Authority as foundation of tradition and knowledge, undeniably true. It occurred to me that “aptness” can be applied to politics and culture as well as religion. As in that the policy must be apt for some people and not for other peoples. If true, then there can be no universal empire or civilization, because no policies can by apt for everyone beyond food, water, space, and hardly anything else. This could be a start of a new political understanding.
Evola discusses extensively the primacy of ritual (praxy or action) over belief.
A beaver finds the beaver dam it is born into "apt," and needs no explanation or justification for why it's dam is superior and best for it (particularist), and need not insist its beaver dam is best for all other animals (universalist), which the dam clearly is not. The dam, like all aspects of human culture (religion, morality, politics), is an extended phenotype of a particular gene pool, generated to boost the adaptiveness, survival, and flourishing of that gene pool and its members.
Philosophically demanding stuff here. I guess it comes down to, who is the ultimate authority: the individual, or the folk? If you choose the individual, that leads to Liberalism, Progressivism, and the atomized absurdity of Clown World. If you choose folkishness, you choose what is healthy and right.
This ties into the Euthyphro dilemma brought up in another article: are things inherently good, or are they good because the gods say so? But as you explained, there's an implicit presumption: that the individual can know what is inherently good, and thus know better than the gods! Thus, the individual is crowned god, which again, leads to the destruction of family, tribe, nation, sex, and basic common sense, as we're living through.
Or as you said in the penultimate paragraph: "By claiming the right to decide the ultimate authority, they have made themselves the ultimate authority. They are just liberals who haven’t got the memo yet." And so, anyone who believes in the Enlightenment lie of the individual as god (including cuckservatives) is on a slippery slope to the current mess.
The correct answer is that the folk and the gods are the highest authority; the good is in accordance to folkish tradition, because we ultimately must live by commands.
The problem with that is "the gods know better than me, I should follow the gods" is still a decision made by the individual himself, whether he acknowledges it or no. Every attempt to get him to do so implicitly presumes the very thing this wishes to denounce. Deciding to trust or obey an authority figure is itself a decision, upon which everything else is then built. The act is unavoidable.
This objection doesn't work. It is structurally equivalent to saying "I have to decide whether to trust the doctor, therefore my opinion on cardiology is as valid as his since his expertise depends upon my trust".
What's more, it misses the point of the argument, which is not only that there is an asymmetrical relationship of epistemic dependency between individual and tradition, but that there is a conceptual dependency. The only way you can question the tradition is with the very resources with which tradition has furnished you. The attempt is hubristic, and the closer you get to the core of the tradition, the less possible even in principle.
The actual situation in which any man finds himself in life is that every action he takes is an act of personal judgement. "I have to decide whether to trust the doctor" is true (and, as 2020 showed us, many doctors are untrustworthy) whether you like it or not. Even submitting without thought is a choice you make. Not making a choice is synonymous with doing literally nothing.
"The only way you can question the tradition is with the very resources with which tradition has furnished you."
You claim that, but the only way you could possibly know the content of any such furnishings is a prior trust in yourself, in your senses, in your memory, and in your ability to correctly understand what is even being asked of you. The only way you can even know what tradition is is to presume your own ability to accurately observe, recall, and process the world.
Since you can't actually see outside your perspective, even knowing that such a thing as tradition exists presumes your perspective is innately trustworthy.
I don't think anyone is arguing that only the superior should have agency, and that the subordinate has to be a mindless servant without Free Will. This is a strawman and a misunderstanding. Rather, the superior guides while the inferior follows, and both do so to the best of their ability. This is how a proper hierarchy works, as explained by Confucius to a different Folk, the Han. It's fine to have agency, as long as you don't usurp the proper authority and crown yourself god, which is the source of much error aka Liberalism.
That's a fine way to organize things, and I certainly have no objection to the idea of hierarchy. My objection lies in the idea that the justification for hierarchy rests in itself, and not in the natural imperative of all life to survive, reproduce, and flourish. It is my contention that periodically a great man, acting on nothing more than his own individual conviction, must of necessity overthrow an existing convention and institute a new one which he perceives as necessary for the health of his folk. This is not for everyone to do (again, natural hierarchy) but given the correct circumstances it is not immoral either. Since you mentioned the Han, the Mandate of Heaven is an especially appropriate way to frame such an action. Overthrow a rotten old dynasty for the good of China.
This pattern is also found all throughout nature. Bees, for instance, will kill their queen if she fails to deliver eggs. Even insects know that hierarchies are not absolute, and sometimes it is necessary for the good of the folk that they be overturned and a new one set up.
