Folkishness Q&A, Part II
Ten Questions Asked and Answered
For Part I, click here.
If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.
Last week we answered questions that people have raised about folkishness, focusing on the fundamentals. This week we continue our Q&A, getting into some more practical territory.
Would folkishness not be stifling?
Anyone who has a wife and has ever tried to put folkishness into practice quickly runs into a problem—she doesn’t want to live anywhere near her mother-in-law. This is quite understandable, and is a perennial complaint against living in a folkish way. You hear it often from Bronze Age Pervert in his podcast, who sees this way of life as icky, third worldist, and bovine. Arthur Powell articulates this sentiment in a more measured way:
If you read accounts of what life is like in some of these pre-political groupings that still exist today it sounds quite stifling and seems to clash with some elements of European desire to expand and assert independence. Imagine living in a massive compound, with maybe 20 servants laying about gossiping all the time, about 30 relatives coming and going and everyone watching you all the time.
It’s true that this is alien to us today, and it would be stifling in an immediate sense. But what is the alternative? The alternative is to continue to become displaced by alien folks in our own countries who are not afraid to live this way, which is much more deeply stifling than hearing your cousin make you a new cousin upstairs.
The time for half-measures is over. We need to become radical fundamentalist zealots. No more negotiation. No more compromise. As Dave Martel says, it’s “our way, whatever we want, forever, or else.” That is the attitude we need to cultivate. No one who is unwilling to live shoulder to shoulder with his own kin in a box, is going to make it. This is not a “feminine” or “longhoused” attitude. Quite the reverse, really. Would we call the Spartan barrack a longhouse? Were the Norse, who lived in a literal longhouse, overly feminine? To ask the question is to answer it.
The future belongs to people willing to live and die for their ideals. A little discomfort, a little less privacy, is a small price to pay for securing a future for your children.
What is the relationship between folkishness and religion?
Speaking of fundamentalist zealotry, is it required that folkish people1 be religious? Do all religions fit with folkishness? If not, which ones?
This was a major concern in Esotericist’s article:
Folkishness is not inherently tied to any particular religion. In the original German folkish movement there were individuals of all shades of opinion on religion. […] Indeed, I could go further and say that one doesn’t need to be religious at all in order to believe in the central tenets of folkishness (although to be religious is probably preferable for a number of reasons). There are people of all religious beliefs or none on the political “right” who might be attracted to folkishness, but some of them might be put off of folkishness if the only folkish content they see is tied to, say, heathenry. They will naturally make the assumption that one has to be a pagan to be folkish, which is not true at all.
The tenets he is referencing are traditionalism, particularism, and communitarianism. These are sound principles, and certainly inherent in a folkish worldview. However, I don’t see how traditionalism can be properly maintained without maintaining the traditional religious life of a folk, any more than traditionalism can be maintained without maintaining other folkways such as costume, language, cuisine, etc. But he has a point that folkishness is not a religious doctrine. One need not be religious to be folkish, but given that folkishness touches all folkways, surely folkishness makes demands of us with respect to religion. But what demands?
Esotericist is right to point to particularism as essential to folkishness. If this, what we might call ownness is essential to folk culture, then this rules out foreign religions. Buddhism or Islam is never going to be an English religion. But what about Christianity? It is a foreign religion, but on the other hand, it has been with the English for many centuries.
Folkishness is pre-ideological, but it also makes moral demands of us, which puts it near the realm of ideology. Let us say something about the relation between ideology, morality, and tradition.2
Tradition is not ideology. Tradition may make moral claims, which is to say, tradition may command that we do this or that, but it is not an ideology. Tradition is a large body of commands, not all of which agree with each other. In practical life, we need to simplify this ocean of commands because not every one of us can be a lawspeaker or a priest who has mastered the whole body of moral claims. What’s more, where two moral claims disagree, we need to be able to decide between them. This simplification is what we call ideology. It is a practical tool that falls short of the richness of the original, and has less authority. Christianity is a morality; “from each according to his means to each according to his need” is an ideology.
Folkishness too has its ideology in that it can be thus simplified. Implicit in the body of folkish moral claims is that what is ancestral has authority, and the more ancestral, the more authority. I have called this the ancestral principle.
The English have had more than one religion. Which religion is the more authoritative? The more ancestral, and in keeping with the principle of particularism or ownness, the one which is native to them. This means that the natural religion for the English is the paganism of the British Isles. Does this mean you can’t be Christian, or atheist, and be folkish? No, it doesn’t, any more than you are required to do Morris dancing or to wear a doublet and hose to be a folkish Englishman. Does this mean no rules with respect to religion? No, it doesn’t mean that either.
At a bare minimum, to be a folkish Englishman means not to disparage or trivialize the native costume or dance of the English. Similarly, you cannot be a folkish Englishman if you disparage or trivialize English pagan practices.3 But it goes further than this. Religion is not a purely private affair—any ancestral European people had some form of civic religion, whether Christian or pagan. Paganisms tended to be indifferent to what cult you practice in the home, even one that hails from the Middle East, or from China or Africa for that matter.4 But when you step into the public square, you are required not only to act respectfully toward the gods of the folk, but to take part in the civic religion.5
This presents a problem for Christian theology not only on account of its monotheism, but on account of its anti-paganism.6 To accommodate English tradition, Christianity in England must a) not disparage the traditional English gods, and b) accommodate itself to the traditional (i.e. pagan) public worship of the English. If it can do that, it can be folkish; if not, it cannot.
