I attended a seminar recently and listened to the keynote speaker for just a few minutes before predicting that he would be left-wing. Sure enough, later in the presentation he spoke about how important anti-sexism and anti-racism were to him and how sincerely he supported Aboriginal issues.
Why was I confident in predicting this? It was because of the way his mind operated. I wrote recently about how men's minds tend to run along a vertical axis, so that they are able to orient upwards toward things that are above one's own thoughts and feelings. Women's minds, in contrast, often run sideways along a horizontal axis and so can be attuned in a close in way to what others are thinking and feeling.
This man was intelligent, had masculine interests, and had a masculine systematising mind. But he was painfully sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of those in the audience. He worried that we might be upset about some of the things he would speak about, and he assured us we could take leave and go outside if we ever felt uncomfortable. At one point in the presentation he talked about the importance of safe spaces and the need to practise self-care.
His mind was so attuned to that more feminine horizontal axis that I knew the vertical axis would be undeveloped. And without a vertical axis, I don't think it's very likely that a person will be genuinely traditionalist. It's not that everyone with that more upwardly oriented mind will be traditionalist, but it does have considerable predictive power.
And here's the issue. Most of the Anglo intellectual men I know are lacking in this power of the mind. They are masculine in certain respects; they are intelligent; and they are intellectually curious. But they have been deprived of any growth along the vertical axis. And this is at least a part explanation of why they are so hard to draw into a traditionalist politics.
So how might a society be organised so that this masculine power of the mind were better developed? The most direct path would be to explicitly teach a more traditional metaphysics. But this is not what I want to focus on. I want to consider what a culture that draws out this aspect of the mind might look like.
The basic principle here is that anything that draws our mind upwards to something higher than us, or larger than our own individual self, to which we are indebted, or which creates a sense of reverence or awe or love or respect, is helping to cultivate a power of the mind along that vertical axis.
I'm not going to attempt a complete list of what fits this criteria or put them in any kind of rank. But I would include a sense of pride in our own origins. If we feel connected to our own tradition, to our culture and to the achievements of our own people, then we have a love for something that extends across time through many generations; we respect the achievements of our forebears; and we feel a sense of duty to uphold standards that have been set for us. This is something that lifts us spiritually up along that vertical axis, to a good that exists independently of us but that draws out our commitments.
It is no accident that those who wish to embed a modernist "leveller" metaphysics so ruthlessly attack this sense of pride in origins. It is one of the key battles in any culture war. Here in Australia we lost that battle some decades ago and were made to feel ashamed. When I talk to young left-wing men it is obvious that this has had a considerable impact.
I would also point out that this type of patriotic feeling helps to develop masculine spirituality. For this reason, it is unwise for the churches to regard it negatively or to undermine it. As a positive example of how the churches have supported this higher aspect of the mind consider the Catholic catechism which teaches that the fourth commandment "requires honour, affection, and gratitude toward elders and ancestors".
A culture that develops the upward motion of the mind will also be oriented toward the heroic. Why? Because the heroic involves a selfless commitment to a larger good that we are willing to courageously defend. Or it denotes a kind of inspired action, sometimes via a test of skill or strength, that distinguishes character and leadership and which draws admiration.
To illustrate how flattened our sense of the heroic has become consider these statues located very close to each other in the Melbourne CBD. The first is of the explorer Matthew Flinders. Erected in 1925, it shows a dignified and determined man with the sailors on either side pushing the boat forward representing strength and endurance.
The second group of statues was commissioned in 1994 to honour three of Melbourne's founding fathers, namely Batman, Swanston and Hoddle. It is, at best, whimsical.
The point of embedding the heroic within a culture is not to encourage self-aggrandizement, or to focus on the achievement of fame as a life goal. It is to encourage that sense men have of wanting to push into the higher reaches of their own nature and to achieve some higher good in doing so. It is an encouragement toward a nobility of character and purpose. And, in setting high standards, it pushes men to consider higher goods embedded within the reality of existence that a man might embody.
Architecture can reflect the kind of axis that a community is most oriented toward. It is notable that traditional church architecture here in Melbourne emphasised spires, presumably reflecting an upward orientation, as with St Patrick's Cathedral:
Whereas the modern parish churches look more like halls, which perhaps might encourage a sideways orientation on fellowship, but not reverence or awe:
While on the topic of churches, worship itself can potentially develop that upward orientation of the mind. Worship helps develop the vertical power of the mind when it is reverent, when it encourages a sense of the sacred, and when it expresses gratitude and indebtedness to God. There is room too for cultivating fellowship in worship, which represents the more horizontal axis of the mind, but if this is made dominant, then there is a loss of balance, i.e., the modernist "levelling" influence has made itself felt.
