A mechanical universe?

Edwin Dyga has written an essay for the Observer & Review which explores the role of cinema in post-War Japan ("Cinema as Symptom and Vehicle of Social Re-engineering: A Post-War Japanese Study", Observer & Review Volume 2, Issue 1, Number 2).

Toward the end of the essay, in his concluding remarks, Dyga makes a connection between the assault on the traditional dynamic between men and women and the assault on traditional national identities. It's a connection I've made myself, but Dyga expresses it eloquently in his own way, and I thought it worth sharing.

Dyga begins the excerpt under discussion by noting "a tendency towards the mechanical view of Man and society". 

This tendency was inaugurated in the early modern period of European history. Basil Willey begins his book on The Seventeenth Century World Background by quoting part of a work by Fontenelle, published in 1686. Fontenelle has a philosopher conversing with a countess as follows:

"I perceive", said the Countess, "Philosophy is now become very Mechanical". "So Mechanical", said I, "that I fear we shall be quickly asham'd of it"; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little; which is very regular, & depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime Idea of the Universe?"

This was a great shift in world picture from what had gone before. Dyga's essay notes an "aesthetics of dehumanised artificiality" within Japanese cinema as a modern development of this mechanical view. He argues that this is "acutely hostile to the idea that Man's sense of self is shaped by his place within natural hierarchies derived from a transcendental understanding of the human condition."

This is well observed. One way of putting this perhaps is that the new cosmology (of a mechanical universe) does not allow for an older anthropology (in which Man's sense of self is shaped by his place within natural hierarchies). 

And here is the key point. Once you set man outside of these natural hierarchies derived from a transcendental understanding, what then is there to ground a sense of who man is and what his telos - his ends or purposes - in life might be? 

For Dyga, the mechanical picture of the world "favours an understanding of the individual as an essentially self-defined entity, and therefore susceptible to recreation at will. No inherited essence means no particularity".

The rejection of inherited essence is prevalent in modern thought. Here, for instance, is Judith Butler putting forward the idea that there are no essences, and that therefore gender is just a performance and a construct:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

If there is no inherited essence, then, argues Dyga, there is no particularity. This is a thought that can be drawn out, and I will do so later in this post. But, as a brief observation, it is true. In a machine like cosmos there are only parts arranged in certain ways to give certain effects - there are not "qualities" that are embedded in reality, that carry inherent meaning and that make groups of things distinctly what they are. 

Judith Butler

Dyga goes on to explain that,

The resulting decomposition of the national polity through the erasure of memory and the distortion or the pathologisation of history is no accident, because it is here that inherited essences and particularity is rooted on a macro level.

In other words, if we are thought to lack inherited essences at the level of who we are as individuals, then these will also be rejected at a higher social level. This will take the form of wanting to erase memory and distort history (think of toppling of statues, or hostility to founders, or strange casting decisions in historical dramas). 

I would add to this that those with the most modernist of minds are often simply blind to the very possibility of traditional national cultures. If someone says to them "I wish to defend my national culture", their answer is often a perplexed "But what is that culture? Does it exist?" I have even heard an Austrian being interviewed in the streets of Vienna, immersed in his own national culture, say "But what is Austrian culture anyway?". This is similar to Judith Butler proclaiming that "gender is not a fact" - despite the observable differences between the sexes being obvious to those with eyes to see.

Dyga finishes the excerpt by writing:

There is a direct interrelationship between the destruction of the individual and his ethne, and the process is catalysed by the intentional rejection of the inherited patrimony through the process of cultural destruction; the assault on the traditional sexual dynamic further enhances that process. The national and sexual 'questions' are therefore profoundly interrelated; they cannot be approached separately...

It makes sense that if the individual is destroyed by the modern world picture, then so too will be his larger community, his ethne.

Some thoughts on how this came to be

I'd like to use part of Dyga's excerpt as a platform to branch off into some thoughts of my own. The relevant quote is the one in which Dyga argues that a machine like understanding of reality,

favours an understanding of the individual as an essentially self-defined entity, and therefore susceptible to recreation at will. No inherited essence means no particularity.

The undermining of essences goes back a long way, perhaps even to the nominalists of the medieval period. But it seems to me that a good starting point is Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century.

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes rejected the notion of essences and also what were called "final causes" (the idea that things have a purpose). Instead he held that beings were subject to "efficient causes" (the sources of motion and rest). 

For Hobbes, the focus is on the desires and aversions that move us toward some object or repel us from it. The things we desire we consider good, those that repel us as bad. 

We are acted upon by external causes in our desires and aversions, and so what we desire is determined at an individual level (so that individuals will desire different things). In this sense we have no free will.

