The Windrose of Reality
This is a reprint of a column originally appearing on in the web periodical EveryJoe on 11 November 2014:
The Windrose of Reality
In our last episode, we saw that the traditional Left-to-Right and Radical-to-Conservative spectrum is confusing and dishonest. It is confusing because it defines all political positions based on their degree of opposition to sick Leftist utopian daydreams, and dishonest because it lumps all opponents to daydreaming together, totalitarians and monarchists and semi-anarchists alike, regardless of the motive for the opposition, regardless of whichever of many varied (and often antithetical) political theories the partisan might prefer to sick utopia.
The real difference is the Right believes that we can agree to disagree. The Left doesn’t agree to that.
We are not likely, at this late date, to impose a new terminology on those who deceive and who welcome deception. However, just for the intellectual clarity is provides, we should toy with alternate taxonomies to describe political philosophies.
Myself, were it feasible, I would propose that we should abolish the one dimensional line, and establish instead a windrose, such as are seen on old maps, pointing to the quarters of the compass, or the eighth, or sixteenths, or any degree of precision as needed. We need a world map of more dimensions, a mappimundi, as are found, as wisdom is usually found, forgotten in museums.
Graphic by Camestros Felapton
In the center of our world map is the basic ideals and ideas of Western civilization from time out of memory. Let us call this Christendom, or, better yet, Orthodoxy.
The orthodox Christian worldview balances hierarchic and romantic ideals of chivalry against pragmatic notions of individualism, and balances the zeal of the crusader against the mysticism of the hermit. It makes room for all of them, kings like St. Louis as well as beggars like St. Francis, warriors like St. Joan of Arc and mystics like St. Symeon the Stylite.
The lighthouse at the very center of the map is the Church, and as one gets farther from Orthodoxy, it grows darker and darker, until we reach an outer ring, where there is no light at all, merely wailing and gnashing of teeth.
There is only one way to stand upright, but any number of directions in which to fall. Nonetheless, ideas come in clouds or swarms that cluster toward each other for support, so we can identify the basic directions into which a man who falls away from the center, when it is a political idea that lures him to topple, and reduce it to four basic directions or ideals.
Let us assign directions to these four ideals according to their chronological order. The basic ideals are chivalry or the personal state, classical liberalism or the impersonal state, socialism or the servile state, anarchism or the non-state.
South is hierarchical governments based on personal oaths, personal honor, and monarchy. In such a government, personal fealty is paramount. The vow of a knight to a king was a personal vow, one man to another, and the faith of the king to his people was a paternal, that is, the fidelity of father to child. In this view of politics, treason was breaking one’s personal, sworn word to a specific man, not betraying a flag nor an abstraction.
A small step in this direction does not rob a man of all virtue. It makes him, perhaps, too eager to glorify relations of status and privilege, and to inflate the person of the monarch to an idol.
Wandering too far in this direction causes a collapse into too much piety and too much emphasis on the community. It smothers the individual; it imposes on the conscience. Too much monarchy oversteps into spiritual matters, it becomes caesaropapism, it creates the national Established Church, the caliphate, where the monarch, the emperor, the secular power, establishes and rules the spiritual life of his subjects.
A sultan lolling on his jeweled throne, established on the skulls of infidels, or King Henry VIII surrounded by the ghosts of his many murdered wives, both of them standing on the bowed heads of their flattering adorers, will serve us as a fitting visual figure to represent this direction.
It is ironic that during the Dark Ages, commonly dismissed as the exemplar of tyranny and superstition, the common man enjoyed more liberty than either during the Roman Empire in generations prior or during the Reformation in generations after, when monarchs dictated the religious beliefs and practices of their subjects. For that matter, the medieval enjoyed more liberty, all things taken with all, than when the modern bureaucrat states, operating under the color of democracy, dictate the morals and manners, personal beliefs and practices of their helpless patients.
The difference is that the modern priesthood, by encouraging and rewarding contraception, fornication, adultery, aborticide, bastardy, sodomy and divorce, is trying their level best to destroy the family structure and the ruin the health of the mind and soul, whereas the medieval priesthood, whatever its flaws may have been, was firmly and clearly doing the opposite.
Historically, this heresy, which I assign to the South, first appeared beyond the borders of Christian lands in the form of Islam, and later in the form of the Ghibellines who supported Imperial control over Papal matters, and later again, in the person of Reformation monarchs who decreed a national church under the control of the secular power.
