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[SERVICE NOTICE: For the foreseeable future, I am going to publish one article per week, every Friday. There will still be a smattering of other quick posts, such as quotes, and links to interesting posts on other websites. But Friday will be the day for the real "thought pieces."]
In my post of 3/24/2025, I discussed Conquest’s Second Law of Politics, which states that any organization that is not explicitly right-wing, sooner or later becomes left-wing. Part of my analysis revolved around the question of high versus low culture, and the difficulty in maintaining the higher form, which is a bedrock of civilization. The entropic forces in society, always present, tend to drag us down to the level of low culture, which is one of the symptoms of Leftism. In the article below, first published on the original AWOL Civilization blog just after the 2008 presidential election, I examined this issue from a somewhat different perspective. * * * So it finally happened: a bonafide neo-Marxist has been elected President of the United States. He will have a sympathetic majority in both houses of Congress, along with a choir comprising the judiciary, the press, academia, the cultural “elite," and the most hardened enemies of America at home and abroad. This is not a macabre scene from a dystopian novel. It is our reality. In order to grasp the full significance of the catastrophe that has enveloped America—and indeed, Western civilization—we must cast our intellectual net far and wide, so that it encompasses the great thinkers of the past. They can guide and inspire us as we confront a phenomenon with which we, in America, have no experience. They can help us re-examine our approach to politics, the arts, education, and a host of other realms, a task that is part and parcel of salvaging and reinvigorating our culture. We can start by reconnecting with the thinkers of the ancient world. It is there, in the literary masterpieces of Athens and Rome and Jerusalem, that one finds clues to the riddles that present themselves to us. It is there that one sees how people prevailed in the face of upheavals that defy the imagination. In this spirit, I would like to present two ancient literary references that have been in the forefront of my mind in recent days. The first is from the Bible, the second is from the comic theater of Athens. In Genesis 25:29-33, a moving scene occurs between Esau and Jacob, the sons of Isaac. Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of pottage (a type of stew): “And Jacob cooked pottage, and Esau came from the field, and he was faint, and Esau said to Jacob, Give me to swallow, I pray thee, of that red pottage, for I am faint…And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. And Esau said, Behold, I am going to die, and what benefit is this birthright to me? And Jacob said, Swear to me this day, and he swore to him; and he sold his birthright…” The American people possess an impressive birthright: Living in a land of liberty, with all that is necessary to pursue their dreams. All the accoutrements are available: natural resources, a beautiful landscape, vast spaces, a noble history, brain power, and a deep tradition of opportunity. But we have sold our birthright for the slick visage of Barack Hussein Obama, our latter-day bowl of pottage. The moaning, self-proclaimed victims have thrown away their heritage. What good is it? they ask. “Behold, I am going to die," so just feed me and clothe me, and let me forget the rest. The second reference from the ancient world is The Frogs, a comedy by the great Athenian playwright Aristophanes (c. 450 – 388 BC). The play was written in 405 BC, as the Athenian empire stood on the brink of destruction. Dissension was rife in the city, and defeat at the hands of the Spartans was nigh (it occurred in 404). The plot is simple. Dionysus, patron of the drama, descends into Hades (the underworld) to find the greatest Greek playwright. The intent is to bring the champion back to the land of the living, to Athens, where he might be able to rescue the city’s decomposing culture. The selection process for best playwright boils down to a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, in which each attempts to demonstrate that he is the greatest practitioner of the art of tragedy. Dionysus acts as moderator of the debate. Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC) represents the old world, with its fine manners, its gymnastics, its piety, and its honor. Euripides (484 – 406 BC), by contrast, is presented as the poet of decadence, sophistry, and philosophical relativism. Euripides accuses Aeschylus of using highfalutin language, of ignoring romantic love, and of being an elitist divorced from the taste and temperament of the people. Aeschylus, for his part, accuses Euripides of contributing in no small measure to the downfall of the city: “You have taught boasting and quibbling; the wrestling schools are deserted and the young fellows have submitted themselves to outrage, in order that they might learn to reel off idle chatter, and the sailors have dared to bandy words with their officers…Of what crimes is [Euripides] not the author? Has he not shown us procurers, women who get delivered in the temples, have traffic with their brothers, and say that life is not life? ‘Tis thanks to him that our city if full of scribes and buffoons, veritable apes, whose grimaces are incessantly deceiving the