Western Culture

Homer’s Odyssey: The Return of the Father; Part 2 of 2

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Odysseus in Ithaca: The Father’s Revenge

Odysseus engages the suitors in combat. 1814 painting by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

Finally, Odysseus makes his way home and “he rejoiced to be in his own country” (13.165-243); “King Odysseus was filled with happiness, filled with joy that this land was his. He kissed the grain-giving soil of it, then prayed to the nymphs with uplifted hands” (13.332-422). Athena transforms Odysseus’ appearance to that of an old man, to better gather allies, observe the suitors’ misdeeds, and prepare his revenge.

Odysseus enters the palace as an elderly beggar and is mistreated by the suitors, who have been scheming to murder Telemachus. The task will not be easy, but Odysseus asserts that he would rather die than live with such indignities: “I would rather perish, rather meet death in my own palace, than look on perpetually at things as detestable as these” (16.41-133). Finally meeting Telemachus, the two emotionally embrace, but Odysseus quickly turns to business: “at Athena’s bidding, I have come to this place to consult with you on the slaughtering of our enemies” (16.222-311).

When Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors, he will not be turned away from vengeance against those who “devoured my substance, forced my serving-women to sleep with you, and in cowardly fashion wooed my wife while I still was living” (22.1-122). One of the suitors offers tribute, but Odysseus will have none of it, dishonor cannot be redeemed with gold:

Not if you all gave me all your patrimony, whatever you have and whatever more you might come to have, not even then would I hold back my hands from slaughter till every suitor had paid for the whole transgression. (22.39-122)

Through subterfuge and prowess, Odysseus and his few allies are able to overcome and kill the suitors. They are not the only ones who must pay. While the few in Odysseus’ household who helped the suitors unwillingly are spared, the willing collaborators must pay, notably the servant-women, who are hanged. As Telemachus says: “Never let it be said that sluts like these had a clean death from me. They have heaped up outrage on me and on my mother; they have been the suitors’ concubines” (22.375-466). The punishments are monstrous, but the guilty perpetrated evil deeds, and the gods willed retribution.

The suitors overthrown and his authority restored, Odysseus can then finally unite with Penelope, who recognizes him in their own bed. Penelope has remained faithful to Odysseus and, with her handmaidens, maintained “the hearth’s unflagging fire” (20.122-93). Thus, the family has been saved. There is something touching in the couple’s complicity. As Odysseus had previously said: “There is nothing nobler, nothing lovelier than when man and wife keep house together with like heart and with like will. Their foes repine, their friends rejoice, but the truth of it all is with her and him” (6.121-200). The family members’ faithfulness to one another has allowed their collective survival.[1]

This is only a brief respite, for in a social world defined by kin, Odysseus knows that the suitors’ families will not be long in retaliating for what has happened. But the three generations, Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus, find confidence and joy in the honor and prosperity of their line:

King Odysseus . . . said forthwith to his son Telemachus: “My son, when you enter the battlefield where warriors prove their mettle, you need not be told not to shame the lineage of your fathers. In courage and manliness we have long been foremost, the whole world over.”

Thoughtful Telemachus replied: “Father, if you are minded so, you shall watch me in my present spirit by no means shaming the lineage that you speak of.”

So he spoke, and Laertes, in his joy cried out: “Dear gods, what a day is this for me! What happiness, when my son and my grandson are vying for the prize of valor!” (24.442-525).

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Homer’s Odyssey: The Return of the Father; Part 1 of 2

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Head of Roman-era statue of Odysseus, found in the grounds of the former villa of the emperor Tiberius.

“Who are you, and from where? Where are your city and your parents?” Thus does a stranger ask Odysseus to identify himself in Homer’s poem dedicated to that hero, the Odyssey (10.325). Taking place after the travails of the Trojan War, the tale is fundamentally about Odysseus’ struggle to find and reestablish his place in a chaotic world. During his twenty-year absence, the hero’s native land of Ithaca has fallen victim to usurpers, and he must overcome innumerable obstacles to find his way home and restore his political authority as king through subterfuge and violence. Odysseus never gives up on his quest, nor does he settle down in one of the many places he visits, because he never forgets his dear family and fatherland, those two defining aspects of his social identity.

