The New Politics: The Spirit and Fate of Conservatism and Progressivism

By Loren Berengere

Dare to perilously entangle yourself inside Berengeres provocative vision of the nature and foundation of political values. He intoxicates. We are in the presence of a red comet in a smog-filled sky. His two formations of books disturb. They attack the readers prejudices. They are very learned. Each book establishes him as brave and original. Each essay in each book is swift, strenuous, and seductive. Each sentence jabs. Berengere alleges that he makes more eye-captivating claims in one spree of pages than most academics dare in a lifetime, and reasonable minds could easily conclude that he is not entirely wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524549466

Loren Berengere

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Copyright © 2017 by Loren Berengere.

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Rev. date: 01/18/2017

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CONTENTS OVERVIEW

FORMATION ONE

Prefatory Note and Table of Cases

Prologue: Glimpses into the Whirlwind

Book One: Preliminary Theses on the Concealed Political Ground

Book Two: Modern Conservatism and the Search for a Remedy

Book Three: New Theses of Political Right

Book Four: New Theses of Religious Right

Book Five: Observations Forecasting the Impending Schism

Book Six: Schismatic Politics as the Antitoxin to the World State

Book Seven: The Constitutional Finale: Constitutional Contrasts of the Ideal States

FORMATION TWO

Book One: Politics as Encounters with the Enemy

Book Two: A Glance at the Religion of the Right

Book Three: A Glance at the Religion of Progress

Book Four: Types of Production as Graduated Expressions of Contending Ideals: Commodity and Value Production

Book Five: Review of Post-Secession Constitutions

Book Six: Religion and the Temporal Power

Book Seven: The Logistics of Secession

THE CONTENTS BY SUBJECT

FORMATION ONE

Prefatory Note and Table of Cases

Prologue: Glimpses into the Whirlwind

Book One: Preliminary Theses on the Concealed Political Ground

The Opposing Ideals and their Motions. Opposing Values as Expressions of the Opposing Ideals. Political Praxis and Political Thought in the Service of the Contending Ideals. The Political Task of De-Privileging as the Necessary Function of the Rising Ideal: Progress as the Process of De-Privileging Dominant Elements by the Transitioning of Ideas.

Progressive Ideas De-Privilege the Dominant Morality.

Book Two: Modern Conservatism and the Search for a Remedy

Philippics against the Conservatives: The Idolatry of Selfishness. Egoism as an Illusory Remedy. Successive Preservationist States of Mind as Continuously Waning Reflections of the Expiring Ideal. Originalism as an Illusory Remedy and the Idea of Two Constitutions. The Two Constitutions as Expressions of the Antithetical Ideals. Conservatism as the Progressivism of Yesteryear.

Book Three: New Theses of Political Right

Constitutions as Means to Ends. The Old Rule of Law and the New: The Unitary Rule of Law and the Bifurcated Rule of Law. The Ideals and Praxis Coincide: Politics as the Struggle for Power. The Right of Invasion in the State of Struggle and the Continual Covert Transfer of Happiness.

Book Four: New Theses of Religious Right

Progressive Theology and the Submerging of Traditional Religious Doctrine in the Emergent Earth as Necessary Preparation for the Construction of the Universal Matriarchal Religious Consciousness of the New Humanity.

Book Five: Observations Forecasting the Impending Schism

Progressivism and Conservatism Defined. The Moral End of the State. The Concept of Sovereignty: The Old Sovereignty and the New. Sovereignty an Exchange of Promises in Light of a Moral Aim. Sovereignty and the Idea of the Situation of Impasse. Who Sovereign? Sovereignty as Potentiality and Sovereignty as Act. Nugatory Sovereignty: Duty, Breach, and the Continuous Escheat of Sovereignty to the Dispossessing State.

Book Six: Schismatic Politics as the Antitoxin to the World State

The Identity of the State. The State as a Compound: Sovereignty as the Continuing Allegiance of the Component Parts. Every Constitution Evokes and Characterizes a Type of Humanity. The American Constitution as Above Strife in the Old Republic and as a Battleground in the Evolving Social Democracy. The Out-Groups and the Struggle for Recognition. Mutual Recognition as a Stage on Freedom’s Way: The Out-Groups and the Victory of Anti-Patriarchal Values. The New Leviathan or World State as the Sum of the Moral Aims of the Matriarchal States. A Glance at the World State: Love and Hate.

The Moral Basis of All States: The Patriarchal State as Originating in the Social Compact or Exchange of Promises in Light of a Moral Aim and the Matriarchal State as Originating in a Pre-Contractual Organic Union of Reciprocal Recognition Illuminating an Opposing Moral Aim. The Constitution as a Compact of Sovereign Patriarchal States and the Constitution as Expressing a Perpetual Matriarchal Organism. The Moral Aim Over Against the State and the State as the Moral Aim: The Idea of the Central Authority and its Constitution as the Result of a Compact Between Sovereign Patriarchal States as the Final Check on Demoralization and the Matriarchal State as the Moral End Itself. Accession, Secession, and the Secret Thereof: The Moral Right of Secession as Transcending the Legal Order. Secession and Sovereignty.

Book Seven: The Constitutional Finale: Constitutional Contrasts of the Ideal States

FORMATION TWO

Book One: Politics as Encounters with the Enemy

Political Enmity as the Expression of Conflicting Ideals. Sovereignty as Act Produces the Antitoxin to the Inevitable March of Progress. Meet Edmund Burke: The Idea of the Preservation of Tradition as the Signet of Failed Conservatism. Secession, Restoration, and the New Conservatism Evocative of the New Politics. The Idea of Universal Secession as the Ruthless Interruption of History.