Where the state intrudes into the inmost conscience where God alone is sovereign, then the partisan of such a theory of politics has fallen too far, and enters the outer darkness that denotes him to be an enemy not of religion, but of civilization itself. He is a foe of civilization itself because he seeks a return to the tribal barbarism that existed before the first cities arose, when the tribal father, or the group, had the right and duty to dictate the conscience of the individual. When the king breaks the wall between the court and the cathedral, and robs the miter of the bishop to perch atop his crown, he breaks the wall surrounding the city, and invites the wilderness in. The terrors surrounding the reign of King Henry and Queen Elizabeth are forgotten, except in the name applied to Bloody Mary, who was of the opposing party; but the wars of the Reformation gave ample leave for barbarian to crack the ark of unified Christendom against the sunken rocks.
Such was the disgust of all civilized men for these excesses that in the modern day, following the bright example of the American Constitution, where the religious authority was returned to the peoples of the congregation, where it belongs, and the hands of the rulers chained by a First Amendment, that this is the least of any political problem in the Western World. Islamic absolute government, both modern and ancient, is the only example of such excess that endures to the modern age.
The disgust created a reaction that since has grown into an overreaction.
North is the opposite direction: the classical liberal ideal of individualism and limited government where all relations are impersonal, controlled by mutual laws and contracts.
Too much individualism oversteps the bounds of piety and community, and leads to an indifference to spiritual things, and contempt rather than pity for the poor. A small step in this direction does not rob a man of all virtue. He can, for example, be an exemplary patriot, and a firm upholder of the natural rights of man.
But his philosophy is worldly rather than Christian, a matter of practical sense. He starts by being tolerant of all denominations, and, if he stopped there, he would remain within the ambit of civilization.
But if he takes a step too far, then he makes a fetish of neutrality, so that any public mention of the faith becomes anathema, and then a matter for mockery, and finally excoriation. He moves from insisting the state establish no national religion to insisting the state mention no religion. Christianity becomes unwelcome, but not illegal.
But the next step after is madness: in the name of equality and toleration and neutrality, he begins to insist that religions which actively seek to overthrow the state and force the state to conform to Shariah Law, namely, the Islamic religion (which we placed, if you recall, in the diametrically opposite direction on our world map), not only be tolerated, but welcomed, nay, celebrated and abetted. At that point, he is an opponent of civilization, if not an enemy, and embarked on self destruction. He has moved all the way into the ring of darkness forming the outer boundary of our map.
Now the advantage of a two-dimensional map of possible political loyalties rather than a simplistic one-dimensional line is that nuances can be distinguished. The antireligious nut who makes such a religion of toleration that he tolerates those who will never tolerate him and that he welcomes mad bombers is not the only pathway into darkness. Let us call this the Northeast direction in which to get lost.
A man getting lost in the Northwest direction starts from the essential idea of religious neutrality, toleration, and a secular basis for law and government, and takes the unnecessary extra step farther from the central lamp when he is lured by the so-called pragmatism of a Machiavelli into what he calls hardball politics, realpolitik. (Naturally enough, this word is German.)
From there it is a soft, slippery slope, gentle and with no roadsigns, into the realm of shameless propaganda, fraud, and treason. All such sins become the expected and reasonable tool of policy, and scruples about such things are laughed away as the rosy figments of idealists. Hardball politics in the realm of economics is an undue deference to the interests of the rich, who are, after all, practical men able to make or break the practical fortunes of politicians or other men. The pragmatic man hence hardens into a cynic, where he expects or even welcomes the incestuous marriage of big business and big government, sweetheart deals, intrigues, false accusations, and, eventually, if the path of excuses labeled ‘the ends justify the means’ is sought out to its nasty terminus, fascism.
This word has been so abused by the Left as to render it meaningless, but its original meaning was a government of the style of Mussolini’s Italy, where industry was privately owned in name while regulated by the government in fact, for the alleged general good of society in name, and for the small cadre of oligarchs and their clients in fact. We Virginians call this the ‘Good Old Boys’ system, and the Democrats have perfected it.
By no coincidence, it is the same form of government that is currently rearing its head in the Middle East, albeit in the name of Islam rather than in the name of National Socialism. Those who call the Jihadists ‘Islamic Fascists’ are using the word in the technically correct fashion, not merely as a swear word.
This worldly philosophy flowered in the Eighteenth Century, in the glorious success of the American Revolution and the nightmarish failure of the French, followed by the Terror. The difference being that the Americans were firmly faithful to Christian ideals, even the Deists who pretended not to be, whereas the French were loyal to ideals of secularism, anticlericalism, and laicism, enunciated by several authors, but most tellingly by the Marquis de Sade.
East is the direction of the crusades, it is where the zealots and the True Believers wander. This direction rejects the chivalry of the south and the cool pragmatism of the north, but there is also nothing individualistic or private in this view. The worldly pragmatism of the classical liberal view disgusts him: he wants a spiritual crusade, a larger goal to which to devote his life. He is human, and humans have spiritual hungers that pragmatic regimes which make money and defend from fraud and force do not satisfy. He needs a dream. But the modern mind does not look for dreams at their source, which is heaven, but seeks the road to heaven here on earth.