The Odyssey has inspired Europeans of every generation since the ancient Greeks and Romans up to the present day. Besides the picaresque quality of Odysseus’ fantastic adventures, one finds an enduring story that can only resonate with all those who long for home. Odysseus, rather unlike Achilles, is close to an ideal hero: enduring, cunning, resourceful, diplomatic, and ruthless when necessary. If the Iliad is the memory in poetry of the archaic Greeks’ countless forgotten wars of conquest and plunder, the Odyssey is that of their exploration and colonization of the ancient Mediterranean and Black Sea, endeavors which were often no less violent. If the Iliad is about the tensions between individual and community in the savagery of wartime, the Odyssey suggests a more constructive personal and political project: the journey home and the restoration of a good country.

Odysseus’ visiting various, often dystopian, societies and his quest to restore his Ithacan kingdom indeed suggest an implicit Homeric politics. The world of Odysseus is an often brutal and lawless one in which travelers are at the mercy of the goodwill of their hosts. Without reciprocity or strength, one is liable to fall victim to depredation. In this trustless world, Homer identifies two things which can serve to create more civil societies: piety and kinship. While the ideal of the polis, of individual sacrifice for the common good, is indeed hinted at in the Odyssey, Odyssean politics are firmly monarchic, with reciprocal duties between king and people.

Among the aristocratic ruling class Homer is dealing with, kinship is the basic foundation for identity and solidarity, and therefore of both personal and political action. Strangers are synonymous with uncertainty and potential violence. Kinship in contrast entails inherited resemblance and shared pride in and duties towards one’s lineage. Among kin, there is the possibility of security. That security, however, only exists by the strength of the family father, his domestic authority and his willingness to use violence against hostile aliens. The Odyssey is then also a tale of what befalls a family and country when the patriarch, by his absence, no longer meets his responsibilities.

For Homer, identity and purpose is found in one’s lineage. One acts for the sake of one’s ancestors and one’s descendants. Odysseus and his son Telemachus resemble one another by virtue of their shared blood and must work together to save their family’s status and power. The restoration of paternal and kingly authority in Ithaca is impossible without brutal revenge against the usurpers. And it is only within the circle of such violence that one’s kin can enjoy a secure and gentle life. According to Homer, a happy man has prosperous descendants and the people thrive under a righteous king, for he rules them like a good father. Read more

Aristotle: The Biopolitics of the Citizen-State, Part 4

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Law versus Decadence

Like Plato (left), Aristotle hoped that an inspired lawgiver could establish an enduring good government.

A last concern of Aristotle’s which is of great relevance to our time is the prevention of decadence. For Aristotle, the good of the city is reflected in the virtue of the citizens. The citizens are educated and trained in virtue by adherence to the city’s largely-unchanging basic law, set in place by an inspired lawgiver. The question becomes: how can the law ensure that virtue is maintained in perpetuity?

There are no easy answers. Nations tend to be victims of their own successes. As Aristotle notes: “People are easily spoiled; and it is not all who can stand prosperity” (1308b10). He speaks at length on how Sparta’s morals were corrupted after that martial city defeated Athens and achieved hegemony in Greece as a result of the Peloponnesian War. According to Aristotle, adherence to Lycurgus’ law did not survive material wealth and the empowerment of women.

The Greeks were less prone to excessive individualism than the modern West has been, but they often ceded to the siren song of egalitarianism. Aristotle reports that many Greeks believed that if men were equal in some respect, such as being freeborn, they must be equal overall and certainly equally entitled to rule. Many took equality as a goal, leading them to seek to both make the citizens equal and to indiscriminately extend citizenship: “some thinkers [hold] that liberty is chiefly to be found in democracy and that the same goes for equality, this condition is most fully realized when all share, as far as possible, on the same terms in the constitution” (1291b30).