Book Two: A Glance at the Religion of the Right

The Idea of Nature’s God Versus the Spirit of the Common Law. The Grand Pyramidal Spectacle of Scrambling and Leisure as Probative of the Salvation of Souls. The Religion of the Right as Instinctually an External Religion.

Book Three: A Glance at the Religion of Progress

The New Consciousness of Religion. The Fusion of the Patriarchal Religions as a Means to the New Humanity. The Theological Attack on Religious Doctrine as a Means to the New Religion. Theology in the Modern World as the Progressive Resurrection of the Primordial Religious Consciousness Entombed Beneath the Patriarchal Religions: Meet Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Father of Modern Theology. Adolf Harnack, Rudolf Bultmann, and the Flowering of Progressive Theology. Native American Theology and the Native Quest for Justice.

Book Four: Commodity and Value Production

Commodity Production as Secondary and Value Production as Primary: The Fantasists as Hidden Producers. The Fantasists as Repositories of Erotic Energy Evoking the Eclipsed Ideal. The Operatives as Active Perverters of States. Governments and Armed Forces as Delivery Mechanisms for Primary Production: the Political Class. The Economic Producers Besieged. The Workers as the Target Class of the Ideological Producers.

Book Five: Review of Post-Secession Constitutions

The Road Not Taken: The Ship of State Steers into the Social Reef. The American Founders Debar the Ulterior Spirit and Moral Aim of the Constitution of the Old Republic. Substantive Due Process and the New Equal Protection as Flues for Perversive Values. The Creation of New States in the World as Vehicles for the Restoration of All Things. The Hidden Meaning of Pragmatism’s Vaunted Marketplace of Ideas. The New Test of Constitutionality as the Concordance or Repugnance of the Laws to the Integrity of a Way of Life and the Decisive Role of Philosophy in the New States: The Absolute Supremacy of Sovereignty over the Law. The Auroreate as the Monitor of Law. The Auroreate Described. The Animate Versus the Inanimate Constitution and the Solution in the Auroreate.

Book Six: Religion and the Temporal Power

The Temporal Power Withdraws its Protection from the Citizens of Heaven as GOD Withdraws Protection from the Temporal Power. The Anti-Christ’s Advent within the Apostate Church Being Produced by the New Theologies. The Goal of the Matriarchal State is the Production of the Apostate Church. The Institution of the United Sharia States. The Remnant Church Arising to Oppose the Apostate Church Seeks Sanctuary in the New Seceded Reactionary State.

Book Seven: The Logistics of Secession

The Marriage of Tolerance and Xenophilia. Xenophobia and Identity. The Imputation of Xenophobia as a Propagandistic Weapon in the War of Ideals. The Amorality of Identities and Secession without Shame. The Prospect of Non-Secession for the Reactionary State. The Sharia Communities Assume Sovereignty and Secede from the Matriarchal State. The Seceded Sharia States Reintegrate into the Matriarchal State to Subvert the State and Seize Power. The Counter-Subversion of Islam by Progressive Theology Begins in the West. The Triumph of the Matriarchal State and the Putative Triumph of the Reactionary States as Twin Pillars of World Civilization.

probitas laudatur

If a man steals a pig, they call him wrong; but if a State is stolen, they call it just.

Mo-Tsu of Lu

[Mo-Tsu spent his life traveling from State to State attempting to promote his political thought, but he was unsuccessful.]

Constitutions change, as a rule, more readily into an opposite than into a cognate form.

Aristotle, The Politics

T he vision of these bohemian writers became irrevocably absorbed into the culture, and once they upset the established order, American society could never return to the earlier conformist status quo. Kerouac’s political conservatism consisted in the fact that he wanted nothing to do with the beast he had created; his novel pictured youths taking to the road and breaking through to another side of life: it was a catalyst for rebellion, but these youths, headed west, then east, then west again in search of the visions of ultimate meaning were sober; soon, Ginsberg and Timothy Leary were planning a psychedelic revolution: if hallucinogens engender passivity, selflessness, pacificism, communal nurturing, merry jejunity, insouciance, muzzy carelessness, sloppiness, and irresponsibility, then Ginsberg’s duty must consist in spreading the gospel. The Beat experiments of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey should be understood as foreshadowings of the coming drug-crazed youth culture obsessed by love-pastiche and anti-war lassitude, along with the following proviso: modern bourgeois cultures are not free to recover lost sanity, for they must look on helplessly as the fringe moves mainstream, the wild counterculture goes canonical, and the Anti-establishment becomes the fundament.

Essay #208,

From Infinity and the Supermen

FORMATION ONE

PREFATORY NOTE AND TABLE OF CASES

B ehind and above the cacophonous chorusing of the foolers and the fooled, you will find here two formations of books. Because I repeat my conceptions as they are applied to other conceptions and to political reality, each book may be seen as self-contained and complete.

I do not go here from A to B, but over, under, around, and through, back and forth, up and down. I write solely to lure the light of day into a cave. So, as I did not compose this to garner a perfunctory interview or fill an empty belly, I do not advise my daring apprentices to wade out into this production unless such are able and willing to detach themselves from commerce with all the techno-clutter, the accelerated nonsense that defines mankind today, to deliver themselves, moreover, from all prejudice, and not just from enervating haste, to scour the silver promontories and purple seas, the vistas that people my revelations, to meditate with me in earnest, and thus catapult themselves into a new dimension inside a new world.