In the modern age, the only heresy where the collectivist, impractical and unchivalrous elements are on full display is the political theory of Marx, and its mutant offspring the cultural theory of Gramsci.
For those of you unfamiliar with these names, Marx invented the theory that to halt the innate injustice of having wage- earners work for a living, the state should seize total control of all aspects of the economy and turn them into slaves.
The impossibility of calculating prices in a socialist commonwealth, the innate limitations of the law of supply and demand, and in innate disutility of labor would all be wished into nonexistence by calling real economists (who pointed out these flaws in Marxist thinking) pigs and running dogs of imperialist capitalists.
And Gramsci turned the brilliance of this ‘A is so not-A’ theory from the economic realm to the cultural realm. Instead of employers oppressing employees by given them jobs being a problem that a totalitarian state controlling the whole economy could solve, Gramsci offer the idea that anyone, anywhere, could claim to be the oppressed victim of anyone else.
And the totalitarian state should not only control the whole economy, but all activity of any kind, deeds and words and thoughts, which super-hypersensative gormless loudmouths might pretend to find offensive. This theory is called Political Correctness, and it operates the same way Marxist socialist so-called theory works: by calling people names who try to discuss it rationally, and then, after the revolution, killing all the rational people.
No heresy has ever spread so far and with such overwhelming results. Communism took over the majority of the Earth’s surface in a generation or two, and Political Correctness took over the press, the entertainment industry, and the political arena in far less time, and without a shot being fired. Which explains the current, choking flood of super-hypersensative gormless loudmouths in all walks of life and over the Internet: Gormlessness is the chief byproduct of Political Correctness, and loudmouthery is the chief export.
The apt visual figure for this direction is either (for Marx) a hammer-and-sickle atop a pile of bloody skulls, or (for Gramsci) a feminist with a bullhorn displaying the dismembered corpse of her own unborn child atop a much larger pile of much smaller bloody skulls.
The last and youngest heresy lies in the West, the direction to which the disembodied Buddhas float once they achieve enlightenment. When Oriental ideas of reincarnation and pantheism became fashionable in the Europe, those ideas seems to promise a refreshing escape from the strident and materialism of the worldly cynics of the North direction, and the bloodthirsty materialist atheism of the East direction.
There are necessary no political consequences of this party, since it is the party of renunciation of worldly things, the direct to which monks and nuns and hermits fly in order to escape worldly entanglements. However, steps too far in this direction become increasingly mystical and disconnected from reality. On that ground we might call it the direction of Anarchists, dreamers who dream that the state can be done away with. The Theosophists and Shavians are scattered in this direction, as are any number of Unitarians and Occultists and New Age movements. When they fall into darkness is when they take the final step of declaring themselves to be divine, able to define good and evil, real and unreal, according to their own likings and on their own terms. At that point they become heretics in truth, Gnostics, followers of the First Century heresiarch known as Simon the Magician.
The visual figure appropriate here is the Magician with his artificial wings, trying to ascend like Christ, claiming to be a god to astonish the gullible multitude.
The outer ring of darkness is one that a lost and wandering soul can reach merely by following any of the directions far enough away from the central light of faith. A chivalrous man wandering too far south become a Grand Inquisitor or a Mohammedan; a rational man cynically seeking his own self interest wandering too far in the direction of cynicism becomes a Machiavellian; an idealist wandering too far in the direction of the ideologues becomes either a gormless idiot or a bloodthirsty beast fit only for a swift death; the mystic drifting like thistledown from one bit of spiritual bric-a-brac to the next becomes empty.
They all get to the point where life is meaningless. I do not mean they do not have hobbies and loved ones: I mean they tacitly support the idea that the only meaning in life is manmade, the only morality what you legislate for yourself, and that all explanations, theories, philosophies and faiths are nothing more than word-drugs to addict you, or word-prisons to entrap you. This stance is known as Nihilism, the idolatry of nothing at all.
The advantage of this world map over the linear spectrum of Left-versus-Right is that it is both more accurate and allows for more nuances of differing opinions in their different relation to each other. And it strikes out of the nerveless hands of the lying creatures called Leftists, Progressives, Liberals, or whatever they are calling themselves this season, the main weapon of they use to deflect attention, their sole weapon: the slander that conservative Christians are grouped together with Nazis and racists. This map places the two equally poisonous brands of revolutionary scapegoat-hunting collectivist vampiric totalitarians, the Commies and the Nazis, the brownshirts and the redshirts, firmly side by side with their twin, where they belong. Without the ability to accuse nonracists of being racist, there is no Democrat party, nor Social Justice Warriors, nor Progressives.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