It's not about order or hierarchy for its own sake, but proper hierarchy. The "natural imperative of all life to survive, reproduce, and flourish" is one of our oldest, highest imperatives (as I mentioned on a recent article), along with survival of the fittest. Of course order can become corrupted, as ours currently is, in which case the storm-winds of chaos are what's needed to restore the good. You're supposed to follow the correct authority, which may require you to rebel against an usurper.
Certainly the Mandate of Heaven is a fine example of this, since in Chinese tradition, the powers of Heaven are superior to that of any dynasty, whose authority is ultimately derived from the former; thus why the Emperor was officially styled the Son of Heaven.
Speaking of John 14:6 and Jesus as the way to knowing God. In my early twenties I trusted in Jesus and in the middle of the prayer my eyes flew open in surprise at the sudden face to face closeness of God. I had been brought near. The God spoken of below from the Encyclopedia Britannica?
“High God, in anthropology and the history of religion, a type of supreme deity found among many nonliterate peoples of North and South America, Africa, northern Asia, and Australia. The adjective high is primarily a locative term: a High God is conceived as being utterly transcendent, removed from the world that he created. A High God is high in the sense that he lives in or is identified with the sky—hence, the alternative name. Among North American Indians and Central and South Africans, thunder is thought to be the voice of the High God. In Siberia the sun and moon are considered the High God’s eyes. He is connected with food and heaven among American Indians.
Though the pattern varies from people to people, the High God usually is conceived as masculine or sexless. He is thought to be the sole creator of heaven and earth. Although he is omnipotent and omniscient, he is thought to have withdrawn from his creation and therefore to be inaccessible to prayer or sacrifice. Generally, no graphic images of him exist, nor does he receive cult worship or appear in the mythology. If he is invoked, it is only in times of extreme distress, but there is no guarantee that he will hear or respond. His name often is revealed only to initiates, and to speak his name aloud is thought to invite disaster or death; his most frequent title is Father. In some traditions he is conceived to be a transcendent principle of divine order; in others he is pictured as senile or impotent and replaced by a set of more active and involved deities; and in still other traditions he has become so remote that he is all but forgotten.”
It's not so much that people can't have shared beliefs and practices. If the "ought" is relative to a class of agent, we can say that there are "oughts" relative to the class of homo sapiens. It's that the "oughts" for mankind are so general as to give no real moral guidance. Universal prescriptions are the least rich, least relevant, and least important, but universal religions treat them as the highest. This has a distorting influence that, among other things, eventually erases folkhoods altogether.
I guess I'm out of the loop on the discussion here, so maybe Imperium will correct me if I'm blundering around rehashing noob arguments, but typically variations in "ought" don't require abandoning the idea of universal truth? For example, if some people have lactose tolerance and others don't, then it is objectively true that people who lack this tolerance ought not to drink milk, while people who tolerate lactose need not observe this restriction. Likewise, if some people have high melanin levels and others don't, then it is objectively true that people with low melanin should put on sunscreen in hot weather. This doesn't require subjective morality- both serve a higher objective moral truth, which is "you ought to maintain good physical health"- there's simply local variation in the means to that end.
My impression is that what's really going on with respect to folkways is something like "you ought to maintain darwinian selection pressures to maintain the physical and mental health of your people", combined with the awkward realisation that if you applied this rule consistently in multi-racial societies you would virtually eradicate the low-IQ minorities in a couple of generations, even if you were civilised about it, which causes said minorities to go apeshit. And also that you need to worship Jesus or Cybele or Nyame or something to induce women to make babies, apparently, but Jesus doesn't do border control.
I dunno, maybe there's some kind of "weight division or league structure in sports" analogy to be drawn here? Yeah, everyone in sport ought to be competing to win, but it's not much fun for the athletes or the audience for the little guys to get crushed over and over with no possibility of victory, so while acknowledging the objective truth of a continuum in strength and ability, you invent weight classes and skill tiers just to try to pair everyone off in matches with at least a chance of winning. Or maybe have people specialise in different sports entirely.
Universal truth isn't really being challenged here. It can be true that the earth rotates around the sun and not vice versa no matter who's asking. Rather what's being challenged is that religion is at bottom a kind of truth-apt description of the world. Instead, it's a fundamentally command-based enterprise, and commands are not universal.
"Moral truths" are second-order moral statements. First-order moral statements are commands like "thou shalt not kill". Second-order "moral truths" are comments on these first-order moral statements. "You shouldn't kill" is, when you unpack it, "Yahweh says 'thou shalt not kill'" with the implication that Yahweh is a relevant authority for the hearer. Once this is understood, the discursive power of universalism disappears and the question becomes "who is the ultimate moral authority?" which by its very nature can only by answered by reference to an ultimate moral authority. Authority is at the bottom of absolutely everything and not subject to debate.
