Communism a Fortiori: A Response to BAP’s GNC
Common Ground Between the Folkish and the Vitalist Right
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Where did wokeness come from? That depends. How long is a piece of string?
John Dewey said that a question well put is half-solved. We could ask where Hurricane Katrina came from and the answer would partly depend on the question. We could talk about a tropical depression off the coast of Africa, or we could talk about the Coriolis effect several causal steps upstream of that. Both answers are right, but one gives you a weather forecast and the other gives you the tools to forecast the weather. Both are useful, but in different ways.
So, when a friend asked my take on Bronze Age Pervert’s GNC concept from his recent podcast, I was pleased to find that it’s quite a useful concept. It’s been a while since I read Bronze Age Mindset, so this was a welcome chance to engage with his recent thought.
This article is both a sketch of BAP’s concept and a practical application of some of the folkish concepts developed here in this Substack. The TL;DR is that they complement each other in important ways. But this sketch can only be a thumbnail sketch, so anyone who wants to go deeper can follow the links.
There are some pretty low-resolution analogies between wokeness and communism out there, but happily BAP’s is not one of them. His thesis is superior because it emphasizes the continuity between wokeness and the broad currents of the 20th century, but as we’ll see we can push its genealogy even further back. Wokeness is in some significant sense not just a set of beliefs but something essentially ethnic, and here we agree with GNC, but there are deeper currents at play here too. We will find that both communism and Anglo liberalism are part of a much older trend—astonishingly old, in fact. The critique of both that we’ll offer will appeal to vitalists, and will establish both anti-communism and anti-liberalism as a kind of “dissident minimum”. But this critique isn’t a sighing nostalgia for the medieval; far from pushing us back to a genteel chivalry or a sickly monasticism, it enshrines and renovates our barbarian roots—something useful to both vitalists and folkish types alike.
I: What is GNC?
BAP’s term Global Negro Communism (GNC) means roughly what many would call globalism, ZOG, neoliberalism, globohomo, wokeness, and Critical Race Theory, but BAP does draw distinctions between these and identifies GNC with some but not others. This finer level of distinction is one of the concept’s strengths. In its simplest form we can think of GNC as an extension not of Anglo liberalism but of communism, but communism as driven by ethnic as opposed to class resentment. But lest we think that this focus on race vs. class is something radically new to Marxism, BAP points out that Marx’s historicism and economism was only ever just a sublimation of his own ethnic resentment:
Marx as a species of underhanded ethnic resentment turned into a fully historical assault on a civilization that Marx had felt slighted his group narcissism, is almost unanswerable.1
What’s truly new is that in GNC, Marxism has shed its theoretical fig leaf and is now just nakedly about the gibs. It is an
international racial Marxism, or let’s say Global Negro Communism, one of my favourite topic but unfortunately not something new in American history, is not invasion of last few year, with Critical Race Theory and the burgeoning “Hutuization” of rhetoric among the American left […] a long-standing pillar of the American establishment and its foreign policy.2
GNC dovetails with a broader liberal slave morality. The same worship of the inferior that gives us fat-acceptance, anti-slut-shaming, and trans beauty queens also gives us “racial justice”:
For the shitlib, the promotion of ugliness, of the misshapen, of the deliberately deformed—this goes along with the promotion of so-called “coloured global South”. It’s a war on idea of distinction or superiority as such, for the true believers, that is.3
But where things get interesting is in the overt theological dimensions of GNC. Trads tend to scoff at wokeness as a religion, but if it’s not, it sure as hell acts like one. Progressivism has mutated into a civil religion the denial of which is virtually blasphemy, and its fundamentalist sect of wokeness inspires the same religious fervour that the Protestant Social Gospel movement of the 19th century did. But religion or no, it’s doing the work of Marxism—liberalism has, above all, produced its own gravediggers:
All of these ideologies deserve the title Global Negro Communism because they achieve through supposedly liberal language what Marxism intended to achieve. It’s for this reason I call Rawls final victory of Marxism over liberalism because it’s trying to achieve what Marxism tried, which is global wealth transfer from the Global North to the Global South, by means of liberal arguments and concepts which basically describe what many call ‘neoliberalism’ but I think is actually ‘neo-Marxism’.4
Interestingly, while GNC is functionally a form of Marxism, its pedigree comes straight out of the aforementioned Social Gospel movement.
