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Sept. 24, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:21:25
Modernism—What Is It Good For?
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Um, where do I start?
Alright, so this is, I'll get my fundamental, I'll let you, you know, discuss your own argument.
But I guess I'll get a little bit of my fundamental argument out of the way.
Is the term you've chosen modernism?
And, you know, in the world of kind of like Strauss and so on, there's an ancient and modern divide.
But that is something that goes back much earlier.
And in fact, we are living in a modern world.
Post-Christ, even, you could say.
I mean, it's kind of a much bigger divide, or certainly over the past 500 years.
But also, modernism is a term that is used pretty precisely in art history or literary criticism of Picasso, Mondrian, very kind of elite.
You know, descending, Duchamp's descending the staircase being the ultimate modern kind of thing.
It's really precisely used in to describe modern art.
But I feel like you're using modernism as just a kind of catch-all for everything you don't like.
And as opposed to kind of seeing even those, you know, because remember, modernism predated World War I. And after World War I, there was almost kind of weird kind of primitivism or traditionalism kind of sneaking in, even Picasso.
I mean, it's a very, it's a bit of an ambiguous thing.
But even that kind of modernism had a lot of different varieties and was kind of pointing in different directions.
I mean, the history of fascism, Is not understandable outside of Futurism.
And, you know, which was a modern art movement.
It was valuing, you know, the motorcycle.
You're talking about Italy.
Yeah, yeah.
Italian fascism.
Not exactly National Socialism, although I wouldn't disconnect them either.
National Socialism definitely had Futurism as well.
Yeah.
And you can see that even in the architecture that was built and was not built, this kind of combination of classicism, which was also occurring in the United States, all of the schools and courthouses and so on.
I went to where my father went to high school in Mississippi, and it was just, yeah, full-on Albert Speer building.
I feel like just claiming that...
I agree, there is a modernist movement, and you could look back at Nietzsche as hugely important, no question.
But it moves in a lot of different directions, and I feel like what I'm seeing from a lot of what you're doing, you're kind of claiming that it just moved to all this shit that you don't like right now, and that I don't like either.
But I think just kind of using the term modernism is problematic.
But also, maybe we need to kind of look at modernism and not just demonize it and kind of understand different ways that it was going and also understand the kind of crisis that it was responding to and not just seeing it as kind of spiteful mutants.
That's more or less my kind of pushback.
But I'll let you go on this.
Okay, when we're talking about modernism, all right, let's get one thing out of the way.
Well, the term, you know, modern has all kinds of different meanings.
When we would say, when historians would normally talk about the modern era, they would talk about, you know, the time from 1492, when Columbus discovered the New World, all the way down to the present.
And typically, historians would divide the modern era into what's called the early modern era.
Which would be 1492 to the French Revolution and the modern era being from the French Revolution down to, you know, today.
And of course, you know, when people talk about modernization, that can have other kinds of different meanings like, you know, technological progress or we're modernizing agriculture.
And I want to emphasize that that's not at all like what we're talking about here.
When we're talking about modernism, we're talking about specifically a movement in the arts and European culture in the late 19th, early 20th century.
And we're talking about the transition from, say, what modernism is, is an aesthetic.
It's a sensibility.
It's not an ideology.
It is not liberalism.
It's like romanticism, right?
Just where the Romantics could spin off in all kinds of different directions, like Victor Hugo or Carlisle, for example.
Towards nationalism, in many ways.
Right.
Modernism is an aesthetic sensibility, and it's compatible with all kinds of different ideologies.
It's compatible with progressive liberalism, like we see in Randolph Bourne.
It's compatible with fascism, like we see.
In Mussolini's Italy, it's compatible with, I think the last thing I wrote about it, with T.S. Eliot's high Anglican conservatism.
And the reason this all came about, how I got started on the subject, is I can't remember what brought it about, but I reread Eric P. Kaufman's book, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.
And I had read this book.
When I was in college, it first came out in 2004.
It was a big influence in it, and I've always wanted to go back and re-read that book.
Because I remember he, in the book, emphasized when he's talking about specifically the repudiation of ethnicity.
Now, we're not talking about racial equality.
We're not talking about the extension of civil rights, political rights, which liberals have been doing for over a century.
We're talking about why did Anglo-Americans start to repudiate their own ethnicity and think of themselves as deracinated, cosmopolitan individualists?
Now, that's a separate question.
Like I said, it's a separate question from racial equality.
When did that happen?
And why did it happen?
And according to Kaufman, one of the main reasons that happened is it had to do with the arrival of modernism.
Talking about the movement in the arts.
In the United States, in the 1910s, specifically a group called the Young Intellectuals, who were these rebels against mainstream progressivism in the 1910s.
And what they did is they combined, they were located in Greenwich Village, which was this artsy, bohemian neighborhood where there's all the different, you know, Influences from Europe was coming in at the time.
And they combined this aesthetic movement with radical anarchist and socialist politics.
And they're the ones who started this rebellion against their own ethnic group.
And what Coffin gets into the book, and he describes it, Over the course of a century is the development of the New York avant-garde.
We agree that elites control culture, but New York in the 1920s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s was becoming the cultural capital of America.
Within New York, Greenwich Village is like ground zero of this.
It's from these modernist influences that Young Anglo-Americans start to repudiate their own ethnicity.
So that's what got me interested in the subject.
I was like, well, that's a curious argument.
I don't really hear many people bring up modernism in the arts as a cause of our racial and cultural decline, but Kaufman argues in the book that what modernism did is it created a new kind of individualism in the United States, whereas before we had, in the 19th century, we had utilitarian individualism, which is mainly Political and economic.
There's a transition to expressive individualism, which is more about self-expression.
More about living a lifestyle.
And once people develop this mindset, how would I put this?
Ethnicity, religion, all these things, tradition, came to be seen as constricting.
It's holding you back from expressing your true self.
Finding yourself and all this bullshit.
So, anyway, talking about modernism.
And this goes back, the tail end of it goes back to France in the 1850s and 1860s, where you're starting to have this rebellion or this transition from romanticism.
With Charles Baudelaire being one, Theophile, Gautier.
Who would be another?
Edouard Manet was the pioneer of this.
And what begins in France around the middle of the 19th century is a movement in the arts, and it takes the respectable middle class as being the enemy.
How would I put this?
