Though I have known you for quite some time I was not aware of this element of your history. Curiously, there is a branch of my family (on the paternal, European side) that emigrated from Denmark to South Africa. My parents were strongly opposed to the *South African regime* as were all the people surrounding me growing up. I could never think of it in anything but the most negative terms. I always remembered a Black friend of my parents who, when discussing the South African situation, always repeated the phrase "Whitey got t' go, Whitey got t' go".Harry Baird wrote: ↑Sun Nov 27, 2022 11:36 amWell, I came from South Africa, which was itself an exploitative colonial project.
For the sake of further conversation I will mention that about 10 years ago now, when I began the interesting process of an ideological about-face, when for different reasons I began to seriously examine the opposite side of the ideological coinage and, as I've said a few times when I read Robert Bork and Richard Weaver, which then led me on to read René Guénon and Julius Evola, I developed the habit or the strategy of examining all conventional ideas through a critical and opposing lens. Note that this was the time when the so-called Alt-Right first made itself manifest. The foundation, as it were, of the Alt-Right, is constructed upon and relational to an idea-set that reexamines liberalism from a critical perspective. There is a sound-ish reason why those who critique the Alt-Right and Traditionalism (Guénon and Evola, etc.) refer to fascism: fascism also has its roots in reaction. And the essential focus of that reaction is against "1789" and "1848".
Evola therefore -- and he is no insubstantial thinker -- attempts to develop a position with an enunciated, clarified, grounded reactive position against an entire historical movement which he describes as decadent. And Evola more or less develops his perspectives from a close reading of Guénon. Evola however took his *reaction* to extreme points. He wrote such titles as 'The Metaphysics of Sex" "Men Among the Ruins" and even an analysis of National Socialism: "National Socialism Viewed from the Right". In order to read these people, believe me, one has to have resolved to confront an entire set of established assumptions and installed ideologies. So allow me to say (and this is indeed true) that over the last 10 years (though my own process began earlier through an idea-confrontation with Nietzsche) I have been in a slow processes, even an *agonizing* process, of confronting and countering my own liberal informing.
This is why I say "I am a product of California Radicalism". I grew around people who, just like the acute Progressives of today, had absorbed their ideas, their ideals, their progressive views, and their activist determinations, as being entirely 'metaphysically sound'. That means that they genuinely and truly and without doubt believed, in their hearts, and at a metaphysical level, that the vision they had for the world was entirely and absolutely right. To oppose it, therefore, was really & truly to be on the wrong side of history. It should be obvious, in any case it is obvious to me, that this belief, this structure of belief, is in its essence a sublimation of the Christian-Progressive worldview. It is, again essentially, a religious view. Or to put it another way it is a 'structure' that remains even when the general construct of a religious-metaphysical view has collapsed. Now, and with that said (I am not sure if I ever stated this to you directly) I see you as nearly a chemically-pure example of a Modern who is deeply informed by a non-vertical Christian worldview and ethics. Again it is what *informs you* at the most essential level. So when you make statements about *what is* and then interject *what should be* an extraordinary (and a metaphysical) idealism is expressed. You cannot see things in any other terms. Your views have been *internalized* into concrete structures that, and so it seems to me, cannot be modified.
(I hope that you do not take this in any sense as an aggressive assault as it is not meant in that way at all. It is just an attempt to put things on the table for examination and discussion. The structure of view that informs you is, of course, very common and as such it can be examined).
If you've ever wondered where I got the idea and the terms about 'undermining' and 'burrowing' of our traditions and indeed of traditional metaphysics it came clearly from Bork (an extremely bourgeois and Americanist perspective), from Weaver (a more developed Platonic idealism), Guénon (an articulated anti-modernist perspective) and from Evola (who provides a sort-of outline for holding to Traditionalist principles in the process of dealing with the failures and degeneracy of modernity.)
So just now the idea of land theft by colonialism (by those who eventually created the US but moreover in the New World), the problem of Israel, and that of South Africa has come up. And this in the context of a larger discussion about Christian belief and Christian metaphysics. It is a welcome turn because, as I have stated, I cannot see the value of an abstract conversation that does not ground itself in the topical and the contemporary.
I was drawn to your assertion: "South Africa, which was itself an exploitative colonial project". From a conventional historical perspective this statement cannot be right. Actually, it requires a specific and a relatively recent perspective in order to confect that statement. It requires an established and a somewhat developed political perspective to *see it in that way*. It requires, then, a type of historical revisionism. You (I mean one) have to have been educated in the view in order to have adopted it. Therefore, to counter this view, I will have to bring forward and become cognizant of another, countermanding view. Largely, that is the view that I have personally. But having the critical position that I do have of post-Apartheid South Africa I will have had to *turn against* entire sets of ideas and assertions which are modernist and progressive. Again, my assertion here is that these are "metaphysical". They exist and operate at a level that could be described, though perhaps a bit fancifully, as subconscious or perhaps *non-rational* is the word I seek. So it requires an emoted reasoning, a sentimental reasoning, to *see things* as we have all been trained to see things. And the more careful and the more 'truthful" reasoning is then seen as 'fascistic (which is an interchangeable term with evil or even demonic).
Did you ever see the movie A Dry White Season? I recently watched it again. And though I fully understand the narrative *oppressed and exploited people seeking freedom & justice* which informs the film from back to front, I admit to *reading* it a bit differently. In this the countermanding and the *backwards* or *counter-directional* reading comes up: back to Bork, back to Weaver, and back to Guénon and Evola. The film is about (here is my counter-directional reading) the daughter who *betrays* the interests of her nation, her people, and of course *her race* which becomes the dénouement really, and the core 'message' of the film, and in this sense the recommended and advocated moral action.
It should be obvious, given what I am saying as a sort of prologue, that I am drawing out here, again, the issue of progression of narratives. That is, the issue of degeneracy and *undermining* and, eventually, of toppling. We follow the narrative because it seems right. We 'believe in it'. We can't see it any other way and no alternative is therefore possible. The result is achieved. Celebration. Justice and Righteousness prevail. And then things descend into chaos and degeneration.