Here is a list of the cases adverted to, with citations:

PROLOGUE: GLIMPSES INTO THE WHIRLWIND

* * *

A free society is not free to turn itself around; an open society is never open to its destruction. A new beginning must be created. But not by revolution. Revolutions in the spirit of Jefferson and Locke address abuses, they have no power over decadence. This script is not that easy to approach, but as my targets are political people, their lust for things political will goad them on to comprehension of my core conceptions. The reader who does not spare the trouble of wading into the currents of my philosophical roman-fleuve Infinity and the Supermen will see at once that my design is to apply the non-political conceptions propounded there to politics, to translate them into political praxis, and with this glaring upshot: to extricate ourselves from a process presented as inevitable will require the creation of new States that will recapture those whose Constitutions have been perverted by the onslaught of an ideal foreign and utterly repugnant to those Constitutions, specifically in the form of the gradual infusion by backstairs and secretive sideways accretions into the Constitutions of foreign values. This contagion, which, if you rely on the new politics as a collyrium and visual aid, nay, a kind of telescope that apprehends approaching asteroids forecasted to collide with our political earth, and I refer, of course, to democracies all over the world, will become more and more discernible and noticeable as time goes by; indeed, the meaning of the political is still a vast hidden continent yet to be journeyed through, a sunken continent descried by my intrepid deep-sea divers whose initial reports of its existence left the oceanographers and Captain Nemos wide-eyed to say the least. This script, then, raises this sunken continent for first inspection. I cannot dictate or force upon you what you will see upon your own inspection, but I can give you a pair of new eyes.

* * *

The political is the encounter of the preserver with the destroyer, for preservation and destruction constitute the unspoken criterion for politics, whereas everybody takes it for granted that good and bad found morality, and beauty and ugliness initiate aesthetics. Two things must happen: the hidden meaning of politics must be pulled out into the open; this will simplify politics and prepare the way for the new politics. Then action, for politics without action is thought, and thought is always pre-praxical as germ and force. The preserver against the destroyer; the destroyer against the preserver; this encounter constitutes the political, such that the political is conflict, a perpetual agreement coming out of this conflict. But if this running agreement, so to say, moves the ball closer and closer to the goal of the enemy, and by ball I refer to the values involved which are the source of the conflict, then the other side, the side that seeks to preserve the values under attack, has a real problem, and for the most part labors under a delusion as to the ultimate outcome, as the nature of a thing is crocheted to its consequences. We call this problem progress, the social and political results of an undiscovered eros drawing the progressives of every stripe into instinctual and subconscious erotic relations with the primordial order of matriarchs who presided over the proto-realization of a pre-patriarchal ideal we call the matriarchal ideal; consequently, the encounter — the conflict behind politics involving preservation and destruction — is really an encounter between ideals in conflict and conflicting ways of life, as we shall see.

* * *

Progress aims for immediate goals, but we group all of these immediate goals within the constraint of a distant goal progress is yet vaguely aware of, a universal goal towards which everything tends, and we observe every thought and event operating in obedience to this unnamed goal of progress. Today everything is changing in accordance with a teleology, such that the progressives, those who push for progress, are really engaged in the evocation of a distant ideal, an ideal which progress of another kind finally eclipsed, but that conception of progress is no longer progress, as the new ideal crescendoing into being constituted a triumph; today progress consists in re-educating those who still cling to the ideal in process of being supplanted, such that progressivism consists in the undermining of this former ideal along with all of the specific values aligned with this ideal, and the new ideal will triumph when the old one has been destroyed. And yet, to exemplify this new ideal its epopts do not have to believe in it. In fact, these daring intellectual revolutionaries and insatiable expansionists do not even know it exists.

* * *

Truth as a fresh-faced, nubile young woman has every right to complain about the philosophers always hitting on her, but when some hermit exits his atelier one morning and confesses to her his longing for rare beautiful things; — well, she must have been ravaged by his demeanor, perhaps his persistence… The hermit declares this: "Looking from the beginning to the present we witness the progressive palliation of social forms all the way up to today, and it’s an easy guess what might loom in the future once a pattern is caught, for from the present looking all the way back social forms are themselves throwbacks to prior forms. In one word, unrestrained egoism is progressively worn down. Even slavery, we notice, entered the world as a palliation of every form that preceded it, namely the forms of force, the raw force of the animal world raging unchecked in the human world. Everywhere in nature the strong live at the expense of the weak, but occasion for the application of force is offered only where conditions of life on the two sides clash, and the weak refuse to subordinate their share of life to the strong. When a modus vivendi is established by subordinating the conditions of the weaker to those of the stronger; — this denotes a very great progress, and I mean that force unrestricted would have killed the conquered, but with slavery operating as a restriction of force, the lives are spared, and man raises himself to a higher stage in the course of history. Slavery solves for the first time the problem of the coexistence of the powerful and the weak, the victorious and the vanquished. The victor who spared the life of the vanquished enemy instead of slaughtering him did it because of self-interest; egoism was his sole motive, for he understood that a living slave is more valuable than a dead enemy. It was egoism that first recognized the worth of human life and, instead of destroying it like an animal in wild fury, possessed sufficient self-control to preserve it for itself, and hence for humanity, which always searches out gentler and milder forms. Specifically, the lot of the weak in comparison with the strong becomes in the progress of human development always milder, more lenient and humane. Next: the conquered people is not led into slavery, it pays tribute; it buys itself free: it is incorporated with the conquering people with inferior rights, and finally with equal rights. This means the fight ends with a contract regulating the relations of both parties and allowing the weaker to remain free. The strong man sheaths his sword and offers terms instead: he spares the subdued enemy out of self-interest. This earliest glimmer of contract presages the eventual decomposition of the terrible Patria Potestas and we pass from the despot of the hearthstone to law: his jurisdiction is finally overridden by the Roman public tribunals. With contract’s foot in the door, so to speak, we next obtain the first substantial contract between servant and master, feudalism. Then, the next palliation occurs when the feudal lord loses his privilege and becomes the tycoon, the industrialist and profiteer in capitalism, in one word, the individual whose naked egoism is predestined to decompose, for this newest embodiment of the patriarchal ideal must suffer its palliation. This progressive movement; can it be nothing but the result of random chance?"

