Western Culture

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 3: Was the 1924 Immigration Law Too Little, Too Late?

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Concluding Thoughts on the Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America

An interesting feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues—their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”[1] There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety”[2]—their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life. Read more

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 2: The Period of Ethnic Defense, 1890-1965

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The early part of the twentieth century was the high-water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races in both intelligence and moral qualities. Not only did races differ, they were in competition with each other for supremacy. For example, William Graham Sumner was a social Darwinist; he thought that social class and racial divisions as well as competition were part of the natural order of things. Writing in 1903, he noted that “the two races live more independently of each other now than they did” during the slave era.[1] Whereas later in the century, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against Darwinism in the social sciences, racialist ideas became part of the furniture of intellectual life—commonplace among intellectuals of all stripes, including a significant number of Jewish racial nationalists concerned about the racial purity and political power of the Jewish people. Many of them were Zionists who believed in the importance of Jewish racial purity (a Jewish homeland in Israel would prevent assimilation and intermarriage) and Jewish racial superiority .[2] Read more

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 1: Nineteenth-Century Optimism and Utopian Idealism

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This is about a pernicious strand of European thinking that is an important component of the crisis we face today—the Puritan strand of American thought which dominated America until the 1960s counter-cultural revolution. The synopsis is that in the nineteenth century, Puritan-descended intellectuals engaged in utopian, idealistic fantasies, often with moralistic overtones. Then after the Civil War, this type of thinking went into disfavor, replaced by Darwinian thinking which reached its apex in the battle over immigration, ending with the passage of the 1924 law. However, this intellectual shift was eradicated by the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique.

The culture of the West is complicated—a blend really between very different cultural influences. A basic idea is that Western societies are individualistic—far more individualistic than any other culture area of the world. But within that general framework of individualism, there are important differences.

One important strand derives from Indo-European culture: From the Pontic Steppes of the Ukraine around 4500 years ago. This culture was completely militarized; it was aristocratic and strongly hierarchical. Read more

Ancient Sparta: The First Self-Conscious Ethnostate? Part 3: The Virtuous Circle of Spartan Power

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The Virtuous Circle of Spartan Power: Discipline Through Lordship

The defining fact of Spartan life was the hard-won conquest of neighboring Messenia in the eighth century and the enslavement of its population as Helots. This victory had launched the virtuous circle of Spartan power. The subjugated Helots provided the Spartan citizen-soldiers with both the leisure and the imperative need to dedicate themselves to martial prowess in the face of a constant threat of rebellion at home. The entire social organization of Sparta came to reflect this state of affairs. Thucydides noted: “most Spartan institutions have always been designed with a view to security against the Helots.”[1]

The system instituted by Lycurgus proved remarkably successful for centuries. The organization and training of the—at their height—around 8,000 Spartan citizen-soldiers to suppress the Helots also translated into international military power, which in turn allowed Sparta to secure allies and thus yet more military power in the Peloponnese. Xenophon opens his account of the Spartan regime saying: “Sparta, despite having one of the lowest populations, had nonetheless clearly become the most powerful and most famous state in Greece.”[2] The unsentimental Thucydides says of Sparta: ‟its system of good order is very ancient and it has never been subject to tyrants. Read more

Ancient Sparta: The First Self-Conscious Ethnostate? Part 2: Commitment to Collectivism

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There is a sense in which all life for Spartan citizens was communal and hierarchical. Even once one had completed the agoge, Spartiates would eat together in common mess halls, again creating common feeling. The ages were mixed, so that the older could teach the young, and citizens were expected to discuss noble deeds. In the gymnasium, the oldest man would supervise, and citizens were expected to train regularly. Xenophon claims that “it would certainly not be easy for anyone to find men healthier or more physically apt than Spartiates.”[1]

Lycurgus reputedly had accompanied his basic law with a land reform giving each of those in the small citizen class an equal property, although economic inequality gradually accumulated over time. A positive consequence of the Spartans’ systematically communal lifestyle was an extremely high degree of trust among citizens. They shared each other’s hunting dogs and horses, the latter being extremely valuable property in those days. Citizens even trusted others to beat their own children if they had done wrong, for “there was a sense in which everyone regarded himself as father, tutor, and commander of each boy.”[2]

The entire society was oriented towards inculcating martial valor and unity. Cowards were severely stigmatized—so much so that they could be beaten freely—and “the citizens considered an honorable death preferable to a life of disgrace.”[3] Read more

Ancient Sparta: The First Self-Conscious Ethnostate? Part 1: Educating Citizen Soldiers

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If in Athens we have ethnopolitical aspects, insofar as the democracy was tempered by Hellenic virtue, in Sparta we have a State wholly dedicated to systematic organization of the society according to a biopolitical ideal. Sparta’s mixed system of government and fiercely communitarian and hierarchical customs were supposed to have been created by the semi-legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, who perhaps lived in the ninth century B.C. Virtually nothing can be said for certain about his life. Lycurgus was, in later ages, rumored to have traveled to Egypt, Ionia, Crete, and even India, where “he talked with the Gymnosophists,”[1] before establishing Sparta’s constitution. What is clear, in any case, is that the basic law and way of life attributed to Lycurgus, and credited for Sparta’s success, were emphatically biopolitical.

Spartan law and culture were obsessed with systematically ensuring good breeding, martial education, and group unity. Spartan ethics and law considered that what was good was whatever was good for the community. During a debate as to whether a commander had abused his authority, the Spartan king Agesilaus argued: “The point to be examined . . . is simply this: has this action been good or bad for Sparta?”[2] Kevin MacDonald has argued that the law instituted by Lycurgus – featuring in-group altruism, relative egalitarianism, separation from and unity in the face of out-groups, specialization in warfare, and communally-determined in-group eugenics – qualifies as a genuine “altruistic group evolutionary strategy.”[3]

Few forms of government have so drawn the admiration of both liberals and ‘totalitarians’ as that of Sparta. Many republicans, both ancient and modern, have been impressed by the Spartans’ ‘mixed’ system of government, with its combination of monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements, as conducive to social unity, stability, and the rule of law. The Founding Fathers of the United States sought to emulate Read more

Ancient Athens: A Spirited and Nativist Democracy

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Pericles, Athenian leader at the city’s zenith

The Persian Empire was driven by a certain logic, certain feedback loops pertaining to domestic conditions and foreign relations, which led to that great state’s steady expansion.[1] The waves of this expansion were finally dashed on the rocks of Greek freedom, embodied in the city-states of Athens and Sparta. Athens and Sparta themselves were each driven by their own logic, their own virtuous circles of power, which defeated the Persian logic in Europe. If Persian power was that of a multinational military monarchy, a culture of empire, Greek power was that of patriotic, fractious little republics, defined by civic freedom.

The particular form of civic freedom and the virtuous circle of power at Sparta were very different however than those at Athens. At Sparta, a rigorous communitarian discipline was maintained by the demands of lordship, the need for the society to be constantly militarily organized to guard against the threat of rebellion by the enslaved Helots. The result was centuries of stability and regional power. At Athens, the virtuous circle of international trade and naval power led to rapid and constant demographic and imperial expansion, resulting in a short-lived empire which almost achieved hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. Athens also underwent a stunningly creative artistic and philosophical flourishing with few rivals in all human history.

Athens and Sparta seem to embody a recurring dialectic in Western history: between sea-power, commerce, democracy, individualism, and technology on the one hand, and land-power, autarky, hierarchy, community, and discipline on the other.

The verdict of the philosophers and men of the Right has generally been Read more