The attitude a society has to male authority figures will also reveal how much it has succumbed to a leveller ethos. The father is the most common male authority figure, and he represents the larger ordering principles within society and within reality. As Lawrence Auster put it:
Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father.
This explains why children who rebel against their own father will often similarly rebel against the larger society. It is notable, for instance, how many leaders of second wave feminism did not have a good relationship with their fathers, often because those fathers were absent:
Germaine Greer: wrote a book titled Daddy We Hardly Knew You.
Kate Millett: her father abandoned the family to live with a nineteen-year-old.
Eva Cox: her father left the family to pursue a relationship with a pianist "leaving an embittered wife and a bewildered and rebellious daughter".
Jill Johnston: her father left when she was a baby. She wrote a book titled: Mother Bound: Autobiography in Search of a Father.
Gloria Steinem: she said of her father that he "was living in California. He didn't ring up but I would get letters from him and saw him maybe twice a year".
Rebecca West: her father left when she was three, both she and her two sisters became radical feminists.
Mary Eberstadt explained much of the fury of the BLM riots in the USA in 2020 along these lines:
Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.
That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period...It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.
She connects the leaders of the BLM movement to a history of fatherlessness:
The author of the bestseller White Fragility was a child of divorce at age two. The author of the bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race reports that her father left the family and broke off contact, also when she was two. The author of another bestseller, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was raised by a single mother. The author of another hot race book, The Anti-Racist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and Take Action, was raised by his grandmother. Colin Kaepernick’s biological father left his mother before he was born, but he was then adopted and raised by a white family. James Baldwin, a major inspiration for today’s new racialist writers, grew up with an abusive stepfather; his mother left his biological father before he was born. The list could go on.So the father is a symbol for a larger order that includes family, faith and patria ("fatherland"). Our word "piety" is derived from the Latin word "pietas" which included honouring not only your own father but all those responsible for your existence, including God and your own people. So Mary Eberstadt is expressing a long tradition in Western thought when she connects filial piety not only to a respect for our own father but also a loyalty toward God and country as well.
You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home ... that will take us to the point where we can secure change.
When we level down society, by casting down male authority figures, we lose access to the vertical structure of reality, in particular through the undermining of filial piety. It is important to note, however, that there is a balance here too between the vertical and the horizontal. Fathers, for instance, will not be held in esteem if they only claim a place in their children's lives through being in a position of authority. Fathers need to build warm human relationships with their children as well. Similarly, those men who occupy positions of authority in society need to be careful not to abuse their power or else trust will be catastrophically lost.
What else indicates the distinction between vertically oriented traditional societies and horizontally oriented modernist ones? Well, certain types of standards. For instance, most traditional cultures recognise different degrees of formality. This makes sense if you have a hierarchical understanding of reality, i.e., one that points upwards. It also makes sense in a society which believes in honour, i.e., in showing respect and in keeping faith.
And so a traditional society will maintain distinctions of sorts. There might be certain courtesies. There might be titles of address. There might be ceremonies and rituals. Different levels of politeness, including of speech.
There is a balance to be held here as well. Too much of this can be stifling and create too much social distance (and provoke a backlash). But the general trend in modern societies is, again, to level things down. We have lost the courtesies between men and women. School students increasingly address teachers by their first name. Formal dress standards are not what they once were. This might not seem much in itself, but the issue is what it points to. By continuing to collapse "degrees and distinctions" we are losing access to one dimension of reality.
Standards of conduct are also relevant here, or at least when they uphold a genuine moral good or virtue. When we abide by these we are acknowledging a higher good that has a claim on us - we are lifting the horizons of the reality we inhabit. And so in traditional societies there will be social norms and taboos that will be generally respected as meaningful.
Again, the general trend in modern levelling societies is toward a loss of standards. If anyone doubts this I suggest they listen to the lyrics of many of the popular songs of today. What is expressed is undeniably crude, as if there were no meaningful standards, which, if true, would mean no higher moral dimension standing above us. There would be a flattening of the reality we inhabit.
I don't believe traditionalists need to go to any extremes in countering all this. What I'm suggesting is that the metaphysics that young intellectual men are brought up with leads them to an understanding of the world that lacks a vertical dimension, and that this is then reflected in the culture and in their politics (with the cultural changes then reinforcing the difficulties they have in relating to traditional ways of being). It is one reason why they come across at times as "mentally blind", in the sense of not being able to comprehend what it might be like to have a sense of loyalty or of patriotic feeling, or, for that matter, to genuinely register the transcendent experiences of life.
