relativism, they end up paradoxically fighting the infinite regression of purporting their “value” is normative to their particular belief system.
Thus we see how the right wing in is by and large a reactionary force, it is a movement that simply objects to what it subjectively values and nothing more. It cannot properly defend itself since it uses the same argument the aggressors use and ultimately concede or allow degradation to take place. When we have something like tradition for the sake of tradition, i.e barbarism, it’s necessarily an unintellectual movement, it is no surprise then that what we get are an amalgamation of sophistic grifters as the mouth parts of what is called the right wing. Though it never go to this level of imbecility, I see certain similarities today with the fascists of the early 20th century, where it was by and large a psuedo-Nietzschen rejection of universality as per the moderns touting the religion of positivism. What basis do they have to reject such a universal claim from the moderns? Simply that there is a loss of something which they “value”. They simply do not want to lose this particular thing, which they have deemed a good, not based on reason or religion, but a peculiar will to do what it wants without acting too religious about it, lest perhaps they are viewed as lunatics for adhering to what they personally believe is unjustifiable. The universal requires another universal claim to rebuttal, because they fail here, the right wing cannot move from their regression. They will not alter their framework to properly combat what is endangering them because they truly do not care to lose it. They do not see the loss of these purported values to be of a religious nature, that is to say, it does not alter their framework substantially. What happens when the universal claim is argued against from particulars though belief in it’s essence is still held? The modern right winger. A beast which forsakes it’s own beloved teleological framework to believe in what is arbitrarily preferred, and so truly end up being heretics of positivism when they should be apostates and heathens or better yet scourges.
What follows are the homosexual and transgender right wingers, the repugnant women leaders, the peons which believe in mythical creatures and fantastical legends, and the possible rejection of all that is true and sound in the world. All from the simple cause of having such an unintellectual and insane position as to reject their own religion on the basis of whatever subjective premise. It is true that to lack intellectual probity, one commits the absurd which encompasses you like a plague upon the body. It breaks down the realities of existence and puts up egotistical and hedonistic impressions in their stead. It cannot be stated more clearly by Nietzsche that the last man is the doom of humanity, those that act not on any rational premise but just blink and stare, their eyes as lifeless as dead fish. The only way forward is to understand the ancients, to understand they are not wrong, they are not disproven a priori as all today presume. That the modern premise begins with the rejection of the ancients as history shows clear as day. That the framework which engendered the derivatives and particulars ever so in whichever way “valued” are there by principle and nothing else. When the proper steps are taken to unshackle the chains of positivism and historicism, the fruits of intellect come through. The right has to discover that their roots have universal claims and the only way forward is to pick them up again. It’s improbable this will happen since I estimate the very reason they refuse to battle on universal grounds is from a lack of want to truly dissolve what they fight, the modern claim to a positivistic universal cosmology. They all seem to have a type of Stockholm syndrome if you will, and who would wish to truly destroy the principles and the world that create and facilitate your current state of pleasure and comfort?
- I mean here those before the Scholastic revival the Church so adamantly focused on. De Maistre, Cortes and even Burke. In particular the rebuttal against the likes of Hobbes who engendered the radical break in the tradition of political philosophy. Maistre, J. , Lebrun, R. An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon Wherein Different Questions of Rational Philosophy Are Treated. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. Strauss, L. The Three Waves of Modernity (1975) ↩︎
- It was certainly clear to those acting as the guard of the medieval framework that came under attack by all the moderns. Strauss points out an excellent portrayal of the issue from the satirist Jonathan Swift. “la querelle des anciens et des modernes. Most of you will remember Swift’s Battle of the Books, in which the moderns are compared to the spider which “boasts of being obliged to no other creature, but of drawing and spinning out all from itself,” and the ancients to the bee “which, by a universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax,” “thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” Strauss, L. Historicism (1941) See Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub with Other Early Works 1696– 1707 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 150– 51 ↩︎
- “History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another view by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps only by the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change
was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected.” Strauss, L. Natural Right and History. The University of Chicago Press, 1965. ↩︎