Okay, but... and again, forgive me if I'm glossing over prior discussions here... my impression from various articles here is that you're trying to anchor religious commandments regarding moral action in the pagan mythos of a particular folk defined through attachment to blood and soil?
Where does that leave the rather large percentage of the earth's white population who claim mixed ancestry from italian, greek, slavic, germanic and/or celtic populations, and/or who no longer reside in their ancestral homelands, not to mention everyone with partial white ancestry? If this can't be left to the discretion of individual worshippers, are we supposed to wait until Perun or Zeus or Dagda finish their custody battle over who they claim jurisdiction over, or something?
The basic insight of imperative ethics is that commands are the anchor point rather than metaphysics. Commands are the anchor, the starting point, the bedrock of justification. All discourse cashes out to commentary on commands.
The question then raised is, "which commands?" Anyone can command.
The answer is that authority (legitimacy to command) flows from fatherhood. Fatherhood is not just a kind of authority, but very pattern of authority, which all traditions—from Judaism to paganism to secular humanist liberalism—agree with. Authority depends upon earlier authority, and that comes from the father. We have fleshed this out here:
This agrees perfectly with the Indo-European conception of folkhood, which had little to do with race, but with paternal ancestry. You are your father's son, that's your race. You worship his gods, you inherit and transmit his commands. If one has a Germanic patrilineage but 95% of his other ancestry is Slavic, he worships the Germanic gods.
Well, I appreciate the answer. My subscription will be lapsing tomorrow, so I guess I'd just ask if you had any commentary on why the axial religions displaced paganism so successfully across most of the planet, including the old world?
It was a matter of material conditions. Axial religions are great for centralization and empire. They deracinate man and untether him from blood and soil. This was what was happening at the time in all the Axial centres.
Material conditions are again changing. We are on the other side of this now, seeing a great devolution (which is a process centuries old but only now visible). Axiality is again winding down for another cycle.
Authority as foundation of tradition and knowledge, undeniably true. It occurred to me that “aptness” can be applied to politics and culture as well as religion. As in that the policy must be apt for some people and not for other peoples. If true, then there can be no universal empire or civilization, because no policies can by apt for everyone beyond food, water, space, and hardly anything else. This could be a start of a new political understanding.
This makes sense because politics and culture are expressions of tradition, which is itself the reified commands of our forefathers.
Evola discusses extensively the primacy of ritual (praxy or action) over belief.
A beaver finds the beaver dam it is born into "apt," and needs no explanation or justification for why it's dam is superior and best for it (particularist), and need not insist its beaver dam is best for all other animals (universalist), which the dam clearly is not. The dam, like all aspects of human culture (religion, morality, politics), is an extended phenotype of a particular gene pool, generated to boost the adaptiveness, survival, and flourishing of that gene pool and its members.
Incredible article. If rational metaphysics are the hiv of the European soul then Judeo-Christianity is the aids.
Philosophically demanding stuff here. I guess it comes down to, who is the ultimate authority: the individual, or the folk? If you choose the individual, that leads to Liberalism, Progressivism, and the atomized absurdity of Clown World. If you choose folkishness, you choose what is healthy and right.
This ties into the Euthyphro dilemma brought up in another article: are things inherently good, or are they good because the gods say so? But as you explained, there's an implicit presumption: that the individual can know what is inherently good, and thus know better than the gods! Thus, the individual is crowned god, which again, leads to the destruction of family, tribe, nation, sex, and basic common sense, as we're living through.
Or as you said in the penultimate paragraph: "By claiming the right to decide the ultimate authority, they have made themselves the ultimate authority. They are just liberals who haven’t got the memo yet." And so, anyone who believes in the Enlightenment lie of the individual as god (including cuckservatives) is on a slippery slope to the current mess.
The correct answer is that the folk and the gods are the highest authority; the good is in accordance to folkish tradition, because we ultimately must live by commands.
The problem with that is "the gods know better than me, I should follow the gods" is still a decision made by the individual himself, whether he acknowledges it or no. Every attempt to get him to do so implicitly presumes the very thing this wishes to denounce. Deciding to trust or obey an authority figure is itself a decision, upon which everything else is then built. The act is unavoidable.
This objection doesn't work. It is structurally equivalent to saying "I have to decide whether to trust the doctor, therefore my opinion on cardiology is as valid as his since his expertise depends upon my trust".
What's more, it misses the point of the argument, which is not only that there is an asymmetrical relationship of epistemic dependency between individual and tradition, but that there is a conceptual dependency. The only way you can question the tradition is with the very resources with which tradition has furnished you. The attempt is hubristic, and the closer you get to the core of the tradition, the less possible even in principle.