[Second City Bureaucrat] document real origins of this pseudo-imperial, but really it’s a self-defeating ideology, a kind of pretend religion, the so-called “civil religion” of vicarious ethnic narcissism which American establishment wishes to promote as the successor to Europe’s creeds [...], an uneasy and competing mix in various proportions of Christianity, of Enlightenment rationalism, and of Greco-Roman aristocratic imperialism and republicanism, but America’s crazy socialist establishment seek to do away with them all and to replace them with this—and really it’s a kind of inadequate and inclusive ideology based on the rejection or an inversion of Anglo-Saxon Protestant exceptionalism.5
We will now turn to this pedigree, the most novel part of the GNC conceptual framework.
II: The Genealogy of Moralism
The most influential genealogy of modern leftism was given by Moldbug who traced its origins to Calvinism. BAP takes issue with this, citing issues with Moldbug’s sources and pointing out that WASPs were conservative both as individuals and as a voting bloc—they opposed FDR, and into the 1960s were disproportionately conservative in academia. Instead, citing Second City Bureaucrat, he offers a different genealogy by way of progressive sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah:
For Parsons, the protestant respect for denominations, coupled with the effects of industry on the division of labor, migration on the demographics of the country, and the Enlightenment-derived American revolution on institutional attitudes toward liberty, diminished the importance of denominational beliefs themselves and created the conditions for the emergence of “common values” among protestants, Catholics, and Jews.6
Protestant religious tolerance, where each man is free to follow his own conscience, then spread beyond the church. Jews, rather than being money-changers, and Catholics, rather than being menial labourers, could chart their own destiny under this Social Gospel. These marginal groups were decoupled from their ancestral (“ascribed”) identities into freely chosen (“achieved”) identities.7
All this was seen in contrast to European despotism, and it’s worth pausing over this word. Despot descends from the Proto-Indo-European *déms pótis, “master of the house”, analogous to the Roman paterfamilias. The despot was the absolute monarch of his domus, the lawgiver whose will ascribes identities to all under his hand—the significance of rejecting this mastery will become clear as we move on. The American revolution starts us on the path away from despotism and toward inclusivity. The inclusion of Catholics and Jews continues this process, but someone is left out—the Negro.
Parsons sees this miserable creature as the test case for inclusion, and his full integration into society as the goal of the historical process. He argues for an American civil religion whose object is the ascendance of the Negro to “full citizenship”—only after this will the yoke of European despotism be thrown off and the rights of man prevail. The need to differentiate themselves from Europeans runs deep in American identity.
Even after achieving de jure equality, the Negro still lacked de facto equality, which had to be remedied by the New Deal and later in Disparate Impact legislation. But Parsons goes beyond this and verges into cultish territory, casting the Negro as the vanguard of global liberation from all status inferiority, calling for an “American style socialist movement” with Negros and their fate as the moral lodestar of our world. BAP points out that this genealogy makes far more sense than anything offered by Jordan Peterson or James Lindsay:
This provide a unifying ideology for the New Left more than, for example, anything to do with the Frankfurt school [...] the people who are politically active, and most moralist liberal academics, they love John Rawls, they worship Rawls, and they espouse these beliefs of Talcott Parsons and Bellah.8
Robert Bellah, possessor of truly progressive physiognomy, doubles down on Parsons:
Protestant idea (Puritan specifically idea) of chosenness, of being a new chosen nation in the wild of a new Canaan, that this is foundation for American civil religion, and he traces way this idea of chosenness evolved or was purified in American texts and history [...] Bellah goes through ways in which Protestant religious fervour toward the end of slavery and the whole drama of the civil war [...] represented the Puritan sense of being chosen to create paradise, free from European forms of misrule, from authoritarianism and exclusion and so on.9
“Or was purified” (emphasis added) is a great insight. We see again this need to be free from Europe, emblematic of thrownness, of all that is unchosen, embedded, and inherited. Freedom is the essential element of Americanness, especially freedom from slavery.
But even the Civil War is unsalvageable in Bellah’s liberation theology fever dream because the Negro is just a passive object to be freed by the Anglo-Saxon saviour. The crime of slavery is compounded even by the act of liberation, which has at its root not genuine good will but the group narcissism of the Anglo-Saxon, with his self-image as God’s chosen people charged with leading the world out of bondage. If you ever wondered where DR3 came from, look no further.
