I think the missing piece here is that the argument defends “prejudice” and “tradition” as valuable in themselves, but never actually defines what is being conserved or why it’s worth conserving. Without that, it risks sounding like we’re defending a vague sentiment rather than a clear, concrete good.
From a biopolitical perspective, the answer is straightforward:
What’s being conserved is the biological continuity of the people who built Western civilization — the genetically coherent European-descended population.
Why it’s valuable is not just “because it’s ours,” but because this population’s unique combination of high average intelligence, low time preference, high trust/cooperation, and other heritable behavioral traits is what has historically allowed our culture, institutions, and technology to emerge and function. These traits are measurable, evolutionarily advantageous, and rare in combination.
Why it matters is that traditions, political systems, and cultural norms are emergent properties of those traits. You can replace governments and laws and still keep a society functional if the people remain; replace the people, and the systems will fail no matter how well-designed.
That’s the part the liberal-rational “procedural” worldview can’t answer without denying science. Our case is actually stronger on empirical grounds than theirs — grounded in evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, and anthropological universals, not just in aesthetic preference.
By clarifying what we’re conserving and grounding it in objective reality, we can defend it without having to rely solely on abstract appeals to “prejudice” or “the sacred” that can be too easily dismissed as irrational nostalgia.
I see it as a spectrum of “right to exist,” with Jews placed firmly at one end and Whites at the other.
On one extreme, Jews are framed as God’s Chosen People — more valuable than any other humans — followed by every tier of “progressive stack” protected classes. At the opposite extreme are the irreparably evil, Hitler-incarnate White people, who are never allowed to express pride in their heritage, celebrate their culture, show solidarity, act collectively for self-preservation, or defend their historical legacy. To grant such people those things, we’re told, would surely lead to another genocide-holocaust-slavery.
And I have to wonder — how many White people can read that without feeling the programming kick in, instinctively agreeing that this double standard is “just the way it is”? That reflex is the mark of how deeply our people have been conditioned to hate themselves and accept a permanent state of ancestral guilt.
Much of that guilt rests on distortions, exaggerations, or outright falsehoods:
Native American genocide — greatly overstated, ignoring disease-driven population collapse and long-standing tribal warfare.
The Holocaust — an atrocity carried out by one regime in one country, not a collective sin of all Whites.
Slavery — a universal human practice, ended first by Whites at enormous cost. In the U.S., only 1.6% of Whites owned slaves (mostly in the South); over 3,000 free Blacks owned Black slaves; hundreds of thousands of White men died in part to abolish it; the British bought the freedom of all colonial slaves, never had slavery in England proper, and paid that debt into the 21st century. Many Native American tribes practiced slavery long before Whites arrived, and some held African slaves as chattel after contact.
Even the word “slave” comes from Slav, a White ethnic group — and long after America had ended slavery, Muslim raiders from the Barbary Coast were still enslaving Europeans from across the continent. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, they took over one million Europeans, including not only English and Irish, but also Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and others from as far north as Iceland.
The facts don’t match the guilt narrative. But the narrative persists — because it keeps one end of that spectrum unquestioned, and the other end perpetually silenced.
History is far more complex than the cartoon morality we’re sold. Whites did not merely “benefit” from civilization—they built, scaled, and exported it on a staggering timeline, lifting living standards, science, law, technology, and governance to levels that many societies had neither created nor can now maintain without outside help. Meanwhile, the moral ledger so often waved in our faces is highly selective: slavery was a human universal; it persists today; and African polities themselves captured and sold other Africans long before Europeans arrived—then profited from delivering captives to the coast. Celebrated kingdoms like Mali enriched themselves on salt and slaves; they did not build institutions that broadly elevated their populations.
None of this excuses genuine wrongs; it restores proportion. It also underscores a simple point: Whites have as much right to continuity, dignity, and collective self-preservation as anyone else.
Culturally, the ground is shifting. Younger generations are far less bound to WWII-era taboos and increasingly skeptical of treating Jews or Israel as beyond criticism. Support for Israel is falling among the youth and will likely continue to erode in the coming decades. That shift, however, is double-edged: much of it rides on anti-White, “settler-colonial” framings that cast Whites as permanent oppressors. So while the old hierarchy of untouchable narratives is wobbling, the hostility directed at Whites is not disappearing with it.
We live in interesting times. All the more reason to reject inherited guilt, refuse demoralization, state the historical record fully, and assert a normal, human right to exist—biologically and culturally—without apology.
The counter argument here rests on a teleological premise that evolutionary theory does not support: “the people” are not necessarily the primary unit of selection. In gene–culture evolution, it is often traditions, norms, or memes that replicate — sometimes at the expense of the population that carries them. History shows cultures enduring without their original people, and peoples persisting after abandoning their traditions. True, if the aim is biological continuity, traditions must be assessed for their current adaptive value, since some become maladaptive under modern conditions. But ultimately, treating “the people” as the fundamental evolutionary unit is not an empirical conclusion but a value judgement — one that requires explicit justification.
You’re right that evolution operates at multiple levels — genes, individuals, kin groups, and sometimes cultural memes. But if the aim is survival in the biological sense, the most basic and irreducible unit of concern is your own genetic line.
In pure evolutionary terms, if my own lineage goes extinct, I have lost the game of life. Yes, some of my alleles may persist in my kin or in unrelated members of my ethnic group, and kin selection theory explains why we cooperate more with those who share more of our genes. But that only matters because it increases the probability that my genes survive. The concentric circles of concern — immediate family, extended family, ethnic group — all radiate outward from that core fact. The further you move from your own genes, the weaker the direct evolutionary incentive, and the more it becomes contingent on other factors.
That’s why preserving “the people” isn’t just a sentimental choice — it’s an extension of the same fitness logic that applies at the family level. Traditions, norms, and memes only matter insofar as they serve that end. A tradition that persists while the people who created it vanish is, from a gene’s-eye view, a failure, even if the cultural form superficially survives.
History bears this out: when the underlying population changes, the culture inevitably drifts, because the behavioral and cognitive traits that produced it are no longer present in the same proportions. The forms may remain for a while, but the substance erodes. So while culture can sometimes outlive the people in a superficial sense, it can’t indefinitely sustain the same civilizational outcomes once the population changes.
From that perspective, treating the people as the primary survival unit is not arbitrary — it’s simply applying evolutionary logic consistently, starting from the most proximate and genetically direct imperative and working outward.
No, I’m not calling your position “arbitrary” — in fact, I’m quite sympathetic to it. My point is that this people-centered view goes well beyond what evolutionary science itself can establish. It is still informed by evolutionary thinking, but it functions more as a historical “prejudice” precisely in The Westering Sun’s sense — a value-laden conviction rather than a strictly empirical conclusion.
Your view is no longer simply an observation about cultural persistence; it makes a much stronger claim: that complex institutions, values, and high-functioning civilizational systems are genetically bound to the people in whom they first evolved, and cannot be sustained by different populations.
This is a testable claim — and it is vulnerable if we can identify cases where deep, functional, civilizationally significant systems (legal frameworks, administrative structures, educational traditions, military doctrines, religious institutions) were successfully preserved and reproduced by populations with substantially different demographic origins from the founders. Examples that appear to challenge the claim include: (1) Byzantine administrative systems under the Ottomans; (2) Roman law in post-Roman Europe; (3) the Confucian civil service in Korea and Vietnam; and (4) the Persian imperial bureaucracy in Islamic empires.
In each case, the cultural transfer was not superficial: these systems retained the capacity for large-scale political coordination, economic integration, and intellectual output for generations after the original population’s dominance ended.
If the link between population genetics and civilizational performance were as rigid as you suggest, such cases should not exist — yet history offers them repeatedly. This doesn’t mean population continuity is irrelevant to cultural stability (and you might have a stronger case regarding the current erosion of European populations), but it does mean the relationship is neither deterministic nor exclusive.
I don’t agree that my position is just a “prejudice” in the Westering Sun sense. My conclusions follow directly from well-established evolutionary theory, behavioral genetics, and psychometrics. We know from a century of research that cognitive ability, time preference, impulse control, trust, and other key behavioral traits are highly heritable and vary systematically between populations. These differences correlate strongly with the kinds of civilizations those populations create and sustain.
This isn’t abstract theorizing — it’s borne out in the record. Populations that don’t have the necessary trait distribution to run high-functioning European-style systems can copy the forms but not the outcomes. Sub-Saharan Africans are the clearest example: more than 150 years after independence, no sub-Saharan state has maintained low-corruption, low-crime, high-innovation governance without heavy external involvement. IQ, long-term planning, and impulse control levels are all significantly lower than in Europe, and the institutional outcomes match.
2. Clarifying my actual claim
I have never claimed that no other population can sustain complex institutions — only that the closer another group’s trait profile is to the founding population’s, the closer their institutional outcomes will be. The more distant they are genetically and behaviorally, the more the results diverge.
Even the closest examples, such as East Asians, show this clearly. East Asians have high IQs and industriousness but are more conformist, more authority-oriented, and less individualistic. The societies they build — Japan, Korea, Singapore — are safe, orderly, and prosperous, but also more authoritarian and less protective of dissent and individual liberty than historic European societies. They can adopt democracy, but they use it differently.
Even groups with above-average IQ but different subtest profiles, like Ashkenazi Jews (high verbal and math, average or below-average spatial), tend to cluster in academia, media, and finance rather than engineering or technical manufacturing — which again shapes the kind of civilization produced. Asians, with lower verbal ability but high math/spatial, excel in engineering but are underrepresented in politics and mass media. Culture flows from these trait distributions; civilization is the aggregate result.
3. On the historical examples
Eduardo’s cases don’t overturn the general pattern, and in some cases, they aren’t true cross-population transfers:
Byzantine administration under the Ottomans: The Ottomans borrowed certain forms but under a fundamentally different legal-religious basis — Sharia and sultanic kanun law instead of Roman-Byzantine codices. They added the devşirme child-levy system to recruit elite officials and the millet system to manage religious communities — neither existed in Byzantium. The fiscal-military timar system evolved from, but was not identical to, the Byzantine pronoia. This was not simply “Byzantium under new management.”