The actual situation in which any man finds himself in life is that every action he takes is an act of personal judgement. "I have to decide whether to trust the doctor" is true (and, as 2020 showed us, many doctors are untrustworthy) whether you like it or not. Even submitting without thought is a choice you make. Not making a choice is synonymous with doing literally nothing.
"The only way you can question the tradition is with the very resources with which tradition has furnished you."
You claim that, but the only way you could possibly know the content of any such furnishings is a prior trust in yourself, in your senses, in your memory, and in your ability to correctly understand what is even being asked of you. The only way you can even know what tradition is is to presume your own ability to accurately observe, recall, and process the world.
Since you can't actually see outside your perspective, even knowing that such a thing as tradition exists presumes your perspective is innately trustworthy.
I don't think anyone is arguing that only the superior should have agency, and that the subordinate has to be a mindless servant without Free Will. This is a strawman and a misunderstanding. Rather, the superior guides while the inferior follows, and both do so to the best of their ability. This is how a proper hierarchy works, as explained by Confucius to a different Folk, the Han. It's fine to have agency, as long as you don't usurp the proper authority and crown yourself god, which is the source of much error aka Liberalism.
That's a fine way to organize things, and I certainly have no objection to the idea of hierarchy. My objection lies in the idea that the justification for hierarchy rests in itself, and not in the natural imperative of all life to survive, reproduce, and flourish. It is my contention that periodically a great man, acting on nothing more than his own individual conviction, must of necessity overthrow an existing convention and institute a new one which he perceives as necessary for the health of his folk. This is not for everyone to do (again, natural hierarchy) but given the correct circumstances it is not immoral either. Since you mentioned the Han, the Mandate of Heaven is an especially appropriate way to frame such an action. Overthrow a rotten old dynasty for the good of China.
This pattern is also found all throughout nature. Bees, for instance, will kill their queen if she fails to deliver eggs. Even insects know that hierarchies are not absolute, and sometimes it is necessary for the good of the folk that they be overturned and a new one set up.
It's not about order or hierarchy for its own sake, but proper hierarchy. The "natural imperative of all life to survive, reproduce, and flourish" is one of our oldest, highest imperatives (as I mentioned on a recent article), along with survival of the fittest. Of course order can become corrupted, as ours currently is, in which case the storm-winds of chaos are what's needed to restore the good. You're supposed to follow the correct authority, which may require you to rebel against an usurper.
Certainly the Mandate of Heaven is a fine example of this, since in Chinese tradition, the powers of Heaven are superior to that of any dynasty, whose authority is ultimately derived from the former; thus why the Emperor was officially styled the Son of Heaven.
Speaking of John 14:6 and Jesus as the way to knowing God. In my early twenties I trusted in Jesus and in the middle of the prayer my eyes flew open in surprise at the sudden face to face closeness of God. I had been brought near. The God spoken of below from the Encyclopedia Britannica?
“High God, in anthropology and the history of religion, a type of supreme deity found among many nonliterate peoples of North and South America, Africa, northern Asia, and Australia. The adjective high is primarily a locative term: a High God is conceived as being utterly transcendent, removed from the world that he created. A High God is high in the sense that he lives in or is identified with the sky—hence, the alternative name. Among North American Indians and Central and South Africans, thunder is thought to be the voice of the High God. In Siberia the sun and moon are considered the High God’s eyes. He is connected with food and heaven among American Indians.
Though the pattern varies from people to people, the High God usually is conceived as masculine or sexless. He is thought to be the sole creator of heaven and earth. Although he is omnipotent and omniscient, he is thought to have withdrawn from his creation and therefore to be inaccessible to prayer or sacrifice. Generally, no graphic images of him exist, nor does he receive cult worship or appear in the mythology. If he is invoked, it is only in times of extreme distress, but there is no guarantee that he will hear or respond. His name often is revealed only to initiates, and to speak his name aloud is thought to invite disaster or death; his most frequent title is Father. In some traditions he is conceived to be a transcendent principle of divine order; in others he is pictured as senile or impotent and replaced by a set of more active and involved deities; and in still other traditions he has become so remote that he is all but forgotten.”
It can be argued that the primal god of the Chinese culture was the above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdi
As it says in the NT - “In him we live and move and have our being”
It seems like a fair summary of the concept, but I'm not sure how this connects to the original discussion?
An argument that in the end the cultural and historical evidence may indicate monotheism as primal/universal.
It seems to be more of an argument for hierarchical polytheism, but I take your point.