Per Bellah, the Anglo by his very existence denies the human rights of all other peoples by failing to see them and their truths in their own terms, only in his own. This chosenness then becomes inverted—Negros must liberate the Anglo from his own benighted group narcissism. “Listen, a black woman is speaking”—this isn’t just ethnic resentment but a deep theological current based on the idea that the low shall be made high. Thus, Bellah was described by a friend as “the most deeply and authentically spiritual person I have ever known” who “challenged me to become more truly Catholic than I have ever yet been”.10
John Rawls is an extension of Parsons’ and Bellah’s liberation theology, if somewhat secularized. His famous “original position”—where one is asked what world he would want if he had no idea where or to whom or with what qualities he would be born—is simply the logical conclusion of Locke’s blank slate, where man is utterly shorn of all background and context, freed from the “accident” of birth, as though it’s an accident that you are your father’s son. This “accident” is theologically significant. In separating the self from the particularities of birth, Rawls simply continues the separation of body from soul begun millennia ago, but in secularized form. Rawls continues and refines the religious imperatives inherited from the Anglo tradition, and only much later becomes his own gravedigger, furnishing the latter-day GNC Marxians with the tools to bury his liberalism.
III: They Come Not to Destroy, But to Fulfil
GNC gets a lot right. McCarthyism turned out to have been absolutely justified, and the US State Department’s promotion of communism abroad is a matter of record—BAP himself gives many examples of this throughout the 20th century in his podcast. GNC also provides a much more plausible genealogy of the modern left than hacks who trace it to the Frankfurt school, and perhaps even than Moldbug, although his Protestant genealogy is always looming in the background. But GNC’s great strength beyond even this is in pointing out where wokeness parts ways from Anglo liberalism, a great comfort to American nationalists who don’t want to have to return to “European despotism” just to put tranny stuff away.
BAP also wants to make a hard distinction between GNC and globalism:
[The post-Trump right] misunderstand something important because this is not globalism, this ideology I’ve been describing, [...] it’s not internationalism, it’s not cosmopolitanism or imperialism, anything like that all—I will agree you if you say “in practice and operationally there are trends in a so-called globalist direction, economic, financial and so on, plus a big lobby of people based around so-called ‘global governance’, the destruction of national sovereignty, the human rights priesthood [...]”, that’s undeniable. What I deny is that there’s a corresponding, even remotely plausible globalist or cosmopolitan ideology that go along with it.11
He says that whatever these people may say of themselves, they don’t actually believe in universalism but that you must “embrace your own heritage”—unless you’re white, in which case fuck you because your heritage just is universalism (a strange case of Bellah and Gobineau actually agreeing on something). We will find shortly that both could not be any more wrong about whites, but the point about GNC’s parochialism is fair enough.
According to BAP, the shift in the Trump era from the left-right distinction to the globalist-nationalist distinction resulted in leftward-directed criticisms of classical liberalism based on the “rights of man” that have nothing to do with the left’s ideology. And yet, we have seen at every stage in the genealogy from Parsons to Rawls that this ideology was couched in the language of “human rights”. Every social justice advocate looks at the French Revolution as a turning point on the historical path that leads to himself. He’s not wrong. Bellah may have been critical of Enlightenment universalism, but the critique seems to be that it didn’t go far enough, since he picks up on the universal “rights of man” and runs with it.
What’s more, we get that other important liberal chestnut out of GNC, consensual theories of governance.
A lot of [the ruling class’] self-understanding and their claims to public legitimacy are based on the illusion of consent, and of them being kind and inclusive, and not violent.12
Elites’ self-image is based on consent, inclusion, etc. The woke critique of classical liberalism is the same as Bellah’s critique of the Enlightenment—that America failed to live up to its own standards, that for as inclusive and consensual as it was vis-à-vis despotic Europe, it wasn’t inclusive and consensual enough. GNC’s ideology critiques liberalism by doubling down on its basic imperatives and casting itself in the role of God’s chosen people.
We can see the essential continuity of wokeness with liberalism in its uniform move toward shedding the inherited, the unchosen, the unconsented-to. Even where it tells us to embrace “muh roots” it does so in the language of freedom—a plain contradiction. If we understand the move from liberalism to GNC as a distillation of this liberation theology, it will become clear that the West’s “uneasy mix” of Christianity, Enlightenment rationalism, and Greco-Roman republicanism that GNC wants to do away with not only hangs together quite easily, but is in its most important aspect homogeneous.