Both Esotericist and Powell sense this and cannot accept it. From Esotericist, whose conception of folkishness is close to what I have called pre-Weimar folkishness:
Since I believe folkishness to be true, and want to convince as many people as possible of its truth, it would only hinder this cause if I were to tie it to a particular religious doctrine. This is not to say that it is wrong for people to try and integrate their religious views with folkishness, but it is very important that we recognise that these religious beliefs are not what characterise folkishness in itself, and I at any rate will continue to write from a perspective that leaves the religious question to the side.
While one can be folkish and can develop folkishness secularly, it does not seem tenable for folkishness as a whole to bracket the religious question. Folkishness does not leave the question of religion open any more than it does the question of language or blood or any other matter of tradition. If folkishness has something to say on custom, it has something to say on religion.
In my view, the most folkish religion imaginable is the ancestor cult, with which Imperium Press readers will be familiar. A “folkish minimum” on the religion question would look like this: members of the folk practice an ancestral cult in the home, which is extended to a worship of national founders, heroes, and ancestors in public during festivals and communal feasts.7
Many nationalists and people who are otherwise folkish will find this religious paradigm alienating and unforgiving. However, I am not concerned to create a mass movement or to appeal to what people already believe. I am concerned to form a vanguard. I am concerned to chart a roadmap to where the vanguard will be able to survive in a hostile world where central authority has broken down, which it is doing and will continue to do. I am concerned to change what people believe, because what they believe has led us to where we are today, which if pursued will lead to the extinction of our folk.
And because Powell specifically asked about how we were at one point able to be both folkish and Christian, I have written an article titled Creed is a Proxy for Blood that addresses this.
How did ideology destroy folkishness?
To answer this we first have to clarify the relationship between ideology and folkishness. We have already defined these terms, so this will help us to clarify this question. Let us review:
Folkishness is an attitude or disposition toward pre-political identity.
Tradition is the cultural expression of pre-political identity, which includes morality.
Ideology is a simplification or reduction of morality.
The relationship between folkishness and ideology is that folkishness is the ground out of which tradition grows, and thus ideology. So if ideology depends on folkishness, how did ideology win? Why did liberalism or feminism or belief in general—what we have called propositional identity—undermine folkishness?
Belief is something that need not be folkish. I can believe that the sun rises in the East, and so can a Chinaman. I can also have moral convictions, such as the “golden rule”, and so can our Chinaman. But if I were to form a community on the basis of beliefs and convictions, there would be nothing in principle distinguishing me and our Chinaman. This “community of belief” is called civic nationalism. It is the death of folkhood, and is wholly excluded by folkishness.
Historically, it is the triumph of this community of belief that undermined folkishness. But still the question remains, how did it do that?
Beliefs can spread in one of two ways: a) they can spread organically, where the belief benefits the believer, thereby the belief and believer multiply together, or b) they can spread virally, where the belief prospers independently (or at the expense) of the believer, where the belief uses the believer as a vector for propagation, multiplying independently of him. Nationalism is an organic belief, which benefits the nationalist, usually at the expense of the non-nationalist. Globalism is a viral belief, which actively harms the globalist, and which benefits only the ideology of globalism.8
So why did globalism beat nationalism? It won because globalism is perfect for holding together an empire of different folks—in other words, it is useful for political centralization.9 You might notice that this is precisely the argument given earlier for why the nation is superior to the folk, and why the folk is superior to the tribe, etc. Once again, there is only one direction this hollowing out of intermediary structures can go, and that is toward globalism.
But even globalism depends on having functional societies, and as we have been at pains to point out, functional societies depend on social capital which in turn depends on folkishness. You can’t have a strong society when you only have a strong nuclear family and a strong folk—sooner or later these will both give out. This is precisely what has happened, and folkishness is the prescription for how to build our societies back up from the brink of destruction.
Ideology as a sort of “glue” holding people together is evaporating quickly—it was only ever secondary and derivative of folkishness anyway.10 The time when group cohesion was based on shared belief is mostly in the rearview mirror, and so we should not spend much time worrying about it as a challenge to the program of folkishness. And to the extent that folkishness itself is an ideology, it is really only a set of training wheels to get you to act instinctively on pre-political loyalty, after which the ideology can be discarded.
How does it work? Can I be a Texan and an American and a white man?
Identity is not something simple—identity is complex, and more than the sum of its parts. In fact, one of the virtues of folkishness is that it provides a framework for navigating this complexity.
Everyone’s identity is multi-layered. You might be a brother, a son, a cousin, a Texan, an American, a white man, an employee, a mentor, and a student—all at once. So the simple answer is yes, you can be all these at once and in fact folkishness makes this complexity as workable as possible. To see how it works in practice, we can look at what happens when problems arise.