So the respectable bourgeoisie is...
Patriotic, religious, and artists start to rebel against that and kind of develop this tendency to, what we need to do in the arts is to violate the norms of middle class culture.
So explicit sexuality and things like that were brought into the mainstream of art.
And there was this huge rejection of tradition.
Anyway, so what I'm arguing here is that in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was this huge cultural revolution.
And this is underappreciated.
In painting, for example, you got the embrace of primitivism, the rejection of perspective, the rejection of representation in art.
Art becomes inward-looking.
It's focused on the artist and the emotions and the worldview of the artist.
It's not about teaching a moral lesson to the public or representing nature or representing God or serving the community.
And then, of course, you have, in poetry, the development of different verses, in architecture, the rejection of ornament.
What else were I doing?
Well, I don't think it's underappreciated.
This is a bit tangential, but I think it's actually helpful for this discussion.
But, you know, there are very few periods, particularly ones that are this short, that have museums dedicated to them.
I mean, the MoMA, the Modern Museum of Art, there's a modern museum in Dallas, Texas, I know, because I grew up there.
There's a modernist museum.
In most big cities, and in some ways it's been museumified, where now the bourgeoisie can go gaze upon the crisis of 100 years ago.
But it's basically something that is taking a kind of generational, or a few generations, but a 30-year period, and kind of...
Everything is in that wake.
And I think to a large degree, postmodern art is stodgy.
It doesn't know where to go at this point.
They've tried all the tricks in the book.
I mean, the most radical thing would be to be representational as Richter and Germany who kind of Germany, who's a kind of elite artist.
I mean, I don't think it's underappreciated, but I mean, this is at least what I would say for it, and I'll give Keith the floor after this, but I do think that there was a tremendous crisis that...
It preceded modernism and that modernism was, to a degree, a kind of response to that.
You know, it was an intellectual crisis.
It was a crisis of faith that had been brewing for a long time, well over a hundred years.
And it was kind of like an overabundance in a way.
I mean, the amount of just advancements, technological inventions and advancements and agricultural advancements.
Where it's almost like you had to, you know, our cup floweth over and we've got to keep pushing the envelope or something.
But I think that a lot of modernism was responding to this crisis and kind of trying to find ways out of it.
And so you have all these contradictory...
You have the kind of embrace of mechanical diamondism and almost like post-humanism.
You have an embrace of primitivism in another kind of mood of trying to get back to things like the cycle of life and birth and death and lost sexuality, which is kind of traditionalist in its way.
And it was anti-bourgeois, I'll definitely grant you that.
I guess what I'm saying is my form of pushback.
It's kind of like it was a response to a crisis that had already taken place and that there are actually aspects of that modernism.
For every communist intellectual, you can find people like Klimt that I think we would have very ambivalent perspectives on, maybe even adoring perspectives on.
Did give birth to...
There is a right modernism, in both senses of that term.
And it's something that we kind of can't get away from.
I don't want to sound too much like Adorno here, saying that you can't write pretty music after Auschwitz, but I think he was actually getting at something.
We can't go back to dodgy...
Bourgeois morality and just have a nice bunch of pictures.
We've got to kind of confront the crisis.
And in that way, we are going to rub some people the wrong way.
What do you think about that?
I'm interested.
Keith Lang's where I'm going.
Okay.
Let me respond to that.
What modernism is specifically...
Is if you had to describe it, it would be a series of like, liberations, right?
In painting, like I said, you know, liberation from representing, I mean, this was like throwing like centuries of tradition in the trash, like perspective in painting, depicting, representing the world.
And then, of course, Which itself threw centuries of tradition in its path.
I wouldn't say that.
I would say that.
I mean, medieval painting is not about perspective.
It is a kind of cartoon, and I don't say that to demean it at all.
We're not going back to around the time of the Renaissance.
I know, but the Renaissance was itself a kind of modernist ideology that was pushing forward.
It was a highly confrontational and upsetting to the masses.
I mean, Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards and left hand, the sun does not move in one of his notebooks.
He was confronting these things that were actually kind of world-shattering.
All the way down, you could say that all the way down until the early 20th century, that religion and traditional morality were overwhelming and determined how people thought, went about their lives, how they acted, how they interacted with others.
And then around the time when modernism comes through, you get this idea that expressing yourself and aesthetics is above morality.
And above religion.
And that is like a radically new thing.
You can just completely disregard traditional morality and you throw it.
And what happens is that religion in the 20th century becomes a lifestyle preference.
Morality becomes a lifestyle preference.
And what is fundamental is being yourself, expressing Expressing your identity or expressing your...
How would I put this?
Your true self or some shit like this.
And what retreats in this is people's relations to other people, right?
They become detached from, say, the ethnic group, from their religion, from traditional morals.
And it's really funny.
If you think of what morality is today...
Morality would be like this code of isms and phobias, right?
What is morality?
It's not being a racist or a sexist or a xenophobe or a transphobe or all this shit that was like, if you go back a century ago, did not exist or was not associated with morality.
The content of morality was hollowed out and was replaced by all these other things.
But don't we need to do that now?
Because we live in a religious-like conformist world in which, you know, whatever you want to call it, liberalism, kind of like your term, modernism, is a bit overgeneralized.
Mine will be too, so it's fair.
Liberalism is where we live.
We almost need to express ourselves and be like, Anti-system and anti-morality.
And right now, this is almost kind of what we need.
And so we need to call upon that.
And even in terms of...
Because again, modernism was an ambiguous phenomenon.
And I think you were kind of demeaning one of Picasso's work about...
Prostitutes and primitive art and so on.
But maybe we too need to get in touch with a kind of raw sexuality in this almost hyper-Puritan world of everything needs to be about consent and you can be whatever gender and you can perform all these bizarre sex acts, but it all has these rules.
And maybe actually we need to get in touch with raw sexuality about sex, death, and life, and rebirth.
And maybe that's actually what we need.
No, no.
I would say that the liberation of sexuality, the liberation of women, the throwing traditional morality in the garbage, not just that, but traditional identities too, right?
So suppose we were to go back a century ago.
Well, a little over a century ago, around the year 1900, morality meant things like truth and justice and fortitude and all these things like bravery or courage.
That's what traditional morality was, right?
And it was not just that, but it was about obligations to other people.
You had a duty to your family, for example.
