Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Book Review: Victoria

victoria book cover thomas hobbes

Before I start writing this review, first let me state my debt of gratitude to the ‘agent’ of its author, Thomas Hobbes: a military theorist and columnist by the name of William Lind.

I started reading his columns in about 2003. I was still a teenager at the time. I was not a terribly right wing teenager, although I read broadly and open-mindedly enough to have my brain fall out a few times. Lind had a very strong influence on me at least in some compartmentalized ways. I did not take him seriously when he would go on rants about ‘Cultural Marxism,’ but I paid very close attention to him when he wrote about war.

Now, I take him a whole lot more seriously across the board, either because I’m older and more knowledgeable, or just a whole lot less cool.

A little more than half of this book has been serialized at Traditional Right, so you can see if you’ll like it there.

This is a novel about a hypothetical future breakup of the United States told through stories of a series of low-grade civil wars. Not being someone with military experience, I can’t speak to the realism of the descriptions of the fighting, but it’s mostly told in an entertaining, almost jocular manner at times. The different parts of the US break down into their degenerate forms; each part suffering some sort of sclerosis unique to that region. A lot of the fighting happens along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines in an irreconcilable way.

The closest author that I’d compare it to is Heinlein — it’s a more involved book than something like Sixth Column.

As far as I can tell, books like this aren’t usually published anymore. It’s apologetically in favor of what a typical early 20th century progressive would recognize as in favor of the foundation Anglo-American values, which in our current culture are completely anathema. This book would be completely un-shocking in 1912, and maybe even unusually left-wing in some of its scenes.

Even though there’s a climactic scene in which radical leftist professors are slaughtered by sword-wielding men, considering how radically values have shifted since the early 20th century, a scene that seems politically unspeakable today would have made a lot more sense to our ancestors.

Without giving too much of it away, the plot is that the Federal government collapses after a brief war, and then an independent republic with its capitol in Maine dispatches advisers to turn various small wars in the other major regions of the US to its advantage. This includes a war against an all-female radical feminist nation that relies intensively on air power and bands of lesbian bikers. It’s a fun book in that way that’s willing to be a little silly when it’s using the plot to illustrate more serious ideas.

If you’ve heard about terms like ‘Fourth Generation War’ before, but aren’t sure where to start, this is not a great book to learn the concepts from the start. For that, you’d be better off reading Lind’s other work or a book like John Robb’s Brave New War or the many books that Lind cites in all of his work. This book on Maneuver Warfare also helps to make certain concepts in the novel more intelligible.

One of those interesting ideas is that of ‘retroculture,’ which is a path that some of the characters and entire countries in the book choose to take in order to guard against the Faustian temptations of modern technology. This is a more techno-fearing variant on the sort of cultural diversity seen in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which was so influential that it inspired the creation of the Amazon Kindle, and even some terminology used in the NRx-osphere.

In the book, people first go back to older technology due to economic circumstances, but then as circumstances improve, they choose to be highly selective about what they adopt.

Overall, I was happy with the book, and read it start to finish over a period of a few days. It helped that I was already familiar with a lot of the books that this one references. I also rarely read novels published after the 1930s, and even then sparingly, so this was a welcome break from a lot of my heavier nonfiction reading.

You can buy the novel at Amazon.

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Excerpts from Carlyle’s “Latter Day Pamphlets”

Since I’ve been on a Carlyle kick lately, and have acclimated to his style, I made it through Latter Day Pamphlets rapidly. There’s no particular theme to this collection of essays — it’s more of a running commentary on issues contemporary to the author.

Foseti has already written capably on the book, and you may want to start with his review for context.

This will be a selection of quotes plus my commentary, intended to encourage people to go and read the book themselves.

Here’s Carlyle on chronic kinglessness and the resultant rule via manipulation of public opinion:

And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open “kinglessness,” what we call anarchy,—how happy if it be anarchy plus a street-constable!—is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I have known nothing similar. And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament to harangue.

