Ten Books Required to Understand the Modern World, Part II

Last time we started into my list of required reading; this week we round off the last five entries. These expositions got to be much longer than I expected—about the length of five of my regular articles packed into two. I hope you get something out of these mini-book reviews and end up actually reading the books.

6) Patriarcha (Robert Filmer):

Filmer doesn’t often show up on illiberal reading lists, which is a shame because he helps the reader avoid many a blind alley that even the based and redpilled end up stuck in. He also occupies an important position in the history of liberalism, as the foil for Locke’s (supposed) triumph in the first of his Two Treatises on Government. To understand him, we must understand his background.

Originally, as we learned in Fustel de Coulanges, God, king, and country were one, and so sovereignty was clear and indivisible. There was no distinction between sacred and secular rulership, and so no “divine right”, because the king (or chieftain, or father) was a priestly office—the ruler held the office by divine right by definition. Later we got the first inkling of a sacred vs. secular in the form of Augustine's “City of Man vs. City of God” distinction, developing through Bernard of Clairvaux’s “God reigns; government rules”. The Early Middle Ages, from the Byzantine Papacy through the Frankish period to about the 11th century, is the story of sacred and secular struggling for dominion one over the other.

At every stage, divine right was in question—who held it? Emperor, or Pope? By turns, each pointed to Augustine’s distinction to justify hegemony over the other. This struggle culminated, as it had to, in the Reformation. In response to this blow against the Papacy, we see a landmark in the rough beast slouching toward liberalism—the rise of consensual theories of governance and the “rule of law”. Filmer definitively rebuts these ideas even before they had flowered into Locke.

For rule of law, Filmer is content to point out, with his famous carpenter analogy, that men are ruled by men and not a piece of paper. At best, the piece of paper is a tool. What’s more, the law was originally unwritten, and could only be formalized by a lawgiver such as Solon or the decemviri if they were granted the kind of absolute power that “rule of law” seeks to limit. Laws were never meant to bind the ruler, but were formalized in order to bind the people. The only thing that does bind the king is what Filmer calls the “natural law of a father”.

Rather than depending on tortuous, post hoc anthropologies like that of Locke and Rousseau, Filmer simply points to the natural dependence of children on fathers, and notes that this is the same relation as of ruler to ruled. But in Filmer’s time democracy was still regarded as absurd, so the question was about elective monarchy. He explains that elective monarchy has no scriptural precedent, no philosophical precedent, no historical precedent,¹ no precedent at all, really.

Even Bellarmine and Suarez, the closest we have to cogent accounts of popular sovereignty, can’t seem to account for how this works, especially scripturally. Originally “the people” were simply Adam’s family—how, then, did there come to be separate nations? How could men rend asunder what God had united? And how does it work when the king convenes a curia? Are decisions reached by simple majority? Supermajority? Consensus? Suarez admits that not all citizens could be present at all curiae, but if even one is missing then his tacit approval is legitimate, in which case all the usurper need do in order to be legitimate is tyrannize the people into silence.² Rome, often held up as an example of popular sovereignty, is anything but. Filmer offers many reasons why not, but the a fortiori reason is that in her greatest peril Rome created herself a dictator—whatever the Romans told themselves,³ their whole society stood upon absolutist sovereignty in the court of final appeal: that of martial law.

Filmer is the grandfather of all elite theory, with his reintroduction of human will as the driving force in politics. In treating the notion of sovereignty as a question of law, he provides clarity on a question which was before him (and after him) muddled, running together the question of government for the people with government of the people. Looked at in this way, government of the people is impossible—at the very least, the law must have an interpreter,⁴ and that interpreter necessarily stands above the law. We remain perplexed to this very day, and until we rid ourselves of proto-liberal concepts, our thinking—where it is consistent at all—will only lead us to liberal conclusions.