Roman law in post-Roman Europe: This is Whites adopting the legal system of other Whites — genetically and behaviorally close populations maintaining broadly similar outcomes.
Confucian civil service in Korea and Vietnam: Korea and China are close in profile and produced broadly similar administrative cultures. Vietnam is more distinct. It maintained the Confucian examination system for centuries, but today ranks far lower than Japan or Korea on rule of law, corruption control, civil liberties, and GDP per capita. The form persisted; the long-run performance diverged.
Persian bureaucracy in Islamic empires: Again, some continuity of form, but under new rulers with different priorities and a distinct religious and legal framework.
In all these, forms travel more easily than functions. Over time, function reflects the traits and values of the population running the system.
4. General principle and pattern
The closer the recipient population is in cognitive and behavioral profile to the originators, the more similar the outcomes — and vice versa. Even the closest matches (East Asians) produce recognizable differences; more distant populations (modern Middle Eastern, sub-Saharan African) produce vastly different and generally less functional systems.
This is not rigid determinism, but it is a robust, consistent pattern grounded in evolutionary biology and supported by psychometric and behavioral data. Culture is downstream of biology, and civilization is downstream of culture. If the goal is to preserve not just the shell of a system but its characteristic freedoms, institutions, and capacities, then maintaining the founding population’s trait profile is a necessity, not an arbitrary preference.
This response is operating in exactly the procedural framework the essay set out to challenge.
The point was not to smuggle in a biological argument under the heading of 'prejudice', but to defend prejudice and tradition as the precondition for any specific cultural or civilizational good. To insist that continuity must be justified in terms of measurable traits is to accept the procedural rules of the public sphere, which demand every attachment be made universally legible and 'scientifically' defensible before it can be recognised as legitimate. That is precisely what has neutered conservatism, and what we need to move beyond.
Nor does there have to be an enumerated object in view for something to be worth conserving. For me, the ultimate referent is Western civilization. But the disposition to conserve — the affective and inherited tendency to guard what has been handed down — is precisely what allows any particular custom, institution, or tradition to endure at all. That applies even if, by some external measure, what is being conserved were 'worse' than the alternatives: because its value lies in its continuity and the identity it sustains, not its score on a universal metric.
I think I agree with you. We don't ask people to explain why they prefer grandma's apple pie to that of other cooks. It would be wrong to reduce this preference to the recipe or the ingredients. It's proper and right that people prefer things that are familiar to them, made by someone familiar to them. Yet once outsiders start questioning whether granma's apple pie really is, objectively speaking, better than all the rest then somehow the spell is broken.
I understand that your point is to defend prejudice and tradition as such, without subjecting them to the legitimating procedures of liberal rationalism. But here’s where I think that approach is both strategically and substantively flawed.
First, refusing to justify tradition rationally doesn’t remove you from the “procedural” game — it just abandons the strongest ground available to us. Liberals already operate within a pseudo-rational framework that selectively denies science when it undermines their ideology (race differences, sex differences, heritability of intelligence, etc.). They’re not winning because they’re rational; they’re winning because they’ve monopolized the authority to declare what counts as “rational” while excluding contrary evidence.
If we can show that our traditions and prejudices are not arbitrary sentiment but are adaptive products of our evolutionary history — that they persist because they enhance the survival and flourishing of our people — then we’re not bowing to their rules, we’re using reality itself as the standard.
Second, saying something is worth conserving “even if by some measure it’s worse than the alternatives” is exactly how harmful traditions persist and destroy civilizations. Continuity alone isn’t the good; survival of the people and the civilizational order they produce is the good. Tradition is valuable because it encodes practices that historically kept us unified, cohesive, and reproductively successful. But when circumstances change — e.g., mass immigration, demographic replacement — some inherited customs (like universalist Christianity’s indiscriminate altruism) can flip from adaptive to maladaptive. Blind preservation then becomes a death sentence.
Finally, understanding why a tradition or prejudice works allows us to cut away what’s harmful without destroying what’s essential. That’s not “procedural liberalism,” that’s applied evolutionary reasoning. Without that capacity for self-correction, you’re left with faith-based traditionalism — which may work for a while, but will eventually fail when conditions change faster than instinct can adapt.
Put simply, tradition’s real value lies not in the rituals or customs themselves, but in the fact that they kept our people unified, cohesive, and reproductively successful in the environment in which they arose. That was the adaptive function, even if it wasn’t consciously understood at the time. But when the environment changes — for example, through the mass influx of low-IQ, high-birthrate foreigners biologically incapable of creating or sustaining our civilization — traditions that were once protective can become lethal if we refuse to adapt them to new realities.
In short: prejudice and tradition are valuable not as mystical givens, but as the distilled results of what has kept our people alive and thriving. That is a claim we can defend empirically — and doing so makes our position stronger, not weaker.
You say you want to reject the “procedural framework,” yet you are making your case within one - namely, language. Language, logic, reason, and science are all procedural, and all western.
You claim that certain things - tradition, 'prejudice', continuity - should be valued. But when someone asks why those values and not others, what would you say? That you refuse to engage in that discussion because you reject the procedural framework?
Why not simply make a rational case for those values, especially when facts and reason can clearly support them? There is a place for metaphysics, but why dismiss rationality?
I completely agree. But how would you (and I) answer the cheerleaders of multiracialism when they point to non-white people who fit pretty well into the evolved culture and political structures of the European-descended population. Or point to the white people who don't?
The way I’d answer that is to step back from anecdotes about individual exceptions and focus on the population-level patterns — because that’s what determines whether a civilization retains its character over time.
Yes, you can find individual non-White people who adapt well to European-descended cultural and political norms. But they’re exceptions, not the statistical norm. Groups differ on average in heritable traits such as intelligence, time preference, impulse control, trust, and conformity/individualism balance — and those differences reliably shape the kinds of societies those groups build.
Take East Asians as an example: on average they score high in intelligence and industriousness, but also in conformity and preference for hierarchical authority. Those traits produce well-functioning societies — but different from ours. They do not, on the whole, produce the same high-trust, individual-rights-oriented, free-speech-protecting societies historically characteristic of Europe and its settler nations. Even small demographic shifts can, over generations, alter the balance of traits enough to change the social fabric.
There’s also a well-documented effect described by Robert Putnam: ethnic diversity itself — even among groups with similar intelligence — reduces trust, civic participation, and willingness to engage in collective action, not only between groups but within previously cohesive groups. That erosion of social capital has real downstream consequences for governance and community life.
As for White people who don’t “fit” perfectly — that’s a moot point in the context of demographic preservation. Every population has variation. A few criminals or “odd uncles” don’t justify bringing in outsiders with a different genetic baseline. Those outliers are still part of our extended family, and almost all of their genes remain part of our shared gene pool. The goal is to preserve the overall genetic and phenotypic continuity of our people, not to achieve some utopian internal perfection.
If immigration ever occurs, it should only come from within the broader European meta-cluster — because those populations are phenotypically and genetically close enough that they integrate seamlessly within a generation and do not alter the essential makeup of the host population. Bringing in more distant populations irreversibly shifts the gene pool and the distribution of behavioral traits that underlie our civilization.
That’s why the discussion has to be about group averages, long-term dynamics, and preservation of the traits that built our civilization — not just whether a particular individual can fit in, and certainly not whether we have a few misfits of our own.
I suspect my personal preference is not necessarily to maintain the existing white gene pool but to have a gene pool that throws up people...like me. Okay, most of the people like me would probably be predominantly white. Even so, if I were king I would introduce a one-in-one-out scheme, a la Keir Starmer. I would take in Mahyar Tousi and expel that white bloke who took a brick to the bollocks during the Southport riots. I would take in Konstantin Kisin and Ben Habib and get rid of the two annoying drunks who shout out the answers at our local British Legion pub quiz of a Wednesday. The 'outs' would all be sent to St. Helena or that tiny island where there are only gannets and puffin.
I understand the dangers of 'regression to the mean' and accept that Mahyar's, Konstantin's and Ben's children may not be as ideal as their dads' but I'm willing to take that chance.
Then there's the problem of which European culture we are trying to defend. I would say getting pissed and football hooliganism are part of British culture but I wouldn't mind if they went the way of spam and powdered eggs.
But all in all I agree with you. These are just quibbles and I realise I'm not and never will be King of the West World.
I get what you’re aiming at with the “one-in-one-out” idea — the appeal of trading an unproductive or destructive local for a capable, law-abiding outsider. On an individual level, that can seem reasonable. The problem is that populations aren’t just the sum of standout individuals; they’re the sum of the average distribution of traits over time.
Even if someone like Kisin or Tousi integrates well personally, their children will regress toward the mean of their broader ancestral group, not necessarily the mean of the host population. Over multiple generations, enough of those small shifts change the overall trait distribution of the society — in intelligence, time preference, trust, and other heritable characteristics — and those shifts change the kind of culture and institutions the society can sustain. That’s why it’s not just about whether someone is “a good fit” right now, but whether the long-term genetic trajectory of the population is preserved.
As for Kisin specifically, I don’t think he’s a great example of someone defending the long-term interests of Europeans. He’s very effective in the mainstream because he operates within the race-blind, pro-liberal-democracy, pro-NATO consensus — and that’s exactly the consensus that got us into our current demographic and cultural mess. Once you start looking seriously at the science of race, IQ, behavioral genetics, and the geopolitics of Israel/Ukraine, a lot of those “mainstream” positions look less like common sense and more like controlled opposition that keeps the debate within safe bounds for the system.
Ultimately, the choice is whether to base policy on individuals we happen to like, or on protecting the population-level traits that built and sustain our civilization. If the latter is the goal, then even seemingly harmless “one-in-one-out” swaps add up to long-term change — and not in our favor.
If we wanted to apply a selective approach, it would have to draw from populations within our own broader European genetic cluster. That way, you can raise the overall quality without introducing the loss of social trust, the erosion of cohesion, or the regression-to-the-mean problem that comes with importing people from more genetically distant groups.
This could read like you are responding to my hypo, when of course your post was before mine. Sorry about that. I should've just posted my remark separately.