Here’s Carlyle prefiguring the baby boomers:

In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble: in times that love something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no wisdom, and see little or none to love, the old man will cease to be venerated; and looking more closely, also, you will find that in fact he has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young boys. In these days, what of lordship or leadership is still to be done, the youth must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own frigid cautious, avarices, mean timidities; and can lead no-whither towards an object that even seems noble.

Carlyle on some of the issues with the voluntary principle, which is an issue that many current and former libertarians are likely to struggle with:

But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that, by favor of Heaven: “the voluntary principle” has come up, which will itself do the business for us; and now let a new Sacrament, that of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our platforms, be universally the order of the day!—Have men considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly enough betokens? Cut every human relation which has anywhere grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of nomadic:—in other words, loosen by assiduous wedges in every joint, the whole fabric of social existence, stone from stone: till at last, all now being loose enough, it can, as we already see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of revolutionary rage; and, lying as mere mountains of anarchic rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c., over it, and to rejoice in the new remarkable era of human progress we have arrived at.

Social coordination can become difficult when it becomes impossible to form and maintain permanent relations of any kind. The forerunner of revolutionary violence is a breakdown in other peaceable relations that make the phenomenon of society possible.

The author on the superior quality of British workers:

For it is the glory of England that she has a turn for fidelity in practical work; that sham-workers, though very numerous, are rarer than elsewhere; that a man who undertakes work for you will still, in various provinces of our affairs, do it, instead of merely seeming to do it.

We ought to perhaps consider that the poor productivity seen in many foreign countries may not be entirely due to bad policies, but that bad policies might come with an inferior human stock with inferior morals poorly suited to production.

Carlyle does not much believe in reformatory justice, and defends the principle of just revenge:

“Revenge,” my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher oneself upon them, and pay them what they have merited: this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolic; the essence I say is manlike, and even godlike,—a monition sent to poor man by the Maker himself. Thou, poor reader, in spite of all this melancholy twaddle, and blotting out of Heaven’s sunlight by mountains of horsehair and officiality, hast still a human heart. If, in returning to thy poor peaceable dwelling-place, after an honest hard day’s work, thou wert to find, for example, a brutal scoundrel who for lucre or other object of his, had slaughtered the life that was dearest to thee; thy true wife, for example, thy true old mother, swimming in her blood; the human scoundrel, or two-legged wolf, standing over such a tragedy: I hope a man would have so much divine rage in his heart as to snatch the nearest weapon, and put a conclusion upon said human wolf, for one!

This made me think of the pop-art phenomenon of the action movie. Most men feel, at least in the base of their brain, that revenge is a legitimate form of justice. Even if at a higher level, in public speech, most people affirm enlightenment conceptions of a ‘justice system’ which sentences criminals not to punish but to reform, in practice, at the emotional and aesthetic levels, none of that translates. When a script-writer wants to fill movie theaters, they tell a story about a man getting bloody revenge to set the world to rights.

Carlyle is not a great believer in the correlation between the rhetorical excellence of a man and his greatness in other pursuits:

No grand Doer in this world can be a copious speaker about his doings. William the Silent spoke himself best in a country liberated; Oliver Cromwell did not shine in rhetoric; Goethe, when he had but a book in view, found that he must say nothing even of that, if it was to succeed with him.

So it is that we all ought be skeptical of glib and prolific bloggers, also.

Closing comments

Foseti seemed to read this in light of this extended post by Moldbug explaining his perspective as to why Carlyle is so important. I read that particular Moldbug post some time ago, and did not re-read it in advance of going over this, so what I focused on in my reading was not quite the same.

Carlyle is only difficult to understand from a more contemporary perspective. When read keeping in mind that he would have been writing to an audience largely familiar with classical works and much more familiar with the long record of Christian theology, it’s just a lot easier to see his perspective as right and normal and the more left-wing perspective as odd and un-rooted.

One perspective has deep roots, and the other is more of a hydroponic type of perspective; a plant in one of those indoor farms with no soil and carefully applied nutrient fluid, sunned by a heat-lamp.