Or, I mean, there was strict...
What I would say is that through all the 19th century, you had a strong, dominant moral consensus.
You had a strong Protestant.
This country is an overwhelmingly Protestant country.
And what happened around the period 1900-1930 was that kind of lost traction.
It was a catastrophe.
And so, like, we still got, like, this is the reason I was attracted to Nisha in the first place, right?
Is I hated the suffocating moralism of political correctness, right?
But then once you dig into it, right?
Once you dig into anti-racism, you dig into political correctness, you realize that the form of moralism is there, right?
We're still a very...
It's a moralizing culture, but the content of it has completely changed, right?
Like, so, like, if Richard, you were to go, if you decided that you were going to, what you wanted to do with your life is that you wanted to explore your true self and become, like, a transsexual who had, like, 500 different, like, partners and cover yourself in tattoos, all that would be praiseworthy.
Yes, queen!
He's redeemed himself at last.
So what modernism is, here's the problem with modernism, is that it's focused completely on the self and inwardness and self-exploration and self-realism.
It's all about the self.
You can look at it in modern art, right?
When you see people like, you know, the skies are green or purple or whatever, that's like...
Art has become subjective.
It's become, from the perspective of the artist, the art is about the artist, in a way.
Whereas before, the artist was like, art wasn't about the artist.
It was about depicting...
You know, this modernism also gave birth to all of these forms of collectivism and socialism on a national or even international scale.
And in a kind of...
New man within that context.
And I would remind you that the sky was gold in evil painting.
And that, you know, I don't know.
I mean, it's not just...
They're not just being...
I mean, look, some art sucks, sure.
But, you know, the best of it, they're not simply...
Being chaotic or idiosyncratic or they're not just pooping on canvas and saying it's hard or whatever.
They are genuinely trying to get at something and try to give you a different experience and perspective on the world.
It could kind of create a truth in art that isn't the truth that we have right now.
But again, it's kind of like I agree with a lot of the critics you have.
Isn't that kind of what we're doing?
And don't we actually kind of need that right now in order to break down the current dominant moral system?
Okay, what I would say is that we live in a very radically different time from what it was in Nietzsche's time, right?
In Nietzsche's time, like, how would I put this?
Oh, I would definitely say so.
First of all, religion in Nietzsche's time, It was overwhelmingly dominant in a way it's not today.
It was undergoing a massive crisis that he responded to.
Don't be one of these Twitter posters that post images of Neuschwanstein castle and be like, return to tradition.
Created by Ludwig II, that itself was a kind of Disneyland park.
He was like, LARPing.
On a large scale.
I mean, I love it in a way, but it was ridiculous.
They were going through a massive crisis.
Oh, yeah, I totally agree.
In fact, I wrote a post about that, and I was like, well, the intellectual background to all this is mainly Darwinism, right?
And of course, what we're saying here is that Darwin had an earth-shattering impact on high intellectual life in the European intelligentsia from that point forward, right?
So, like, people, you're right that, like, in Nietzsche's time, people were wrestling with the crisis.
This was something new.
People were trying to make sense of it.
But what I'm saying is that, like, the difference between, say, the 1870s and 1880s, whereas this was the beginning of the crisis, like, now, like, we're well, well, we're, like, the distance from, like, Texas to Florida, like, in terms of, like, time has traveled here.
Especially in Europe, Christianity has collapsed.
It's gone.
Traditional morality has receded.
I mean, I forgot who the poet was who said at the time.
He said they saw the great tide of religion receding.
And so that's the story of the 20th century.
That is the main thing that happened.
Religion and morality, which used to be so utterly dominant, receded.
And the vague outlines remained.
The same is true of the United States, although everything that happened in America has happened a bit later and a bit more delayed than has happened in Europe.
But it's fundamentally the same thing.
Even in the United States, there's been a huge retreat from Christianity.
Christianity, where Protestantism used to be, this is what's so different from our times.
Protestantism, 100 years ago, used to be the dominant mainstream culture, right?
It was just overwhelmingly dominant.
It filled the content of our culture.
And now that has completely receded from the time of 100 years ago.
And what's happened is that as...
As religion is retracted, as traditional morality is retracted, it's been – and aesthetic values, I would argue, has kind of replaced that, is that people have kind of created – creating this new morality, right?
So the whole – the thing that made me and probably you attracted to Nietzsche in the first place is this – it is moralism, right?
But it is a completely – 20th century kind of moralism.
Morality is not being a racist.
It's being a cosmopolitan who rejects your own people and values, I guess, foreigners.
Or it's about being opposed to sexism or nativism or xenophobia or all the isms and phobias.
All this shit.
What I'm saying is that there was just this...
It's like a cultural bomb went off and all this crap is kind of like...
You know, come in, like, in the wake, in the wake of it.
And so, yes, we need to get, absolutely, absolutely, I totally agree with you that we need to critique that, and we need to get rid of that, but, like, what I'm saying is that, and this is kind of where we part ways, is that what was not the problem in Nishi's time is our problem.
By that, I mean, like, our elite, like, despises the masses, right?
It oppresses us.
It oppresses me and you.
I mean, like I said, if you decided that what you wanted to do with your life was to be a two-spirit transsexual, you would have been fine in life.
You would have been able to succeed and go places that the roads are blocked to us today.
What is going to get us out of that?
Oh, God, I'm really sorry, but you are.
But go to preferences.
Do Apple comma or alt command comma.
Would you agree that, like, if you had to describe the normal person, would you describe the normal person as self-absorbed?
Kind of like detached from, strangely detached from other people and just immersed in themselves.
That's how I would describe it.
Yeah, I think that's a fair description.
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem.
The normie doesn't have an ethnic identity or really a traditional sense of morality.
And if they're religious, it's in a way that would have just been strange.
I don't want to project SJWs onto the entire population.
I mean, you know, plenty of people...
SJWs are moralists, but like...
They are.
The content of their morality is completely different.
What I'm saying is if you went back 100 years ago and people said, "Okay, what morality is is doing your duty to your family or being honest or being hardworking or being courageous." That kind of morality is great.
It's a fucking terrible thing.
But it lost.
Yeah, it's a fucking terrible thing.
That it lost, right?
Because it is left...
I agree.
It's tragic.
But we need to radically critique the current dominant morality.
Right.
