neoreaction

Towards a Neoreactionary Aesthetic

‘Neath an eyeless sky, the inkblack sea
Moves softly, utters not save a quiet sound
A lapping-sound, not saying what may be
The reach of its voice a furthest bound;
And beyond it, nothing, nothing known
Though the wind the boat has gently blown
Unsteady on shifting and traceless ground
And quickly away from it has flown.

Allow us a map, and a lamp electric
That by instrument we may probe the dark
Unheard sounds and an unseen metric
Keep alive in us that unknown spark
To burn bright and not consume or mar
Has the unbounded one come yet so far
For night over night the days to mark
His journey — adrift, without a star?

Adrift Without a Star

Generally, most cultural studies are done post facto, that is, to analyze that which has already taken place and is, because it is no longer taking place, a motionless body subject to dissection. We imagine that we understand culture that has passed from us because we can examine its ephemera from a safe distance; we inherently grasp the paradox of Heisenberg. For to say something about a living human culture is to alter that living human culture (provided that culture is aware of what was said.) To describe a person living is either to insult or flatter them; we may attempt zero proscription, but vanity comes not from an opinionated mirror but a neutral mirror and an opinionated gazer.

It is worth beginning a tradition of cultural self-examination, if such a thing did not exist, a way of describing what is ongoing and thus a way of describing that entails knowledge of something as living, and not a detailed examination of its husks and fossils. When I use the term ‘towards’ I do not mean to imply this is something that does not exist; rather, that it is something extant but nascent; something which, once it is named, will be recognized.

When I started following neoreactionary writers and blogs a while ago (at first, unintentionally, since there was no formal label to it) I began to collect impressions — informally — of the way in which neoreaction expresses itself. While some thrived on the notion of the different parts of neoreaction as being different, I looked instead for the reason why they were somehow able to cling together.

This is by no means exhaustive; these concepts are emergent and I have only included those that I have become certain of due to emphasis and repetition.

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Orwell identifies ‘neo-reactionaries’ in 1943

A big h/t to Brad Birzer on Facebook, for pointing out this column Orwell wrote for Tribune in 1943:

Reading Michael Roberts’s book on T. E. Hulme, I was reminded once again of the dangerous mistake that the Socialist movement makes in ignoring what one might call the neo-reactionary school of writers. There is a considerable number of these writers: they are intellectually distinguished, they are influential in a quiet way and their criticisms of the Left are much more damaging than anything that issues from the Individualist League or the Conservative Central Office.

T. E. Hulme was killed in the last war and left little completed work behind him, but the ideas that he had roughly formulated had great influence, especially on the numerous writers who were grouped round the Criterion in the twenties and thirties. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene all probably owe something to him. But more important than the extent of his personal influence is the general intellectual movement to which he belonged, a movement which could fairly be described as the revival of pessimism. Perhaps its best-known living exponent is Marshal Pétain. But the new pessimism has queerer affiliations than that. It links up not only with Catholicism, Conservatism and Fascism, but also with Pacifism (California brand especially), and Anarchism. It is worth noting that T. E. Hulme, the upper-middle-class English Conservative in a bowler hat, was an admirer and to some extent a follower of the Anarcho-Syndicalist, Georges Sorel.

The thing that is common to all these people, whether it is Pétain mournfully preaching ‘the discipline of defeat’, or Sorel denouncing liberalism, or Berdyaev shaking his head over the Russian Revolution, or ‘Beachcomber’ delivering side-kicks at Beveridge in the Express, or Huxley advocating non-resistance behind the guns of the American Fleet, is their refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved. Man is non-perfectible, merely political changes can effect nothing, progress is an illusion. The connexion between this belief and political reaction is, of course, obvious. Other-worldliness is the best alibi a rich man can have. ‘Men cannot be made better by act of Parliament; therefore I may as well go on drawing my dividends.’ No one puts it quite so coarsely as that, but the thought of all these people is along those lines: even of those who, like Michael Roberts and Hulme himself, admit that a little, just a little, improvement in earthly society may be thinkable.

The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that up to a point they are right.

Birzer has written a fair bit about Hulme.