* * *

Just as civil society is a throwback to a state of Nature, the atomistic spirit that views economic self-interest as the highest interest, the indispensable interest for a free society, is itself a truncation and watered-down version of an original, albeit fictional for purposes of classical political theory, condition of absolute self-seeking egoism in which the strongest individuality has a right to dominion and plunder, a condition previous to the State in which human beings preyed upon one another with impunity and were preyed upon by wild beasts, so conservatism as the defender of civil society in which the market economy expresses the free individual as the hero who is the engineer and sine qua non of such a system, the one who creates wealth and gainfully employs those who depend on this system for their subsistence, harks back to the social traditions that first bestowed upon the individual free play for his unrestrained appetite for self-seeking. In the beginning, conservatism greedily honors unbridled self-assertion, the fundamental principle of life, as tradition. So we understand that the pious defense of tradition in the spirit of Edmund Burke really comes down to the inerrant championing of civil society against the State, yet when conservatives champion the American founders of the original Constitution of the Old Republic who apply the spirit of the political philosophy of John Locke to the State and its Constitution what they champion is the political theory that fuses the State with civil society, making it, the State, subservient and instrumental to property. This is just the point: the bold innovations of Locke’s political philosophy, a cause of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, could not be hailed by the Tories, as conservatism opposes innovation until it is established as tradition in due time. An example is Blackstone. The conservative William Blackstone, who gave Jeremy Bentham such bile that he eventually threw up his hands and abandoned the law for bigger and better things, extols the liberties of England, as the established liberties are tradition, but it was progressivism in the law (Glanvill, Bracton, and Coke, especially Coke) that secured the liberties by way of centuries of struggle for innovation in the law, a struggle against the Crown, against Toryism, against conservatism in every form. What? Conservatism moves? Where is it moving to?

* * *

The idea of contract comes very late. This is the case with wills, the idea being that a will transfers domestic sovereignty with the transfer of property being only a subsidiary feature, and also with individual possession of property, for early society begins with the group not with the individual. This group was the family resting upon the patriarchal authority of the father to whom all its members, wife, sons, daughters, slaves, were absolutely subject. These members have no power to acquire property, to bequeath it, or to enter into contracts in relation to it. Scholars find traces of this Patria Potestas in the Institutes of Justinian. Its gradual disintegration, visible in the reforms of the praetor’s edicts, followed the course of gradual emancipation of the members of the family, except those under age, from the despotic authority of the father: this is the gradual substitution of the individual for the father, and I mean that the patriarchal ideal assumes a new embodiment. This gradual decomposition of the Patria Potestas, the stringency of the power of the father, constitutes a movement; a movement of what? The patriarchal ideal, its declivity, and the declivity of one ideal always entails the ascension, or gain in power and pervasiveness, of the opposite ideal. This progressive decomposition produces the individual; in other words, the individual appears in history as the result of a value shift pursuant to a struggle of ideals. This individual has power to enter into contracts. Now scholars will say that feudalism inherits the decay of the Patria Potestas and bases itself upon free contractual activity of the individual, but the scholars keep silent about feudal society’s full capacity for cruelty, hardness, and infliction of pain, as the rights of the feudal lords over their vassals were Draconian, as shown by the infamous right of the lord to deflower any bride in his demesne, and by their conduct, lawless on its face, as the action of novel disseisin — where the plaintiff is newly dis-seised of his land — ejected from his estate by a bullying lord — clearly shows tenants dispossessed and remediless prior to the institution of this celebrated cause of action by Glanvill, the King’s justiciar; these upstanding scholars who point to feudalism as a bastion of individualism, hence implying a substantial freedom from oppression, forget about the fact of villeinage, the predicament of the host of hapless souls at the bottom of the pyramid, that is to say, the slaves, who toil without any thought of individuality. Indeed, the very fact of subinfeudation instituted a rigid hierarchy not at all redolent of the free individual, but of the patriarchal values of segregation and superiority. The truth of the matter lies elsewhere: feudalism for all its contractual facade, its covenanted rights and duties appurtenant to land tenure, gives us just a first promise of hope for the individual, the first emancipation of the individual from the choke hold of the patriarchal father, not his emancipation as such. This will not happen until the coming of capitalism. From the liberty of capitalism we look back on feudalism as a mere mitigation of the patriarchal father figure, not a deliverance from it, such that its function as a mitigation entailed really a flowering of patriarchal ethos, for the cold hard Roman father, almost the same father as the new German immigrants with their patriarchal mund, has become, in the wake of the celebrated debut of contract as indicative of the pupa of the individual, the mighty feudal lord with his volcanic pride, inexorable ambition, and ruthless cunning. In other words, the individual appears in history as a palliation of patriarchal power; then this palliation becomes its exemplar and bastion in capitalism. In this process of palliation of power and privilege the baton is passed from the feudal lord with his patriarchal authority, itself a curtailment of the Roman power of the father as absolute along with the gradual infusion of jural restraints on this absolute power, to the next avatar of the individual as the entrepreneur, and I mean patriarchal power in its curtailed form, such that the individual functions simultaneously as a deliverance from the former patriarchal privilege and its latest redaction as capital. Ideas, attitudes, perspectives and stances are instances of the ascendant ideal expressing itself in history, an ideal in process of achieving dominion as opposed to the corresponding declivity of the opposing ideal; — this has been the secret driving force for any kind of development. Well, then; is it an illicit leap, something incomprehensible, that the same process that birthed capitalism in the wake of the assault on feudalism will now turn against this specific form which has outlived its usefulness as an expression of its declining ideal? We said traditional values exist because of an original innovation, such that yesteryear’s progress becomes today’s conservatism; indeed, conservatism as the outcome of progress, of original innovation as a break from previous values, becomes a retardation of progress, specifically, the slowing down of the decomposition of the old ideal.