IV: The Genealogy Continued
Paul Gottfried noted the same moralizing Jewish-Puritanical elements in his After Liberalism,13 and like BAP and Carl Schmitt before himself, Gottfried drew a distinction between 19th century liberalism and 20th century liberalism, which latter he called “mass democracy”. The main difference between them is 19th century liberalism’s pluralism—as embodied in the argy-bargy of parliament—vs. mass democracy’s unity, as embodied in the rise of the managerial class and its totalizing ideology that BAP has identified as GNC. Despite their differences, even more important is what 19th and 20th century liberalism share.
Mass democracy’s extended franchise was justified by challenging the middle-class to hold its ideas of freedom consistently—bourgeois liberals like Guizot, Maine, and Lecky who regarded the lower classes as unfit for self-governance simply found themselves checkmated. In this process, democratic man’s citizenship and his cultural identity were separated as he was merged into consumer society, and the latter eventually had to give.
Bourgeois liberalism committed a patricide of its own though. In Western Europe, expanding global trade created a new class of aristocrat, the self-made bourgeois who succeeded by his industry and innovation. The old landed aristocracy blocked bourgeois parliamentary ambitions but couldn’t defend this in light of its own legitimating claim of Enlightenment rationalism—freedom from superstition and hereditary status. If the bourgeois could govern a commercial empire, he could govern a nation.
Aristocratic liberalism of the 18th century had argued against absolutism on the basis of freedom as well. Its argument was an analytical one: that rationality and not heredity was the only basis for rule—the sovereign was to be abstracted away from any contingency and his authority was to be entirely separated from any inherited authority. Before even this, revolutionary liberalism argued the irrelevance of tradition and advocated a return to a mythical originary “state of nature” in which the supposed primordial freedoms of the English (or French or whatever) would be respected.
At every stage, the differences pale before the common thread: the previous incarnation of liberalism didn’t go far enough, and the current thing is here to more completely and consistently embody its animating principle. What is that principle? It’s that of Parsons, Bellah, and Rawls—to strip man of his background and context, to replace the centre with the margin, to raise personal conscience up over the non-consensual, and to enshrine the individual as his own highest moral and epistemic authority. The essential continuity between the revolutionary spirit of the English Civil War and the revolutionary spirit of the Floyd riots is simply undeniable.
This Untermensch ideology has obvious roots in the Reformation’s sola scriptura and sola fide, with the age of absolutism as a brief interregnum where the Proto-Indo-European dems potis again reigned in the wake of political chaos (as he always does). But the bug ideology of the Reformation was not full born from the brow of Zeus—it too had a genealogy.
To spare the reader a book-length dissertation, we will just get to the point already. This process of individuation, of deterritorialization, of decontextualization, and of abstraction from all that is unchosen, embedded, and inherited—this process began in what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age.
The Axial Age introduces what Adam Katz has called super-sovereignty. Rather than a flesh and blood sovereign, a king, perhaps in Nietzschean terms a master—rather than an embodied dems potis, the main “Axial acquisition” is super-sovereignty: a sort of master rule to which the flesh and blood master must subordinate his will. No longer is he the god-emperor, the representative and embodiment of the god on earth; the king is now just an executor of the super-sovereign abstraction, whether this be “freedom”, “logos”, or today, “human rights”. We have here the great-grandfather of critique. The performance of the rites is secondary; the king’s main function is to exercise his conscience—“freedom” is in the driver’s seat; he is now a mere interpreter of what “freedom” means.
The Axial acquisition of super-sovereignty is a cynical (and diabolically brilliant) attempt to dissolve the rigid hierarchy of tribal structures. Instead of adhering to the hereditary worship of the father, man is now told that he must choose which god to worship—what Max Weber called the ethicization of religion. Orthopraxy, right practice, gives way to orthodoxy, right belief. It is not enough to perform the rites; one must know why to perform them. Interposed between man and his god is his conscience, to which the god must justify himself. It’s no longer enough that the worship be inherited; the god, the object of worship, must be the most glorious, the most just, the most high, and it is left to the worshipper to stand in judgement of the god. Not only do we have a grotesque inversion of man and god, the inversion of all inversions—we have the invention of the individual abstracted away from the background, as he remains today (only more so).
