The Wisdom of the Ancients, Part 3: Nature and Nurture; Socrates as Moral Exemplar for the Alt Right

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The Death of Socrates

  1. Self-Improvement: Nature and Nurture

Contrary to the currently fashionable egalitarian blank-slatist hysteria, the Greeks universally believed that an individual’s qualities were the fruits of nature and nurture. Even the sophist Protagoras, a thinker of democratic leanings and an educator of the people, argued: “Teaching requires natural endowments and training; one should begin to learn when one is young.”[1] The recognition of inborn human inequality in no way implied that the well-endowed should rest on their laurels. On the contrary, all humans should constantly work to maximize their potential through training and education.

The Greeks developed techniques for individuals to cope with and live well in the harsh world they inhabited. They were remarkably cognizant of the means available: good education, constant training, healthy habits, and socialization with good individuals. Through self-discipline and piety, reason could rule over emotions, pleasures and pains. The Greeks considered a life of belly-chasing, death-fearing, and comfort-clinging to be an evil, subhuman one, no better than that of the lower beasts. Politically, moral education of the citizens was considered practically the first duty of the state, to be achieved through training, culture, public religion, and laws.

None went further than the divine Plato in imagining what superhuman perfection might resemble. His ideal republic is a state effectively led by an enlightened and pious order of warrior-monks as a cognitive and moral elite drawn from the best of the whole people. This elite then systematically educates and trains itself, and to the extent possible the people, towards the good. But Plato goes further than most philosophers and follows the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus in making genetic improvement of the population through good breeding a sacred moral imperative. This principle, while it follows quite naturally from humanity’s many successes in plant and animal breeding, is nonetheless remarkable given that Plato wrote long before the scientific facts about Darwinian evolution and genetic heredity were known. (Incidentally, I dare say that most of what science has since taught us on heredity reflects very favorably on Plato’s observations, concerns, and ideal.) Read more

The Wisdom of the Ancients, Part 2: Piety, Aristocratic Values and Necessary Inequality

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  1.  Nature & the Gods: Sacred Laws

Greek thinkers often debated the nature of the gods and the universe itself — or nature — and their relationship with the laws. Many Greeks denounced their traditional stories about passionate and violent gods as impious. Some denounced their city’s laws as contrary to nature. The Greeks were typically Western in their willingness to question convention.

The Greeks almost universally believed that anyone who violated the will of the gods or nature, whether out of ignorance or contempt, would inevitably be ruined and destroyed as a result. In a quite literal sense then, to be impious or to do the unnatural meant for the Greeks to be engaging in maladaptive behavior. Homer’s capricious gods and the suffering of his heroes, who may have unknowingly offended a god, reflect the anxiousness of men, facing death and danger at every turn, to respect the inscrutable higher powers that hold sway over their lives.

This point is perhaps made most explicitly in one of Xenophon’s dialogues on the subject of incest:

Socrates: Those who transgress the laws laid down by the gods pay a penalty which no man can escape in the way that some transgressors of man-made laws escape paying the penalty, either by escaping detection or by the use of force.

Hippias: What penalty, Socrates, cannot be escaped by parents who copulate with their children or children who copulate with their parents?

Socrates: The greatest of all, I can tell you, what greater misfortune could happen to human beings in the procreation of their children than to procreate badly?[1]

The prohibition on incest is therefore a divine or natural law. This interdiction is a perfectly adaptive principle, even though the Ancients could know nothing about the genetic reasons for consanguineous diseases or inbreeding depression. In Xenophon’s dialogue, Hippias and Socrates observe two further customs besides incest which, being shared by (virtually) all human societies, likely reflect natural law: “among all peoples the first established custom is to worship gods” and “to honor parents.” I would argue both are fundamental adaptive principles. To honor one’s parents means to know one’s kin, to be in solidarity with them, and, to a certain extent, to inscribe ourselves in their wider plan. Elsewhere, Xenophon observes that a mother’s love for her own children is also a “natural law,”[2] which is self-evidently adaptive. Read more

The Wisdom of the Ancients, Part 1: Greek City-States as Ethnostates

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Lycurgus bas relief from the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives

Like too many of our generation, I was raised and “educated” without acquiring any real knowledge of European identity or our Western tradition. The Classics lay unopened. Though I may have tried once or twice to read them, they always left me baffled. I was too ignorant to even attempt to lessen my ignorance through them. I then did not know where we, our great civilization and family of nations, came from, and I took them for granted. “The West” meant little more to me than a set of very recent and highly questionable values largely imposed in the last century or so.