people…” Then there is the following exchange between Dionysus and Euripides, almost creepy in its applicability to our current predicament: DIONYSUS: And you, Euripides, prove yourself [fit] to sprinkle incense on the brazier. EURIPIDES: Thanks, but I sacrifice to other gods. DIONYSUS: To private gods of your own, which you have made after your own image? EURIPIDES: Why, certainly! DIONYSUS: Well then, invoke your gods. EURIPIDES: Oh! Ether, on which I feed, oh! Thou Volubility of Speech, oh! Craftiness, oh! Subtle Scent! Enable me to crush the arguments of my opponents. We learn that Aeschylus used only heroes and god-like figures in his plays, whereas Euripides invented every sort of vulgar character imaginable. Euripides explains that his intent was to “please the people." Moreover, he says, “I introduced our private life upon the stage, our common habits…I did not burst out into big noisy words to prevent their comprehension; nor did I terrify the audience by showing them Cycni and Memnons on chariots harnessed with steeds and jingling bells. Look at his disciples and look at mine. His are…all a-bristle with long beards, spears and trumpets, and grinning with sardonic and ferocious laughter, while my disciples are [the effeminate and loquacious] Clitophon and the graceful Theramenes.” Euripides democratized the theater. He catered to the popular desire to portray the vulgar, the seedy side of life. Often, his characters were beggars dressed in rags. Theater was now for everyone, and about everyone. It is tempting to speculate: How similar was the situation in the Athens of 405 BC, the year The Frogs was written, to the America of today? Could one not easily think of a contemporary Euripides, some best-selling author or popular screenwriter, succeeding handsomely here in our dumbed-down victimocracy, with its effeminate and sophistic king, crowned by the rampaging mob? Which great cultural figure would Dionysus bring back to help save us? We cry out for our Aeschylus—who would it be? [Quotes from The Frogs taken from Aristophanes, the Eleven Comedies, vol. 2, Immortal Classics republication of the 1912 London Athenian Society edition, pp. 227, 245-46, 235, 239-40.]
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In my posts of 12/27/24 and 1/17/25, I examined the work of Friedrich Hayek, who with consummate skill helps us understand the ideological roots of the Left. Continuing in the same vein, below is my discussion of Karl Popper, whose work in this domain provides an excellent companion to Hayek. The post was first published in 2007, on the original AWOL Civilization blog.
* * * Every period has a handful of commentators that grasp the essence of their era. In our time, one of them must surely be Karl Popper (1902-1994). Well-known as a philosopher of science, his writings in the sociopolitical realm are some of the most extraordinary of the twentieth century. Probably the most widely read of these is The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Impressive as the book is, I believe that Popper’s greatest achievement in this area is The Poverty of Historicism (1957). In this work, he deconstructs one of the founding myths of modern totalitarianism, a conceptual idol that underlies the thought of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin: historicism. This is the belief that there is a predictable regularity to history, that its course is based on immutable laws. As Popper puts it: “The belief…that it is the task of the social sciences to lay bare the law of evolution of society in order to foretell its future might be perhaps described as the central historicist doctrine.” This myth enabled Hegel to concoct his “world-historical spirit," in which history is a “court of judgment" and “the exposition and the actualization of the universal spirit." This vague spirit has come to rule human affairs, as “the spirit in and for itself prepares and works its way towards the transition to its next and higher stage.” Popper shows that this sort of phony analysis is derived from a key error, that of mistaking trends for laws: “This, we may say, is the central mistake of historicism. Its ‘laws of development’ turn out to be absolute trends; trends which, like laws, do not depend on initial conditions, and which carry us irresistibly in a certain direction into the future. They are the basis of unconditional prophecies, as opposed to conditional scientific predictions.” Popper debunks the scientific pretenses of Comte, Hegel, Marx, and their disciples, who misapply the methods and lexicon of the natural sciences to social phenomena. It is one of the great essays on this subject, alongside Hayek’s Counter-Revolution of Science. To understand the ideological roots of the contemporary Left, Popper's masterpiece is a must-read. [Quotes from Popper taken from The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1960 edition, pp 105-6 and 128. Emphasis in original. Quotes from Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), Cambridge University Press, 1991 edition, pp 372-3] Among the many problems staring our society in the face is the imminent meltdown of the financial and monetary system. There are numerous facets: uncontrolled government spending and intervention; a looming sovereign debt crisis; the enormous, Byzantine derivatives complex; the insolvent banking system; the growing power of the BRICS countries; and on and on. Putting all the pieces together is a daunting task.