While Aristotle is indeed more ‘bourgeois’ than Plato, he too is contemptuous of egalitarian excesses, which manifest themselves in democratic extremism and selfish individualism. Aristotle, like Plato, argues at length that right equality or justice means that equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally (1287a1). And again, for him, justice means the interests of the community:

What is “right” should be understood as what is “equally right”; and what is “equally right” is what is for the benefit of the whole city and for the common good of its citizens. The citizen is, in general, one who shares in the civic life of ruling and being ruled in turn. (1283b27)

Aristotle notes that some democracies are so extreme that they actually undermine the existence of their own state, and hence do not survive as long as a moderate democracy. He writes with great eloquence on that “false conception of liberty” which has so often seduced our people:

In democracies of the type which is regarded as being peculiarly democratic the policy followed is the very reverse of their real interest. The reason for this is a false conception of liberty. There are two features which are generally held to define democracy. One of them is the sovereignty of the majority; the other is the liberty of individuals. Justice is assumed to consist in equality and equality in regarding the will of the masses as sovereign; liberty is assumed to consist in “doing what one likes.” The result of such a view is that, in these extreme democracies, each individual lives as he likes — or as Euripides says,

For any end he chances to desire.

This is a mean conception [of liberty]. To live by the rule of the constitution ought not to be regarded as slavery, but rather as salvation. (1310A12)

Is this not a very concise summation of the ills of modern liberalism? I would argue that the West was already severely infected by the 1930s, before metastasizing to an absurd degree from the 1960s onwards. Thus today, liberals express desire only for ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity,’ all the while destroying the very foundations for these ends through multiculturalism and open-borders, these being zealously imposed with disastrous short-sightedness. Read more

Aristotle: The Biopolitics of the Citizen-State, Part 3

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Population Policies and Eugenics

The Spartan sage Lycurgus instituted Greece’s most ambitious population policies.

True to his communitarian foundations, Aristotle argues that population policies — notably concerning immigration, naturalization, and reproduction — are a fundamental element of statecraft and ought to be determined by what serves the interests of the society as a whole. Aristotle observes very lucidly: “The prime factor necessary, in the equipment of a city, is the human material; and this involves us in considering the quality, as well as quantity” (1325b33). The city is defined not by mere geography, but above all by the population. Therefore: “To determine the size of a city — to settle how large it can properly be, and whether it ought to consist of the members of several races — is a duty incumbent on the statesman” (1276a24). The statesman then has a duty to decide who is fit to be a citizen and to ensure the biological reproduction and quality of the citizens, thus perpetuating the city.

In line with Aristotle’s imagined foundation of the city as an extended family, the Greeks typically granted citizenship according to rules of descent. Aristotle observes: “For practical purposes, it is usual to define a citizen as one ‘born of citizen parents on both sides,’ and not on the father’s or mother’s side only; but sometimes this requirement is carried still farther back, to the length of two, three, or more stages of ancestry” (1275b22). Aristotle also defines a city in part by the possibility of intermarriage among its members. Naturalized citizens are clearly considered exceptional, Aristotle deeming them citizens “in some special sense” (1274b38).

The ancient Greeks were obsessed with their ancestry and lineage, following aristocratic and hereditarian assumptions. Aristotle says that “good birth, for a people and a state, is to be indigenous or ancient and to have distinguished founders with many descendants distinguished in matters that excite envy” (Rhetoric, 1.5).[8] Following the widespread Greek assumptions that both nature and nurture mattered, he writes that “it is likely that good sons will come from good fathers and that the appropriately raised will be of the appropriate sort” (Rhetoric, 1.9). Aristotle furthermore lists shared blood as one of the forms of friendship, an eminently adaptive view: “The species of friendship are companionship, intimacy, consanguinity, and so on” (Rhetoric, 2.4). Read more

Aristotle: The Biopolitics of the Citizen-State, Part 2

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The ekklesiasterion, or assembly meeting place, of Messene, where civic debates were held

Aristotle’s Republic of Virtue

From these biopolitical premises, Aristotle wholeheartedly agreed with the communitarian ethos which the Greeks took for granted. As the philosopher explains: “the goodness of every part must be considered with reference to the goodness of the whole” (1260b8) and “a whole is never intended by nature to be inferior to a part” (1288a15). Indeed, Aristotle’s definition of a community-centered notion of justice may well be incomprehensible to many moderns: “The good in the sphere of politics is justice; and justice consists in what tends to promote the common interest” (1282b14). How many political discussions today — whether about abortion, gay marriage, immigration, economic policy, or whatever — refer to the common good rather than to solipsistic arguments about individual or sectoral ‘rights’ and ‘fairness’?