* * *

Legal rules change as they are applied to novel fact situations, and as Constitutions are fundamental rules of right this applies with special force to Constitutional adjudication, but conservatives in their noble zeal to preserve tradition indulge in a kind of stubbornness and rush to deny the nature of logic built into the law, as rules must be applied. Therefore: if society flows ever onward into the future, and law follows society, this constant adaptation that satisfies society’s changing demands is really shaping not with reference to specific provisions in the written Constitution itself, but with reference to the greatest good of a society, and we locate two antithetical greatest goods discoverable in history as productive of all cultural forms, hence political and jural forms, such that any non-progressive State would have to insulate itself from the alien good of an alien society. Then, the progressive State would defame the non-progressive society intent upon preserving the values it has freely chosen to preserve, and I mean, of course, the way of life it has chosen to exemplify, the ideal it has chosen to embody, with the canard that it is a static society not unlike the societies in the Middle Ages, but this is not a proper apprehension of such a possible State, as any non-progressive society will redirect law to evolve within its own moral universe, so to speak, and I mean in accordance with its own moral absolute and the values that hover about and subserve that absolute. Surely it is the case that within that universe the good that broods over the society and its law must insulate itself from corruption that will creep in from the opposing good and its values, such that a new conception of Constitutionality is in order for any State so insulated: when the supreme judges are confronted with the task of extending principles of law to meet new states of facts which cry out for a remedy, the duty of the judges will consist not in ascertaining the congruence of the new facts with specific Constitutional provisions, but in ascertaining the consonance of inlets of innovation with the supreme good chosen by that society, the moral end that hovers over the document, and which the Constitution expresses as written law. And yet, if the Constitution actually expresses that very moral end, checking the specific provisions of the document will suffice, but not in the case of perverted Constitutions, as we shall see.

* * *

We said that in each era thought is constrained by the dominant ideal that underlies the culture of the age, and that this outlook reveals a dominant form of life, a way of regarding the world, as a form of praxis issues from a way of living in the world, such that a secret rupture, the onset of a long process of internal disintegration in the ascendant ideal, is required for the limits of the thinkable to expand and make possible a new way to think and a new way to live, as this secret rupture commences a new culture, just as the piling up of era upon era eventually reveals a new dominant ideal. This ideal experienced its first birth pangs in pre-history and was lent its final codification in Babylon when legal theorists hatched the idea of protecting the weak from the strong, although we affirmed that this kind of praxis only imitates and recaptures the primordial matriarchal condition of equalization, material happiness, and tranquility created by the matriarchs, as we discover a secret, quite unconscious, erotic relation between these matriarchs and progressives who work unremittingly to restore the non-violent condition to mankind under such rubrics as social justice just as the opposing force, instantiated as the patriarchal values of hierarchy, distinction, and superiority, likewise shows up in the world as an imitation of the first creation of divisions and distances between units, let us say, as hierarchy presupposes division and distance; and we said this original creation of distance-between inaugurated itself as cosmogonies of the first Supermen who created possible worlds distinct from this actual world, and I only mean to say that there was a revolt, or patriarchal takeover, as the religious scholars rightly say, all over the world against this original condition of paradisal peace, non-violence, and woman-based values instituting equality. But we will not belabor this here. Rather, we must focus on the process of robbing the old ideal, the ideal instituting patriarchal values, of its hegemony, a power transfer of world-historical proportions DESTABILIZING world history and refashioning everything, including man himself as patriarchal man; this, incidentally, is the ultimate meaning of technology: the fusion of man with Machine and everything that entails regarding the equalization, softening, reification, robotization, one-dimensionality — what do these names matter? — of homo sapiens, and I mean, of course, the divestiture of this homo sapiens, as man thinking will have become impossible: man feeling in a condition of mutuality and nurturing, that is the goal, man macerated into matriarchal homogeneity. Under the circumstances, the political is the expression of the moral, as Plato and Aristotle shrewdly point out, and as the founders of the American Republic chose not to remember, for they put all their eggs in Montesquieu’s basket, who wanted political liberty and feared concentrations of power, whereas Plato and Aristotle dreaded warfare within; and yet, even Plato and Aristotle, the glorious twin summits of political thought and creativity, could not in their wildest dreams imagine that the moral as such expresses antithetical forces we have apprehended in a state of mutual enmity and perpetual strife.