Here’s a hypo to piggyback on Keith's question: I’m the cultural commissar at the Jared Taylor compound in Idaho. Our residents seem to be occupied with lugging around packets of dog shit, booze, college football, and Reacher. Their conversations seem decidedly trivial.
I think maybe they’re failing to establish continuity with Western Civilization as a referent. I decide they should hear Bach’s Cello Suites, and the only two performers available are Yo-Yo Ma and Alicia Weilerstein (please assume they’d come, best I could come up with at the moment).
I get pushback from the community along the lines of no chinks or kikes. How should I respond?
The premise of your hypothetical is flawed on two levels. First, Jared Taylor himself is the opposite of the caricature you’re painting — highly educated, multilingual, impeccably civil, and a defender of high culture. The idea that a community built on his principles would consist of people “lugging around dog shit and booze” is just a cheap stereotype, and frankly an insult to White communities in general.
Second, you’re presenting a false choice: accept permanent outsiders into your community or forgo world-class performances. That’s not reality. There are countless White performers of the same calibre as Yo-Yo Ma or Alicia Weilerstein, and even if there weren’t, the entire premise of modern technology means you can enjoy those performances remotely without sacrificing social trust, genetic continuity, or cultural cohesion.
In other words, your scenario trades away the long-term health of the population for a short-term experience that could easily be replicated without the trade-off. That’s a poor bargain — and it doesn’t address the core point that civilizations are built and sustained by the underlying traits of their people, not by one-off artistic encounters.
I think conservatism can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.
The liberals see the aspects of behaviour that come with human nature as baggage; they are above all that and form themselves into exclusive tribes, to prove it.
Heuristics are useful and often work. Tit for tat with forgiveness is a winning strategy over blind forgiveness and over tit for tat without forgiveness. And not showing in-group preference when other groups show in group preference is a losing strategy (except for a small group of traitors who ride their group into the ground and profit for a while)
Other readers have commented that the language in this essay is too abstract, and thus confusing and hard to follow. I don't think that's the problem though.
I think the main issue is that this essay tries to cram too many different ideas into a single essay. Even though the title is "In Defence of Prejudice", most of the paper isn't about prejudice, aside from the "Wisdom of prejudice" section. That section is also too short to adequately defend prejudice.
The best thing that could be done to improve this work would probably be to separate it into a few essays, and expand each of them.
Very abstract, metaphysical, mythical. Riding the tiger, are we?
I'm not much for mysticism and metaphysics, so why not just say it out in the open?
The current tilt to the Left is dysfunctional and unless we course-correct, the Western civilization will end or be irreparably damaged.
The arguments and empirical data are clear:
1. Whites are being replaced in their homelands. Intent or no intent.
2. Without Whites, the West ceases to exist. Immigrants don't assimilate, they reacreate their mini-homelands.
3. Therefore, we HAVE to become healthily ethnocentric.
I agree with Cofnas on this, we simply have to demolish the noble lie of egalitarian thesis. Or as Camus puts it, the denial of race.
I don't think we have to sacrifice modernity, i.e. science, procedure, rationality. Prejudice is proto-rationality. If prejudice, loyalty, tradition and nation WORK, you can make a rational argument for them. And an intuitive one as well. That will appeal to many people as well.
I think we can take our balls out of the freezer after 80 years of telling noble lies.
Cofnas acknowledges the problem, acknowledges that we have to destroy the equalitarian position, but he rejects ethnonationalism. He understands part of the problem but hates the actual real solutions. He still thinks we'll live in multiracial utopia if we just about that we're not equal. It’s like communism level detachment from human nature.
I don’t believe that colorblindness is the solution. My vision is a society in which communities are granted more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although when people organize themselves spontaneously, there is often a degree of homogeneity. A society that has absorbed the truth of hereditarianism should be open to this alternative.
I feel I would have been very receptive to this author's argument if it hadn't been couched in such awkard language. The older I get, the more convinced I become that we only really understand things we can visualise and here I could visualise precisely nothing. There were just too many strings of long, difficult words that jiggled around in my brain, refusing to coalesce into a proper thought. I still have no idea what 'the symbolic order', 'symbolic cowardice' or 'symbolic energy' are. In the end I gave up just before The Wisdom of Prejudice, though I may have another run at it once my overtaxed brain has had a breather.
Given that this piece was written in defense of a world view that often can't play the pompous language games of the rational liberal elite it's ironic that the author chose to write in precisely that style, as though he had accepted the enemy's choice of weapons, weapons which he can clearly wield with dexterity but the rest of us foot soldiers can't.
I teach basic Conversation English to Japanese university students and at the end of term they have to give a 5-minute presentation in English on a subject I choose. Some of them pitch the presentation at me rather than at their classmates, despite me telling them that the rest of the class has to understand the presentation or there is no point. They therefore know should avoid any hi fallutin' language and expressions that only the teacher and ChatGPT will understand. That, I felt, was the problem here.
My take is that this article is attempting to make a philosophical version of the argument presented in Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"; that people with different moralities operate from different foundational moral principles, and that in order to understand people of different morality you must first understand their moral priors.
Although as other comments here have pointed out, there's several arguments being made in the one essay, with the second argument being about conformity to language.
I think I'll have to read the article again, this time in full and give the author a second chance.
Yes, I remember reading The Righteous Mind and being surprised by how much I agreed with what Haidt said. I had previously been a New Atheist fanboy and Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt were always at loggerheads so I assumed Jonathan Haidt was an idiot. He always argued with Harris in a gentle, wheeldling way that got my back up. Yet it turned out that Haidt was far from being an idiot and instead I started to go off Sam Harris, principally because of his politics and his inability to see that people's whose moral foundations were different from his weren't for that reason wrong.
'Conformity to language'. What does that mean? That we get an abstract idea and try and make our behaviour fit the idea?
Conservative beliefs tend to be more in line with our intuitions, which presumably come partly from our genes and partly from the traditions and culture we inherit. If our morality doesn't come from our intuitions then I don't know where it comes from. I don't think you can find a rational reason not to kill someone who's getting on your nerves, only a moral one based on intuition.
Anyway, I thought the article was going to try to justify a life based on intuitions rather than on liberal rationality, a hard task when justification itself is only achieved through arguing rationally, which is precisely what the author was arguing against.
Last night I got fed up with expending so much mental effort on the article but I'm going to take another run at it now. Wish me luck!
That's a bit too much pure abstraction for me. Can you give concrete examples or even hypotheticals that would demonstrate the normative claim being made here?
For negative examples, witness the capture of every successful populist party. In the UK, this is presently happening to Reform. It is a recurring, concrete example of procedural absorption. For (partial) positive examples, you can see how someone like Trump is successful precisely because he resists being entangled in the language games of the procedural public sphere. This is of course partial and inadequate for the kind of civilizational restoration we need. My project is about articulating what truly post-rational, affective politics would look like.
I would add that the demand for concreteness itself reflects the rationalist expectation that a disposition or mode of belonging must be defended through a list of empirically verifiable cases. This too is part of the same procedural mindset under critique.
"In the United States, this culminated in the marginalization of traditionalism and paleo-conservatism by new forms of conservatism palatable to managerial rule. [T]he broader postwar conservative coalition increasingly came to be dominated by neoconservatism, whose missionary creed drew symbolic energy from liberal internationalism and American exceptionalism."
It is worth noting that Roger Scruton, cited in this article as a positive example of an intellectual who defended prejudice, describes himself as a *neoconservative* in his book "Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition." (He further applies that label to Samuel Huntington, who is also approvingly mentioned in this article.) Moreover, "liberal internationalism" is an ambiguous term, but Charles Krauthammer spends much of his essay "Democratic Realism" attacking what *he* calls "liberal internationalism." That essay is one of the classic statements of neoconservatism.
"In this new order, ideas do not prosper according to their truth or organic resonance, but on their capacity to be abstracted, repeated and operationalized at scale. They must be defended with slogans, metrics and universalist principles—forms of argumentation that can be processed by bureaucracies, debated in public forums, and amplified through media systems."
This is one reason why I think Frank Salter's concept of "universal nationalism" has such potential. Nationalism has "organic resonance," but in this way, it can be universalised.
Where in 'Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition' does Scruton describe himself as a neoconservative? I haven't read the book, and two different AIs said he explicitly distances himself from that label in the book. Of course, AIs can be wrong!
I'm not sure he is referring to "Samuel Huntington in America, Pierre Manent in France, and myself in Britain" as neoconservatives, but merely as "thinkers [that] typify the new movement of ideas". Scruton would have to have had a rather strange understanding of the ideology to mention Manent as someone who "typified" it. Manent isn't even mentioned on the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism. There are also about a dozen people in America who "typified" neoconservatism more than Huntingdon.
In this article, Mervyn Bendle refers to a 2004 interview and writes, "Acknowledging his distance from neoconservatism, Scruton agreed in the interview that the book revealed more of a kinship with American paleoconservatism".
Sure would be nice to have the original text of that interview, especially since the book Bendle refers to is Scruton's 1979 work "The Meaning of Conservatism," not "Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition." It's also possible Scruton's ideas evolved with time. I think the context in the latter book makes pretty clear that, if Scruton means to imply any distinction between "neo-conservatism" and "the new movement of ideas" it is a very minor one, with the former being perhaps a subset of the latter.
Having skimmed the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism, it seems to me that it barely mentions anyone from outside the USA, so the lack of Manent's inclusion hardly means he wasn't an example of a French neoconservative. The article also omits Portuguese author Joao Carlos Espada, even though Espada contributed to "The Neocon Reader": https://books.google.de/books?id=31y5P8Lz-S4C&pg=PP9&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=false Even Michael Gove, a British contributor to that same anthology, is absent!
For reasons laid out in my article, I think Huntigton's neocon leanings are underappreciated. Therefore, Scruton's choice of him as an example may simply reflect greater insight than most commentators possess. In any case, he doesn't explicitly claim that Huntington is the *best* American example of a neocon. Maybe he just picked him because he liked him.