But Hobbes is a compatibilist. This means that he believes we have a certain kind of free will, namely to act without impediment to realise the desires that are determined for us. If we can do this then our will is free in the sense of being unimpeded.

So here is the issue. Hobbes's way of dealing with a mechanical cosmos does not initially seem to point to the idea of people being self-defining entities susceptible to recreation at will. After all, who they are is determined by the way the environment acts upon them. 

However, in the Hobbesian view we each have our own unique desires that constitute who we are and the aim is for there to be nothing to hinder us in the pursuit of these desires (except when the strong arm of the state is necessary to preserve our life and our property from others). 

So even though our desires do not come from our own free will, you still end up with an individual who believes "this is what I desire to be, so I should be free to be this without impediment". These desires are conceived to be uniquely determined, so this undermines the idea that they might be derived from distinct and particular qualities that we share with others (essences). 

The Hobbesian view runs against certain aspects of modern science, such as the idea of genetic coding or even of evolutionary adaptation. For instance, humans are dimorphic with clear distinctions between the sexes that are related to different roles throughout the long human prehistory. This dimorphism is biologically coded in relation to chromosomes, hormones, brain structure and so on. 

Those committed to modernist ideas about every individual being uniquely ordered toward their own desires and, in this sense, self-defining, will often downplay this biological coding. They will argue that the only relevant biological differences between the sexes are "what is between the legs" or they will argue fiercely against evidence of brain differences between the sexes or they might claim that the coding is no longer relevant and can be overridden (or even rewritten). 

To give some idea of how influential the kind of view held by Hobbes was in the Anglo tradition, consider the case of Victoria Woodhull, a prominent American feminist of the 1870s. As you might expect, she wanted to abolish the distinctions between peoples and between the sexes, arguing that women should be "trained like men" and that there should be a merging of the races to achieve a unitary world government. Her metaphysics sound very similar to those of Hobbes:

But what does freedom mean? "As free as the winds" is a common expression. But if we stop to inquire what that freedom is, we find that air in motion is under the most complete subjection to different temperatures in different localities, and that these differences arise from conditions entirely independent of the air...Therefore the freedom of the wind is the freedom to obey commands imposed by conditions to which it is by nature related...But neither the air or the water of one locality obeys the commands which come from the conditions surrounding another locality.

Now, individual freedom...means the same thing...It means freedom to obey the natural condition of the individual, modified only by the various external forces....which induce action in the individual. What that action will be, must be determined solely by the individual and the operating causes, and in no two cases can they be precisely alike...Now, is it not plain that freedom means that individuals...are subject only to the laws of their own being.

The Western mind, for a time at least, was also influenced by the German idealist tradition. During the Romantic era, there was a backlash against the machine like understanding of the cosmos. Writing in the late 1700s the poet Novalis complained that,

Nature has been reduced to a monotonous machine, the eternally creative music of the universe into the monotonous clatter of a gigantic millwheel.

Some of the German idealist philosophers reacted against the determinism implied by this world picture (of no free will) by asserting the independence of the absolute "I". But they did so in catastrophic ways. Against the idea that the phenomenal world of existence determined who we are, they asserted that the absolute "I" might posit itself against this world. There was now a kind of hostile relationship between the given world of being and the free self, which later developed into nihilism. Here is a description of a university lecture by the German philosopher Johann Fichte:

As Fichte stood at the podium in Jena, he imbued the self with the new power of self-determination. The Ich posits itself and it is therefore free. It is the agent of everything. Anything that might constrain or limit its freedom - anything in the non-Ich - is in fact brought into existence by the Ich.

 Fichte saw himself as a liberator:

My system is the first system of freedom: just as the French nation is tearing man free from his external chains, so my system tears him free from the chains of things-in-themselves, the chains of external influences.

But this liberated will now stood against phenomenal reality:

My will alone...shall float audaciously and coldly over the wreckage of the universe.

So in reacting against the machine like world picture, these philosophers doubled down on the idea of freedom being an act of self-determining will. Instead of re-picturing external reality, it was defeated to the point of wreckage by the absolute "I". 

Tupper & early Victorian marriage

In 1865 Karl Marx wrote a "confession" in which he set out his personal likes and dislikes. His responded to the category of "aversion" with the name of a long forgotten Englishman, Martin Tupper. 

Who was this man Marx disliked more than any other? He was a poet who wrote an immensely influential work called Proverbial Philosophy (first published in 1838 it went through forty editions and sold over 200,000 copies in the UK).

