Hope and Pessimism

Hope and pessimism are dialetically related, twins of the same womb of human frailty, and counteracting medicines for the human soul. In an ideal society they exist in a tenuous balance. I have come to the conclusion that the modern America I live in is addicted to an idea of hope without pessimism. We want to believe that it is already possible to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without constraint. This is the hope of fools, blind to history, the hope of addicts and hedonists blind to the limits of pleasure, the hope of utopians blind to tragedy. It is the hope of settlers blind to others in the landscape, seeing in that land only reflections of their dreams and nightmares. They thus interpret the land, and its peoples resistance to settler attempts to impose those dreams, as willful evil or primitive savagery. Similarly, they interpret the failure of these dreams as a personal moral failing, rather than a permanent feature of existence. Hope thus unconstrained by its opposite naturally devolves into amnesia, fantasy, and a desperate drive to feel and appear happy. It manifests itself in more extreme versions as a morbid fear of death. It looks anxiously to the future when all human limits will be removed, while manifesting a contempt for the past and an inability to remain present. I do not mean to condemn hope outright. Without it we perish, for it enables visionaries to dream of better tomorrows. But the way it manifests itself in American political discourse is as an unbearable and unsustainable naivete, a belief that one can have progress without sacrifice, patriotism without tragedy, and prosperity without end. On the right, it manifests itself as the manifest destiny of white christian america, the alleged culmination of history and humanity. All others are considered savages, primitives, expendables, terrorists. White prosperity comes to be seen as the ultimate moral good, and anything that threatens it induces a series of moral panics. On the left it bubbles up as the idea that we are all progressing easily and naturally towards a liberal ideal, and that all we need do is tinker with a few things and wear a few safety pins to get there. The left's fetishism of King as a prophet of this liberal progress ignores King's own well-developed sense of struggle, tragedy and pessimism. In conclusion, I would like to see Less false hope and More hopeful pessimism.

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Conservatism, Conservatives and White Supremacy

Although I don't really consider myself a conservative, I have a few thoughts on modern conservatism. Conservatives basically believe in the unchanging preservation of legacies, moral, cultural and spiritual, from the ancient past. They look to these legacies as sources of guidance, and believe they are better guides to what is right and true than contemporary moral attitudes and ideas. Studying the Ancient Egyptians, I am deeply sympathetic to conservatism as a necessary corollary of cultural and religious preservation. When you've created a just society that has stood the test of time, there is something therein worth preserving. This is one reason why the Ancient Egyptians were so conservative. This is also why I respect those who choose to live according to conservative religious traditions, be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Conservatism free from attachment to state power or ethnic exclusivity is a powerful vehicle for preserving valuable moral dispositions. But modern conservatism doesn't deserve the name. It is mostly, if not solely, a form of ethnic nationalism based on the supremacy of European white Christian identity. It is not based on the preservation of old virtues, but on the spreading of new diseases of the heart, based on the lust for power. Perhaps there are a few strands of modern American conservatism that meaningfully connect to the universalist spiritual traditions and disciplines of medieval Christianity, but these are largely secondary to the preservation of group power of Euro-Americans in the space of a settler state. In its nationalist garb, this conservatism is basically the national and cultural expression of white supremacy. When a white nationalist like Jared Taylor talks about preserving white culture, he is articulating a conservative white nationalist critique of American liberalism. Listening to Taylor makes me think about how the founders of this American settler republic would react to the contemporary social scene. Arguably they would be more sympathetic to Jared Taylor than to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Which makes me think that Dr. King didn't represent an "American" tradition, nor a conservative one. Rather his work was an attempt to decolonize that American tradition, a herculean effort to reshape America into a more inclusive space. Whatever battered remnants of political virtue we cling to today are legacies of his and other's sacrifice, not the unchanging and hallowed traditions of this nation's checkered history. #BlackHistoryMonth #MartinLutherKing #Conservatism

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