12th August

I’ve been doing some thinking.

Upon reading all this, it occurred to me how easy it is to disturb my perception of free societies. A lot resides in the eye of the beholder.

I can see from my entries in the journal that unconsciously I seem to assume that my own society is a despotism under the hood.

All this talk about deceiving people to believe they live in a free society has heightened my sensibility to the matter.

Perhaps we all need to be posed this very question, the grand negative question: How is our own culture a despotism?

13th August

The despotism of the Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu is a “traditional” one. The leader goes by his emotions.

Thus in modern times we say: Once our system has been rid of autocratic personalities, there exists no despotism.

Then we have the counterreaction from the conservatives. “Hey wait a minute. Why does the liberal testament feel like repression too? How did they manage to sneak in a despotism without a despot?”

The Protocols of the Wise of Zion fumbles around in an attempt to answer. Or rather, they buckle and fold. They can ridicule the psychology, but the text was written long before the turn to linguistics and culture in philosophy made people aware that oppression can take very different forms.

It’s a patchwork of newspaper cartoon texts and allegations quilted together by a clumsy glue. “They want us to be moulded to their shape”, “they want to sneak in a secret tax”, “they want drooling obedience to their filthy liberalism”. This ubiquitous “they” was furnished with a face and the rest was easy to write with a little creative adaptation of Joly’s text.

14th August

This morning something else struck me. Some parts of the Dialogue must have been particularly provocative to the author of the Protocols.

The Dialogue assails the entire mentality of the old ruling class. It caricatures them as greedy leaders who have no intention of taking care of their serfs and peasants.

The Protocol is probably written by someone furious about the primitive ridicule in the Dialogue. He directs a similar humorous counterattack on the intellectualism that has caused a change in wind direction.

The author feels he has to turn America upside down. They exemplify the Montesquieuean system par excellence. He is constantly preoccupied with USA, and he constantly pokes to their election system, trying to expose weaknesses in it.

15th August

Necessity dictates that I must row to the nearest island for provisions. My outboard motor has one of its periodic electrical failures, and my supplies are low. The mainland is too far away for rowing. Second best solution is to row to this island in calm weather, spend a night, purchase the necessities and row back after a good night of rest.

In the meantime, I noticed that Maurice Joly let Montesquieu refer to a certain Joseph the Maistre. I would like to read about him.

16th August

“Montesquieu: It is a chapter from one of your disciples that you are developing for me here.”

“Machiavelli: And who would this be?”

“Montesquieu: Joseph de Maistre.”

Proclaimed as an early father of conservatism, the Comte of Maistre (1753-1821), Joseph Marie, is sobering reading alongside the caricatured Machiavelli and the venomous Protocols, but he is of course not a disciple of the actual Machiavelli, neither in time nor in inclination.

He is a throwback to man’s need for solid ground, a reminiscence of the Christian need for a solution to problems that are specific to Christians… Except we all share the need.

HUMAN AND DIVINE NOMENCLATURE, JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

One of the great errors of a century which professed all possible errors, was to think that a political constitution could be written down and created a priori, when both reason and experience affirm that a constitution is a divine creation, and that precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written down.

. . . The essence of a fundamental law is that nobody has the right to suppress it: now how can it be above everybody, if somebody made it? The consent of the people is an impossible foundation for it; and even if it were otherwise, agreement by consent in no way constitutes a law, and constrains nobody, unless it is safeguarded by a higher authority. Locke attempted to define the nature of law as an expression of united wills; a fortunate man, who can thus discover the nature of law in something which, on the contrary, excludes the very idea of law.

Indeed, united wills make a ruling, not a law, which latter necessarily and manifestly pre-supposes the existence of a higher will, strong enough to command obedience.

What can you say, but amen. He is right.

History is brimful of two and only two actions: Tearing down what is elevated and lifting up something to replace the void after the cultural carnage has subsided.

It is and remains the skeleton in the closet of the Enlightenment: Erecting a civil society on a non-authoritarian foundation equals abandoning necessity and laws. How can it stand?

So they all invoke God, and if that smells of authoritarianism, God’s will, God’s word, or God without God: Reason, The People’s Will, the State.

Comte de Maistre lets his conviction shine bright, simplistic as it is.

“According to Hobbes’s system” — the same one which has had so great a success in our century in the works of Locke — “the validity of the civil laws depends only on the consent of the people ; but if no natural law exists which ordains the promulgation of the laws that have been made, of what use are they? Promises, contracts, oaths, are only vain words: it is as easy to break this frivolous link as it is to form it. Without the dogma of God the Lawgiver, all moral obligations are merely an illusion. Strength on the one hand and weakness on the other, that is all that binds human societies together.”

The answer is of course to let all the atheists convert to Catholicism after which they no longer will be able to break God’s law.

Voltaire would not have felt convinced.

I am informed that Joseph de Maistre was not at ease with Rousseau’s proposals. Rousseau, who was himself at odds with the Enlightenment philosophers, was not foundationalist enough for his taste.

“Strength on the one hand and weakness on the other, that is all that binds human societies together” says the Comte.