Aristotle is decidedly more ‘bourgeois’ and less spiritual than Plato. He has far less to say about the role of religion in the good society, this being practically an afterthought. He seems to hope for, at best, a stable and moderate regime, one respecting the interests of both rich and poor, founded upon an enlightened citizenry composed of independent landowners and responsible citizen-soldiers. But Aristotle also had an elevated notion of what politics should be about. In his own time, he contradicted those who believed that the state exists only as a kind of contract between individuals, meant only to guarantee their security or to enable them to chase after coin.

For Aristotle, man fulfills his nature as a rational being through philosophical contemplation and active citizenship. But only a minority have the intellectual gifts necessary to do this, and furthermore, as a practical matter, the work of servile subalterns is necessary to secure the necessary leisure to pursue philosophy and politics. Hence, Aristotle notoriously endorses a doctrine of natural slavery: barbarians and the morally defective are incapable of freedom and hence are only fit to be slaves of better men, thus enabling the latter to fulfill our human potential. Natural slaves are those who, either as individuals or as entire peoples, are so poorly endowed in reason that they may only participate in it as the servants of superior men. Aristotle observes: “what difference, one may ask, is there between some men and the beasts?” (1281b15). The recognition of inequality, enabling the creation of a just community and hierarchy, is no less central to Aristotle’s ethics and politics than those of Plato. Read more

When is the final decadence coming? From Sallust and Juvenal to the present (Part 1)

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What follows below is the translation of my speech/paper delivered in the French language at the conference organized by Résistance Helvétique, Geneva, March 9, 2019.

*   *  *

The Ancients, that is, our Greco-German-Gallo-Slavo-Illyro-Roman ancestors, were well aware of hereditary causes of decadence, although they attributed to this notion different names. The idea of decadence, let alone its reality, has always been present, although its current denomination came first into the French language by the eighteenth century in the writings of Montesquieu.[1] Later on, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called “decadent” poets in France were a favorite and highly praised genre in traditionalist literary circles, labelled today in a somewhat derogatory way as “far-right circles.” Subsequently, these so-called decadent poets and writers started to exert a considerable influence on many right-wing rebels despite their own often unbridled, transracial, alcoholic and narcotized manners, or simply put, despite their decadent lifestyles.[2]

Although less common than in France, the term “Dekadenz” was also common in the prose of reactionary and revolutionary conservative writers in Germany by the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like their counterparts in France, these writers had become terrified over the climate of moral decay and capitalist anomie in the cultural and political life of their country. It should be pointed out, however, that the German word “Dekadenz,” which is of French origin, has a different meaning in the German language, a language which prefers tapping into its own lexical treasure trove and where signifiers often yield different meanings. A good German conceptual equivalent of the French word “décadence” would be a very unique German term “Entartung”, a term translated into French and English by a heavy-handed term “degeneracy,” which, because of its biological connotations, does not always match with the original meaning of the German word “Entartung.”

The German word “Entartung,” whose etymology and meaning were originally politically neutral, refers to a process of “de-naturalization,” a process not exclusively linked to biological degeneration. This unique German word, due to its frequent use during the period of the National Socialist rule in Germany, underwent a negative semantic shift in the wake of World War II and following the Allied anti-German propaganda, to the point that it is no longer in use in the realm of culture and politics in contemporary Germany.[3]

In ex-Communist Eastern Europe, during the Cold War, the term decadence was almost non-existent. Instead, the communist commissars blasted Western capitalist mores with a revolutionary and all-purpose term that soon became a derogatory buzzword in the communist vernacular: “bourgeois.” In summary, one can conclude that the most avid users of the term “decadence,” as well as its most ardent critics, have been writers classified as right-wingers or authors on the far right.

Three essential questions need to be raised. When does decadence start to manifest itself, what are its origins, and how does it end? A host of premodern and postmodern writers, from JB Bossuet to Emile Cioran, each in his own way and each resorting to his own mode of literary expression, have provided us with apocalyptic accounts of decadence seen as steering us now toward the end-times of the European world.