Having become conscious of my ignorance, I sought to rectify this, and I began reading some of the Classics — especially those of the Ancient Greeks — and, to my joy, I found that this time I could read them and that they often had very relevant insights for our times. I believe the difference is that I am a bit older, a bit wiser, and that I have been able to emancipate myself from the very impoverished view that postwar consumer democracy represents the highest possible form of human life. Having removed my liberal blinders, I could finally appreciate these works.

For the most part, I have not reviewed these works, for they are too subtle and my lights are too feeble to do them full justice. (I have, however, because the relevance and insight were too great, written for The Occidental Observer on the ethnocentric and eugenic themes in Plato’s Republic.) I fear my inferior paraphrases are not much use and I instead encourage the curious to read the Classics themselves.[1]

Nonetheless, I do wish here to highlight a few major insights and themes which I have drawn from my (by no means comprehensive) readings. In so doing, I hope to provide a useful introduction and whet the appetite of my readers to discover our peerless Western tradition. This should not be done in an antiquarian spirit. The Greeks, a brilliant people living in the harsh world of the ancient Mediterranean, discovered truths and techniques of timeless value, things to not memorize, but to live by. If one has understood anything, one begins to see life in a different way, and one begins, however modestly, to change one’s life, day by day. Read more

Alexander Dugin on the Heartland versus the Heartless: The Neocon and Neoliberal Plan for Russia (and America)

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There is a marked difference between freedom and liberty, a distinction which highlights the greatest defect of liberalism (especially as it has come to be understood in postmodern discourse).

“Liberty” implies liberation from something, which marks freedom as a negative category. Because of the connotations of liberty commonly understood in the West before the rise of left-wing concepts like liberation theology (i.e. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech), the negative functions of liberty aren’t always obvious to people in the Anglosphere, even or perhaps especially those who consider themselves conservative.

The Eurasians don’t struggle with this bind. Alexander Dugin, the Russian political scientist maligned as a fascist in the West, gets to the heart of the matter in his book, Putin vs Putin: Putin viewed from the Right:

Today, in realizing the ‘liberty from’, we understand ever better that this nihilistic agenda is leading us to an abyss.… A declaration of individual freedom in effect means total dependence of the common man on the oligarchy. Individual freedom abolishes all forms of collective identity. One is not allowed to be a supporter of a national state or a religious institution, because this is not politically correct (Dugin 59).

It is not hard to understand why a Russian political scientist is suspicious of liberty as it has been sold by the Atlanticist powers (Western Europe and the U.S.) when too often neoconservative concepts of liberty involve liberating people from their lives, or neoliberal projects result in liberating nations from their resources. This asset-stripping facet of ostensible liberation is also not lost on Dugin: “In a former socialist country, where a capitalist coup was implemented on short notice, state and public property ended up in private hands and social guarantees…were done away with” (Dugin 59-60).

When people are convinced that the responsibilities that bind them to one-another (faith, community, ethnicity) are merely burdens to be shed, when they are sold individualism as a fetishized commodity that atomizes them, they are ripe for plunder and exploitation. Many on the Right cite Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals as a foundational blueprint for how the Left operates (and it is), but no book encapsulates this nihilistic isolation as a desired state of affairs like Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which holds that “liberals should fight against any ideology or political philosophy (ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Hegel) that suggests human society should have some common goal, common value, or common meaning” (Dugin 297). Billionaire Jewish business magnate George Soros was so apparently taken with the book, which he considers his “personal bible,” that he saw fit to borrow the title for his grant-making network, the Open Society Foundation. Read more

Dealing with Dysfunction: A Review of “What It Is Like to Teach in Failing Schools,” Part 2

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Part 1 of “Dealing with Dysfunction”

