Chapter X
High Culture and Government
When the world ceases to value virtue, it also ceases to value true beauty. Today we are frequently caught in a battle between high culture, which we might describe as ‘true art’, and popular culture, which, whilst many people may call it art, is in fact the product of the left’s critical theory, which has systematically destroyed many of the driving forces of Western cultural achievement and made artistic beauty nothing more than the dirt which is scraped off the boots of modern ‘artists’. Whilst this book is not devoted to aesthetics, we must consider whether the government, if it is truly to value tradition and morality, has a responsibility to the arts, to ensure that they are not only supported by government but also an intrinsic part of it. High culture, really, is not high culture at all, but true culture which deserves to be appreciated by all. The destruction of education by critical theory has made this harder and harder, and unless an injection of true artistic virtue is rammed into the operations of political society itself, culture will be forever distinct — a battle which ends in the dirt being piled on top of the gold, with future civilisations only having a small chance of one day digging the latter up.
High culture is derived from classicism, which is to say the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Look at the very buildings which house our parliaments, the great columns and spires, turrets and pedestals! The architects of such great works sought to imbue a spirit of that age, marked by philosophy and critical thought, into the minds of those who make our laws and decide our futures. To lay an eye upon a beautiful building built after the style of our ancestors is to see the great things that human beings have always striven for: beauty and truth. Many civilisations of the ancient world had a remarkable respect for the powers of logic, and indeed, considering how much modern knowledge is derived from the scientists and thinkers of those ancient worlds, it is easy to understand why those who lived only a few hundred years before us had so much respect for them. To have a classical education brought great respect, to own a neoclassical house or statue was a sign of taste, to love the struggle for perfection, the order of design was not merely taste — it was an appreciation of beauty. To design such art is to project one’s own mind into the creation of something new, using the skills of logic and imagination combined to create something which stirs whomever lays eyes upon it, or hears it. It is therefore an act derived from a great inner appreciation of beauty, and a willingness to express one’s own feelings for something else for the appreciation of others — it is selfless, it is virtue exemplified.
Much modern art is slapped in the makeup of a successor to high culture, when beneath the veneer lies nothing more than the dirt we spoke of before. It is not beautiful to place one’s own bed on display,22 to scream into a microphone for a few minutes,23 to paint a canvas in different shades of single colours.24 Yet modern establishments laud their work as revolutionary — for it fits the revolutionary mantra of the neurotic left. This art ‘liberates’ itself from the conventions of what makes traditional art in any way artistic, and in so doing makes itself non-art; yet the critics call it art, and so art it is in the eyes of a world which has not been taught what virtue is, what skill is.
In music, the discos swell with noise, with sound put together specifically for coupling with flashing lights and drug use, so that the pounding, melody-less rhythms will in turn pound the listener into a psychotic stupor, eyes wide and mind lost to some other world which only brings short-term madness and long-term misery. Singers swear and attack their former lovers openly in their lyrics, song becomes an exercise in selfish self-indulgence and suffering rather than any meaningful pathos, rather than requiring any vocal skill. Machines tune the voices of attractive women to be acceptable to the ear, so that young men with unrestrained appetites might become devout followers of their latest crush and call it ‘music’. The pounding frustration of Beethoven, who could not even hear, yet offered his musical expression to the world despite all the odds, is slapped in the face and driven into the mud in the name of popularity. Meanwhile, attempts at modern classical music offer nothing but dissonance, and a complete lack of control in the face of modern orchestral sizes, developing the theories of those who paled in comparison to the skill of the masters who preceded them. Cultural corruption on such a vast scale as this must be amended.
Once, the state was the embodiment of culture, when great works of literature were quoted in parliament, in books and stories with moral worth depicted in paintings and in music. Even Godwin, who despised almost every existing institution, quotes Shakespeare and other contemporary novelists, philosophers and dramatists. At the coronation of kings, national holidays and spectacles, composers such as Handel wrote the most regal and striking music, which remains the staple of many modern choruses. Trumpet fanfares and the logical and theoretical structures of events and accompanying music held the audience of such spectacles in rapture. Government bodies wrote reports in perfect grammar and ensured that the language used was standard and correct, whilst members of parliament debated in as perfect diction as they could muster, speaking clearly and openly about their own opinions independent of pressure from their colleagues about what is and is not acceptable to say when part of a particular political group. Many of these statesmen were also authors, who wrote either great literature with social and political meaning behind it, commenting on the nature of life and what the country needed to bring it forward, or they were philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, both a representative and a champion of liberty, who despite his questionable views on economy and utilitarianism, still did not fail to provide the public with books explaining his personal opinions on various political issues of his day.