Standing ready to assist us in this labor are the great thinkers of the field. Among these must be counted the incomparable Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992). He is best known as one of the founding fathers of the Austrian school of economics, and the outspoken nemesis of John Maynard Keynes. Hayek demonstrates conclusively how Keynesian economics—that web of misconceptions and mythology in which the West is now trapped—is dysfunctional and guaranteed to fail. But Hayek goes far beyond this level of analysis. He goes deeper, burrowing into every rabbit hole of socialism and interventionism to expose the ideological and spiritual foundations of this perennial challenge, not merely to the financial and monetary system, but to civilization in its entirety. I am reprinting below a post that I wrote about him in 2007, on the original AWOL Civilization blog. * * * The Extended Order of Human Cooperation No blog on the deterioration of Western culture would be complete without a tribute to Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), the great Austrian-born economist and philosopher. When one considers the breadth of his work and the acuity of his analysis, he may very well be the preeminent sociopolitical thinker of the 20th century. No one has been such an outspoken advocate for liberty, or such a devastating foe of all forms of socialism—what Hayek often calls "collectivism." In The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), he deconstructs the illusions of the early socialist thinkers, notably the false doctrine of “scientism," the misapplication of scientific methodology to social phenomena, particularly history. History, Hayek explains, is not a real thing, subject to the methods of the natural sciences. If we are to undertake a study of zebras, we need not hesitate to employ these methods. We see before us a type of animal that is clearly distinguished from other species. There can be little doubt that a zebra is a zebra. Our subjects behave in accordance with the characteristics of their kind. They cannot change themselves, and there is no emotional or intellectual bond between researcher and subject. All this is completely different when it comes to human history. Our subjects do not behave in a predictable fashion, and they can remake themselves. There are many bonds (and enmity) between researcher and subject. But most importantly, the creation of history is itself a subjective act. The actors are implementing what they believe to be “their" history of the moment; moreover, each individual has a different perception of his own behavior, his neighbor’s behavior, and indeed everything else occurring in the world. To say that this phenomenon is subject to laws in the same sense as natural laws is a serious error. In The Road to Serfdom, written during World War II, Hayek demonstrates that Communism and Nazism are two sides of the same collectivist coin. He traces the careers of the National Socialist (Nazi) leadership, showing that they were socialist in every sense of the word. In fact, many were prominent “left-wing" socialists or communists who embraced the swastika as Hitler rose to power. Hayek thereby dismisses the influential myth that the Nazis were some sort of ultra-conservative movement. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), perhaps his magnum opus, Hayek lays out a philosophical blueprint for a 20th-century society based on liberty. This book is the modern heir to the ideas of Locke and Adam Smith. The Fatal Conceit (1988) is a general critique of socialism, in which Hayek shows that “rational" planning is doomed to failure. The very first paragraph sums up much of his thinking: “This book argues that civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread…” When I read Hayek, I am always struck by his vast command of history, culture, philosophy, and economics, as well as by his matter-of-fact tone. His attitude is distinctly non-ideological; he is never the advocate of a party or “program.” Hayek warned us about flirtation with the wily seductress that is collectivism. Will we take heed? In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I have been pondering the glory of the Founding Fathers, and indeed, of the early generations that built America. One man that skillfully conveys this epic is the brilliant historian Gordon Wood (born 1933), himself a testimony to the integrity and character that Made America Great.
I recommend watching an hour-long lecture by Wood, “The Greatness of George Washington,” delivered at Brown University in 2013. Wood delves into the stellar qualities of Washington, and of the leaders of the nascent American republic. The lecture is fascinating and inspiring, and it demonstrates what is possible in a society led by men of this caliber. For another view of George Washington, I am reprinting below a post that I wrote on the original AWOL Civilization blog (August 2007). * * * Born of Liberty One of the favorite targets of anti-American historical revisionists is the Founding Fathers. This is logical: You undermine the society you hate by delegitimizing its architects. Anyone who has read Jefferson or Madison knows that the men who fashioned the American republic need no defense. Comparing them to most of today's leaders or "intellectuals" is like comparing Aristotle to Michael Moore. Nevertheless, it’s nice to receive some reinforcement now and then. I ran across such reinforcement while reading Chateaubriand, the great French statesman and writer of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. His remarkable life included a sojourn in the New World, where he met with George Washington, in Philadelphia, in 1791. Chateaubriand was awestruck by the humility of “le Général Washington," a demeanor he described as the “simplicity of the old Roman." Washington had a small house, just like the neighbors, with no guards and no valets. The man himself appeared very tall, with “a tranquil and cool, rather than noble, bearing, looking very much like he does in the etchings.” “Silence envelopes the actions of Washington. He acts with deliberation; one would say that he feels responsible for the liberty of the future, and that he fears compromising it. What light radiates from his profound humility!” Chateaubriand was fascinated by his conversation with “the citizen-soldier, liberator of a world…I was happy that Washington’s eyes looked upon me. I will be warmed by it for the rest of my life. There is virtue in the gaze of a great man.” The author compares Washington with Napoleon: “Washington’s republic lives on; the empire of Bonaparte is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte spring from the bosom of democracy: both born of liberty, the former was loyal to it, the latter betrayed it.” And finally: “Washington was the representative of the needs, the ideas, the wisdom, the opinions of his era…He blended his existence with that of his country; his glory is the patrimony of civilization…” [Quotes translated from Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, Paris, Editions Gallimard -- Pléiade, 1951, pp. 219-225.] In my recent post Intellectual Decay, Bitcoin Edition (11/23/24), I discussed the problem of subjective value, first as applied to money, and then to art and culture in general. I examined this issue in depth in an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Speaking Truth to Art.” I invite you to read the piece, as relevant now as it was then.
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Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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