I don’t see how anyone who has read The Clash of Civilizations could seriously take Huntington as a neoconservative, and Scruton is an even worse fit for the label. In any case, I specifically acknowledged that it 'yielded genuine policy achievements, in both Britain and America, while helping clarify key distinctions between conservative and progressive worldviews.'
As for Scruton’s praise of Murray’s book on neoconservatism, that likely owes at least as much to their friendship and his role as a mentor as it does to any deep ideological identification.
"The issues that divide the West and these other societies are increasingly
important on the international agenda. Three such issues involve the efforts of
the West: (1) to maintain its military superiority through policies of nonproliferation and counterproliferation with respect to nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons and the means to deliver them; (2) to promote Western political
values and institutions by pressing other societies to respect human rights as
conceived in the West and to adopt democracy on Western lines; and (3) to
protect the cultural, social, and ethnic integrity of Western societies by restricting the number of non-Westerners admitted as immigrants or refugees. In
all three areas the West has had and is likely to continue to have difficulties
defending its interests against those of non-Western societies."
- "The Clash of Civilizations"
That sounds rather neoconservative to me - unless, of course, one defines neoconservatism as being pro-immigration.
"In any case, I specifically acknowledged that it 'yielded genuine policy achievements, in both Britain and America, while helping clarify key distinctions between conservative and progressive worldviews.'"
Sure, and I appreciated that (even as a non-neocon). I never accused you of disparaging neoconservatism wholesale.
"As for Scruton’s praise of Murray’s book on neoconservatism, that likely owes at least as much to their friendship and his role as a mentor as it does to any deep ideological identification."
I mean, I guess that's possible, but I think the evidence I have cited paints a pretty cohesive picture. For what it's worth, Robert P. George writes in his obituary for Scruton that "Roger joined the iconic American neoconservative Irving Kristol in giving capitalism only “two cheers” — perhaps no more than one and three-quarters." In fact, George seems to identify this as the main feature that set Scruton apart from other Anglo-American conservatives.
You are cherry picking quotes out of context and also misinterpreting them. Huntington was describing recent history, not recommending the promotion of Western-style democracy in countries that were fundamentally unsuited to it.
'The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization.'
'Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some have promoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. […] The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.’
These views are fundamentally opposed to neoconservatism as it is commonly understood.
I think you're kinda missing the point. In the pages that follow the quotation I provided, Huntington offers a nuanced assessment of the successes and failures of Western endeavours to promote Western forms of governance abroad. He's not a blind ideologue, but he is for an assertive foreign policy overall. In "Who Are We?", he also joins many neocons in portraying neoconservative-style foreign policy as a longstanding American tradition:
"In conducting their foreign policy, most states give overwhelming priority to what are generally called the ‘realist’ concerns of power, security, and wealth. When push comes to shove, the United States does this too. Americans also, however, feel the need to promote in their relations with other societies and within those societies the moralistic goals they pursue at home. [During the nineteenth century,] its emergence as a great power […] made it possible for America to promote abroad [its] values and principles[.] The relation between realism and moralism thus became the central issue of American foreign policy in the twentieth century, as Americans, in McDougall’s words, redefined their country from ‘promised land’ to ‘crusader state’."
"These views are fundamentally opposed to neoconservatism as it is commonly understood."
Or rather, as it is commonly caricatured by its detractors. Perhaps *some* neoconservatives can be accused of "universalism," but neoconservatism is opposed to multiculturalism. Check out Irving Kristol's collection "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea." The second (!) essay included in that volume is entitled "The Tragedy of 'Multiculturalism'."
This definitional debate is tangential to my point. My argument isn’t about adjudicating the label for particular figures (though I maintain its inappropriate in these cases), but about the structural role certain postwar conservative currents played in making themselves acceptable to managerial rule. Whether or not Huntington or Scruton fit your preferred definition of neoconservatism doesn’t change that. I’m using the term to name a morphological type within a broader civilizational pattern, not to catalogue individual affiliations.
Quote: "Liberals and leftists often take satisfaction in portraying conservatism as less intellectually rigorous than systems like liberalism or Marxism. But the “sophistication” of these ideologies largely reflects their construction from abstract principles designed for systematization. Conservatism, by contrast, is more like a disposition than a system. It involves instinctive attachments to custom, tradition and inherited ways of life."
I would disagree with that somewhat. If I am a conservative it is because I want to conserve liberal institutions, which is the way it was with Edmund Burke too, if I remember correctly. And the thing is, these institutions have been largely abandoned by the very people who used to call themselves liberals (or more often by their children I suppose). Check out the American Civil Liberties Union for example.
My point is that the way is now open to defend these liberal institutions on the basis of the same "abstract principles" that were used to establish them in the first place. Most of them are still mighty fine principles, at least in my opinion.
The fact of the matter is that none of the smartest people writing about policy today are on the left, even moderately so. Or on the right either, at least not necessarily. In my own case at least, I strive to play it right down the middle. A liberal conservative, a conservative liberal, call me what you will. However narrow the path, it's the best way to go.
All forms of political collectivism will fail as scale and diversity increase. And collectivism, whether material or intellectual, is the realm of 20th-21st century progressivism.
Once I thought that collectivism cannot work, ever. A system in which those who produce in abundance willingly and freely share with those less capable of producing the means to life--in short, voluntary redistribution of resources. But I was wrong. Examples exist.
Collectivism is a natural result of evolved familial bonds that most species of mammals evolved as a means of survival and successful reproduction. At its narrowest scope, it is the mother/child model of nurturing and protecting. As species evolve larger social structures, collectivism is applied, voluntarily and without external coercion to not only the nuclear family, but to extended blood/mating relationships as well. This can scale up naturally to clan and tribe. It reaches its limits at ethnicity, diffusing as it scales up, so that amongst ethnicly differing groups, very little desire to share resources remains.
Now, if this is in any sense accurate, we might expect that a monocultural polity--a nation whose vast majority is of the same ethnic background, *might*--just maybe--be able to adopt a collectivist political/economic system that requires minimal external coercion for an extended period. But it will be fairly fragile and the free redistribution of resources will always tend to self-limit to the scope of blood relations and mating bonds. Beyond that, such "sharing" requires forcible confiscation and redistribution--which is itself subject to corruption and sharing amongst blood or ethnic relatives.
So that said, any modern western multicultural system is extremely poorly suited to non-coercive collectivism, and you know where that leaves us, right?
Increasing levels of enforced redistribution, rife with cheating on the part of those will surplus resources, and suspicion of hoarding/withholding by those who tend to receive redistributed resources.
Discussing the superfluous differences between liberals and conservatives under the current deleterious conditions in the West is a useless endeavor. We live in a plutocratic oligarchy...the super-rich vs the not super-rich. The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption.
"The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption."
This is interesting and it aligns with my own belief--based on years of simply living thru multiple US administrations--that the left/right division of political parties in the US is an illusion. They are simply pre-packaged strategies to sell a set of marketable beliefs to the voting public, and the belief that is the most satisfying or best sold wins the election--which equals power, which the winners then sell to the small minority of the super-rich/rich who actually can pay for favored intervention by the empowered winner of the election.
There have been two basic ways to attempt to live and succeed in this system for all the rest. One way is for an individual to join with other like-minded individuals to attempt to overhaul the system, but based on *what*, exactly?
The other way is for the individual to attempt entry onto the bottom-most rungs of the rich class, such that you have enough in common economically that some of the gravy spills off of the gravy dish and you can blot up some, to your benefit. Leave it to your descendants to ratchet their way up onto the table, if they can.
The latter strategy requires no cooperation from fickle moral ideologues and is easier than many people think.
Not to be a wiseguy, but do you have any concrete proposals of how, exactly, to get this started?
I'll be honest with you. As a callow anti-war student I actually believed that The People--righteous dudes and chicks, all--would rise up and unify, and...and...and...
Start the Age of Aquarius, I guess.
I thought this all the way thru the 70s and half the 80s. Somewhere around Reagan's second term I started to wonder that if maybe if you can't beat 'em, maybe you should join 'em.
The very best I could manage was, as I said, the bottom-most rung (if that), but I knew that if what I was after in my lifespan was increased positive choices in all areas, from where I lived, to where my kid went to school, to what I ate, to a low-stress retirement, to personal safety, I was moving in the right direction. This is plainly demonstrable and has been for years.
So basically, until you can see clearly that the national public ethos will support mutual benefit (maybe I saw this in the 50s, but I was to young to really know one way or the other), I'd say that the practical and grounded individual in the US might want to think that it's been every man for himself for at least the last 40 or so years.
In fact, I'd venture to guess that only in times of real (not imagined) national threat--Great Depression, maybe, WWII, maybe--was it anything other than every man for himself in the urban areas. The frontier, maybe not.
You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices
"You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices."
Your reply is a non sequitur. We are not talking about the workplace and bosses; we are talking about those who control your life.
I like the piece, but I don't think the problem is purely structural. Example: these "neo-conservatives", ex-Communists from New York, are a particular people, with particular fears and loves, which are highly motivating, but which as a rule they prefer to keep hidden.
I think the missing piece here is that the argument defends “prejudice” and “tradition” as valuable in themselves, but never actually defines what is being conserved or why it’s worth conserving. Without that, it risks sounding like we’re defending a vague sentiment rather than a clear, concrete good.
From a biopolitical perspective, the answer is straightforward:
What’s being conserved is the biological continuity of the people who built Western civilization — the genetically coherent European-descended population.
Why it’s valuable is not just “because it’s ours,” but because this population’s unique combination of high average intelligence, low time preference, high trust/cooperation, and other heritable behavioral traits is what has historically allowed our culture, institutions, and technology to emerge and function. These traits are measurable, evolutionarily advantageous, and rare in combination.
Why it matters is that traditions, political systems, and cultural norms are emergent properties of those traits. You can replace governments and laws and still keep a society functional if the people remain; replace the people, and the systems will fail no matter how well-designed.
That’s the part the liberal-rational “procedural” worldview can’t answer without denying science. Our case is actually stronger on empirical grounds than theirs — grounded in evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, and anthropological universals, not just in aesthetic preference.