Another of Mr. Teacher’s idiosyncrasies is his view on race. Although he does not explicitly identify his ethnicity, apparently he is a White man. And despite having plenty of real-world experience dealing with Blacks and Browns he does not address race as a biological concept. When discussing the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA) that compares student academic achievement across national borders the author notes that “American educators produce similar outcomes as Finland and Korea when looking only at White and Asian students” (99). Okay, that is to be expected. But then he goes on to state that the PISA “results help to show that biology is not the leading or most significant cause for assessment differences between subgroups (eduspeak for races) because largely non-white United States Hispanics significantly outscore biologically ‘White’ Uruguayans” (101).

The above is pretty slim evidence to base a conclusion regarding the role of race in educational achievement. A closer look shows that AT’s comparison is not apt. While Uruguay is 88 percent White, that is within a Latin American context. In addition, Uruguay has a far smaller per capita income than the US, and spends a significant smaller percent of its GDP on education.[1] As a result the South American country has a shorter school day, larger class sizes, and more basic educational facilities.

Strangely, later in the book the author gives evidence that race is a significant factor in educational outcomes.

Black Canadians are just 2.5 percent of the Canadian population. Black Canadian students in Toronto — the largest concentration of Blacks in any Canadian location — have a dropout rate of 40 percent — a much higher dropout rate than their Canadian peers. There is also a large scholastic achievement gap between Black Canadians and other Canadians (212).

In addition, AT notes that Black Canadian students have disproportionately high rates of absenteeism, suspension, and expulsion. So here you have two different countries with two different educational systems with the same racial disparities. This seem to be more convincing than the author’s Uruguay example. Mr. Teacher describes himself as an Orthodox Christian, and he affirms “God’s sovereign Will in human affairs” (213). He might not believe in biological evolution, which could explain his ambivalence on race. Read more

Dealing with Dysfunction: A Review of “What It Is Like to Teach in Failing Schools,” Part 1

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What it is Like to Teach in Failing Schools: A Memoir, an Inquiry and a Critique (2016)
by A. Teacher

Even without the students present, a visitor familiar with middle-class White schools would notice that Atlanta’s “Fairfield Junior Academy” is different. Walking the halls he would observe that there were no lockers. “[W} e moved all the lockers into the classrooms because most of the fights and drug deals took place during transition time when students went to their lockers” (76). If the visitor was unfortunate enough to need the restroom, he might see “dried diarrhea on the walls and toilet in the bathroom stalls” (111). Venturing into a classroom he might encounter vandalized computers and locked file cabinets that had been broken into.

As the subtitle indicates, this book is part a memoir, part a scathing critique of the educational establishment that some call Big Ed. This reviewer has twenty years’ experience in secondary and tertiary education. Fortunately, I have not experienced many of the problems the author relates, at least not to the same degree. Thus some of the dysfunction A. Teacher (AT) describes is particular to his type of school — a failing junior high — while other problems are systemic and likely to be experienced by most public school teachers in America.

The reader might conclude from the opening paragraph that Fairfield in one of those neglected, underfunded minority schools one hears about. While it is a non-White school (70 percent Black, 27 percent Hispanic), it is not underfunded. “Our school was flushed with money” (12). There was plenty of technology — computers, iPads, smartboards, and printers in every room. There was also widespread theft and vandalism, plus poor maintenance of the facility.

American education is often top heavy with administrators. This is particularly true of urban schools. So, in addition to student misbehavior, a major complaint of Mr. Teacher was the reams of paper work and endless meetings his position required. These demands left little time for lesson planning, and made classroom management more difficult. Because every behavior issue needed to be thoroughly documented it was less likely a teacher would take action.

One way a bureaucracy insulates administrators from day to day problems is the put-it-in-writing strategy. A “Response to Intervention” form was required “to document every infraction a child commits, complete with where the incident took place, what preceded the incident, what the infraction entailed, and the consequences that followed” (89). Even with documentation teachers at Fairfield felt the administration did not support their efforts to maintain order. Read more

https://youtu.be/mdjdfg0_NIk

Kevin MacDonald & Andrew Joyce – Leftist Violence in Trump’s America

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