Tupper as a young boy

For the early Victorians Proverbial Philosophy was regarded as a source of lessons in life and was sometimes gifted to young couples on their wedding day. I thought it might be interesting to read the section on marriage in the book, to gauge the quality of advice being dispensed. I did so and I'm pleased to report that Tupper's approach to marriage is generally very insightful: I think many modern readers would consider him "based" to use a modern term. 

Tupper was a sincere Christian. He is therefore something of a role model for Christians, in the sense that he was able to combine his faith with a high degree of worldly wisdom. He combined an idealism about marriage with a grounded realism. 

Tupper aged 40

I'd like to go through his advice section by section, with some commentary of my own. This will take some time, but I'm confident that readers will find points of interest along the way. 

The advice begins as follows:

Seek a good wife of thy God, for she is the best gift of His providence;
Yet ask not in bold confidence that which He hath not promised:
Thou knowest not His good will:—be thy prayer then submissive there-unto;
And leave thy petition to His mercy, assured that He will deal well with thee.
If thou art to have a wife of thy youth, she is now living on the earth;
Therefore think of her, and pray for her weal; yea, though thou hast not seen her.
They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not:
They grow up leaning on each other, as the olive and the vine.
Youth longeth for a kindred spirit, and yearneth for a heart that can commune with his own;

The significant part of this begins with the line "They that love early become like-minded, and the tempter toucheth them not". It is an observation that at a certain age our youthful passions propel us to want a close connection with the opposite sex and that we are less hardened into a separate self and more able to blend into a common life together.

He meditateth night and day, doting on the image of his fancy.
Take heed that what charmeth thee is real, nor springeth of thine own imagination;
And suffer not trifles to win thy love; for a wife is thine unto death.
The harp and the voice may thrill thee,—sound may enchant thine ear,
But consider thou, the hand will wither, and the sweet notes turn discord:
The eye, so brilliant at even, may be red with sorrow in the morning;
And the sylph-like form of elegance must writhe in the crampings of pain.

This is good advice. Men sometimes do not vet a future wife well, despite the importance of doing so. They can fall for false charms, or their infatuated minds can project qualities onto the woman that aren't really there, or they can be charmed by overly superficial qualities.

O happy lot, and hallowed, even as the joy of angels,
Where the golden chain of godliness is entwined with the roses of love:
But beware thou seem not to be holy, to win favour in the eyes of a creature,
For the guilt of the hypocrite is deadly, and winneth thee wrath elsewhere.
The idol of thy heart is, as thou, a probationary sojourner on earth;
Therefore be chary of her soul, for that is the jewel in her casket:
Let her be a child of God, that she bring with her a blessing to thy house,—
A blessing above riches, and leading contentment in its train:
Let her be an heir of Heaven; so shall she help thee on thy way:
For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil.

This is the kernel of the advice that Tupper gives. He believes that a genuinely godly wife is more likely to bring "a blessing to thy house". He uses a poetic line to express this "For those who are one in faith, fight double-handed against evil". It is similar to the advice given by a much earlier English poet, Sir Thomas Overbury in his poem of 1613 titled "A Wife". Overbury thinks a man should most value "good" in a wife rather than birth, beauty and wealth: "For good (like fire) turnes all things to be so./Gods image in her soule, O let me place/My love upon! not Adams in her face....By good I would have holy understood,/So God she cannot love, but also me".

It is difficult to disagree. Marriage cannot rest on ordinary feeling alone, as this is prone to be unstable. When our commitments instead are tied to our deeper faith, then they are much more likely to be durable. 

Take heed lest she love thee before God; that she be not an idolater:
Yet see thou that she love thee well: for her heart is the heart of woman;
And the triple nature of humanity must be bound by a triple chain,
For soul and mind and body—godliness, esteem, and affection.

The first line is also good advice. If a woman loves you "before God" she is likely to expect the things from you that rightly belong to God - and that you cannot possibly deliver. I have written about this previously - that there are women who expect a husband to be a divine therapist who can release her from core childhood wounds (omnipotence), or who expect a husband to intuit her needs before she herself knows she has them (omniscience). This places too great a weight upon the marriage, a weight it will not be able to bear. 

And the last line is also well expressed. There ideally will be godliness when it comes to the soul; esteem (respect) for the husband when it comes to the mind; and affection (physical love) when it comes to the body. If any of these are missing there is a weak link that will prove detrimental. Think, for instance, of women who settle for men they have no physical affection for, and what kind of marriages usually result. 

How beautiful is modesty! it winneth upon all beholders:
But a word or a glance may destroy the pure love that should have been for thee.
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
But regard it not a pearl of price:—it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
If the character within be gentle, it often hath its index in the countenance:
The soft smile of a loving face is better than splendour that fadeth quickly.