It's not so much that people can't have shared beliefs and practices. If the "ought" is relative to a class of agent, we can say that there are "oughts" relative to the class of homo sapiens. It's that the "oughts" for mankind are so general as to give no real moral guidance. Universal prescriptions are the least rich, least relevant, and least important, but universal religions treat them as the highest. This has a distorting influence that, among other things, eventually erases folkhoods altogether.
I guess I'm out of the loop on the discussion here, so maybe Imperium will correct me if I'm blundering around rehashing noob arguments, but typically variations in "ought" don't require abandoning the idea of universal truth? For example, if some people have lactose tolerance and others don't, then it is objectively true that people who lack this tolerance ought not to drink milk, while people who tolerate lactose need not observe this restriction. Likewise, if some people have high melanin levels and others don't, then it is objectively true that people with low melanin should put on sunscreen in hot weather. This doesn't require subjective morality- both serve a higher objective moral truth, which is "you ought to maintain good physical health"- there's simply local variation in the means to that end.
My impression is that what's really going on with respect to folkways is something like "you ought to maintain darwinian selection pressures to maintain the physical and mental health of your people", combined with the awkward realisation that if you applied this rule consistently in multi-racial societies you would virtually eradicate the low-IQ minorities in a couple of generations, even if you were civilised about it, which causes said minorities to go apeshit. And also that you need to worship Jesus or Cybele or Nyame or something to induce women to make babies, apparently, but Jesus doesn't do border control.
I dunno, maybe there's some kind of "weight division or league structure in sports" analogy to be drawn here? Yeah, everyone in sport ought to be competing to win, but it's not much fun for the athletes or the audience for the little guys to get crushed over and over with no possibility of victory, so while acknowledging the objective truth of a continuum in strength and ability, you invent weight classes and skill tiers just to try to pair everyone off in matches with at least a chance of winning. Or maybe have people specialise in different sports entirely.
Universal truth isn't really being challenged here. It can be true that the earth rotates around the sun and not vice versa no matter who's asking. Rather what's being challenged is that religion is at bottom a kind of truth-apt description of the world. Instead, it's a fundamentally command-based enterprise, and commands are not universal.
"Moral truths" are second-order moral statements. First-order moral statements are commands like "thou shalt not kill". Second-order "moral truths" are comments on these first-order moral statements. "You shouldn't kill" is, when you unpack it, "Yahweh says 'thou shalt not kill'" with the implication that Yahweh is a relevant authority for the hearer. Once this is understood, the discursive power of universalism disappears and the question becomes "who is the ultimate moral authority?" which by its very nature can only by answered by reference to an ultimate moral authority. Authority is at the bottom of absolutely everything and not subject to debate.
Okay, but... and again, forgive me if I'm glossing over prior discussions here... my impression from various articles here is that you're trying to anchor religious commandments regarding moral action in the pagan mythos of a particular folk defined through attachment to blood and soil?
Where does that leave the rather large percentage of the earth's white population who claim mixed ancestry from italian, greek, slavic, germanic and/or celtic populations, and/or who no longer reside in their ancestral homelands, not to mention everyone with partial white ancestry? If this can't be left to the discretion of individual worshippers, are we supposed to wait until Perun or Zeus or Dagda finish their custody battle over who they claim jurisdiction over, or something?
The basic insight of imperative ethics is that commands are the anchor point rather than metaphysics. Commands are the anchor, the starting point, the bedrock of justification. All discourse cashes out to commentary on commands.
The question then raised is, "which commands?" Anyone can command.
The answer is that authority (legitimacy to command) flows from fatherhood. Fatherhood is not just a kind of authority, but very pattern of authority, which all traditions—from Judaism to paganism to secular humanist liberalism—agree with. Authority depends upon earlier authority, and that comes from the father. We have fleshed this out here:
https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/where-do-pagans-get-their-authority-a05
This agrees perfectly with the Indo-European conception of folkhood, which had little to do with race, but with paternal ancestry. You are your father's son, that's your race. You worship his gods, you inherit and transmit his commands. If one has a Germanic patrilineage but 95% of his other ancestry is Slavic, he worships the Germanic gods.
Well, I appreciate the answer. My subscription will be lapsing tomorrow, so I guess I'd just ask if you had any commentary on why the axial religions displaced paganism so successfully across most of the planet, including the old world?
It was a matter of material conditions. Axial religions are great for centralization and empire. They deracinate man and untether him from blood and soil. This was what was happening at the time in all the Axial centres.
Material conditions are again changing. We are on the other side of this now, seeing a great devolution (which is a process centuries old but only now visible). Axiality is again winding down for another cycle.
Looking forward to that.