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Thoughts on “Dover Beach”; thoughts on race and ethnicity
(Note: this entry begins on the subject of the decline of religion as expressed in Matthew Arnold’s poem. Philip M. then argues that Christian belief is irretrievably dead for the peoples of northern Europe, and therefore that it’s destructive of me to say that Christianity is the only source of absolute morality. People need morality, he continues, but they can get it from their Christian heritage which is part of their historic culture as a people, and don’t need Christian faith per se. Philip then argues that the instinctive though suppressed awareness of race.can be a basis for a revived sense of British or white peoplehood. I reply that while a people’s race is part of the indispensable substrate of their existence as a group, it cannot by itself serve as the source of their values, morality, and culture.)
Philip M. writes from England:
This is an article about declining religious observance in America.
America already faces more of an uphill struggle than Europe because whites in the USA as a group do not have a strong ethnic identity (although I guess some Southerners and other pockets with long lineage must have something close to this), only a racial one, and historically we have proved difficult to unite as “Whites.”
But America’s saving grace has been its strong Christian faith which amongst other things has provided a strong voluntary spirit; and therefore smaller government, and a more pro-family Nation generally (and I say this as an agnostic, credit where credit is due).
When I hear the militaristic metaphors and strident self-confident language I have heard many of the more muscular Christian right in America use (I know this sounds liberal but it’s not—I approve of it!) I get the distinct impression that like in many Arab countries where there is a lack of a viable nationalism, much of what would be a nationalist backlash is transferred to religion. In some respects Christian traditionalists in the USA have more in common with the peoples their government is waging war on than their own rulers (you may disagree).
But I digress, I really just wanted to say that America cannot afford to lose its Christian heritage. From where I’m standing it would seem to me to be a disaster for white America at an already critical time (the election of a first non-white president and all), but a disaster for us too.
You never did answer me when I asked you a while back whether you had read Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” which compares the retreat of Christianity to the retreating roar of the sea, but if you did not read the last two stanzas, I am pasting them again because I think it is a most profound piece of poetry.
Is the tide going out on American Christianity too, Lawrence?
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
LA replies:
I confess I’ve never really thought about “Dover Beach” before, though it’s a famous poem. For whatever reason, it never appealed to me. The first thing that strikes me while reading it now is that the last stanza is saying something profound, that the world in itself, by itself, the material world, is just “stuff,” it does not have true value; that true value, true culture, comes from something that is “beyond” the world yet inhabits the world. And he is mourning the loss of that.
But the poem doesn’t really hit me, it strikes me as too pretty, too sentimental and sad in that mid Victorian way, rather than really profound. (Its language is very much like Tennyson’s in “Idylls of the King,” which I’ve been very fond of since reading it in my sophomore year of high school, but which cannot be called the highest level of poetry.)
Maybe the problem I have with the poem is the metaphor of the retreating tide. It’s too mechanical, as though faith were just a natural force that waxes and wanes according to some external rhythm, rather than an apprehension of truth, a belief in God, in the soul. If the loss of religion is as inevitable as the retreating tide, there’s nothing to be done about it. Ironically, this poem about religion has an almost Darwinian determinism: man as the subject of impersonal forces outside his control.
What we call faith really means: man is turned toward the truth, or turned away from the truth. Man is given the grace by God to believe, or is not given it. The metaphor of the retreating tide, while it may be thought of as accurately describing the steady external decline of religion in modern times, does not accurately describe the inner reality, in which man is either turned toward or turned away from God. So I feel that the poem is deeply depressing and defeated and not true to the reality of religion.
And I think that this is partly because Arnold’s real concern is not the loss of Christian faith, but the loss of Christian culture. It’s the external, cultural results of the fading of Christianity that he sees and mourns (as I’m guessing from reading the poem itself, I don’t know that much about Arnold). Since he doesn’t have real faith himself, and perhaps is not even interested in faith but only in its positive consequences for society, he can only helplessly mourn the inevitable external loss of Christian culture which is due to the loss of an internal Christian reality that he himself does not have, and therefore he can’t imagine turning around and reversing the internal loss and thus the external loss.
Philip M. replies:
Thanks for such a full answer, there’s a lot to think on there. On first reading of what you say I can only say that the “determinism” I feel when I read the poem is not so much Darwinian, but rather Spenglerian, part of the slow death of a civilisation that has reached its imperial zenith and is facing the inevitable subsequent decline. But there is much in what you say that I would need to think about—I wish I’d had you for an English lecturer at university, your faith gives you a totally different perspective. Once again, thanks for the answer.