Well, I totally agree.
But we don't want to just say it was better 50 years ago, which is kind of the...
Please tell me I'm not echoing.
Oh, you sound very good now.
Okay.
Sorry, chat.
Go ahead, Keith.
I think this definition might help.
I think this is kind of what you're getting at, Richard.
If you want to differentiate modernism from modernity, I think the best way to understand it is modernism is the intellectual trend that forces the contradictions of modernity.
It's a kind of revelation of crisis.
A lot of the things like enlightenment values, capitalist economics, You know, scientific notions of truth from the scientific revolution, that there was a kind of unhappy marriage between them and an older Christian moralism.
And modernism is kind of just the revealing of that crisis and kind of pushing it to its logical conclusion.
And that's why you end up with...
I'd say what's most characteristic of modernism as a metaphysic is like...
Hermeneutic suspicion, like you have in the works of fiction, like Ulysses or Kafka.
And then you get that in philosophy, you end up with the turn towards language and the sort of positivist turn and death of metaphysics.
So you could say, I mean, from Hunter's perspective, like, yeah, modernism, like it obviously was, I agree with him in terms of the negative effects it had, but I think what you're getting at is that You know, the fact that modernism, the fact that someone like Nietzsche was able to reveal this crisis or fast forward this crisis shows that it was already latent.
And so you kind of have to tear down the edifice before you can rebuild with something that isn't prone to this kind of crisis.
Like the fact that it was possible for modernism to happen shows that there was a crisis there in the first place.
Exactly.
No, I think we're seeing the same things.
Yeah, go ahead.
I mean, you could say that any sense...
Okay, we've all talked about ideology to death.
We've talked about liberalism inside out.
But the sensibility, of course, changes over the centuries.
You had in the 18th century, you had neoclassicism.
Then in the 19th century, the dominant sensibility was romanticism.
And you've got to think how romanticism affected people.
In the real world, it oriented them towards...
Other people around them, like, so, like...
And that sensibility, like, just colored pockets.
And, of course, you know, sensibilities change over centuries.
And what I'm saying is that modernism is the sensibility of...
became the sensibility of the 20th century.
Now, modernism is not liberalism.
Liberalism is...
Modernism is elitist.
It's cosmopolitan.
It's based on alienation.
And one of the key modern values is that it's transgressive and that it's constantly wanting to tear things down so that the new can be embraced.
It's heavily focused on the self and its interior states.
So if you want to define modernism, you would say, like, What modernism is, is first of all, like a love of novelty and transgression.
And secondly, it's about like self-exploration and self-realization is what I would say.
And now that can be expressed, okay, when people have like a sensibility that can be attached to their politics, their religious beliefs, that it can come out like all kinds of different ways.
We already talked about like, yes, yes, in Italy.
The futurists were embraced by Mussolini's Italy, whereas in the Soviet Union, modernism was repressed.
And the same thing was true of Hitler's Germany.
Hitler hated modernist art and famously condemned it as degenerate art.
And a lot of the modernists at this time escaped.
He hated some of it.
Yeah, I mean, there was the repression of degenerate art.
It was condemning expressivism and impressionism.
And so a lot of the modernists who were in Europe fled to the United States.
Of course, the Frankfurt School being a classic example of this migration of modernists during the Second World War period to New York, where the New York avant-garde had already established itself in the 1910s.
Where I'm going with this is that, like, of course, you know, Hitler was defeated, and the Nazis were crushed, and Germany was divided between the Soviets in the West.
And, of course, you know, from that point forward, especially the United States embraced the modernist avant-garde and kind of, like, contrasted it with, you know, the Soviet aesthetic, which was socialist realism.
You know, socialist realism and all the Eastern Bloc was the mandated form of art.
So America kind of like assailed the Soviets by promoting expressive individualism, expressive freedom, expressivist modern art.
You know, like, you know, the American was, you know, I guess the Rolling Stones danced around in blue jeans or something or McDonald's and, you know.
The message was that the Eastern Bloc is missing out on all this wonderful cultural freedom of the West.
This was a weapon that was used against the Soviets for a long time.
The context of the Cold War and World War II is one of the reasons why these people who came to the United States were embraced by the American establishment at the time.
So what do you have to say about that?
I don't totally disagree with the history you just put forward.
But I would push back on two ways.
First off, the modernism.
I think you're definitely overstating the return to tradition of the Soviet Union.
Although I appreciate the fact that it's a contrarian view.
It's not a return to tradition.
It's that they had their official Soviet...
There was definitely a, like, we're going for socialist realism while the CIA in the United States was supporting abstract expressionism.
Yeah, I mean, that is a really interesting irony.
I do think that you can't understand fascism writ large outside of modernism and all that we're talking about.
That that was a, maybe not sufficient, but definitely necessary component to it all.
And I would push back a little.
And again, I'm kind of pushing back.
I don't want to just reject, defenstrate your general narrative, but I would just kind of push back in a way that it's almost like we have to have these contradictions within ourselves if we're going to go forward and overturn the current moral system, which is not traditional.
You know, bourgeois Christian morality.
It is something else and it's something even more puritanical.
But, you know, someone in the chat put forward a funny meme that has an image of Disneyland and it says, return to tradition.
And it's kind of right in a way.
I mean, the Disneyland castle is based on Ludwig II's...
You know, Neuschwanstein and others, the Kimse Castle, and lots of other things that he created.
And it's a kind of copy of a copy in this funny way.
Because Ludwig himself, you know, and I kind of like Ludwig II in a kind of funny way.
I think he was a romantic eccentric who was kind of fighting the modern age in his own...
You know, ultimately benign but kind of hilarious way.
But it's this idea that if the only way that traditionalism could be reasserted in the modern world is Through something like Disneyland.
Even Las Vegas, when you go there, Sin City, the height of Dionysian debauchery, you have this gesturing towards kind of fake versions of an aristocratic traditionalist past.
So you can visit Paris of the 19th century.
You can visit Caesar's Palace.
You can visit all this kind of Baroque, you know, facade-like architecture.
But we all know that it's...
It's fake and that it's as fake as the fake paintings of the sky that you see when you're walking through the shopping mall.
It's a kind of false tradition that is reasserted and it's materialized and capitalized in the sense that it's something you consume.
And it encourages consumption on its almost most degenerate level, which is just gambling, throwing money on the table and seeing if you come up.