To understand the connection between the historical Zarathustra and Bellah, we can simply quote Bellah himself, who characteristically accuses Axiality of not living up to its own standards:
My point is that the Axial Age gave us “theory” in two senses, and neither of them has been unproblematic ever since. The great utopian visions have motivated some of the noblest achievements of mankind; they have also motivated some of the worst actions of human beings. Theory in the sense of disengaged knowing, inquiry for the sake of understanding, with or without moral evaluation, has brought its own kind of astounding achievements but it has also given humans the power to destroy their environment and themselves. Both kinds of theoria have criticized but also justified the class society that first came into conscious view in the Axial Age. They have provided the intellectual tools for efforts to reform and efforts to repress. It is a great heritage. I doubt that any of us would rather live in a tribal society than in one whose beginnings lie in the Axial Age; I know I would not. Yet it is a heritage of explosive potentialities for good and for evil. It has given us the great tool of criticism. How will we use it?14
Axiality does everything its 19th and 20th century descendants do: it unroots man from all context, raises up the conscience above all, and in so doing, makes the individual his own high priest—all in the service of breaking down tribal (centre) structures to enfranchise the plebeian man without a worship (margin).
The subordination of orthopraxy (roughly, ritualistic worship) to orthodoxy (roughly, creedal religion) introduces propositionality, the great grandfather of civic nationalism, where man is no longer defined by his inherited commands (his traditions) but by his freely chosen beliefs. Since the command is linguistically and metaphysically the transference of will from the commander to the commanded, the subordination of the command-based orthopraxy is the subordination of will. Each man becomes his own self-legislator, every man his own king—at least insofar as the actual king must appeal not to station or birth but to freedom, or democracy, or equality, or justice, as ultimately determined by the subject’s individual conscience—and so the very concepts of hierarchy and authority are hopelessly contaminated. Each man is now just what he believes, is defined by his relationship to the truth above any other relationship, and because the truth is the same for him as for a Mbuti pygmy or a tadpole, any community narrower than all sentient life becomes secondary to his “community of belief”.
What does this ghoulish situation have to do with GNC? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The Axial Age is still with us, we are still living in an Axial world, and short of a total rejection of Axiality, short of a total “revaluation of all values”, no truly Bronze Age mindset is possible. But as insightfully pointed out by BAP, GNC is not a mere continuation of liberalism but a partial break from it—and this means a break from Axiality.
V: GNC in Light of Axiality
In some sense, GNC is a continuation of Axiality. We can see this in its LARPing as a “Gemeinschaft”:
Parsons maintained that the society into which groups assimilated in the modern world was not American but rather a “societal community”, which he defined as an “aspect of the total society as a system, which forms a Gemeinschaft, which is the focus of solidarity or mutual loyalty of its members, and which constitutes the consensual base underlying its political integration.”15
The Gemeinschaft (borrowing a term from Ferdinand Tönnies) is essentially a pre-Axial social arrangement of organic, automatic relations of blood and soil—it’s anything but consensual. Even in considering itself as an organic community it still appeals to propositionality and Gesellschaft.
While it’s true that liberalism is for liberals a kind of sublimated ethnos, this is only part of the story. In his podcast, BAP describes a girl at a hostel who bristles at the sound of his “potato accent”, but this is a class and not an ethnic prejudice. Identity is now overwhelmingly propositional—this girl would have no problem if you were a West African Dogon as long as you sounded the same and were socialized out of your tribal folkways. It’s just this tribalism that is the real enemy, these ascribed identities that can’t even in principle be disinherited. Even ethnic parochialism is acceptable so long as it’s a pet identity (“Polish or Bengali cuisine”) and not a threat, as Malcolm X was over and above MLK. The real threat is organic, inherited, “thrown” identity—especially white identity.
And yet, in another and perhaps more important sense, GNC represents a break from Axiality. BAP is right that the impetus behind GNC is ethnic resentment, and this is nothing if not a tribal (pre-Axial) motivation. This is a challenge to liberal propositionality, to the liberal idea of civic nationalism, that you just are your beliefs. GNC is a partial and imperfect reversion to ascribed identities, and this is being driven by the structure of postmodernity, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that propositionality is eating itself, and this is part of a wider and inevitable trend toward the archaic.
So BAP is right, GNC is a partial break with liberalism, the penultimate Axiality. It has revitalized the Negro and accelerated his already strong barbarism. When you look at the famous footage of the black rioter snatching the white conservative’s protest sign, you know who has all the will to power.
VI: A GNC of Our Own
Given our (woefully incomplete) genealogy of liberalism from the Bronze Age on down, it might seem like the arc of history bends toward propositional identity, Gesellschaft, and slave morality—that Axiality is inevitable. It’s anything but.
