Those of us who care about the maximization of Individual Autonomy in a manner not inconsistent with the Common Good are subject to occasional bouts of crushing pessimism.
In the increasingly scorched landscape of Western discourse, it sometimes feels like we are staggering, alone, towards our civilization’s Golgotha. But we are not alone, no matter what the Wormtongues of the Woke-Left and American Alte Rechte[1] would have you believe.
As a great Canadian poet and craftsman teaches us, “All of us do time in the gutter, dreams learn to look at the stars.” So before we sink down too far, let us first learn to recognize the Substack Scouts[2] who are bringing us back actionable battlefield intelligence.
Celine101’s Essay “Race-Swapping: The Re-engineering of Western Mythos and The Asymmetry of Adaptation” is Exhibit A for the Defense.
To read her is to encounter a masterpiece of careful construction, courage, and candor. Based in the United Kingdom – an environment that has become notoriously non-permissive for those who insist on calling things by their real names – she operates as a diagnostic clinician of our cultural malaise. Her craftsmanship is undeniable; she provides the truth about the structural rot she observes in one-way racialist casting decisions in popular entertainment:
[The] underlying elite consensus is that Western culture belongs to everyone, and therefore, it has no inherent right to preserve its own specific ethnic, demographic, or aesthetic boundaries. It is treated as a substrate upon which the “added value” of modern diversity must be layered.
But, the author points out, this ideal is asymmetrically applied. And this asymmetry reveals a targeted dismantling of the Western default. European identity is the only identity expected to passively accept its own displacement and erasure in its native mythologies.
But there is a difference between “truth” and “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” just as not every clinician is destined to become a surgeon, lest too much flesh be resected and the patient be crippled.
So as we commend our Substack Scouts, let me also offer a gentle rebuke—not of her facts (which are unimpeachable, inarguable, and profound), but of the remedy she proposes:
If Western civilisation [sic, British people] is to endure as a distinct and meaningful entity in a multipolar world, it must recover the cultural seriousness required to treat its myths, its history, and its identity not as blank canvases for ideological projection, but as inheritances worthy of solemn, unapologetic preservation.
So let me begin my response by making three points:
- First, the existence of a “multipolar world” is about as fanciful as the existence of “female astronauts”: There is Western Civilization, and there is everything else.
- Second, the first point explains why the Vandals of modern entertainment – who are profoundly, even pathologically uncreative – are incapable of achieving transcendence on their own merits: The only thing worth strip mining in Zambia is copper; and the Zambians’ copper, like the Saudi’s oil or the Shona’s breadbasket, is merely an accident of location.
- Third, “solemn, unapologetic preservation” is the response of a people who have lost faith in the inexhaustible renewability of their own civilization.
In Celina’s essay, I detect a palpable lack of faith in the ultimate Architecture of Reality—a defect which, I am ashamed to admit, I often fall into myself. When cultural arsonists are burning civilization itself, it is easy to forget that the Fire Itself is often a refining one.[3]
The temptation for our Substack Scouts, and for those of us who follow their maps, is to succumb to seductive moral indignation. We see the “Woke-Left” – “Creatives” who have wrecked our popular entertainment and bankrupted Hollywood with their unimaginative, ideologically-driven dross – striving to kill the patient to save the disease.
In our outrage, we might be tempted to follow Celina’s Conclusion and “hermetically seal off” our civilization by outlawing their mockery; but – take it from someone who has a million dead Iraqis on his conscience – some are cures are worse than the disease we were told needs to be wiped out.
The Way of Balance asks much of us: To return to what Samuel Gregg – in his masterpiece, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization – identifies as the source of our greatness. Sam argues that Western Civilization is not a White American Ethnic Bunker[4]; instead, Western Civilization is the best perfect machine ever developed to reconcile Reason and Faith.
This reconciliation is the only substrate upon which Individual Autonomy and the Common Good can truly flourish. They are not competing interests; they are a binary code. One cannot achieve the fullest realization of one without the other.
In Celina’s essay, we encounter a faint echo of the only pathogen that can kill us: The Collectivist Delusion.[5]
America’s Alte Rechte – those “Wormtongues” who mimic the very conspiratorial mindset of the Woke-Left that they claim to be protecting us from – whisper that centrally-directed collective action is our only hope.
They tell us that “People are smart” and that encouraging the mob to braying for blood is “White Self-Defense.”[6]
They are wrong. “People” are stupid. “People” is a mob, deindividuated and stripped of responsibility.
“Persons,” on the other hand, are as wise as “People” are foolish.
A group of Persons is what juries are made up of, not People. This Radical American experiment in self-government of ours relies on the non-delegable responsibility inherent in the Trial by Jury—the belief that twelve sovereign Persons can weigh the facts – and come to the truth – better than any braying collective.
The Alte Rechte and their fellow travelers on the Woke-Left seek nothing less than “ideological jury nullification.” They want us to abandon the individual responsibility of the Person for the mindless safety of the Tribe. They fling unhinged, sensationalized accusations against themselves without realizing it,” hoping we won’t notice that their “totalitarian nightmare” is just another sterile and unimaginative grift.
Endless lecturing is about as persuasive as shouting. We have seen this movie before, which is why Hollywood’s bottom line has imploded.
But if the story of Simon the Sorcerer teaches us anything, it is that the human desire to grift is inexhaustible. Celina’s diagnosis is spot on, and we need to take care what remedy we apply.
In the real world, sometimes dosis sola facit venenum.[7]
[1] “American Alte Rechte” is a more accurate technical description of their “new wine into old wineskins” movement than “Woke-Right.” See, e.g., Retzer, Teresa. “From Contrarian to Propositional Speech: The Neue Rechte and Völkische Siedler in Germany.” Comparative Critical Studies 21, no. 2-3 (2024): 359-375.
[2] We owe Substack Scouts like Celina101 and Sasha Stone and Eugyppius and Andrew Hastie and Darryl Cooper our gratitude and our attention.
And let me preempt any outraged letters from either (or both) of my readers: I understand that some of those people I have listed have been declared anathema by one or more of our self-proclaimed New Ecclesiasty. Save the stamping: I don’t read outraged letters demanding that I agree with you on which side of the egg is “proper” to crack open. (I’ve accumulated plenty of outrage of my own, thank you very much.) And, since I don’t have a lectern to kick, I refute our modern-day Humes thusly: I. Don’t. Care.
And as for present-day Eugyppius, Pseudo-Eugyppius is probably a better name, as I very much doubt a 5th Century learned monk – even one who was cool enough to be both the biographer of Saint Severinus of Noricum and compiler of Saint Augustine’s works – is writing A Plague Chronicle on Substack these days.
[3] Dynamiting a mansion or two to contain an out-of-control fire is sometimes necessary, but try telling mansion owners that.
[4] White Homelands and universal faith are incompatible in my mind, as my Master was probably not a chiseled 6’1” blue-eyed Aryan when He walked amongst us.
[5] Maoist Ultra-Nationalism, Czarist Imperialism, European Dithering, and War Islam are no threat to the American Body Politic unless our immunological response has been deactivated from within.
[6] Please note: I am not suggestion that Celina101 traffics in American Alte Rechte garbage. Her essay is a paragon of courage, candor, competence, and commitment. Rather, I am suggesting that even the purest of intention can be sidetracked when it encounters either Caligula or Herod.
[7] As Paracelsus teaches us, “The dose makes the poison.”
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