And so reviving the traditional morality that should be admired to its own degree could only be done in a kind of Disneyland fashion.
It could only be done in this fake way that exists within capitalist superstructures.
And if we want to actually overturn the current moral system, which I do and you do too, that We're going to have to kind of take in a lot of these modernist tendencies within ourselves.
And kind of ride them out and emphasize them to a degree.
And so it is kind of contradictory that we're radical traditionalist or the alt-right, which is a kind of contradictory term, or other, you know, radical conservative, conservative revolutionaries.
That was a very much a kind of alt-right-like phenomenon.
Between the wars in Germany.
That we're going to have to kind of take in some of these tensions and contradictions within ourselves in order to overturn the current order and create a new one.
And so I think this, I guess maybe my ultimate critique of yours is that you seem to be kind of retreating into a conservatism of it was better long ago and then...
Then these bad people came along and screwed it all up.
And I know what you're saying is more deeper and complicated than that, but you kind of get my point, that the only way out is through.
Well, yeah, you're right.
You're right.
And my view of it is, I mean, the way I've thought about it is that these ideologies, these sensibilities, they kind of like play themselves out over the course of A century.
And then, you know, I mean, look at how, for example, how Romanticism ended.
And, you know, creating the huge, you know, nation states, unified Germany, unified Italy, and putting nations on a course to the World Wars.
That was the disaster that that crisis, the crisis of the World Wars, was the disaster that discredited nationalism, that discredited...
racialism that discredited eugenics anti-semitism and so forth and like cleared cleared the path for the triumph of modernism modernism Modernism did not discredit eugenics.
I mean, if we want to go there, I mean, it's not the opposite.
No, no, no, no.
We're saying that the crisis of the World War is what kind of— Well, if you say the 19th century was dominated by romantic values, And also, Christian moralists would hate eugenics more than any liberal postmodernists.
Let's also remember that.
I mean, if that's the claim you're making...
No, what I'm saying is that the 19th century was dominated by a romantic sensibility.
And the effect of romanticism in the arts, for example, the way that affected the people was that, you know...
It led to the unification.
It led to this ideal that we need unified ethnostates, right?
And then, of course, by exaggerating the differences between the ethnic differences and stuff between nations and saying there's absolutely irreconcilable differences between, say, the Germans and the French or the Germans and the English, that kind of paved the way to the world wars.
And that was like...
Don't we need to overcome that?
Isn't there something to be said for cosmopolitanism?
From our perspective?
Isn't there something to be said for cosmopolitanism?
From our perspective.
Don't we want to kind of overcome...
We don't want to go back to romanticism because that led to the great disaster of the World Wars.
But then again, the problem is that the reaction to the World Wars went to exactly the opposite extreme.
And what I'm saying is that when modernism became the dominant sensibility in the West, especially after World War II when the United States was dominant over Western Europe, what you've had is like a dismantling of nations, right?
A dismantling of traditional morality.
The crumbling of religion, the loss of solidarity and cohesion within nations, the promotion of all these minorities from within.
So what I'm saying here is just as romanticism, if you look at the long term and how romanticism led to the creation of ethnostates and the order of Europe and how that ended in the great crisis of the World Wars.
Similarly, Modernism, by becoming the dominant since the 20th century, is leading us into the next crisis, which is not between nations, but within nations.
It's nations that absolutely lose cohesion.
The great divide in our times is not between nations.
It's between elites and the masses.
Between the masses and all these minorities.
The United States has Americans have nothing in common anymore.
Whereas if you go back to, say, around 1900, it's absolutely amazing, right?
We had an ethnic identity.
We had a religious identity.
50 years before that, we were at each other's throats.
A basically common morality.
I agree with you.
What is the effect of modernism in the arts on the masses?
Especially on the elites, right?
And what the effect of it was is that elites repudiated their own ethnicity and became hostile to the masses.
I totally disagree with that, what you just said.
The question is, how did the elites become cosmopolitan and reject their own ethnic identities?
The elites were cosmopolitan for a long time, maybe forever.
Let's remember that.
I wouldn't say that.
They spoke the same language.
They were literally related in terms of the ruling families.
I don't want to take it off track but I think the interesting question in this for me is from the perspective of a racialist, is Nietzscheanism a good vehicle with which you challenge Neoliberal cosmopolitanism.
I'm not sure it is, because, I mean, like, neoliberalism as a project kind of is, like, Faustian.
It is, you know, our elites kind of are Nietzschean in their orientation.
It just happens that, you know, we're getting, we're on the other side of it, getting picked over.
But, I mean, like, the idea that, I mean, the idea that I know we need to go through, yeah, I agree with you, we need to go through modernism, but at the end of the day...
If your answer to it is more modernism, I mean, for, like, I had a conversation with Joel Davis today, and I just, like, remarked, it's funny, like, a lot of the critiques he was making of liberalism are kind of traditionalist critiques.
So, I mean, I kind of, like, have this perspective of going through modernism, but it does kind of bring you back to a more sort of traditionalist outlook.
But, I mean, I just, you can jump in here, but I kind of struggle to see how Nietzscheanism is, like, a fundamental challenge.
To the moralism of the current elite?
A big question.
I'm not sure where I would start.
I mean, to associate Nietzsche with the current moral system is...
I mean, I kind of...
Okay, I can grant you that the current elite and their, like, I don't know, just...
I mean, it depends on what we're describing here, but the current elite and they're just power-hungry, grabbing for world domination.
Yeah, okay, you can kind of say that that's Nietzschean on some level.
Nietzsche talked about this massification of the population is going to create tyrants as well.
I mean, there's going to be that singular person or entity that kind of rules them all as the mass becomes much more conformist and dumbed down and so on.
So, I mean, if that's what you're saying, You know, okay, I guess the elite is Nietzschean in that very strict sense.
But in terms of, you know...
Confronting this crisis or building one that is going to be a greater platform for human flourishing and greatness writ large.
I think the elites are not in any way, shape, or form Nietzschean.
We're not pressing towards some...
You know, new Napoleon or something.
I think we're pressing towards the last man and a kind of bureaucratic administration over a bunch of idiots at a shopping mall, in which modernism has kind of become, I mean, there's like a modernism to Walmart.