Philip M. continues:
Your reply goes to the heart of the biggest difference I have with VFR. Arguing Christianity (or at least religion) has a monopoly on truth, and saying non-religious societies will fail if they are not grounded on religious faith, is a high-risk strategy. If you win the argument and everyone becomes (your kind) of Christian, then great. But what if people don’t turn back to Christianity yet you convince them that there can be no absolutes without religion? You are then preventing even an attempt at finding an alternative way. [LA replies: But surely I’m not the only person who argues that there are no absolutes without religion or some value system that goes beyond material reason. Further, I’ve always expressed things in terms of a range of Western “higher” experience, not just Christianity. Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy posits absolutes. Romanticism (at least some forms of it) posits absolutes. Bourgeois morality (which is not necessarily explicitly Christian) posits absolutes. Traditional Americanism (which is not necessarily explicitly Christian) posits absolutes.]
Put it this way. If Christianity in the West were to fail, which would you prefer as an alternative society for your grandchildren to live in? One governed by a socially and sexually conservative white-nationalist party which respected and retained a great deal of Christian morality, and which actively fostered good relations with the Church, or any of the alternatives—Islam, Liberalism, Marxism…. [LA replies: Hmm, you’re not talking about a non-Christian West, but a West that has Christian morality. But is Christian morality sustainable without Christian religion? Why are you interested in Christian morality, since you feel that Christianity is out of the question for much of the West?]
For this reason I have always found the VFR deconstructing of non-Christian strands of conservative Western politics as founded on nothing solid, as, whilst philosophically compelling, to be something of a Pyrrhic victory with regards to us Northern Europeans where, at least in my estimation, there is zero chance of Christianity making a comeback. Christianity in Britain is simply not a living thing. So, for the sake of any of my potential offspring, I have to look for alternatives, truthful or not. [LA replies: But of course Christianity is not a living thing in Britain. Just as traditional morality is not a living thing in Britain. Just as a traditional sense of British nationhood is not a living thing in Britain. Just as traditional race consciousness is not a living thing in Britain or elsewhere. The whole British and Western thing is gone, not just Christianity. So why are you singling out Christianity as the one thing that can’t be brought back? Saving the West means that this whole range of things that are now lost must be restored in some form. If you don’t believe that they can be restored in some form, then you don’t believe in the possible restoration of the West, period. So, again, why single out Christianity as the one thing that must not be asserted because it can’t be brought back?]
March 10
Philip M. replies:
“LA: Hmm, you’re not talking about a non-Christian West, but a West that has Christian morality. But is Christian morality sustainable without Christian religion? Why are you interested in Christian morality, since you feel that Christianity is out of the question for much of the West?”
Religions that have stood the test of time do so partly because they have adopted tried-and-tested, common-sense approaches to issues such as the role of women and the nature of the family. Although I am no longer a Christian, I still value much Christian morality not so much because it is Christian (other than in a historical, cultural sense) but because I believe it is right in a pragmatic sense and, for me, is “moral” in an axiomatic way. My beliefs may not have the gold-standard backing of a divinity, but you must not underestimate the strengths of a unified racial and ethnic group that can Hold Certain Truths To Be Self-Evident. Whilst your attacks on non-religious faith may undermine the abstract first-principles of a potential moral-code, real-life communities are not bound together by abstract principles but by ties of blood, history and land. So I agree with Christian morality not because it is Christian, but for the reasons Jews and Christians adopted and kept their morality in the first place—they work, and they create societies that have a fundamental soundness, goodness, decency and order which is obvious to someone of goodwill who cares enough to look at them and the alternatives. And that is enough for me.
“LA replies: But of course Christianity is not a living thing in Britain. Just as traditional morality is not a living thing in Britain. Just as a traditional sense of British nationhood is not a living thing in Britain. Just as traditional race consciousness is not a living thing in Britain or elsewhere. The whole British and Western thing is gone, not just Christianity. So why are you singling out Christianity as the one thing that can’t be brought back? Saving the West means that this whole range of things that are now lost must be restored in some form. If you don’t believe that they can be restored in some form, then you don’t believe in the possible restoration of the West, period. So, again, why single out Christianity as the one thing that must not be asserted because it can’t be brought back?”
