Posted on by Bonald

It is no doubt a great thing to free oneself from the cloud of humbug into which we are all born. However, clearing one’s vision is only the start of seeing; next we must actually look around. One way that the Enlightenment controls the minds of billions, locking them into a degrading and absurd mental slavery, is by making people imagine they know what’s on the other side. “Without the social contract…tyranny! Without separation of Church and state…religious warfare! Without feminism…rape! Without capitalism…communism! Without cosmopolitanism…Nazis! So love your chains, and repeat the slogans like a good boy.” You know how it goes. You heard it, and you remember how it kept you bound for a long time after you realized that you didn’t particularly like what they were pushing. Some never break free, but remain trapped on the edge of the edge of the Enlightenment box. They realize that there are deep problems with individualism and technocracy, but they can never effectively counteract these things, because they can imagine no alternative but Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition. Think Rod Dreher. It is not true that conservatism or reaction needs to postulate any kind of ideal time in the past, but the Enlightened must commit themselves to the belief that the past was an utter horror.

However, those blinded by the Enlightenment have no idea what is on the other side. How could they, with such a narrow, unimaginative, and parochial worldview? In fact, the world of alternatives is vast, so vast that anyone beginning to step outside Enlightenment strictures should be warned that the greatest intellectual challenge is still ahead.

The key to rejecting liberalism (the political expression of the Enlightenment project) is to realize that it’s a swindle. It claims to stand above every particular conception of the Good, granting freedom to all and favoritism to none, when in fact it imposes its own narrow vision on all of us. Its claims to neutrality just mean that it gets to impose itself without ever being forced to argue (or even assert) that its claims are objectively true, and that it never has to assume the responsibility that comes from being a recognized establishment.

Having rejected liberalism, you understand that the state cannot avoid the big questions about God, free will, and the nature of human flourishing, because any social order will represent some implicit answer to these questions. However, this does not yet answer any of these questions.

Now that you realize that gender roles are not inherently iniquitous, you can finally start thinking about the proper relationship between the sexes. Just because you notice that women are being treated differently than men in some context, you can no longer automatically conclude that the women are being treated unfairly, as you would have done when you were a liberal. On the other hand, it is possible that the women are being treated unfairly. What’s more, there is the new possibility–undreamed of by liberals–that the men are being treated unfairly. You must dig into the particulars of the case, the historical context and social functions; you must then apply general principles of natural law (none of which are as simplistic as “gender equality”). You must try to conceptualize the universal masculine and feminine virtues that society should foster, remembering that any given instantiation of masculine and feminine roles will be conditioned by culture and economic organization. Given this background, do the laws and culture provide a path for the achievement of masculine and feminine excellence? Or are the man’s protective instinct and the woman’s nurturing instinct being thwarted or deformed? These are subtle questions.

Similarly, rejecting a general right to immigration, right to religious freedom, or propositional nationhood doesn’t solve the problem of what duties we have to immigrants and ideological minorities. It just eliminates one easy answer. Rejecting the idea that ethnic communities can have no legitimate interest in perpetuating themselves makes it possible to begin thinking sanely about race. In this idiotic age of antiracist-hysteria, this is no mean accomplishment in itself, but it is just a beginning. What are today’s real cultural-biological groupings (as opposed to those created for the Democratic Party client system)? Should we be concerned with groups the size of the entire white race, Irish-Americans, or the Jews of one city? Whichever groups we choose, what are the proper ways for them to pursue their survival?

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