By clarifying what we’re conserving and grounding it in objective reality, we can defend it without having to rely solely on abstract appeals to “prejudice” or “the sacred” that can be too easily dismissed as irrational nostalgia.
The "right to exist" in a cultural and biological sense is normally only affirmed in public discourse for Jews. To know who rules over you...
I see it as a spectrum of “right to exist,” with Jews placed firmly at one end and Whites at the other.
On one extreme, Jews are framed as God’s Chosen People — more valuable than any other humans — followed by every tier of “progressive stack” protected classes. At the opposite extreme are the irreparably evil, Hitler-incarnate White people, who are never allowed to express pride in their heritage, celebrate their culture, show solidarity, act collectively for self-preservation, or defend their historical legacy. To grant such people those things, we’re told, would surely lead to another genocide-holocaust-slavery.
And I have to wonder — how many White people can read that without feeling the programming kick in, instinctively agreeing that this double standard is “just the way it is”? That reflex is the mark of how deeply our people have been conditioned to hate themselves and accept a permanent state of ancestral guilt.
Much of that guilt rests on distortions, exaggerations, or outright falsehoods:
Native American genocide — greatly overstated, ignoring disease-driven population collapse and long-standing tribal warfare.
The Holocaust — an atrocity carried out by one regime in one country, not a collective sin of all Whites.
Slavery — a universal human practice, ended first by Whites at enormous cost. In the U.S., only 1.6% of Whites owned slaves (mostly in the South); over 3,000 free Blacks owned Black slaves; hundreds of thousands of White men died in part to abolish it; the British bought the freedom of all colonial slaves, never had slavery in England proper, and paid that debt into the 21st century. Many Native American tribes practiced slavery long before Whites arrived, and some held African slaves as chattel after contact.
Even the word “slave” comes from Slav, a White ethnic group — and long after America had ended slavery, Muslim raiders from the Barbary Coast were still enslaving Europeans from across the continent. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, they took over one million Europeans, including not only English and Irish, but also Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and others from as far north as Iceland.
The facts don’t match the guilt narrative. But the narrative persists — because it keeps one end of that spectrum unquestioned, and the other end perpetually silenced.
History is far more complex than the cartoon morality we’re sold. Whites did not merely “benefit” from civilization—they built, scaled, and exported it on a staggering timeline, lifting living standards, science, law, technology, and governance to levels that many societies had neither created nor can now maintain without outside help. Meanwhile, the moral ledger so often waved in our faces is highly selective: slavery was a human universal; it persists today; and African polities themselves captured and sold other Africans long before Europeans arrived—then profited from delivering captives to the coast. Celebrated kingdoms like Mali enriched themselves on salt and slaves; they did not build institutions that broadly elevated their populations.
None of this excuses genuine wrongs; it restores proportion. It also underscores a simple point: Whites have as much right to continuity, dignity, and collective self-preservation as anyone else.
Culturally, the ground is shifting. Younger generations are far less bound to WWII-era taboos and increasingly skeptical of treating Jews or Israel as beyond criticism. Support for Israel is falling among the youth and will likely continue to erode in the coming decades. That shift, however, is double-edged: much of it rides on anti-White, “settler-colonial” framings that cast Whites as permanent oppressors. So while the old hierarchy of untouchable narratives is wobbling, the hostility directed at Whites is not disappearing with it.
We live in interesting times. All the more reason to reject inherited guilt, refuse demoralization, state the historical record fully, and assert a normal, human right to exist—biologically and culturally—without apology.
The counter argument here rests on a teleological premise that evolutionary theory does not support: “the people” are not necessarily the primary unit of selection. In gene–culture evolution, it is often traditions, norms, or memes that replicate — sometimes at the expense of the population that carries them. History shows cultures enduring without their original people, and peoples persisting after abandoning their traditions. True, if the aim is biological continuity, traditions must be assessed for their current adaptive value, since some become maladaptive under modern conditions. But ultimately, treating “the people” as the fundamental evolutionary unit is not an empirical conclusion but a value judgement — one that requires explicit justification.
You’re right that evolution operates at multiple levels — genes, individuals, kin groups, and sometimes cultural memes. But if the aim is survival in the biological sense, the most basic and irreducible unit of concern is your own genetic line.
In pure evolutionary terms, if my own lineage goes extinct, I have lost the game of life. Yes, some of my alleles may persist in my kin or in unrelated members of my ethnic group, and kin selection theory explains why we cooperate more with those who share more of our genes. But that only matters because it increases the probability that my genes survive. The concentric circles of concern — immediate family, extended family, ethnic group — all radiate outward from that core fact. The further you move from your own genes, the weaker the direct evolutionary incentive, and the more it becomes contingent on other factors.
That’s why preserving “the people” isn’t just a sentimental choice — it’s an extension of the same fitness logic that applies at the family level. Traditions, norms, and memes only matter insofar as they serve that end. A tradition that persists while the people who created it vanish is, from a gene’s-eye view, a failure, even if the cultural form superficially survives.
History bears this out: when the underlying population changes, the culture inevitably drifts, because the behavioral and cognitive traits that produced it are no longer present in the same proportions. The forms may remain for a while, but the substance erodes. So while culture can sometimes outlive the people in a superficial sense, it can’t indefinitely sustain the same civilizational outcomes once the population changes.
From that perspective, treating the people as the primary survival unit is not arbitrary — it’s simply applying evolutionary logic consistently, starting from the most proximate and genetically direct imperative and working outward.
No, I’m not calling your position “arbitrary” — in fact, I’m quite sympathetic to it. My point is that this people-centered view goes well beyond what evolutionary science itself can establish. It is still informed by evolutionary thinking, but it functions more as a historical “prejudice” precisely in The Westering Sun’s sense — a value-laden conviction rather than a strictly empirical conclusion.
Your view is no longer simply an observation about cultural persistence; it makes a much stronger claim: that complex institutions, values, and high-functioning civilizational systems are genetically bound to the people in whom they first evolved, and cannot be sustained by different populations.
This is a testable claim — and it is vulnerable if we can identify cases where deep, functional, civilizationally significant systems (legal frameworks, administrative structures, educational traditions, military doctrines, religious institutions) were successfully preserved and reproduced by populations with substantially different demographic origins from the founders. Examples that appear to challenge the claim include: (1) Byzantine administrative systems under the Ottomans; (2) Roman law in post-Roman Europe; (3) the Confucian civil service in Korea and Vietnam; and (4) the Persian imperial bureaucracy in Islamic empires.
In each case, the cultural transfer was not superficial: these systems retained the capacity for large-scale political coordination, economic integration, and intellectual output for generations after the original population’s dominance ended.
If the link between population genetics and civilizational performance were as rigid as you suggest, such cases should not exist — yet history offers them repeatedly. This doesn’t mean population continuity is irrelevant to cultural stability (and you might have a stronger case regarding the current erosion of European populations), but it does mean the relationship is neither deterministic nor exclusive.
1. On whether my position is “merely value-laden”
I don’t agree that my position is just a “prejudice” in the Westering Sun sense. My conclusions follow directly from well-established evolutionary theory, behavioral genetics, and psychometrics. We know from a century of research that cognitive ability, time preference, impulse control, trust, and other key behavioral traits are highly heritable and vary systematically between populations. These differences correlate strongly with the kinds of civilizations those populations create and sustain.
This isn’t abstract theorizing — it’s borne out in the record. Populations that don’t have the necessary trait distribution to run high-functioning European-style systems can copy the forms but not the outcomes. Sub-Saharan Africans are the clearest example: more than 150 years after independence, no sub-Saharan state has maintained low-corruption, low-crime, high-innovation governance without heavy external involvement. IQ, long-term planning, and impulse control levels are all significantly lower than in Europe, and the institutional outcomes match.
2. Clarifying my actual claim
I have never claimed that no other population can sustain complex institutions — only that the closer another group’s trait profile is to the founding population’s, the closer their institutional outcomes will be. The more distant they are genetically and behaviorally, the more the results diverge.
Even the closest examples, such as East Asians, show this clearly. East Asians have high IQs and industriousness but are more conformist, more authority-oriented, and less individualistic. The societies they build — Japan, Korea, Singapore — are safe, orderly, and prosperous, but also more authoritarian and less protective of dissent and individual liberty than historic European societies. They can adopt democracy, but they use it differently.
Even groups with above-average IQ but different subtest profiles, like Ashkenazi Jews (high verbal and math, average or below-average spatial), tend to cluster in academia, media, and finance rather than engineering or technical manufacturing — which again shapes the kind of civilization produced. Asians, with lower verbal ability but high math/spatial, excel in engineering but are underrepresented in politics and mass media. Culture flows from these trait distributions; civilization is the aggregate result.
3. On the historical examples
Eduardo’s cases don’t overturn the general pattern, and in some cases, they aren’t true cross-population transfers:
Byzantine administration under the Ottomans: The Ottomans borrowed certain forms but under a fundamentally different legal-religious basis — Sharia and sultanic kanun law instead of Roman-Byzantine codices. They added the devşirme child-levy system to recruit elite officials and the millet system to manage religious communities — neither existed in Byzantium. The fiscal-military timar system evolved from, but was not identical to, the Byzantine pronoia. This was not simply “Byzantium under new management.”
Roman law in post-Roman Europe: This is Whites adopting the legal system of other Whites — genetically and behaviorally close populations maintaining broadly similar outcomes.
Confucian civil service in Korea and Vietnam: Korea and China are close in profile and produced broadly similar administrative cultures. Vietnam is more distinct. It maintained the Confucian examination system for centuries, but today ranks far lower than Japan or Korea on rule of law, corruption control, civil liberties, and GDP per capita. The form persisted; the long-run performance diverged.
Persian bureaucracy in Islamic empires: Again, some continuity of form, but under new rulers with different priorities and a distinct religious and legal framework.
In all these, forms travel more easily than functions. Over time, function reflects the traits and values of the population running the system.
4. General principle and pattern
The closer the recipient population is in cognitive and behavioral profile to the originators, the more similar the outcomes — and vice versa. Even the closest matches (East Asians) produce recognizable differences; more distant populations (modern Middle Eastern, sub-Saharan African) produce vastly different and generally less functional systems.