Culture and the government were intertwined with each other, and it was seen as a duty of those in government to hold in reverence those things which defined the traditional culture and high achievements of their ancestors. When we explored constitutions in Book III, we used the analogy of the plan of a house to discuss how it is best to draw up a national constitution. If the state is a house, then culture is its beams. The classicists adorned those beams with gold to beautify it and steel to strengthen it, whilst modern culture is more akin to a wood-rot. The beams will be eaten by the decay until there is no culture at all, and then we must dread to think what will happen — at best, we may be left with the shell of a house, at worst we will not have one which can function in any meaningful way at all.
Once again, our discussion ultimately falls down to the question of virtue. If society is to be virtuous then its government cannot simply be virtuous in action, but in attitude and habit. Custom and tradition are one thing, but practical culture with beauty running through its veins is just as important, if not absolutely necessary for the flourishing of traditional society. If the state has an appreciation for these things, it will soon enough become fashionable to emulate these traditions in order to be seen to participate in the higher echelons of society — thus will a more virtuous cultural system begin to take root in the bedrock of popular entertainment and art.
There will be those who will argue that aesthetics is not important in matters of governance, and that it is merely a matter of taste, but as we have said, this difference of opinion relies upon what we consider to be virtuous. Education in the modern world places very little value on virtue in a meaningful and practical way whatsoever, and so it is only natural that the vast majority of people have no interest in high culture. This is worse than a shame, since if it is culture which defines a society, and our societies are losing those cultures, then the agenda put forward by the left’s critical theory is coming to fruition: the criticism of everything traditional, everything binding, everything necessary for an enriching and functional human society is beginning to wear down the nation, and therefore mankind itself. When culture is dead, and traditions are no longer associated with government, there will be no defence against the threats of multiculturalism and the ab
olition of borders. Humankind will become a cultureless, empty and faceless race of apes, with nothing special about them whatsoever apart from their slavery to an establishment which systematically destroyed the very reason for their existence — moral improvement.
Culture is a vehicle for virtue, and thus it is a political vehicle. Attitudes towards high culture must lose their false associations with snobbery and anachronism, for they are related to these things in no way at all — rather, they are the defining symbols of a nation, the last bastion of golden beauty in the crumbling house of society.
Chapter XI
The Features of Democracy
We should define democracy literally by its name: the rule of the people. Godwin considers it to be a system where each citizen is considered ‘a man and nothing more’, that is to say, each man is given the same amount of influence over the affairs of state as the next. However, since mankind is not and can never be equal, when we say ‘the people’ we must include men with more influence, or at least the right to more influence, and those who still have influence but express it in different ways. Viewing democracy as an equality of influence upon the state presents a number of problems which prove equally democracy’s incompatibility with human nature.
The British philosopher Nick Land best identifies the major criticisms of modern democracy in his seminal essay of the neo-reactionary movement:
[Neo-reactionary politics is] predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it perceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing and cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.25
Land’s worldview is distinctly Hobbesian, viewing the masses of the people as unfit to govern, and he makes a cogent point — many people with the power to vote simply have no idea about politics, nor do they wish to find out about it, so long as their own personal interests are attended to. Perhaps a better and certainly less verbose definition of the true value of modern democracy is best provided by Marvin Simpkin, who captured the essence of mass politics’ flaws in an article for the Los Angeles Times written in 1992:
Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.
Herein lies the flaw of democracy. Because of the apathy of the majority of voters, or at least the caprice with which their opinions and desires chop and change, the general populace can very quickly become unaware of the fact that their rights are being removed, surreptitiously or otherwise, or indeed they can whimsically decide to vote to remove those rights, and suddenly find themselves in abject slavery. Of course, they would naturally blame their politicians for deceiving them, even though the right to vote and come to their own decision on the matter was their prerogative throughout, and any culpability for the loss of liberty would lie with the electorate alone. It is also possible for perfectly good men to be persecuted and ostracised as a result of ridiculous public sources of dislike, or merely because they express an opinion which differs from the accepted wisdom. We may consider the amusing examples from ancient Athens, where the politician Aristides, who had earned himself the nickname ‘the Just’ for his actions and speeches, was ostracised by the democratic assembly, and when he anonymously asked a citizen why he was voting for Aristides’ banishment, the man replied that he had never met Aristides, nor knew of any wrongdoing he had done, but was annoyed at hearing him consistently referred to as ‘the Just’, making the citizen feel small in comparison.