PRELIMINARY THESES ON THE CONCEALED POLITICAL GROUND

1

P olitical praxis expresses the as yet indiscernible gigantomachy of opposed forces, as political action is the firework display of clashing swords, but the display remains unconscious of itself. The political actors think they struggle for power, but they fight for either this ideal or that one, and all the values mankind may imagine cluster around these opposed ideals like nimbi, for the values themselves derive from the ideals or proto-forces; — in Infinity and the Supermen we called them absolute teloi, as we identified a matriarchal telos and a patriarchal telos striving in history. — Consequently, we observe political action as well as political thought actively reflecting a contest for competing goals, and I mean that the practical goals aimed for are really expressions and displays of more distant goals, for each ideal is its own goal, its own telos or end.

2

Political conservatism exists subserviently as one expression of its ideal; it strives to hold on to the old ideal: conservatism wants to conserve a once ascendant ideal, and the conservatives are in a dither because they can see the expression of their ideal — they call it tradition, or traditional values, or the Constitution — losing ground and fading away.

3

Political conservatives martially align themselves against the progressives, against progress, and even though the progressives are not fully conscious of the exact lineaments of the end or goal of progress, they sense the coming of their Crystal Palace — as we made reference to it in Infinity and the Supermen, the perfect Sphere, for a sphere represents final equalization of all elements, a completed Whole, but much vaster, much more extensive than the Hegelian Whole, for we said the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics are but moments or periods of pupation inside a much more comprehensive process; and you may call this process progress, if you like —; these political conservatives fight against the progressives because the progressives realize that before the new Palace can be built the old one must be destroyed.

4

The conservatives are derided for looking backward, for being backward-looking, and for this reason the progressives call them obscurantists, but the conservatives have no desire to obscure their ideal any more than the progressives want to obscure theirs.

5

Edmund Burke, a notable in the ranks of conservatism’s ablest defenders, rightly asserts that conservatism is a stance of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society. But once we yield to the conception of history that the historical progress touted by the progressives is an exhibition of the hitherto unacknowledged motions of an advancing ideal, for we said that the ideal that is in a subordinate position in relation to the other ideal attacks the regnant ideal unremittingly in its nisus towards expression, expansion, dominion, and absolute power, and that this journey of the new ideal entails the gradual waning and eventual dissolution of the once regnant ideal and the triumphant enthroning of this new ideal replete with its order of values, for we observed values clustering about ideals like nimbi; then society, or perhaps I should say those percipient individuals who accede to such an idea, will perforce recognize as a consequentia mirabilis that the progressive stance of yesteryear is the historical root of tomorrow.

6

Is this understood? Consider the ruminations of William James concerning the gradual acceptance of a new idea; at first the novel proposal is rejected with all of the obligatory epithets, outrageous, unworkable, incoherent, disruptive of good manners, decency, and order and so on; but eventually a wall is breached, a foothold is gained, and acceptance finally happens; Mommsen, the old historian of Rome, put it this way: real change happens when the older generation is laid in the grave.

7

Sir Edward Coke was the firebrand political liberal of his day because he championed the independence, even the supremacy, of the common law against the royal prerogative, but Lord Coke triumphed against the Crown, against James and Chancellor Bacon, against the entire English monarchy, because his idea triumphed, and an idea is greater than a man. Indeed, the puzzling unexpected idea, even the bizarrest of ideas, come to think of it, that government ought of right to be under the heel of law, triumphed first in England, and we can only guess whether or not such a gauntlet was contemplated by Stephen Langdon, the author of Magna Carta, even though no guesswork need come into play when the legal historian uncovers the Langdon—Bracton—Coke line as constituting the necessary preparatory activity that fallowed the ground for the fruit of Constitutionalism. Who can doubt that Langdon, Bracton, and Coke formulated unexpected innovations that changed everything? But these innovations would cease to exist as innovations, and become, in due time, Burke’s vaunted historical roots of society, the very inherited traditions and institutions the conservatives hold so dear. And yet: to say that inherited traditions and institutions are changing would make conservatism into a contradiction, for we said that the conservatives oppose the changes of the progressives; whereas to deny that the progressives are gaining ground would be intellectually dishonest, such that the historical roots of a society are established and fixed, to be sure, but the fixity prized by the conservatives, and upon which their solemn professions of faith depend, falls victim again and again to the very accretive supplementations called for by the progressives.

8

You can see now: the traditions themselves undergo change in the oblique and circumlocutory sense that they are denatured by additions. Conservatives tend to think of law as categorical and deductive, as we shall see, but the common law, as sharply distinguished from the Roman law model, is inductive, not deductive in the sense that legal rules are always applied to facts to get a result, and experimental in the sense that there is no deduction from rules to facts, but instead, we find many inductions from facts to rules, such that novel fact situations have the power to alter the rules, and at the very least the facts always determine, although without rigid precision, which rules are relevant. This is the meaning of the famous dictum of Judge Wendell Holmes, The life of the law is not logic, it is experience. Do the conservatives demand that the flowing river be congealed into blocks of ice?