I mean, there's a way in which the kind of aesthetic, a certain kind of, certain flavor of modernism, that aesthetic conformity.
And geometric, you know, moving away from representation almost towards a kind of Semitic, like, geometric, you know, functional but still decorative architecture is a form of modernism we have today.
We're kind of moving to, like, neoliberal, like, neo-feudalism and, like, the, you know, on the mass level we're heading to, like, the last man, but at the same time we have an elite that have, like...
The elite have separated themselves from that.
They've achieved an incredible level of innovation and material comfort.
What's lacking is that there's no sense of virtue, of duty to the collective among our elite.
Nietzsche would want a decisive elitist that would do something and take responsibility for the decision.
I think one thing that's kind of fascinating about our elites is that the billionaire class...
They do feel a certain sense of duty.
They feel like they have to donate to all these global funds and whatever.
But they don't want to rule in some way.
They want to act behind the scenes and operate through governments and so on.
They want to donate money or be...
I mean, we see...
I would not blame Nietzsche for the just vast hordes of wealth that are being...
They want to acquire all this lucre.
They either want to be invisible or they want to be feted as benign humanitarians.
But the one thing they don't want to do is actually rule and take responsibility for a better world.
They are an irresponsible elite in that sense of the word.
Who's more Nietzsche than Trump?
Who's more Nietzsche than Trump?
I could kind of go with that on some level.
I would disagree on some other levels.
Go ahead.
In terms of Nietzsche and modernism, Nietzsche, of course, cast a huge shadow on everyone that followed him.
Darwin did, just like Floyd did, just like Bergson did, just like, especially H.G. Wells did.
H.G. Wells, you know, had read Nietzsche.
And so had, you know, all the people I'm studying, like, Nietzsche was one of their favorites, right?
Randolph Bourne, Floyd, Dale, Sherwood, Anderson, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw.
Have you ever read Man and Superman?
The thing is, Picasso apparently loved Nietzsche and saw his art as Nietzschean because it was breaking with all these rules and the embrace of primitivism, for example, in Picasso's art.
The problem, you read Nietzsche and What he's dealing with is not our problem.
And by that, well, as I said, the whole focus of his philosophy, in my take, is like the elites are held back by, you know, the slave morality of the masses and Christianity.
And the elites are being held back from being, from self-realization, from being creators.
And through their great work, you know, being the bridge to the Ubermensch.
Our elites embrace this philosophy.
They're all focused on their own self-realization.
As this idea has trickled down to the masses, it has led to this world of detached, self-absorbed individualists completely focused in on their own lives.
You can see the great turning in modern art.
Is individualism really the problem with society?
Expressive individualism is.
But they're just, I mean, as you would agree, we have some of the most conformist people ever.
I mean, we have a kind of like, this is actually A.O. Wilson, but Dutton evokes it.
We are living in a kind of, I think it's called eusocial.
That is, unlike other mammals, we're almost closer to insects.
Like, we have this like...
We have a hive mind.
Hyper rules-based moralism of conformity.
When you look at your average Americans, are you really struck by their rampant individualism?
They seem to live in a mass society in which we are all...
Americans have always been individualists.
I'm saying the rugged individualism of the frontier is completely different from the decadent, aesthetic individualism that we have today.
You're just picking up on cliches.
The rugged individualism of the frontier was an absolute Darwinian test.
No question.
You had to be a badass to live.
On the frontier, in the Wild West, if we want to use that term.
But that did not promote individualism.
It promoted the opposite.
If you were a lone guy and you were anything other than a criminal, you were going to die.
You survived the frontier through religion, cooperation, conformity in a certain sense.
Yeah, it's just a certain kind of individualism.
It's intensely, extremely, intensely religious.
It's focused on self-reliance.
It reinforces tradition.
We're not talking about decadent esthetes and dandies.
That's not the kind of individualism that was encouraged by the frontier.
That's the kind of individualism I'm talking about is nurtured by urban life.
Not the conditions of the frontier.
It's expressivist.
It's aesthetic.
It's not mainly economic.
It's not political.
But where is it going with this?
Do we have those people?
If you go to New York City, are you just struck by the fact that T.S. Eliot is on your right and Picasso is on your left?
It's almost like that.
A very good Woody Allen movie where the guy from the modern age kind of travels back to the turn of the century Paris and then goes to the Belle Epoque and all this.
Are you struck by the fact that you just walk into a coffee shop and Salvador Dali is sitting there?
Or are you struck by the fact that you have a bunch of surrounded by morons?
Is individualism really the issue right now?
Is that the way that you would critique The average white person in America is completely detached from their ethnicity.
They're completely detached from any sense of racial consciousness.
If they have families, their family structure is usually a huge percentage of Americans.
Their family structure is screwed up.
They're isolated.
I would blame the suburbs for so much of that, to be brutally frank, and not Nietzsche.
I mean, the fact that community has been destroyed and that there's not a...
I mean, this is something that I've never...
I don't know what quite is happening in Ireland, and I think each country is having problems in their own way.
But when you go to a lot of American towns, is there even a center to this community?
Is there a place where everyone goes to kind of talk and so on?
No, it seems like we are isolated in our own homes and that people are having greater community through the internet as we're doing here.
Like I said, Nishi's focus was on the self-realization of the elites and his philosophy is not so much about like, okay...
How should, like, the average person or the masses live?
His focus was entirely, like, on this small group of, you know, the higher men who he wanted to inspire to, I guess, go to greater heights or whatever.
But, like, a lot of people, a lot of elites in the, especially, you know, literary elites in the 20th century kind of digested this message.
And like it made them alienated from their own people.
What they took away from the issue was elitism and being alienated, completely alienated from their own people.
And like that's still with us today.
And that's a major problem that the elites don't identify with the masses or, you know, to use as Nishi would describe them as like the herd.
the bird animals, the slaves.
When we have an elite that's completely self-absorbed and focused on itself in its own world and is completely trashed like traditional religion and morality, like in the garbage can, like what kind of society is that?
Richard, would you not acknowledge at least that your concern for white people as a group is fundamentally not Nietzschean?
It is coming from a sense of virtue or duty.
There's some kind of transcendent good there that you're ultimately appealing to.
Or almost a mundane good that you're appealing to.
I mean, a mundane good in the sense of, you know, this is us, and I like the people that I'm surrounded by, and I want to support them.