This is precisely why we defined the purpose of a national constitution as being for the insurance of certain rights, certain customs and traditions which embody the spirit of the nation and have a sacrosanct quality which governments must swear to protect, no matter how much pressure they might come under to change them. To criticise democracy is not the domain of the intellectually weak, but a necessity of the intellectually strong. But some form of democracy must be present in all political society, since some of the people will always be in government, and some of the demos will always hold kratos (power). The Western world has gone so far down the path of political enfranchisement that it has reached a stage where the power given to the people at large can never be taken back. How then can we make the best out of this potentially destructive situation? We should bear in mind the famous quotation from Winston Churchill that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others’; we must concede that the change towards total political enfranchisement was inevitable given the values of free expression, free speech and a free press that the West so valued. In a world which protects the freedom to offer an opinion, no matter how controversial so long as it is not obscene or vicious, the question ‘if we can all opine on all, why should we all not vote?’ naturally follows. We should use the enfranchisement of the entire population as an opportunity for virtue, and since we have asserted that the primary cause of government is virtue, then the opportunity is indeed palpable.
If every citizen has the vote, then the use of that vote for virtuous ends relies on a strong trust in the people of a nation to find the best political ends from their common consciousness, to elect the best representatives and respond to political events with outrage when necessary and praise when deserved. To place value on virtue and judgement in the casting of one’s democratic vote comes from having had those principles drilled into the individual from a young age. Education itself has an obligation to prepare the citizen for their role as a member of political society, which we might add, means educating young people in the structure and meaning of the constitution, and offering them insight into why the exercise of their political right is so important, not merely for themselves but for society as a whole. Often education is marked not by constitutional and societal instruction, but a politically motivated one, where teachers push a particular political agenda in their teaching of history and politics, emphasising the moral importance of a left-wing inclination, and preparing children for their future life as the stiflers of alternative discourse, the snuffers-out of political life.
This leads us to our ultimate justification for democracy as it stands: even if a great number of the population have detestable opinions, since individual opinion is the lifeblood of political discourse, democracy should have a tendency to edge itself more towards the truth than other systems, since it allows all — the moderate, the liberal, the conservative and the radical, to express their opinions freely and influence the government, so that it might edge the nation ever further towards moral improvement on a far grander scale than if the electorate was limited or non-existent. It also allows for virtuous men to have their opinions reinforced against the virtueless, and in the event of large swathes of the electorate being misled, allows for there to be a strong base from which the most steadfast of principles can stand against the forces of corruption. There comes with this a grave warning, however, which is that when society becomes intolerant of a certain viewpoint, no matter how detestable it may seem to any number of people, the value of democracy falls away. When the people cry out for the removal of the rights which guarantee their liberty, and lynch, either physically or metaphorically, those who speak out in the defence of those rights and traditions, then we know that democracy has failed. So long as democracy allows every man, no matter what his personal political disposition might be, the right to express his views and vote for the representative whom he feels best mirrors his personal aspirations for society, there will always be a glimmer of hope, no matter how much it might seem as though the rights of the people are at risk of being removed by t
he people themselves.
***
Considering the inequality of man, as we have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, complete equality of political status is never going to be possible. Even today, whilst we may believe that no man has more political influence than any other due to everyone having the same right to one vote each, this is practically not the case at all. When we come to each election and make a decision as to whom to vote for, to whom do we listen? Is it to our own conscience? For some of us this is the case, but there are also many who listen to their politicians, despite the complaints made about them, and believe their promises, judging their vote on the basis of short-term personal satisfaction rather than long-term virtue for society. Those already in government already have more political influence for a start. It has also become a political ploy in modern society to have famous non-political individuals, such as famous actors or popular ‘artists’, endorse political parties and ideas, since the general population might be more inclined to look up to and vote according to the ideas of people who they have been captivated by in modern day-to-day entertainment. The question of political power is as much a subversive and psychological one as it is a rational one. The public mind, in general, would rather vote for their favourite actor than their favourite philosopher. At least the actor is sexually attractive, while the philosopher, degraded as a ‘know-it-all’, has no objective value whatsoever, on account of the boredom he inspires compared to the heartthrob actor.
Political Justice Page 16