Racial and ethnic consciousness may be submerged and successfully diluted with race-mixing, but it can never be eradicated totally from people’s instinct and subconscious. This is why modern liberalism requires mass immigration, because favouring your own people in the form of an extended family is so natural it happens on its own if permitted. The only way to get rid of it is to destroy the ethnic group completely, even if this means bringing in third-worlders and causing friction——it must be done to obtain total power: tribalism is hard-wired into us, but Christianity is not.
From time to time one can see the faint embers of English and British nationalism in people’s speech and attitudes. Even, on a racial level, one can see that whites in the UK are more interested in foreign disaster stories if they happen to whites than to other races, so there is still some nascent, deep-buried racial sympathies out there in PC white-Britain. The leftists understand this, and this is why they say Britain is still a “racist” society—it is. But I see no such half-submerged, or atavistic impulse towards Christian belief because it is Christian, or they are Christian. When discussing religion in the UK, Leftists will rarely bother saying that we are still sub-consciously Christian and therefore we unwittingly discriminate against other faiths—and they would say this if they felt it was true.
Those racial and ethnic embers can still be fanned by secular and temporal causes—economics, social unrest or civil war. But I have seen no evidence or even the smallest sign in post-Christian Britain that Christianity can take advantage of any potential social or economic change. Maybe I am wrong—I would welcome it, but I have not noticed it.
Religion, like culture and language can wither and die. Races and ethnic groups exist until destroyed completely.
I hope I did not say that “your Christianity is the one thing that must not be asserted.” I would always fully support and defend Christian traditionalists when they do this. All I would ask is that you are honest with yourself about your chances, and if you see that you cannot resurrect your faith, that you equally defend, support and work constructively (and I know some of my lot can be difficult) as the next-best alternative which will defend race and ethnicity and which will at least hold core values in common with your faith.
LA replies:
You write:
“Even, on a racial level, one can see that whites in the UK are more interested in foreign disaster stories if they happen to whites than to other races, so there is still some nascent, deep-buried racial sympathies out there in PC white-Britain. The leftists understand this, and this is why they say Britain is still a “racist” society—it is. But I see no such half-submerged, or atavistic impulse towards Christian belief because it is Christian, or they are Christian.”
This is a valid point. I think that you are pointing to a basic racial substrate of human identity and consciousness, which, of course, liberalism denies. However, I think that you may be trying to derive more from race than is possible. While a group can determine that it cares about its race /ethnicity and wants to preserve it and not do those things that will lead to its being destroyed (such as allowing mass immigration), a group’s race cannot, by itself, be a basis for that group’s morality, values, and culture. A group’s race is instinctively felt, as you point out, and is a sine qua non of its distinct existence as a group. But its race is not capable of being, by itself, a principle of order.
To put it another way, the race of a group is necessary, but not important. For example, we need to eat every day. Eating is necessary, but not important. We don’t make a big deal about eating and say that the act of eating provides the meaning of our lives and that we derive our morality and our values from the act of eating. Similarly, my distinct physical body is indispensable to my existence, but my distinct physical body is not important in the sense of being the source of my morality and values. In the same way, a group’s race is indispensable to its existence and needs to be preserved, but it’s not important in the sense of being a source of morality. The group cannot derive its values and meaning from its race.
Which is not to say that a group’s physical qualities do not matter culturally and aesthetically. The Greeks’ ideal of beauty was inseparable from the way the Greeks looked. We cannot imagine northern Italian Renaissance painting apart from the distinctive physical appearance of the human figures in the paintings. Certain physical types may become ideals, and those ideals carry not only aesthetic but moral meanings. But those physical types take on their particular meaning in a particular cultural/spiritual context. If you reduce the meaning of a culture to a physical type you end up with the kitsch of Nazi sculpture.
The various historic peoples of Europe were distinct racial-national groups. If they didn’t have those particular racial-nationaol qualities, they wouldn’t have been what they were. But those groups didn’t create the nations and cultures they created out of values derived from their mere race. Their race provided the indispensable “substrate” of their existence, not its telos, purpose, and meaning. The purpose and meaning came from elsewhere. Thus, according to Bede, the English became a nation when they adopted Christianity. They didn’t become a nation from the bare fact of being Anglo-Saxons; in fact they were divided into several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It was their Christianity, added on top of their common substrate of ethnicity-race, that made them the English nation.