There have been RETVRNS to something healthy and organic all throughout history. After late antiquity with its anemic Neoplatonism, we get the robust tribalism of the “Dark Ages”, where the personal relationship of vassalage and homage is a thinly-disguised Germanic heathenry, a barbarism come screaming out of the ancient North to restore organic relations between men. There’s nothing propositional about it—your loyalty is not to a creed but to a flesh and blood man. In the early modern period, we get cuius rego eius religio, where religion again becomes something neither universal nor free, but inherited from the “accident” of birth. This is of course an echo of the archaic principle of suo quisque ritu sacrificia faciat, the essence of the Aryan cult of the ancestors, where the paterfamilias’ priesthood over the family was unopposable by those under his manus.
And now, 2,500 years after Cleisthenes’ deterritorialization dealt Greek aristocracy its death blow, we have the alt right. The alt right is as imperfect a break with Axiality as GNC is—I nevertheless teach you the Saxon who began to hate. Does he feel ethnic narcissism? Perhaps he does. Very well, he is an ethnic narcissist, and this is his source of power. This is the resentment of Ulysses returned to find parasites eating through his store and trying to fuck his wife. Read what happened next.
White identitarianism is the rebirth of the ancestor cult in the modern world, and is the vehicle for the same revitalization and rebarbarization for whites as GNC is for blacks. To call it ethnic narcissism is to miss the point—it is a reversion to pre-Axiality, to barbarism, to pre-propositional imperativity—to the renovation of the will. The Anglo liberal respecter must come to grips with the fact that the age of imperialism is over, balkanization is a bull market, and this is the fate of all empire.
This is cause to celebrate for anyone who appreciates the high and the great. As modern research has made clear, it’s the pre-Axial layer doing all the heavy lifting in building up what is high, in building the great man who stands on the shoulders of the nameless folk, who grows out of them as the flower grows out of soil. The propositional, the achieved identity, the Faustian yearning for the horizon—all these are parasitical on the brute thrownness of heritage, which is just to say, of race and folk.
The time is coming for the trannegerial elite to “put woke away”, and they are right to try because GNC is stoking white identitarianism, and driving a revival of biological excellence, of which BAP and the RWBB phenomenon themselves are examples.
It is in this desert of thought that I am resurrecting vital prophetic vision of Nietzsche, and the great work, the great project of all genuine Nietzscheans who followed him early on: the creation of a new Knights Templar—but now based no longer on theological doctrines, but on doctrines of nature, of the overall biological improvement and cultivation of mankind.16
The vitalist right and the folkish right are aiming at the same thing: to revive and renovate our barbarian roots, and folkishness is indispensable to this goal. Earlier in the podcast BAP points out, contra Moldbug, how South African Calvinism became something radically different than GNC. Why the difference? Quite simply, because of the Boers’ “group narcissism”, because of their self-regard as a coherent folk. The sine qua non of the Bronze Age mindset is the rejection of propositionality, where mere ideology quails before the naked power of familial loyalty—where, as my friend Dave Martel put it, “you are your father’s son; that’s your ideology.” This means the end of Axiality, and we will have it whether we want it or not.
Bronze Age Pervert, Caribbean Rhythms ep. 118 (2023), 0:51:03. All quotations from the podcast sic erat dictum.
Ibid, 0:00:45.
Ibid, 0:12:11.
Ibid, 1:48:54.
Ibid, 0:09:18.
Cf. David Goodhart’s Anywheres vs. Somewheres distinction (cosmopolitans vs. nationalists), whom he describes as having “achieved” vs. “ascribed” identities respectively.
BAP, CR 118, 1:13:31.
Ibid, 1:15:05.
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/remembering-robert-n-bellah
BAP, CR 118, 1:26:34.
Ibid, 1:48:30.
Paul Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999).
The Axial Age and Its Consequences, eds. Robert N. Bellah, Hans Joas (Harvard University Press, 2012).
BAP, CR 118, 1:49:38.
Very nice article. Subscribed!
"Rather than a flesh and blood sovereign, a king, perhaps in Nietzschean terms a master—rather than an embodied dems potis, the main “Axial acquisition” is super-sovereignty: a sort of master rule to which the flesh and blood master must subordinate his will."
This is merely a descriptor of reality. No human is omnipotent, and even monkey troops know that an alpha who excessively abuses his station and does nothing for the troop must, and deserves to, be overthrown. Call it noblesse oblige, if you want, but the idea that power comes with attendant responsibilities and can be delegitimized by failure to deliver on them is as old as social behavior. Bees will kill their own queen and raise up a new one if she fails to lay enough eggs.
The demands nature places on a group's survival supersede the will of any one man. If group relations become an active detriment to the primal imperative, it is better for a species to go solitary.