9

Think of the young Hegel, standing on the shoulders of previous theologians, using every philosophical tool at his command, and not a little imagination, to revamp Christianity, to reshape it into a new form with a new content. Then, from the standpoint of religious conservatism, Kierkegaard objects, as theological conservatism is exercising its right to fend off the incursions of innovations that denature religious doctrine; think of the Hebrew prophets seeking to segregate faith and culture as a way to insulate the religion of Israel from the syncretic incursions of the priests who have fallen under the spells of Baal and Ishtar, for the wicked priests seek to preserve the inherited traditions and institutions of the religion, but also to synthesize these traditions and institutions with the foreign cultic practices of the fertility religions. And what is the end and aim, if you prefer, the unintended consequence, of these innovations? The fashioning of new religions. Now what can it signify if we admit that the historical roots of the primary religions have been preserved but polluted?

10

We see that the progress of the progressives is really the gradual erosion of an ideal that promotes a state of society at odds with their agenda of egalitarianism and equalization, for the patriarchal ideal promotes a non-syncretic condition of difference, individuation, segregation of elements, and hierarchy based upon difference in rank, the precondition of which is distance between individuals. But the matriarchal ideal promotes unity, non-violence, nurturing, the idea of Commune, absence of suffering, material gratification, sensuous play and general carelessness, absence of masculine aggression with its militarism and invidious distinctions of wealth, etc., whereas conservatives swear that capitalism is under attack, and indeed it is under attack — how could such a system not be under attack given the working of the opposed forces we are propounding? — but as capitalism and Marxism are mere economic models, they are epiphenomena, and I mean, of course, mere incidentals in a larger process. I am saying that conservative values express an older full-bore masculist ideal, the patriarchal ideal, that has been trapped in a process of gradual erosion for thousands of years, and that the values and the programme of the progressives express an opposing ideal, the matriarchal ideal, that has been gradually advancing by an insidious process we call the de-androcization of all values; — now we know the meaning of Nietzsche’s meaningless revaluation, for to say that a value is revalued says nothing in particular, and being nothing in particular it is nothing at all. Revalue all values? Revalue into what? The classical ideal? The Renaissance ideal? But we say that these so-called ideals are mere subsets, and obtrude in history as tangential to the patriarchal ideal, just as utopian socialism, Marxian communism, and, say, the new Creation story and emergent universe theological idea of Teilhard de Chardin; — these are subsets within the new matriarchal ideal, but Marx and the others could not have known this: the Marxian interpretation of history is economic; religion is banished to the superstructure, for it is epiphenomenal, but we say economic models are epiphenomena, for they are driven by forces hitherto uncomprehended. Again: the famous reconciliation of opposites we find in Hegel evokes and justifies primordial matriarchal unity, the unification of all elements; social justice is such an expression of the matriarchal call for such unification; social justice considered in its ultimate consequence means unification; even the so-called collective itself is incidental to our meaning of final unification in the Sphere, the Crystal Palace, call it what you will; this end-state of progress realized is the triumphalism in progressivism, a secular religion; and yet, secular religion, I should say, the emerging secular religion, can only be comprehended if we comprehend it in its ultimacy, for even Deism was a kind of secular religion; as such, we will recognize this faith of the progressives as an evocation of a primordial matriarchal condition of mankind, as we shall see.

11

Understand me: I do not merely mean to say that the approaching giant is a secular religion. It is, rather, a pre-patriarchal religion, the pre-archaic religion of the Mother Goddess who loves all of her children, i.e., mankind, equally. How, then, is hierarchy justifiable? In other words, exclusion of any kind is immoral, as the morality of one ideal differs markedly from the morality of the other ideal. A plurality of moralities? Well, yes, but each morality is subsumed beneath either this ideal or that one, for ideals are more expansive than moralities. What does this mean? It means precisely that in order for the equalization and inclusion of a new utopian freedom to come about, the new order produced by the new ideal, and I mean the ascendancy of this ideal, must entail the creation of new values. These new values are emerging today, for the emergence of a new ideal for mankind and the creation of new values go hand in hand; indeed, we observe every endeavor of mankind, all human activity whatsoever, working to bring about the ascendancy of the new ideal by way of the gradual matriarchalization of life: values are de-androcized. So then: for the aforementioned equality to supervene hitherto privileged groups must be de-privileged. Look once more; can you verify the de-privileging of the male? Equality of the sexes? Yes, it is so pretty to think so, but if you can fix your gaze upon more distant vistas, upon much more remote events that will occur according to the process of the motions of opposites we propound then you will find yourself in a much better position to throw out all platitudes endemic to the fast-paced popular culture with its naive worship of anything new as higher swindles; — did I say higher?

12

Nietzsche envisaged the creation of new values as the restoration of pagan values, the values of an ancient, perhaps mythic, aristocracy that would restore honor and the privileges appertaining to honor and courage; a kind of new knighthood? No, not a knighthood, for Nietzsche exalts the thinker, the artist, the rare and complicated as a type above the man of action. This type winds up the clockworks, so to speak, for the active types, the praxis men as we called them in Infinity and the Supermen, such that political praxis is nothing other than the exegesis and acting out of a command-language handed to them as a task; in other words, politics cannot provide a direction, but is effective after a direction is already known. And yet, by known I only mean generally followed, for we see that our true orientation remains unknown.