Or as Samuel Francis said in his speech at the 1994 American Renaissance conference, the whiteness of the white race was indispensable to the creation of Western civilization, but it was not sufficient. Similarly, through all of American history up to the mid twentieth century, white Americans were frankly aware of themselves as whites and saw America as a “white man’s country.” But they didn’t make a big deal out of whiteness in itself. Their whiteness was part of the substrate of what they were, it was not a source of values. Now it could be argued that their failure to make a big deal out of whiteness was the reason they precipitately and disastrously gave up their racial identity at the time of the civil rights movement. But that can’t be it, because there were white peoples who did make a big deal out of whiteness, such as the South Africans, and they also gave up their racial identity under the pressure of racial egalitarianism. So the failure was not the failure to make race the source of values; the failure was the failure to see that their race was an indispensable part of what they were.
This is a difficult subject to articulate and I am not claiming that my way of putting it is the only way. But the effort needs to be made.
Philip M. replies:
I have read through what you have written a couple of times, but there is so much in there I haven’t grasped it all yet. For the moment, this comes to mind. You quote Bede about the English becoming a nation when they became Christian. Firstly, he was a monk so had a vested interest to “Christianise” English history.
Secondly, he was specifically talking about embracing Catholicism—statues, praying to the virgin Mary, obeying the Pope in Rome. For a thousand years the English were devout Marians, Papists and Catholics.
Do you think we became less English when we became Protestant? Bede would probably think so, but I would say there was continuity from Catholicism to Protestantism and we can likewise still exist, albeit in an altered form, in a post-Christian world. The English were quintissential Catholics and then quintissential Protestants. Yet the “we” remained “we.” As this is what is happening here I have no choice but to hope and believe we can shed our skin yet still somehow remain “us.” If Christianity really is an essential component to the English then we are already dead.
LA replies:
First, the English Reformation was an extremely traumatic event in English history and is not something to be passed off lightly. Also, it was a unique event and it’s not clear that it can serve as a model or antecedent for other changes.
Second, it cannot be ignored that England’s rapid rejection of God, Christ, the Christian religion, Christian morality, and Christian culture has happened simultaneously with the rapid suicide of the English nation.
LA continues:
I will say something I’ve said before. I think only one thing can save Britain and the rest of western Europe. Just as a man, when he gets really messed up in his life, and sees that his own direction is wrong, and so turns to God and repents and asks Jesus Christ to enter his life and be his guide, and is born in newness of life, in the same way, only something like that can save Europe. There has never in history been such a clear example of a civilization rejecting God, rejecting spiritual and moral truth, and simultaneously destroying itself. I believe Europe can be saved by—can only be saved by—turning back to God.
Which leads to the next level of the problem: that the churches as they now exist are mostly part of the Western suicide. But I believe that if people began looking for true Christianity, they will find it, or it will be restored, perhaps in some new form that we cannot see now. And I’m speaking for myself as well as for others, because my own church` has ceased to be a Christian church.
Philip replies:
Well, I suppose all unique events are unique events, but then they happen again and they aren’t unique any more!
I would argue that the loss of our faith was a symptom of a wider cultural and civilisational malaise.
There is no clear cut-off point as to where culture begins and religion ends. For example, a traumatic event such as the first world- war caused many to question their patriotism, and this in turn may have lead them to question the Anglican church for its role of sustaining a national myth that killed millions—as they may come to see it. So cultural factors could come to influence their religious thinking, and the demise of one presages the demise of the other. After all, people do not separate church and state in their own minds, and that is why the American Constitution had to specify not to do this.
LA replies:
Actually, the U.S. Constitution most certainly did not mandate a “separation” of church and state. This is secularist propaganda, which has become the conventional understanding.
See, for example, Blake Dunlop’s exchange with Bruce Gourley in the Bozeman, Montana Daily Chronicle on the question, “Was America founded as a Christian nation or as a secular nation?” (Hint: the answer is neither.)
Philip replies:
On your point about he need for a return to Christianity, maybe you are right.
But I am not impressed by the calibre of person in the church in Britain today. They are, it has to be said, cowardly, sentimental, naive, obsequious towards modern culture and severely lacking in wisdom in the face of an enemy that hates them implacably and will destroy them. They have less excuse than the rest of the population. If Christians claim to be living in the Truth then they will be judged as such, and in this country, they will be found wanting.