What’s harder for modern readers to grasp, and perhaps for me, is the difference between a more historically rooted perspective and one that attributes great weight to concepts like individualism and rights.

As 21st century people, we collectively believe in these notions of individualism and of abstract rights, in a way that suffuses our culture in such a way that it’s the water in our fish bowl. Carlyle is writing at a time that’s still transitioning to this world of equality-fraternity with its sacrament of divorce, so it was possible to conceive of and see both visions of humanity in the present.

Even Americans of 1850 would have taken the motto ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ rather differently than Americans of 2014. Each word in that motto meant something different then relative to what it means today.

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Excerpts from Carlyle’s ‘The French Revolution’

Carlyle's French Revolution manuscript burning

It took me more than a month, but I’ve finally finished Thomas Carlyle’s epic poem/history of the French Revolution. Some people have commented to me that they tried to read this and could not get through it.

I do think that it’s worth going through, even if you have trouble with it. It helps to have some pre-existing familiarity with some of the major characters and events of the time period, because otherwise, it’s easy to get lost with all the mentions of characters and events all tumbled together in rambling oration.

What I got from this is a sense of what it might have been like to live through the events, without knowing what would happen in advance. Most history suffers from what Taleb calls the narrative fallacy. Carlyle treats the events as if neither he nor you know the inevitable outcome of events. This adds to the sense of chaos that isn’t usually present in histories of the French revolution, which, in today’s context, usually try to suffuse chaotic outbursts of violence with philosophical meaning that they did not actually possess.

Excerpts from the Homeric Tragicomedy

The work has some lovely images in it. On the fall of the Bourbons, Carlyle says:

 The oak grows silently, in the forest, a thousand years, only in the thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his axe, is there heard an echoing through the solitudes, and the oak announces itself when, with a far-sounding crash, it falls.

Another aspect of the Revolution which is under-appreciated is the degree of hunger and economic chaos that came with the rise of Republicanism. People are always starving. Trade and specialization break down (adding additional context to the later works of Bastiat on economics). There are numerous outbreaks of backyard gun-smithing, because there’s nothing to do for anyone except to arm themselves to fight both internal enemies and foreigners.

Mobs of ill-kempt women are always emerging at first to harass the aristocratic remnants, and then their Republican replacements, for bread.

Carlyle:

It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable.

The radicals urging for reform are incapable of actually addressing the problems that the society suffers due to social chaos.

The King’s Treasury is running towards the lees; and Paris ‘eddies with a flood of pamphlets.’ At all rates, let the latter subside a little!

To my eyes, it reminds me of our contemporary social environment, in which bloggers flood the minds of the general public to little avail.

And then as to Pamphlets– in figurative language; ‘it is a sheer snowing of pamphlets, like to snow up the Government thoroughfares!’ Now is the time for Friends of Freedom,; sane, and even insane.

Industrious labor becomes displaced by speculation. In come the political designers, all of whom have their own crankish ideas on how to remedy France’s terminal illness.

This is the Sieyes who shall be System-builder, Constitution-builder General, and build Constitutions (as many as wanted) skyhigh, — which shall all unfortunately fall before he get the scaffolding away.

…

A Constitution can be build, Constitutions enough a la Sieyes: but the frightful difficulty is that of getting men to come and live in them!

The French Republicans at times are quite reminiscent of libertarians of today. Constitutionalists, in Carlyle’s view, err in believing that political design is what matters more than political practice.

The Constitution, the set of Laws, or prescribed Habits of Acting, that men will live under, is the one which images their Convictions,–their Faith as to this wondrous Universe, and what rights, duties, capabilities they have there; which stands sanctioned therefore, by Necessity itself, if not by a seen Deity, then by an unseen one. Other laws, whereof there are always enough ready-made, are usurpations, which men do not obey, but rebel against, and abolish, by their earliest convenience.

…

Your Revolution, like jelly sufficiently boiled, needs only to be poured into shapes, of Constitution, and ‘consolidated’ therein?