13

We presented Nietzsche in Infinity and the Supermen as a prime example of philosophers falling into the hazard of unintended consequences, for it is most evident that Nietzsche’s thinking intends the eventual supervention of paganized masculist values; his error is precisely the assumption of the perpetuation of the justification for such values, and we called this justification the patriarchal ideal as opposed to the matriarchal ideal replete with its antithetical values and praxis. We see that such an assumption is in fact unfounded. Nietzsche turns out to be the prophet not of masculist values, but of matriarchal values. Consider his vulgar pronouncement God is dead. This means, as anyone conversant with this philosophy knows, that the transcendent realm collapses in upon itself; thus Nietzsche reverses Plato to make the world present itself as immanence. Nietzsche emphasizes, Remain true to the Earth, but Nietzsche failed to understand the mission of Earth. What is Earth? In one word, it is the Kingdom of the Mother Goddess arrayed in the glory of Earth-based values, such that in his zeal to reverse Plato and the tradition, Nietzsche also reverses the cosmogonic act of the Sumerian king-god who uses the pickaxe to separate Earth from Sky, thus creating and enforcing distinction, segregation, and disunity; he uses the tool to separate the sides of the furrow into which humankind is sown; the tool is also a weapon to weed out rebellious cities and protect loyal cities, and the slave chops out weeds, understood as rebellious plants, to cultivate useful vegetation. These ordering acts are equivalent: they mean separation, division, distinction, disunity, and represent the patriarchal proto-perspective in opposition to synthesis, convergence, the unification of all elements in the Sphere, for there is no division and distance between units in a sphere, just as the circle is the creation symbol for the matriarchal Native Americans because there is no way to make the circle hierarchical. I put it that the aboriginal North Americans did not defend the land merely to resist occupation in a merely physical sense, but to resist the patriarchal conceptions of the colonizer. If everything in the circle is of equal value, then how can homo sapiens pull rank, so to say, on the animal nations, the birds, the rocks, the trees? The new ethics of the sheepish philosopher, Peter Singer, the ethical need to dethrone homo sapiens; is this imperative an extreme development of that darling in the juridical nursery, discrimination, an example of contemporary philosophy’s surrender to the values of popular culture, or a straight regression to matrist praxis? In which case we witness the insidious occupation of the occupiers, the colonization of the colonizers. Undoubtedly, for this is Earth’s mission: to de-privilege and dethrone, to negate primacy and dominion, for primacy and dominion are immoral states of being; the progressives identify this immorality and condemn it.

14

A deified Earth means the emergence of corporeal values, the anti-male, anti-intellectual values of Earth: material gratification, I mean an abundant supply of Mother’s milk, equalization, peace, reconciliation of opposites into unity, non-violence, emphasis on the body and sexuality, the release of the sexual in all forms, but complete absence of an invidious individuality, for individuality will inevitably lead to a desire to assert the self in a way that distinguishes by distinction whether the distinction or excellence be spiritual or physical, for distinctions mean superiority, and this will not be tolerated. I give a few examples.

15

Just as Tolstoy in Russia appropriated to himself the muzhiks, idealizing them in an unseemly manner to compensate for an overwhelming sense of sinfulness, and as Mrs. Stowe in America took under her wing the Black slaves to compensate for her felt sinfulness, for she abandoned the religion of her fathers, we assert unequivocally that the modern environmentalists need something to believe in, and although the reader may suppose that I make these remarks bigotedly, I reply that I only propose, here and throughout these investigations, to point up differences; indeed, in Infinity and the Supermen we propounded a kind of ceaseless cosmic exchange of opposed forces overstepping bounds, then making reparation, one to the other, with this consequence: the revelation of a cosmic justice. Now we were remarking that although it is not necessary for all so-called environmentalists to abandon or revise traditional religion, an honest environmentalist will admit that it is the mission of environmentalism to teach that man no longer may enjoy primacy and dominion over the natural environment, and that any denial of the existence of a transcendent deity, I mean a transcendent deity that is necessarily patriarchal, for we said that matriarchal conceptions are immanent and strictly telluric, therefore biological and corporeal, will not leave the denier alone to face Nothing, for Earth remains. So we say that the environmentalists enact a flawless logic: they appropriate the natural environment just as Count Tolstoy appropriated his muzhiks, Jean-Jacques Rousseau his state of Nature, for Rousseau was Tolstoy’s hero, and Mrs. Stowe her slaves. They are the new Abolitionists. What do they want to abolish? Patriarchal values.

16

Indeed: ecology-converts see drilling down into a numinized Earth as an act of rape just as slavery is a masculine scheme of non-acceptance and non-inclusion carried to an exploitative extreme; the numinization of the Earth is the planetization of the former throne of homo sapiens, for man thinking must be de-privileged and displaced just as the monoculture must be displaced by the multiculture, for monoculture means the dominance of one group, even one religion, and this is dreadful.

17

As enforcement of a new nurturing interaction with ecological systems de-privileges homo sapiens, the prohibition of dominion over animals also de-privileges homo sapiens, for the empowerment of one thing is the loss of status for another. Adults are de-privileged when children are empowered, Rousseau’s Emile serving as a proto-instance of such child empowerment; girls must be empowered as boys must be de-privileged, for the boys must be indoctrinated and taught how not to be boys; the adult male must be indoctrinated and taught that masculinity is the cornerstone and core of the authoritarian personality declared by our Frankfurt School to be the basis of all fascisms; feminism is the empowerment of women by matriarchal feminists, as womankind is divided into those women who have been awakened to the imperative to demonize masculinity and those who have not, Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies serving as a proto-awakening: the political issues of abortion and gun control are annotations to the larger