For those wretched doubters inhabiting the earth, those golden words have stopped making sense.

All Joseph can do is write and hope that for a few shining moments, the obviousness of the truth radiates from some unusual word constellation.

Logic is a bad route to go. Either you are already convinced and don’t need his logic, or you will probably not be persuaded by an argument along the lines of “all other political systems can be ignored; only if there exists a God with a fist as big as a truck, will the immoral hordes be held responsible.”

Provocatively one could say that if de Maistre had not had his catechism, if you could remove the specificity of Catholicism from his emotions, you would end up with Rousseau.

He can appeal to a deeply felt innate humility in us all, but why can’t Voltaire do the same? Humility towards something greater does not require a Catholic divinity.

Spoken like a true soldier

All we have are a few chance words that can reveal the human condition in a clearer way…

WAR, PEACE, AND SOCIAL ORDER, JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

The fearful sight of carnage does not harden the true soldier’s heart. Amidst the blood he sheds, he remains as human as a wife is chaste in the ecstasy of love. Once he has sheathed his sword, sacred humanity comes into its own again, and it is probably true to say that the most exalted and the most generous sentiments of all are felt by the soldier.

Before we habitually accuse him of romanticising, one ought to remember that so did Shakespeare. Nobles are valiant on the battlefield.

In fact, I remember having read a brief essay by an officer in an army of our century informing in graphic detail how the soldier’s job was to separate the soul from the body of the enemy. The whole thing was immensely spiritual in its political incorrectness and shocking physicality. I cannot for my life of it remember where I saw it.

In the presence of death we change. A battlefield is not required, neither is a sword. The vissicitudes of life can amply take away our loved ones to a disease or old age.

Let the Comte speak as if he was a soldier (would he have written differently had he been to war?), though he really was a diplomat.

He can have any conviction he cares for, his essays will still invariably be dominated by authenticity or inauthenticity. The hard part is figuring out which is which.

I have no idea what a transcendental truth could possibly mean, but if I speak a sentence which by chance would be identical to one spoken under fire, when I am suffused with a vivid clarity of fate, then there is a chance it is authentic.

Cast your mind back, Sir, to the grand siecle in France. The harmony which existed in that century between religion, military courage and science, is responsible for the noble character which all nations have hailed with universal acclamation as the pattern of the European man.

Take the first element away from it [religion], and the unity, or in other words, the whole beauty of it, disappears.

The divine spirit, which has singled out Europe as its dwelling-place, even mitigated the scourges of eternal justice and the type of war waged in Europe will always be outstanding in the annals of the universe.

Stop ye postmodernists before you latch on to “the divine spirit” and babbles on about what constitutes which power relation. Because there is more.

Men killed each other of course, burned and ravaged and committed thousands of useless crimes, I admit, yet they began their war in May and stopped in December; they slept under canvas; the fighting was confined to soldiers.

Ignore the man for a second. He is not reasoning, he is contemplating. The phenomenon he observed got to him.

I find the postmodernist philosophers weak though intriguing. What does it signify, this “they slept under canvas”? A self-deceit? That is one way to look at it: His personal mythology is at odds with objective reality, but not a very postmodern idea anyway. There is no objective reality given that all thoughts are culturally shaped and so is language. Except perhaps for the soldiers sleeping under canvas.

Joseph does not write how they slept, though. In that sense his writing is still a narrative. His sin is no different than any other man’s sin: Gazing at the full spectre of reality and still just coming away with a story.

I don’t want the story nor the analytical method nor the academic distance. Their words are too feeble to strike me as anything but old signs on the road signifying nothing.

I want the monster of reality itself.

17th August

Looking back at all my notes, it becomes apparent how I hold true anything that runs counter to my own intuition. My fingers must type something not of me, like one of those silly teenage movies in which unsuspecting youngsters play with occult toys and inadvertently invites the forces of the dark. The Shining nailed it though. Typing is madness.

Picking up from yesterday…

WAR, PEACE, AND SOCIAL ORDER, JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

War is divine in its consequences, both general and particular, which are of a supernatural order; consequences which are little known because few people care for them, but which are none the less beyond all question. Who could doubt that death on the battlefield entails great privileges? Who could think that the victims of this fearful judgement shed their blood in vain? Yet the time is not propitious for insisting on these subjects; our century is not prepared yet to think about them. Let us leave natural philosophy to this world and keep our own eyes ever fixed on the invisible world, which will give us the answer to everything.

Religiosity is perhaps even more dangerous than religion.

Nothing awakens the slumbering human heart as sincerity. And nothing else puts us on the track to heresy against authenticity, to deafness towards the nameless ghouls of death lurking in the dark — truly the only authenticity we will ever encounter.

War is divine in its results, over which human reason speculates in vain: for they can be totally different in two nations, although both were equally affected by the war. Some wars debase nations and debase them for centuries; others exalt them, perfect them in every way, and within a short space of time, even repair momentary losses with a visible increase in population, which is very extraordinary.

Religion is not opium. It is heroin.

PARADISE LOST