7) The Origin of Language (Eric Gans)

When Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, it was not considered a work of science, but a work of natural history. One thinks that in the transition of evolutionary biology to being a hard science, something has been lost, because as a work of history first and foremost, it provides us with a narrative, and a narrative is a powerful thing.

This is what Eric Gans did in the field of anthropology with his Generative Anthropology (GA)—providing a narrative account of our origins. The influence of GA on the radical right is owed to a number of people such as Thomas Bertonneau, but chiefly to Adam Katz. Outside of a small circle of academics, GA’s implications for liberalism have not been well understood, although it remains radical and corrosive.

Gans follows René Girard’s mimetic account of the origins of humanity. Humans are the most mimetic of animals, which generates conflict as the person we’re imitating becomes our rival over a finite resource. When such mimetic rivalry gets out of hand, this can lead to crisis which threatens the whole community. In Girard’s account, just such a crisis leads a group of proto-humans to mark out one member of the group as the “scapegoat” whose murder is required to diffuse the crisis.

Gans accepts the basic theme of the mimetic crisis, but sees it unfold in terms of language—the birth of the human is an essentially linguistic event. In this “originary scene”, the community’s mimetic rivalry has built up to where the normal pecking order (Gans gives the example of a recent kill) threatens to devolve into general violence. One member is seen by the rest to hesitate, and this gesture of hesitation diffuses the crisis as others imitate it. It also becomes the first linguistic sign—the ostensive—and since proto-humans don’t have agency, no other agency could have diffused the situation than the object of desire itself, thus will is imputed on to this object which becomes a sacred centre—God.⁵

GA requires a large amount of exposition just in order to discuss its implications, which is perhaps why it never quite took root in the radical right. The originary hypothesis set out above is not particularly intuitive, but the important takeaway is that the ostensive is at the root of all language. From this follows the imperative which is derivative of the ostensive, and from the imperative follows the declarative which is derivative of both. Rather than seeing these on a continuum of primitive/developed, we should see them in terms of fundamental/derivative.

Where all of this starts to have obvious implications is in realizing that there are also ostensive, imperative, and declarative cultures. Every historical culture is of course a mix of all three, but it’s clear that, for example, societies whose religion involves a shamanic element are strongly ostensive, since the shaman ecstatically participates in the divine just as the ostensive sign is inextricable from the thing it describes (“man overboard!” is only ever said in the presence of the man fallen overboard). Likewise, societies with a cultic religion are very strongly imperative, since the heroic cults of say, the early Greek city-states, were almost exhaustively ritualistic, with only a bare minimum of propositional content. So, what does declarative culture look like? We have here the proposition nation.

We can pinpoint the birth of the proposition nation with relative precision—these cultures were born out of the Axial age. This shift happened in many places, but the paradigmatic shift was from the Indo-Iranian cultic religion, characterized by orthopraxy, lineage, and cyclical history, to the Zoroastrian reforms, characterized by orthodoxy, universalism, and eschatology. No longer was the religion based on exclusive and inherited cultic imperatives, but on truth—and because the truth is the same no matter who apprehends it, religion ceased to be a valid constitutive principle for a distinct people. One was a Zoroastrian as long as one accepted the truth of the prophet’s revelation; no longer did the creed grow out of the folk, but the folk out of the creed. This propositionality, which I have discussed in my article In Praise of Gullibility has been a major current of liberalism and has proven corrosive to ethnic boundaries.

Gans’ thought gives us the tools to put propositionality in its place. As it turns out, both linguistically and culturally, propositionality comes only very late, and stands upon a much deeper foundation, without which it is nothing. While propositional identity is useful, especially for power centralization across ethnic lines, societies that ignore and even reject their foundations are not long for this world. Gans gives us the conceptual framework to articulate why.

8) Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (Émile Benveniste)

You may be surprised to see a dictionary on a list of required reading, but Beneviste’s Dictionary is a bit of a misnomer—a strange dictionary indeed that has only 54 entries. Really, it is a series of reconstructions, based on linguistic comparanda, of those archaic institutions that stand at the foundation of our own social orders.