I mean, I think it's almost...
I'm not sure it's...
I wouldn't quite describe it as transcendent.
I mean, I think the things that I do, that I say that...
Kind of getting into people's skin is almost like this, you know, we need to be pushing forward into the, we are the bridge, the overmensch, the ethnostate is this grand empire.
Those are the kinds of things where I become, you know, edgy and, you know, alienated and so on.
But I would say that a lot of my concerns actually are more mundane in the sense of like, are we going to be able to help and support the kind of decent people that I want to live around?
You know, it's real mundane.
Yeah, but that's fundamentally...
I mean, that's not a Nietzschean intuition.
It's bound up with virtue.
If you're going to write philosophy...
I mean, okay.
I think racialism is ultimately a barrier to the overcoming of the Ubermensch.
I would say the ethnic nationalism.
I would say...
Every man in Ubermensch.
Yeah, that's kind of the Nietzscheanism that's been embraced.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, I certainly think that kind of petty ethnic nationalism can be a barrier to this kind of overcoming of the crisis.
That Nietzsche was pointing to.
And that is littered throughout his writings is this kind of weird thing.
When you hear that Nietzsche was a Nazi or whatever kind of slander you will sometimes hear, you find all of these attacks and critiques of German nationalism as kind of petty and this embrace of empire and Napoleon and Rome and so on.
And I would say that, I mean, If Western civilization, if we do have an impulse and a drive that is higher than ourselves, that is higher than just protecting our own community,
which is a totally normal, natural desire, it is to do something in this world, to create values in this world that are higher and greater than ourselves and that we have this charge and in some ways other people don't.
So if you're going to write philosophy, it seems like you would write about that and not, you know, just like, let's support our community.
We've got some foreigners coming in or something.
I mean, you know, there has to be a transcendent, inspiring message to this.
Other than mere nationalism.
And mere nationalism gets you into this point where you are supporting the status quo, which is the cancer.
We need to keep out all these immigrants so that we can maintain the American way of life as it is right now.
And we need to understand that the American way of life as it is right now is the problem.
That is the thing that we're trying to overcome.
Well, I mean...
I've allowed a critique of Nietzsche that, like, the Uberman would be...
How was it he described?
It'd be an Olympian figure, not an Apollonian figure.
But he was kind of getting at this, that Nietzsche is constantly sort of implicitly appealing to something transcendent that he's putting, like, imminent values up against.
And I'd say...
I'd say you do that as well.
Implicit in a lot of what you're saying is a more traditionalist understanding of virtue, but it's still an appeal to something more than eminent individualism and overcoming.
So it's still kind of pointing that what we need to get back to is a more comprehensive sort of traditional worldview rather than accelerating into modernism.
Okay, I agree.
Sometimes we're playing with so many different terms that we can kind of get, you know, it's like you change a term here and it changes one there and so on.
Yeah, I think that, I would say this, I think that we absolutely need a transcendent impulse within our movement and that a mere nationalism, foreigners suck.
Immigrants do crime.
That is not going to cut it.
And that we actually need a bigger impulse towards the movement.
Absolutely.
What I would say is one of the reasons that nationalism is having such a hard time is that identity, that sense of ethnic identity has been deconstructed and eroded.
All the traditional morality that we used to associate with that identity has been deconstructed and eroded as well.
The typical American is a completely self-absorbed person.
They don't think of themselves in relation to others, in relation to a culture or an ethnic group.
They're not collectivists.
Or a race, or say to their ancestors, or their descendants, they're not used to that way of thinking.
They're kind of absorbed in themselves.
They don't have that identity, right?
So when people go out there and say, we need to be nationalists, all the precursors of that have been eroded.
And we get Trump nationalism, which is almost...
Literally dishwasher nationalism.
I mean, if you actually look at some of these, yeah, some of these speeches that he'll give where everyone's, you know, oh, he's comparing them to Hitler or something.
He's literally talking about how dishwashers were better 10 years ago and we need to, we're bringing it back, folks!
Like, you know, and like showers are like hotter and wetter now or something.
Like, it's bizarre.
It is not.
But that's the kind of almost nationalism that you would get with the current American populace.
I mean, it's like that speaks to them.
You know, make dishwashers low efficiency again.
I mean, it's like that's the kind of thing that kind of immediately speaks to the last man of our current age.
And we...
We need to speak to something else.
Other people are going to do better at this than we ever could if that's what we're going for.
It's just like brutal populism.
But also, you know, our movement has to be idealistic and transcendent and recognizing a current crisis and seeking to overturn a current morality and pushing for something that might even seem outlandish.
You know, in terms of our future orientation.
The thing is, maybe Brad would agree with me on this, but what I'd say is if you want to fundamentally challenge the modern world, if your vision is only different in aesthetics really and you're not fundamentally challenging the precepts that this whole worldview is based on, then it's not...
It's not a fundamental challenge.
I think I am, obviously.
The elites perceive me as challenging their fundamental precepts.
I'll say that.
Aesthetically.
Aesthetically?
Come on.
If we're still relativists, if we're still moral nihilists, if we're still operating in this kind of...
Epistemological skepticism.
We are relativists.
I mean, we are relativists.
But relativism is, I meant like ideally speaking, I mean, look, relativism, much like modernism, much like liberalism, it can have so many different definitions that...
You know, if we want to go there, we would have to unpack quite a bit.
But, I mean, relativism, in the way that I'm describing it now, is basically that we are speaking from a perspective.
We come from somewhere that my morality and my values emanate.
From a long line that is rooted in something.
To be a relativist as opposed to a liberal who believes that there is one value system for all mankind, that actually is challenging them.
The notion that we would speak for our ancestors from our relative perspective on this earth.
Actually is fundamentally challenging the current elite.
You could argue that liberalism itself is kind of founded on relativism.
It's not.
You sound like a conservative saying this stuff.
It's just wrong.
It's not.
I'd include conservatism as well.
The whole modernist and the Straussian way of saying modernist approach to politics is once you lose the confidence in...
Ethical and moral norms that liberalism fills this vacuum where you have to stay as this legal arbiter.
Morality is something that is left for the private realm.
I think Tyler said in the chat that you have to challenge Nietzsche on the metaphysical level.
This is my point.
All of the presumptions that underlie Nietzsche's worldview that were...