He is being realistic here in acknowledging that men are attracted to beauty in women. He is warning, though, that physical beauty eventually fades, and he notes something that others have observed, namely that a gentle character in women comes to be written on the face. The famous author Roald Dahl wrote along similar lines that,

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Tupper continues,

When thou choosest a wife, think not only of thyself,
But of those God may give thee of her, that they reproach thee not for their being:
See that He hath given her health, lest thou lose her early and weep:
See that she springeth of a wholesome stock, that thy little ones perish not before thee:
For many a fair skin hath covered a mining disease,
And many a laughing cheek been bright with the glare of madness.

The Victorians were aware of hereditary traits. Tupper is warning that we are to consider the traits we will pass on to our children. We should look for physical health in her family, but also an absence of mental illness (the word "mining" is used here in an older sense of "ruin in a subterranean way").

Mark the converse of one thou lovest, that it be simple and sincere;
For an artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns.
Observe her deportment with others, when she thinketh not that thou art nigh,
For with thee will the blushes of love conceal the true colour of her mind.

This is an early version of "see how she treats the wait staff". Tupper hits on something important here in the last line. Most women will treat a man well in the early stages of courtship, when you are promising her something that she seeks, and when her disposition to you will be at its most favourable. What is more revealing are the longer term trends in her character, as revealed in her past history (though it can be difficult to estimate this history based on her own testimony). 

Hath she learning? it is good, so that modesty go with it:
Hath she wisdom? it is precious, but beware that thou exceed;
For woman must be subject, and the true mastery is of the mind.
Be joined to thine equal in rank, or the foot of pride will kick at thee;

Interesting. Tupper thinks it good for a woman to have learning and wisdom, but that it can be a problem if a woman exceeds her husband in this, because if she is mentally superior to her husband he will not be able to lead. What Tupper is getting at here is something like the concept of hypergamy, in which a woman wants to marry up, i.e., to be with a man she can look up to and admire. If she cannot do this, there is a risk she will lose respect for him and with it her capacity to love.

And look not only for riches, lest thou be mated with misery:
Marry not without means; for so shouldst thou tempt Providence;
But wait not for more than enough; for Marriage is the DUTY of most men:

He strongly cautions against marrying for money. Men should have some resources before marrying, but not wait too long. The one thing I'd note here is that this runs against the feminist narrative that marriage at this time was based on financial considerations alone - here we have a leading Victorian influencer telling his readers that money should not be a primary concern.

Grievous indeed must be the burden that shall outweigh innocence and health,
And a well-assorted marriage hath not many cares.
In the day of thy joy consider the poor; thou shall reap a rich harvest of blessing;
For these be the pensioners of One who filleth thy cup with pleasures:
In the day of thy joy be thankful: He hath well deserved thy praise:
Mean and selfish is the heart that seeketh Him only in sorrow.
For her sake who leaneth on thine arm, court not the notice of the world,
And remember that sober privacy is comelier than public display.

This is a more difficult passage. One message here is to turn to God in thanks for your blessings in marriage, rather than only turning to God when things are difficult. The last line perhaps reflects an earlier belief that public displays of affection are unseemly and should be kept private.

If thou marriest, thou art allied unto strangers; see they be not such as shame thee:
If thou marriest, thou leavest thine own; see that it be not done in anger.

The first line reflects an earlier ethos in which poor individual behaviour reflected badly not only on the individual, but might also damage the reputation of the family. So Tupper wants his readers to consider the character not only of the wife, but also of her wider family that the husband will be associated with.

Bride and bridegroom, pilgrims of life, henceforward to travel together,
In this the beginning of your journey, neglect not the favour of Heaven:
Let the day of hopes fulfilled be blest by many prayers,
And at eventide kneel ye together, that your joy be not unhallowed:
Angels that are round you shall be glad, those loving ministers of mercy,
And the richest blessings of your God shall be poured on His favoured children.
Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen,
And reverence well becometh the symbol of dignity and glory.

I like the line here "Marriage is a figure and an earnest of holier things unseen". The word "earnest" means "a foretaste of what is to follow". 

Keep thy heart pure, lest thou do dishonour to thy state;
Selfishness is base and hateful; but love considereth not itself.
The wicked turneth good into evil, for his mind is warped within him;
But the heart of the righteous is chaste: his conscience casteth off sin.