They spend all their time condemning and excommunicating people like me for trying to save them. It’s hard not to feel a little resentful, to be honest.
LA replies:
I understand completely. As I’ve said many times, much of organized Christianity as it now exists is an enemy of Western civilization. But—as crazy as this sounds—that does not contradict what I said about the need for Christianity. It is, instead, entirely consistent with the all-embracing, suicidal crisis of the West, in which all leading aspects of the West, including its founding religion, subscribe to a liberal ideology that requires the West’s destruction. We cannot be saved without rejecting that ideology at all levels of our society and culture. Whether such a rejection can happen before it is too late I do not know. But I do know what the ideology consists of: the denial of God, transcendent truth, and objective morality; which in turn leads to the denial of hierarchy and particularity; which in turn leads to the belief in equality and non-discrimination as the ruling principles in a bureaucratically and scientifically managed, unfree society.
(Unfree, except, of course, in the sexual, disruptively expressive, and criminal sense, which is what Samuel Francis meant by anarcho-tyranny.)
Tim W. writes:
The hostility which liberals have towards Christianity is proof enough that it’s necessary to the survival of the West and its traditional concepts of liberty. Secularism cannot defend against something like Islam without going fully totalitarian. And by that I mean hard totalitarian, as in the old Soviet Union. Today’s Europe and Canada are mostly soft totalitarian, lacking gulags and death camps but stifling dissent with threats of job loss, humiliating police interrogations, or loss of social status. We have the beginnings of that here in America, with diversity training (the state tells us what we’re allowed to think on certain topics), leftist control of public schools and colleges, and socially imprinted political correctness.
In our existing liberal societies, Muslims and other anti-Western groups benefit from something that has been called “maladaptive altruism.” Liberalism has defined our civilization as having no real qualities worth defending. Instead, all we’re permitted to stand for (as you have noted many times) is tolerance of others and their diversity. So anything that is traditionally Western (Christianity, white people, classical education…) is voided and replaced by openness towards the alien. Since the aliens do not practice “tolerance” towards us, they simply roll over anything in their path. Since our traditional culture has been wiped out, the only thing that can stop something like Islam is a hard totalitarian state. Such a state theoretically might arise if socially decadent leftists someday begin to fear Islam and decide to crush it. Short of that, or a return to a traditional Christian culture, I fear that our existing soft totalitarian systems will just concede to the “other” until there is nothing left to concede.
LA replies:
Tim has given three scenarios:
1. The leftist, secular West remains in its present, soft-totalitarian condition and keeps surrendering to Islam.
2. The leftist, secular West freaks out about the Islam threat, and goes hard-totalitarian in order to combat it.
3. The West returns to traditional Christian culture and on that basis defends itself from Islam without going totalitarian.
I would like to understand more of Tim’s thinking as to why a secular West that opposes Islam would become hard-totalitarian, while a traditional Christian West opposing Islam would not.
March 11
Tim W. replies:
We know that traditional Christian culture can resist Islam without going totalitarian because it has done so. A real culture can resist an aggressive opposing culture without crushing its own people because those people know their nation stands for something. They agree with that something and are willing to fight to protect it, to protect their women and children, to protect their institutions, to protect their future.
A secularized leftist culture has no endearing features of that type. It no longer stands for anything of value and people will not be motivated to defend it unless they are forced to do so by a threatening regime. Notice how passive populations are once they become secular and liberal. Or look at how nonchalant the liberals are in America when confronted with external threats or mass illegal migration into their territory. Western liberals simply don’t care if their nations become Islamic or if another race of people replace them. They could only be made to fight by a powerful state since all other institutions to which they might show loyalty or allegiance have been undermined. The church, the family, the ancient traditions, the male leadership role have all been destroyed. All that’s left is the state, and all it stands for in a soft totalitarian (standard liberal) nation is tolerance of the aggressors and openness to the diversity they bring. The only way to change that if white leftists begin to freak out about Islam or another race of people overpowering them is either to return to traditional Western values such as Christianity and self-government or to go hard totalitarian and jackboot the white/secular population into a war against the left’s new enemy. They won’t do the former so that leaves the latter.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 10, 2009 01:20 AM | Send
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