Of that time in terms of like Darwinism and the scientific revolution and capitalism and everything else.
If you're not fundamentally challenging them, you're not really fundamentally, you're only challenging it on the aesthetic level.
And that, you know, you're going to least then that aesthetically, you know, there's another way you'd like the world to be, but it's not a fundamental challenge to that whole worldview.
Okay, I...
I think I already gave my rejoinder to that, but I would just say that this is one thing, and I'm going to actually have to go pretty soon, so I might have to hand off the, because we're doing Alpon sliding this afternoon, so this very niche process of, yes.
On the mountain top.
Yes.
Above the mountain.
I'm taking my, yeah, I do it.
Sliding down.
Yeah, we could go metaphors on this one, yeah.
Looking out over the herd, the Christian slaves laughing.
Out over the herd animals and their pathetic lives.
As they drive to McDonald's or something.
But we've got to forget they're still our people and we've got an obligation to them.
But we've got to make them that up.
You know what that is?
The more I thought about it, I'm like, why do I have these values?
Where does this come from?
Why am I interested in white people in the first place?
Why do I have a sense of obligation to other people in my community?
It comes from my traditional Southern culture.
That's the origin of it.
To be honest, it's not in anything I read in Nietzsche, ever.
It's from my cultural background.
I'm sitting here in a rural area and have all these archaic values about white identity and our obligations to other people that, you know, have kind of been lost in the 20th century.
But where were you going?
We were talking about your...
Well, I would say this, and I'll let other people talk, because first off, I need to go in the next 15 minutes, let's say.
But I would just say this.
I do think...
I'll just add this, and hopefully this is food for thought.
I do think that we still are, in a way, living in a long crisis that actually is fairly similar.
It's different in obvious ways from where Nietzsche was writing, but I do think that there is kind of a long crisis that is being played out over maybe the quarter of a millennium.
That has resulted in a crisis of faith, the death of God, if you want to put it that way, that has resulted in deaths of millions of people in world wars, and also a kind of last man-ism that we're seeing today in the West, particularly in the United States, and that we're kind of in a very similar crisis, and that a lot of these...
Modernist or Nietzscheans, if you want to say, they actually can speak to where we are if you read properly.
So I would just add that in for a little food for thought.
But I think this has been a good discussion and I'll let other people talk.
So if you guys want to jump in or if Keith wants to continue down his incorrect line of thinking, I guess I won't stop him.
Yeah, Plato is the answer, Richard.
More Platonism is the answer, you know.
The answer to the death of God is the rebirth of God.
It's the only thing that's going to solve it.
It's the death of the death of God.
But look, let me jump in here for a sec, because I think Richard is right on one point, and...
Keith and Brad are right on another.
And I would follow Richard in saying that Nietzsche's perspectivism on the fact that you're coming from a certain place in history when you make these claims is actually correct.
But here's the problem with Nietzsche, is that what he does is he makes this fundamental claim and then he prescribes a certain psychology of sorts about power, about will to power.
And he reads this back into his genealogical method of history.
And so he looks back at history and goes, okay, we have these games of domination and power that are played based on people's psychological states.
The priest has the sickness of weakness and resentment.
So he props up this kind of morality.
In other words, this is the birth of social science, is this idea of secular reason where you diagnose metaphysically a certain philosophy of history, and then you say, okay, we've overcome metaphysics, but then he just puts up another one in its place, right?
And so this is why, because you guys are saying, why is Nietzsche influencing a lot of leftists, even though they might be misinterpreting it?
Well, the reason that that's the case is because he presents a history.
Sorry, a philosophy of history where all these social systems are a result of power.
Okay, so you go forward to people like Foucault.
And people say, okay, well, Foucault is very friendly to neoliberalism.
He didn't have a good critique.
So you've got to ask yourself, why is that?
It's because he inherits Nietzsche's genealogical method, and then he reads the system of power without any notions of virtue or cooperation or an ontology that's not an ontology of violence.
So Foucault's answer to neoliberalism is basically, look, neoliberalism is here to stay, and what we're going to do to resist the market excesses...
It's to do the Nietzschean technologies of the self, to create yourself aesthetically.
As an elite.
And this is why Foucault doesn't have a good critique of neoliberalism.
It's because what we should do with Nietzsche is actually agree with him in his genealogical critique, but put it back on the secular notion of history.
And that's the idea that this certain ontology that the liberal elite is inhabiting and that we all tacitly accept.
I mean, even in the decent right, right?
People are very closet Thomas Hobbes fans, even without noticing it.
And I think to make that critique is we can go with Nietzsche and say, okay, he's right about these things, but we have to turn it on him and see where he went wrong and why he's influenced a lot of the things that we hate.
And I think he does so because he props up a metaphysics that actually assumes a lot of the same problems he's trying to overcome.
Exactly.
I think we need to go.
I think we eventually just need to go back to scholasticism.
What would I say with this?
I mean, you look at Nishi and you look at his philosophy.
What was I going to say with this?
When I started out, I was heavily influenced by Nishi.
I still am to this day.
I like to read about how things evolved throughout history.
Whereas Nishi did his genealogy from his time back.
We've got to look from our time back, too.
Nisha and who his ideas influenced and what effect they had.
One of the things I was surprised, the whole reason that I've started talking about Nisha is that in Greenwich Village in the 1910s when these people were creating, the young intellectuals were creating modern liberalism, he was one of their top influences.
Randolph Bourne, for example, wrote The name of one of his essays was literally Twilight of the Idols or something like that.
And, like, Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was a huge fan of Nietzsche.
He influenced all these leftists.
And, you know, I think what they took away from him is that, well, the reason they loved him so much is because, you know, he's saying, like, oh, traditional morality is garbage.
It's, you know, nothing but power relations.
Traditional religion, huh, that's the slave morality of the masses, right?
We really need an elite to realize themselves or to, you know, stand above the masses.
And anyway, go ahead.
I was just going to quickly say that's why social science is the way it is, because you get these studies saying, okay, the white person who loves his own kin and wants to maintain these ethnic bonds is just doing so as an expression of power against an outgroup, right?
And so what they do is they take that kind of Nietzschean psychologizing element that was birthed into the foundation of social science and the secular assumptions that go into it, and then they pathologize it, right?
And they pathologize these notions of virtue that we're discussing, that people should have a sense of kinship.
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