This is not rigid determinism, but it is a robust, consistent pattern grounded in evolutionary biology and supported by psychometric and behavioral data. Culture is downstream of biology, and civilization is downstream of culture. If the goal is to preserve not just the shell of a system but its characteristic freedoms, institutions, and capacities, then maintaining the founding population’s trait profile is a necessity, not an arbitrary preference.
This response is operating in exactly the procedural framework the essay set out to challenge.
The point was not to smuggle in a biological argument under the heading of 'prejudice', but to defend prejudice and tradition as the precondition for any specific cultural or civilizational good. To insist that continuity must be justified in terms of measurable traits is to accept the procedural rules of the public sphere, which demand every attachment be made universally legible and 'scientifically' defensible before it can be recognised as legitimate. That is precisely what has neutered conservatism, and what we need to move beyond.
Nor does there have to be an enumerated object in view for something to be worth conserving. For me, the ultimate referent is Western civilization. But the disposition to conserve — the affective and inherited tendency to guard what has been handed down — is precisely what allows any particular custom, institution, or tradition to endure at all. That applies even if, by some external measure, what is being conserved were 'worse' than the alternatives: because its value lies in its continuity and the identity it sustains, not its score on a universal metric.
I think I agree with you. We don't ask people to explain why they prefer grandma's apple pie to that of other cooks. It would be wrong to reduce this preference to the recipe or the ingredients. It's proper and right that people prefer things that are familiar to them, made by someone familiar to them. Yet once outsiders start questioning whether granma's apple pie really is, objectively speaking, better than all the rest then somehow the spell is broken.
I understand that your point is to defend prejudice and tradition as such, without subjecting them to the legitimating procedures of liberal rationalism. But here’s where I think that approach is both strategically and substantively flawed.
First, refusing to justify tradition rationally doesn’t remove you from the “procedural” game — it just abandons the strongest ground available to us. Liberals already operate within a pseudo-rational framework that selectively denies science when it undermines their ideology (race differences, sex differences, heritability of intelligence, etc.). They’re not winning because they’re rational; they’re winning because they’ve monopolized the authority to declare what counts as “rational” while excluding contrary evidence.
If we can show that our traditions and prejudices are not arbitrary sentiment but are adaptive products of our evolutionary history — that they persist because they enhance the survival and flourishing of our people — then we’re not bowing to their rules, we’re using reality itself as the standard.
Second, saying something is worth conserving “even if by some measure it’s worse than the alternatives” is exactly how harmful traditions persist and destroy civilizations. Continuity alone isn’t the good; survival of the people and the civilizational order they produce is the good. Tradition is valuable because it encodes practices that historically kept us unified, cohesive, and reproductively successful. But when circumstances change — e.g., mass immigration, demographic replacement — some inherited customs (like universalist Christianity’s indiscriminate altruism) can flip from adaptive to maladaptive. Blind preservation then becomes a death sentence.
Finally, understanding why a tradition or prejudice works allows us to cut away what’s harmful without destroying what’s essential. That’s not “procedural liberalism,” that’s applied evolutionary reasoning. Without that capacity for self-correction, you’re left with faith-based traditionalism — which may work for a while, but will eventually fail when conditions change faster than instinct can adapt.
Put simply, tradition’s real value lies not in the rituals or customs themselves, but in the fact that they kept our people unified, cohesive, and reproductively successful in the environment in which they arose. That was the adaptive function, even if it wasn’t consciously understood at the time. But when the environment changes — for example, through the mass influx of low-IQ, high-birthrate foreigners biologically incapable of creating or sustaining our civilization — traditions that were once protective can become lethal if we refuse to adapt them to new realities.
In short: prejudice and tradition are valuable not as mystical givens, but as the distilled results of what has kept our people alive and thriving. That is a claim we can defend empirically — and doing so makes our position stronger, not weaker.
You say you want to reject the “procedural framework,” yet you are making your case within one - namely, language. Language, logic, reason, and science are all procedural, and all western.
You claim that certain things - tradition, 'prejudice', continuity - should be valued. But when someone asks why those values and not others, what would you say? That you refuse to engage in that discussion because you reject the procedural framework?
Why not simply make a rational case for those values, especially when facts and reason can clearly support them? There is a place for metaphysics, but why dismiss rationality?
I completely agree. But how would you (and I) answer the cheerleaders of multiracialism when they point to non-white people who fit pretty well into the evolved culture and political structures of the European-descended population. Or point to the white people who don't?
The way I’d answer that is to step back from anecdotes about individual exceptions and focus on the population-level patterns — because that’s what determines whether a civilization retains its character over time.
Yes, you can find individual non-White people who adapt well to European-descended cultural and political norms. But they’re exceptions, not the statistical norm. Groups differ on average in heritable traits such as intelligence, time preference, impulse control, trust, and conformity/individualism balance — and those differences reliably shape the kinds of societies those groups build.
Take East Asians as an example: on average they score high in intelligence and industriousness, but also in conformity and preference for hierarchical authority. Those traits produce well-functioning societies — but different from ours. They do not, on the whole, produce the same high-trust, individual-rights-oriented, free-speech-protecting societies historically characteristic of Europe and its settler nations. Even small demographic shifts can, over generations, alter the balance of traits enough to change the social fabric.
There’s also a well-documented effect described by Robert Putnam: ethnic diversity itself — even among groups with similar intelligence — reduces trust, civic participation, and willingness to engage in collective action, not only between groups but within previously cohesive groups. That erosion of social capital has real downstream consequences for governance and community life.
As for White people who don’t “fit” perfectly — that’s a moot point in the context of demographic preservation. Every population has variation. A few criminals or “odd uncles” don’t justify bringing in outsiders with a different genetic baseline. Those outliers are still part of our extended family, and almost all of their genes remain part of our shared gene pool. The goal is to preserve the overall genetic and phenotypic continuity of our people, not to achieve some utopian internal perfection.
If immigration ever occurs, it should only come from within the broader European meta-cluster — because those populations are phenotypically and genetically close enough that they integrate seamlessly within a generation and do not alter the essential makeup of the host population. Bringing in more distant populations irreversibly shifts the gene pool and the distribution of behavioral traits that underlie our civilization.
That’s why the discussion has to be about group averages, long-term dynamics, and preservation of the traits that built our civilization — not just whether a particular individual can fit in, and certainly not whether we have a few misfits of our own.
Yes, a very good reply.
I suspect my personal preference is not necessarily to maintain the existing white gene pool but to have a gene pool that throws up people...like me. Okay, most of the people like me would probably be predominantly white. Even so, if I were king I would introduce a one-in-one-out scheme, a la Keir Starmer. I would take in Mahyar Tousi and expel that white bloke who took a brick to the bollocks during the Southport riots. I would take in Konstantin Kisin and Ben Habib and get rid of the two annoying drunks who shout out the answers at our local British Legion pub quiz of a Wednesday. The 'outs' would all be sent to St. Helena or that tiny island where there are only gannets and puffin.
I understand the dangers of 'regression to the mean' and accept that Mahyar's, Konstantin's and Ben's children may not be as ideal as their dads' but I'm willing to take that chance.
Then there's the problem of which European culture we are trying to defend. I would say getting pissed and football hooliganism are part of British culture but I wouldn't mind if they went the way of spam and powdered eggs.
But all in all I agree with you. These are just quibbles and I realise I'm not and never will be King of the West World.
I get what you’re aiming at with the “one-in-one-out” idea — the appeal of trading an unproductive or destructive local for a capable, law-abiding outsider. On an individual level, that can seem reasonable. The problem is that populations aren’t just the sum of standout individuals; they’re the sum of the average distribution of traits over time.
Even if someone like Kisin or Tousi integrates well personally, their children will regress toward the mean of their broader ancestral group, not necessarily the mean of the host population. Over multiple generations, enough of those small shifts change the overall trait distribution of the society — in intelligence, time preference, trust, and other heritable characteristics — and those shifts change the kind of culture and institutions the society can sustain. That’s why it’s not just about whether someone is “a good fit” right now, but whether the long-term genetic trajectory of the population is preserved.
As for Kisin specifically, I don’t think he’s a great example of someone defending the long-term interests of Europeans. He’s very effective in the mainstream because he operates within the race-blind, pro-liberal-democracy, pro-NATO consensus — and that’s exactly the consensus that got us into our current demographic and cultural mess. Once you start looking seriously at the science of race, IQ, behavioral genetics, and the geopolitics of Israel/Ukraine, a lot of those “mainstream” positions look less like common sense and more like controlled opposition that keeps the debate within safe bounds for the system.
Ultimately, the choice is whether to base policy on individuals we happen to like, or on protecting the population-level traits that built and sustain our civilization. If the latter is the goal, then even seemingly harmless “one-in-one-out” swaps add up to long-term change — and not in our favor.
If we wanted to apply a selective approach, it would have to draw from populations within our own broader European genetic cluster. That way, you can raise the overall quality without introducing the loss of social trust, the erosion of cohesion, or the regression-to-the-mean problem that comes with importing people from more genetically distant groups.
This could read like you are responding to my hypo, when of course your post was before mine. Sorry about that. I should've just posted my remark separately.
I suspect Ansel first answered my question and after yours came in, edited his own to include an answer to your comment. I think.
I hadn't actually seen theirs yet. I redid mine because I'd forgotten to answer the question at the end of yours about White people.
Here’s a hypo to piggyback on Keith's question: I’m the cultural commissar at the Jared Taylor compound in Idaho. Our residents seem to be occupied with lugging around packets of dog shit, booze, college football, and Reacher. Their conversations seem decidedly trivial.
I think maybe they’re failing to establish continuity with Western Civilization as a referent. I decide they should hear Bach’s Cello Suites, and the only two performers available are Yo-Yo Ma and Alicia Weilerstein (please assume they’d come, best I could come up with at the moment).
I get pushback from the community along the lines of no chinks or kikes. How should I respond?
The premise of your hypothetical is flawed on two levels. First, Jared Taylor himself is the opposite of the caricature you’re painting — highly educated, multilingual, impeccably civil, and a defender of high culture. The idea that a community built on his principles would consist of people “lugging around dog shit and booze” is just a cheap stereotype, and frankly an insult to White communities in general.