There is a lot in these four lines. First, that marriage requires both spouses to consider the good of the other. I have argued this many times on social media, often without success. For instance, there was a trend a while ago for women to argue that wives should never do things for their husband. I objected as follows: 

But I failed to persuade my opponent:

Even more significantly, Tupper is aware that much hinges on the quality of mind of the spouses - that a mind can be "warped" and so turn good into evil. This is why the original choice of spouse is so important, as the goodness of one spouse can fall onto barren ground and the marriage can fail regardless of their efforts. This is a much more realistic view than the commentary you sometimes hear that "all you have to do is to be nice and your efforts will be rewarded many times over".

If thou wilt be loved, render implicit confidence;
If thou wouldst not suspect, receive full confidence in turn:
For where trust is not reciprocal, the love that trusted withereth.
Hide not your grief nor your gladness; be open one with the other;
Let bitterness be strange unto your tongues, but sympathy a dweller in your hearts:
Imparting halveth the evils, while it doubleth the pleasures of life,
But sorrows breed and thicken in the gloomy bosom of Reserve.

The first part of this passage is about marriage being a high trust institution. This is why the experience of betrayal hurts the institution so much - it leads to "emotional unavailability" and an unwillingness to make the commitments that marriage requires. In the second part of the passage, Tupper counsels that the spouses be open with each other. I think this is true in the context he gives: that issues should be aired and communicated rather than held in reserve and allowed to fester. But it may not be true that men should communicate everything about themselves openly to their wife. Women sometimes find it more attractive if the man retains a part of himself that is more difficult to read. 

YOUNG wife, be not froward, nor forget that modesty becometh thee:
If it be discarded now, who will not hold it feigned before?

Froward means "difficult to deal with". Tupper is suggesting to young wives that if they change in this way after the marriage that people will assume that a kind of underhanded "bait and switch" has been employed. 

But be not as a timid girl,—there is honour due to thine estate
A matron's modesty is dignified: she blusheth not, neither is she bold.
Be kind to the friends of thine husband, for the love they have to him:
And gently bear with his infirmities: hast thou no need of his forbearance?

The last line is interesting. Tupper is reminding women that they should be a little forgiving of their husband's faults, as he surely must also be forgiving of hers. 

Be not always in each other's company; it is often good to be alone;
And if there be too much sameness, ye cannot but grow weary of each other

This is good advice - that there is a right amount of time to be together and time to be apart. I would add to this that in a balanced life we would spend a certain amount of time in male spaces (or for women female spaces) and a certain amount of time with our families.

Ye have each a soul to be nourished, and a mind to be taught in wisdom,
Therefore, as accountable for time, help one another to improve it.
If ye feel love to decline, track out quickly the secret cause;
Let it not rankle for a day, but confess and bewail it together:
Speedily seek to be reconciled, for love is the life of marriage;
And be ye co-partners in triumph, conquering the peevishness of self.

You sometimes hear the claim that until very recent times marriage was just about property and that women were nothing more than chattel. Yet here we have a very influential Victorian era writer asserting that "love is the life of marriage" and that it is therefore important not to allow resentments to build that might undermine this love.

Let no one have thy confidence, O wife, saving thine husband:
Have not a friend more intimate, O husband, than thy wife.
In the joy of a well-ordered home be warned that this is not your rest;
For the substance to come may be forgotten in the present beauty of the shadow.
If ye are blessed with children, ye have a fearful pleasure,
A deeper care and a higher joy, and the range of your existence is widened:
If God in wisdom refuse them, thank Him for an unknown mercy:
For how can ye tell if they might be a blessing or a curse?
Yet ye may pray, like Hannah, simply dependent on His will:
Resignation sweeteneth the cup, but impatience dasheth it with vinegar.
Now this is the sum of the matter:—if ye will be happy in marriage,
Confide, love, and be patient: be faithful, firm, and holy.

There is a positive attitude to parenthood here, as a blessing that brings both a deeper care and a higher joy and that widens the range of existence.

That concludes Tupper's advice to newlyweds. Tupper, like other early Victorian writers I have read, took marriage very seriously, enough to think through what was required to make a marriage work. There was no easy Disney "happily ever after" that was simply owed to someone. Marriage required prudence in choice of spouse, and thereafter it required an active orientation to virtue and faith.

Finally, please note that Tupper did not believe that women were incapable of moral guidance. Tupper appealed to both sexes in giving his advice and understood women to have a share in the mission to create loving marital unions.

The levelling down of Western culture

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.

Our society clearly has issues with male authority figures. Since about the 1980s, fathers have been portrayed in popular culture as, at best, loveable but harmless figures of fun. Worse has been the attitude of certain feminists, who have portrayed fathers as figures of violence and oppression, as did Kate Gilmore when appointed to lead the Keating Government's gender campaign in 1994:

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.