Originally I bought it for use in my own project of ritual reconstruction, and while it has proven somewhat useful for that, the true value of it is in reconstructing the worldview of the Indo-Europeans through their social realities. Due to its nature, there is no overall thesis being advanced here. What there is, however, is a series of brilliant and often shocking reorientations of our origins. I will give an example of one such reorientation, taken from book III, ch. iii, The Free Man.

Very often the Indo-Europeans are characterized as a kind of proto-liberal. As the story goes, just as the aristocratic liberal of Robespierre’s time accepted the need for hierarchy, so too did the Indo-European who was a free aristocrat bound only by his word and his honour, but otherwise at liberty to go his own way and seek his own fortune if he felt himself slighted.⁶

This reading of “aristocratic individualism” into Indo-European society enshrines liberal categories by making them aboriginal to us as peoples. They also make it very difficult to read much of the early Western Canon intelligibly, as for example in Sophocles’ Ajax, where after the hero finds himself slighted by his countrymen and humiliated by a fit of madness, the possibility of acting as an individual in contrast to the group does not even occur at all, and the only option for Ajax is suicide. As Sophocles himself surely could have guessed, no such aboriginal freedom ever existed.

Indo-European societies have no common linguistic root for the idea of “freedom”. There is, however, a term common to the Romans and the Greeks. First, we have to understand that although these two related peoples came to be heavily entangled later on, this was a meeting of long-lost cousins. The Romans and Greeks share a common ancestor some 2,000 years before they re-established contact, and their primitive institutions can be traced back to this ancestor, if not further. Both these peoples originally called the “free man” *(e)leudheros, whence Latin liber, and so our own “liberty”. Thus far, Macdonald seems to be right—it looks as though liberty really is our tradition.

If we examine the linguistic root of liber however, we discover that it does not answer to anything like the liberty of the Declaration of Independence. Liber is the name of a god of vegetation; children are called liberi; cognates in Old Slavic and modern German give us “the people”;⁷ other cognates in Gothic and Sanskrit give us “grow”. What unites all these, between children, vegetation, the people, and growth? We have here the idea of a common stock or breed, a metaphor for the organic growth of a people. To be free, in the original conception, is not to be rid of something, but to belong to something—in fact, it is to be unable to be rid of something. We have the concept of a common stock based on shared ancestry, something immutable, permanent, and inherited—the complete opposite of what freedom later came to mean, even in classical times. This semantic shift is a reflection, at least in the Roman world, of the “struggle of the orders” where a caste without a worship (based exclusively on agnation in those times) was enfranchised through the “high-low vs. middle” mechanism, with elites enfranchising an underclass at the expense of the common stock.⁸

It is the same in the Germanic world. The word family which gives us the semantic cognate “free” derives from the IE root *priyos, meaning “dear”, as can be seen in the linguistic cognate “friend”. Idiomatic usages in the Indo-Iranian branch make clear that this had corporative overtones; a friend is as dear as one’s own body, because the institution of friendship among the IEs was the same as “freedom” or ”liberty”—it referred to a peer group who were “dear” to each other, and to a social status that is, like *(e)leudheros, ultimately a matter of birth.

When you drill down into the linguistic prehistory of the concept of freedom, you find nothing that we would recognize today. If we are to see our origins in the cold light of day, we will have to be rid of fables like “we wuz free barbarians”; nothing could have been less intelligible to a clansman on the Pontic steppe.

Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society is not a book for laymen. Like Mitra-Varuna, it’s aimed at the specialist; it helps to know Latin and Greek, and Sanskrit and German would be good too—although none of these are required. But it’s chock full of redpills on economy, kinship, society, sovereignty, law, and religion, and so it’s well worth the effort. As it turns out, we are not so far from illiterate Bronze Age goatherds in our worldview, and where we are, we have invariably gone wrong.

9) Muqaddimah (Ibn Khaldun)