Second, you’re presenting a false choice: accept permanent outsiders into your community or forgo world-class performances. That’s not reality. There are countless White performers of the same calibre as Yo-Yo Ma or Alicia Weilerstein, and even if there weren’t, the entire premise of modern technology means you can enjoy those performances remotely without sacrificing social trust, genetic continuity, or cultural cohesion.
In other words, your scenario trades away the long-term health of the population for a short-term experience that could easily be replicated without the trade-off. That’s a poor bargain — and it doesn’t address the core point that civilizations are built and sustained by the underlying traits of their people, not by one-off artistic encounters.
I think conservatism can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.
The liberals see the aspects of behaviour that come with human nature as baggage; they are above all that and form themselves into exclusive tribes, to prove it.
Heuristics are useful and often work. Tit for tat with forgiveness is a winning strategy over blind forgiveness and over tit for tat without forgiveness. And not showing in-group preference when other groups show in group preference is a losing strategy (except for a small group of traitors who ride their group into the ground and profit for a while)
Other readers have commented that the language in this essay is too abstract, and thus confusing and hard to follow. I don't think that's the problem though.
I think the main issue is that this essay tries to cram too many different ideas into a single essay. Even though the title is "In Defence of Prejudice", most of the paper isn't about prejudice, aside from the "Wisdom of prejudice" section. That section is also too short to adequately defend prejudice.
The best thing that could be done to improve this work would probably be to separate it into a few essays, and expand each of them.
Very abstract, metaphysical, mythical. Riding the tiger, are we?
I'm not much for mysticism and metaphysics, so why not just say it out in the open?
The current tilt to the Left is dysfunctional and unless we course-correct, the Western civilization will end or be irreparably damaged.
The arguments and empirical data are clear:
1. Whites are being replaced in their homelands. Intent or no intent.
2. Without Whites, the West ceases to exist. Immigrants don't assimilate, they reacreate their mini-homelands.
3. Therefore, we HAVE to become healthily ethnocentric.
I agree with Cofnas on this, we simply have to demolish the noble lie of egalitarian thesis. Or as Camus puts it, the denial of race.
I don't think we have to sacrifice modernity, i.e. science, procedure, rationality. Prejudice is proto-rationality. If prejudice, loyalty, tradition and nation WORK, you can make a rational argument for them. And an intuitive one as well. That will appeal to many people as well.
I think we can take our balls out of the freezer after 80 years of telling noble lies.
Cofnas acknowledges the problem, acknowledges that we have to destroy the equalitarian position, but he rejects ethnonationalism. He understands part of the problem but hates the actual real solutions. He still thinks we'll live in multiracial utopia if we just about that we're not equal. It’s like communism level detachment from human nature.
Cofnas' position seem to be free association:
I don’t believe that colorblindness is the solution. My vision is a society in which communities are granted more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although when people organize themselves spontaneously, there is often a degree of homogeneity. A society that has absorbed the truth of hereditarianism should be open to this alternative.
https://ncofnas.com/p/victory-without-a-hereditarian-revolution
I feel I would have been very receptive to this author's argument if it hadn't been couched in such awkard language. The older I get, the more convinced I become that we only really understand things we can visualise and here I could visualise precisely nothing. There were just too many strings of long, difficult words that jiggled around in my brain, refusing to coalesce into a proper thought. I still have no idea what 'the symbolic order', 'symbolic cowardice' or 'symbolic energy' are. In the end I gave up just before The Wisdom of Prejudice, though I may have another run at it once my overtaxed brain has had a breather.
Given that this piece was written in defense of a world view that often can't play the pompous language games of the rational liberal elite it's ironic that the author chose to write in precisely that style, as though he had accepted the enemy's choice of weapons, weapons which he can clearly wield with dexterity but the rest of us foot soldiers can't.
I teach basic Conversation English to Japanese university students and at the end of term they have to give a 5-minute presentation in English on a subject I choose. Some of them pitch the presentation at me rather than at their classmates, despite me telling them that the rest of the class has to understand the presentation or there is no point. They therefore know should avoid any hi fallutin' language and expressions that only the teacher and ChatGPT will understand. That, I felt, was the problem here.
That's why I just rejected the article as mostly useless and wrote this instead:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/in-defence-of-prejudice/comment/144469406?r=5i54qo
Many great comments here.
My take is that this article is attempting to make a philosophical version of the argument presented in Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"; that people with different moralities operate from different foundational moral principles, and that in order to understand people of different morality you must first understand their moral priors.
Although as other comments here have pointed out, there's several arguments being made in the one essay, with the second argument being about conformity to language.
I think I'll have to read the article again, this time in full and give the author a second chance.
Yes, I remember reading The Righteous Mind and being surprised by how much I agreed with what Haidt said. I had previously been a New Atheist fanboy and Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt were always at loggerheads so I assumed Jonathan Haidt was an idiot. He always argued with Harris in a gentle, wheeldling way that got my back up. Yet it turned out that Haidt was far from being an idiot and instead I started to go off Sam Harris, principally because of his politics and his inability to see that people's whose moral foundations were different from his weren't for that reason wrong.
'Conformity to language'. What does that mean? That we get an abstract idea and try and make our behaviour fit the idea?
Conservative beliefs tend to be more in line with our intuitions, which presumably come partly from our genes and partly from the traditions and culture we inherit. If our morality doesn't come from our intuitions then I don't know where it comes from. I don't think you can find a rational reason not to kill someone who's getting on your nerves, only a moral one based on intuition.
Anyway, I thought the article was going to try to justify a life based on intuitions rather than on liberal rationality, a hard task when justification itself is only achieved through arguing rationally, which is precisely what the author was arguing against.
Last night I got fed up with expending so much mental effort on the article but I'm going to take another run at it now. Wish me luck!
That's a bit too much pure abstraction for me. Can you give concrete examples or even hypotheticals that would demonstrate the normative claim being made here?
For negative examples, witness the capture of every successful populist party. In the UK, this is presently happening to Reform. It is a recurring, concrete example of procedural absorption. For (partial) positive examples, you can see how someone like Trump is successful precisely because he resists being entangled in the language games of the procedural public sphere. This is of course partial and inadequate for the kind of civilizational restoration we need. My project is about articulating what truly post-rational, affective politics would look like.
I would add that the demand for concreteness itself reflects the rationalist expectation that a disposition or mode of belonging must be defended through a list of empirically verifiable cases. This too is part of the same procedural mindset under critique.
That prompted me to respond to move it from vague philosophical handwaving to solid objectively defensible positions and claims.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/in-defence-of-prejudice/comment/144469406?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5i54qo
"In the United States, this culminated in the marginalization of traditionalism and paleo-conservatism by new forms of conservatism palatable to managerial rule. [T]he broader postwar conservative coalition increasingly came to be dominated by neoconservatism, whose missionary creed drew symbolic energy from liberal internationalism and American exceptionalism."
It is worth noting that Roger Scruton, cited in this article as a positive example of an intellectual who defended prejudice, describes himself as a *neoconservative* in his book "Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition." (He further applies that label to Samuel Huntington, who is also approvingly mentioned in this article.) Moreover, "liberal internationalism" is an ambiguous term, but Charles Krauthammer spends much of his essay "Democratic Realism" attacking what *he* calls "liberal internationalism." That essay is one of the classic statements of neoconservatism.
"In this new order, ideas do not prosper according to their truth or organic resonance, but on their capacity to be abstracted, repeated and operationalized at scale. They must be defended with slogans, metrics and universalist principles—forms of argumentation that can be processed by bureaucracies, debated in public forums, and amplified through media systems."
This is one reason why I think Frank Salter's concept of "universal nationalism" has such potential. Nationalism has "organic resonance," but in this way, it can be universalised.
Where in 'Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition' does Scruton describe himself as a neoconservative? I haven't read the book, and two different AIs said he explicitly distances himself from that label in the book. Of course, AIs can be wrong!
—NC
I hope this link works for you.
https://archive.org/details/conservatism-roger-scruton/page/n103/mode/2up?q=%22neo-conservative%22&view=theater
Scruton also praised Douglas Murray's "Neoconservatism: Why We Need It" as "[r]equired reading for all conservatives," according to the book's cover.
For related information, see my article "The Myth of Neocon Anti-Nationalism":
https://www.merionwest.com/the-myth-of-neocon-anti-nationalism/
I'm not sure he is referring to "Samuel Huntington in America, Pierre Manent in France, and myself in Britain" as neoconservatives, but merely as "thinkers [that] typify the new movement of ideas". Scruton would have to have had a rather strange understanding of the ideology to mention Manent as someone who "typified" it. Manent isn't even mentioned on the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism. There are also about a dozen people in America who "typified" neoconservatism more than Huntingdon.
In this article, Mervyn Bendle refers to a 2004 interview and writes, "Acknowledging his distance from neoconservatism, Scruton agreed in the interview that the book revealed more of a kinship with American paleoconservatism".
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/philosophy-roger-scruton-mervyn-bendle.html
—NC
Sure would be nice to have the original text of that interview, especially since the book Bendle refers to is Scruton's 1979 work "The Meaning of Conservatism," not "Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition." It's also possible Scruton's ideas evolved with time. I think the context in the latter book makes pretty clear that, if Scruton means to imply any distinction between "neo-conservatism" and "the new movement of ideas" it is a very minor one, with the former being perhaps a subset of the latter.
Having skimmed the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism, it seems to me that it barely mentions anyone from outside the USA, so the lack of Manent's inclusion hardly means he wasn't an example of a French neoconservative. The article also omits Portuguese author Joao Carlos Espada, even though Espada contributed to "The Neocon Reader": https://books.google.de/books?id=31y5P8Lz-S4C&pg=PP9&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=false Even Michael Gove, a British contributor to that same anthology, is absent!
For reasons laid out in my article, I think Huntigton's neocon leanings are underappreciated. Therefore, Scruton's choice of him as an example may simply reflect greater insight than most commentators possess. In any case, he doesn't explicitly claim that Huntington is the *best* American example of a neocon. Maybe he just picked him because he liked him.