Despite this, it seems that Europe is still alive and kicking despite a series of decadences it has encountered over its history, starting with the decadence in ancient Rome all the way to serial decadences in modern times. With one big exception. In view of the large-scale racial replacement of European peoples by the masses of non-European peoples, the old European world seems to be now preordained not to a transient decadence, but rather to a terminal decadence. Read more

Review: of Richard Storey’s The Uniqueness of Western Law

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The Uniqueness of Western Law: A Reactionary Manifesto
Richard Storey
Arktos, 2019

With Washington Summit taking a hiatus and Counter-Currents more or less capitulating in the face of a rapid sequence of Amazon bans, Arktos has emerged as one of the most prolific and stable of the Alt-Right’s publishing brands. Some of this success and stability may be due to the brand’s ability to secure translations of works by familiar names like Alain de Benoist and Julius Evola, as well as bring forward work from new, innovative, and fresh young thinkers like Richard Houck. But I think another, and possibly more important, element contributing to the brand’s ongoing growth and development is consistency — consistency in leadership, editorial standards, production values, and manuscript selection. Over the last couple of years, as a voracious reader of content on numerous topics from multiple sources, I’ve come to appreciate the consistency offered by Arktos in all of these areas. I recently acquired a number of their new titles covering a range of subjects, some of which I expected to agree with wholeheartedly, and others that I thought might challenge me or broaden my understanding in certain areas. Of these, Richard Storey’s self-described “Reactionary Manifesto” fell somewhere in the middle of these expectations. Marketed as “an original interpretation of libertarian theory,” the book was guaranteed to pique my curiosity.

I am not a libertarian, nor have I ever embraced any such political identity or affiliation. My thinking regarding the broader trajectory of libertarian thinking is absolutely in line with that laid out by my TOO/TOQ colleague Brenton Sanderson in his landmark essay “Free to Lose: Jews, Whites & Libertarianism” (TOQ, vol. 11, no., 3; Fall, 2011) For Sanderson, the Jewish intellectual origins of economic libertarianism are explained by the fact that

free markets advance the interests of Jews through imposing an impersonal economic discipline on non-Jews through which their ethnocentricity and anti-Semitic prejudice can be circumvented. … Jews have indeed prospered under the conditions of free market capitalism among often hostile majority European-derived populations. … Jews, even in the freest of markets, are notorious for developing and using ethnic monopolies. … Accordingly, the free-market libertarian agenda, when promoted in the context of a society that is multi-racial, and where some racial groups exceed Whites in the degree of their ethnocentricity, may not promote the group evolutionary interests of Whites in enhancing their access to resources and reproductive success.

Sanderson continues:

It seems evident from the foregoing that the only time that Whites will be acting in their own evolutionary self-interest in embracing the free-market libertarian agenda will be when they either live in a racially homogeneous society where their group interests are not imperiled by the utility-maximizing behavior of individuals; or in a multi-racial society where competing racial groups do not exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism, or exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism but lack the native endowment of intellect to capitalize on this by effectively employing altruistic group strategies in competition with individualistic Whites. … It would seem that libertarian ideas are particularly hazardous to the collective interests of White people because we are naturally attracted to them. As MacDonald notes, our evolutionary history makes us prone to individualism in the first place. You then get a negative feedback loop where libertarian ideology intensifies this innate individualism to encourage ever greater individualism among Whites, and an ever greater aversion to manifestations of White ethnocentrism. Thus, where the spirit of free market libertarian individualism reigns, Whites willingly maximize their individual self-interest at the expense of the group evolutionary interests of the White community — with disastrous long-term consequences.

In terms of analysis, this simply can’t be improved upon. Sanderson’s essay serves as a devastating critique of libertarianism from the standpoint of White ethnic interests, and it has been, and remains, very influential on my thinking about the topic. Thus, even before I opened Richard Storey’s text, I thought that its success would be determined to a large extent by the manner in which it addressed the core issues of ethnic interests and how it grappled with the fact Whites seem uniquely susceptible to individualistic and atomizing ideologies. The fact that Storey is known to frame his thinking in an outwardly Catholic fashion also raised possible doubts as to its potential for wider appeal. Fortunately, this short but remarkably efficient volume rose to the challenge. Read more