Moreover, Scruton implictly endorsed the Iraq War, which would certainly have made him an unusual example of a paleocon. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/american-intention-to-liberate-not-to-enslave/ And again, he seems to have been rather enthusiastic about Murray's arguments in favour of neoconservatism.
I don’t see how anyone who has read The Clash of Civilizations could seriously take Huntington as a neoconservative, and Scruton is an even worse fit for the label. In any case, I specifically acknowledged that it 'yielded genuine policy achievements, in both Britain and America, while helping clarify key distinctions between conservative and progressive worldviews.'
As for Scruton’s praise of Murray’s book on neoconservatism, that likely owes at least as much to their friendship and his role as a mentor as it does to any deep ideological identification.
"The issues that divide the West and these other societies are increasingly
important on the international agenda. Three such issues involve the efforts of
the West: (1) to maintain its military superiority through policies of nonproliferation and counterproliferation with respect to nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons and the means to deliver them; (2) to promote Western political
values and institutions by pressing other societies to respect human rights as
conceived in the West and to adopt democracy on Western lines; and (3) to
protect the cultural, social, and ethnic integrity of Western societies by restricting the number of non-Westerners admitted as immigrants or refugees. In
all three areas the West has had and is likely to continue to have difficulties
defending its interests against those of non-Western societies."
- "The Clash of Civilizations"
That sounds rather neoconservative to me - unless, of course, one defines neoconservatism as being pro-immigration.
"In any case, I specifically acknowledged that it 'yielded genuine policy achievements, in both Britain and America, while helping clarify key distinctions between conservative and progressive worldviews.'"
Sure, and I appreciated that (even as a non-neocon). I never accused you of disparaging neoconservatism wholesale.
"As for Scruton’s praise of Murray’s book on neoconservatism, that likely owes at least as much to their friendship and his role as a mentor as it does to any deep ideological identification."
I mean, I guess that's possible, but I think the evidence I have cited paints a pretty cohesive picture. For what it's worth, Robert P. George writes in his obituary for Scruton that "Roger joined the iconic American neoconservative Irving Kristol in giving capitalism only “two cheers” — perhaps no more than one and three-quarters." In fact, George seems to identify this as the main feature that set Scruton apart from other Anglo-American conservatives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/roger-scruton.html
You are cherry picking quotes out of context and also misinterpreting them. Huntington was describing recent history, not recommending the promotion of Western-style democracy in countries that were fundamentally unsuited to it.
'The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization.'
'Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some have promoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. […] The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.’
These views are fundamentally opposed to neoconservatism as it is commonly understood.
I think you're kinda missing the point. In the pages that follow the quotation I provided, Huntington offers a nuanced assessment of the successes and failures of Western endeavours to promote Western forms of governance abroad. He's not a blind ideologue, but he is for an assertive foreign policy overall. In "Who Are We?", he also joins many neocons in portraying neoconservative-style foreign policy as a longstanding American tradition:
"In conducting their foreign policy, most states give overwhelming priority to what are generally called the ‘realist’ concerns of power, security, and wealth. When push comes to shove, the United States does this too. Americans also, however, feel the need to promote in their relations with other societies and within those societies the moralistic goals they pursue at home. [During the nineteenth century,] its emergence as a great power […] made it possible for America to promote abroad [its] values and principles[.] The relation between realism and moralism thus became the central issue of American foreign policy in the twentieth century, as Americans, in McDougall’s words, redefined their country from ‘promised land’ to ‘crusader state’."
"These views are fundamentally opposed to neoconservatism as it is commonly understood."
Or rather, as it is commonly caricatured by its detractors. Perhaps *some* neoconservatives can be accused of "universalism," but neoconservatism is opposed to multiculturalism. Check out Irving Kristol's collection "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea." The second (!) essay included in that volume is entitled "The Tragedy of 'Multiculturalism'."
This definitional debate is tangential to my point. My argument isn’t about adjudicating the label for particular figures (though I maintain its inappropriate in these cases), but about the structural role certain postwar conservative currents played in making themselves acceptable to managerial rule. Whether or not Huntington or Scruton fit your preferred definition of neoconservatism doesn’t change that. I’m using the term to name a morphological type within a broader civilizational pattern, not to catalogue individual affiliations.
That's perfectly fair. In that capacity, I found your essay very insightful.
Quote: "Liberals and leftists often take satisfaction in portraying conservatism as less intellectually rigorous than systems like liberalism or Marxism. But the “sophistication” of these ideologies largely reflects their construction from abstract principles designed for systematization. Conservatism, by contrast, is more like a disposition than a system. It involves instinctive attachments to custom, tradition and inherited ways of life."
I would disagree with that somewhat. If I am a conservative it is because I want to conserve liberal institutions, which is the way it was with Edmund Burke too, if I remember correctly. And the thing is, these institutions have been largely abandoned by the very people who used to call themselves liberals (or more often by their children I suppose). Check out the American Civil Liberties Union for example.
My point is that the way is now open to defend these liberal institutions on the basis of the same "abstract principles" that were used to establish them in the first place. Most of them are still mighty fine principles, at least in my opinion.
The fact of the matter is that none of the smartest people writing about policy today are on the left, even moderately so. Or on the right either, at least not necessarily. In my own case at least, I strive to play it right down the middle. A liberal conservative, a conservative liberal, call me what you will. However narrow the path, it's the best way to go.
All forms of political collectivism will fail as scale and diversity increase. And collectivism, whether material or intellectual, is the realm of 20th-21st century progressivism.
Once I thought that collectivism cannot work, ever. A system in which those who produce in abundance willingly and freely share with those less capable of producing the means to life--in short, voluntary redistribution of resources. But I was wrong. Examples exist.
Collectivism is a natural result of evolved familial bonds that most species of mammals evolved as a means of survival and successful reproduction. At its narrowest scope, it is the mother/child model of nurturing and protecting. As species evolve larger social structures, collectivism is applied, voluntarily and without external coercion to not only the nuclear family, but to extended blood/mating relationships as well. This can scale up naturally to clan and tribe. It reaches its limits at ethnicity, diffusing as it scales up, so that amongst ethnicly differing groups, very little desire to share resources remains.
Now, if this is in any sense accurate, we might expect that a monocultural polity--a nation whose vast majority is of the same ethnic background, *might*--just maybe--be able to adopt a collectivist political/economic system that requires minimal external coercion for an extended period. But it will be fairly fragile and the free redistribution of resources will always tend to self-limit to the scope of blood relations and mating bonds. Beyond that, such "sharing" requires forcible confiscation and redistribution--which is itself subject to corruption and sharing amongst blood or ethnic relatives.
So that said, any modern western multicultural system is extremely poorly suited to non-coercive collectivism, and you know where that leaves us, right?
Increasing levels of enforced redistribution, rife with cheating on the part of those will surplus resources, and suspicion of hoarding/withholding by those who tend to receive redistributed resources.
Discussing the superfluous differences between liberals and conservatives under the current deleterious conditions in the West is a useless endeavor. We live in a plutocratic oligarchy...the super-rich vs the not super-rich. The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption.
"The manufactured contention between political parties is one of the methods used by the Deep State to foment societal disruption."
This is interesting and it aligns with my own belief--based on years of simply living thru multiple US administrations--that the left/right division of political parties in the US is an illusion. They are simply pre-packaged strategies to sell a set of marketable beliefs to the voting public, and the belief that is the most satisfying or best sold wins the election--which equals power, which the winners then sell to the small minority of the super-rich/rich who actually can pay for favored intervention by the empowered winner of the election.
There have been two basic ways to attempt to live and succeed in this system for all the rest. One way is for an individual to join with other like-minded individuals to attempt to overhaul the system, but based on *what*, exactly?
The other way is for the individual to attempt entry onto the bottom-most rungs of the rich class, such that you have enough in common economically that some of the gravy spills off of the gravy dish and you can blot up some, to your benefit. Leave it to your descendants to ratchet their way up onto the table, if they can.
The latter strategy requires no cooperation from fickle moral ideologues and is easier than many people think.
The Deep State only accepts capitulation. They will not accept defeat. The West's only hope is destroying the Deep State.
Not to be a wiseguy, but do you have any concrete proposals of how, exactly, to get this started?
I'll be honest with you. As a callow anti-war student I actually believed that The People--righteous dudes and chicks, all--would rise up and unify, and...and...and...
Start the Age of Aquarius, I guess.
I thought this all the way thru the 70s and half the 80s. Somewhere around Reagan's second term I started to wonder that if maybe if you can't beat 'em, maybe you should join 'em.
The very best I could manage was, as I said, the bottom-most rung (if that), but I knew that if what I was after in my lifespan was increased positive choices in all areas, from where I lived, to where my kid went to school, to what I ate, to a low-stress retirement, to personal safety, I was moving in the right direction. This is plainly demonstrable and has been for years.
So basically, until you can see clearly that the national public ethos will support mutual benefit (maybe I saw this in the 50s, but I was to young to really know one way or the other), I'd say that the practical and grounded individual in the US might want to think that it's been every man for himself for at least the last 40 or so years.
In fact, I'd venture to guess that only in times of real (not imagined) national threat--Great Depression, maybe, WWII, maybe--was it anything other than every man for himself in the urban areas. The frontier, maybe not.
If you were a realist, you would realize that there will always be a bureaucratic deep State, just like there will always be an elite
"If you were a realist, you would realize that there will always be a bureaucratic deep State, just like there will always be an elite."
Your capitulation will ensure that you are always subjugated...enjoy.
You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices
"You must be a real joy to work with because any well-adjusted person would realize there are better and worse bosses based upon your actions and choices."
Your reply is a non sequitur. We are not talking about the workplace and bosses; we are talking about those who control your life.
I like the piece, but I don't think the problem is purely structural. Example: these "neo-conservatives", ex-Communists from New York, are a particular people, with particular fears and loves, which are highly motivating, but which as a rule they prefer to keep hidden.
Here is a reflection on some of the responses to this essay: https://westeringsun.substack.com/p/beyond-conservatism