France finds itself rocked by tumultuous debates, ruled by writers and editors, whose rhetorical conflicts can have no final resolution. When there is violence, in tends to be spasmodic, with no well-defined ends.

Great is Journalism. Is not every Able Editor a Ruler of the World, being a persuader of it; though self-elected, yet sanctioned, by the sale of his Numbers? Whom indeed the world has the readiest method of deposing, should need be that of merely doing nothing to him; which ends in starvation!

People tend to hope that rebellion will result in better conditions for the people. Historians, of which Carlyle is no exception, tend to caution the hotblooded that most revolutions fail to meet their aims, especially when they succeed.

Reader, fancy not, in thy languid way, that Insurrection is easy. Insurrection is difficult: each individual uncertain even of his next neighbour; totally uncertain of his distant neighbours, what strength is with him, what strength is against him; certain only that, in case of failure, his individual portion is the gallows!

During the chaos, the men who profit the most are speculators and farmers alike:

Higher than all Frenchmen the domestic Stock-jobber flourishes,– in a day of Paper-money. The Farmer also flourishes: ‘Farmers’ houses,’ say Mercier, ‘have become like Pawn-brokers’ shops,’ all manner of furniture, apparel, vessels of gold and silver accumulate themselves there: bread is precious. The Farmer’s rent is Paper-money, and he alone of men has bread: Farmer is better than Landlord, and will himself become Landlord.

This sort of economic arrangement emerges during the crack-up boom which accompanies the death of all paper money regimes. In the cities, speculators win and lose fortunes. Outside the cities, the farmers make out much better than bandits.

Carlyle has a sage’s eye for dramatic events and dialogue. As Robespierre is executed in the same sky-blue robe that he wore to usher in his new secular religion:

A woman springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand; waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: “The death of thee gladdens my very heart, m’envivre de joie;” Robespierre opened his eyes; “Sclerat, go down to Hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!” — At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell powerless, there burst from him a cry;– hideous to hear and see. Samson, thou canst not be too quick!

In the end, even after the King-killing, and numerous revolutions, the problem of hunger remains with the People:

Unhappy Senators, unhappy People, there is yet, after all toils and broils, no bread, no Constitution. “Du pain, pas tant de longs discours, Bread, not bursts of Parliamentary eloquence!” so wailed the Menads of Maillard, five years ago and more; so wail ye to this hour.

Eliminating shams, according to Carlyle, does not necessarily build a self-supporting order to replace it:

Anarchy is destruction: a burning up, say, of Shams and Insupportabilities; but which leaves Vacancy behind. Know this also, that out of a world of Unwise nothing but an Unwisdom can be made. Arrange it, Constitution-build it, sift it through Ballot-Boxes as thou wilt, it is and remains an Unwisdom,– the new prey of new quacks and unclean things, the latter end of it slightly better than the beginning. Who can bring a wise thing out of men unwise? Not one.

…

As for the External form and fors of Life,– what can we say except that out of the Eater there comes Strength out of the Unwise there comes not Wisdom! Shams are burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very Cant of them is burnt up. The new Realities are not yet come: ah no, only Phantasms, Paper models, tentative Prefigurements of such!

…

What is still stranger, we understand all Frenchmen have ‘the right of duel;’ the Hackney-coachmen with the Peer, if insult be given: such is the law of Public Opinion. Equality at least in death! The form of Government is by Citizen King, frequently shot at, not yet shot.

Vacuums expect to be filled.

Concluding thoughts

It was impossible for me to read this and not notice how closely modern American conservatism resembles French radicalism. The peculiar obsession of American conservatives with the written constitution and the notion of citizen equality is unmistakably French. The hopes that many radical modern conservatives have in rebellion are also paralleled by the hopes of French rebels.

After Jackson, and even before under Jefferson, America shifted closer to the ideals of the French radicals on the other side of the ocean than they did to the monarchist mother-country. This drift became more explicit as time went on.

Even today, we have an American magazine which some conservatives consider ‘moderate’ entitled Jacobin. The real Jacobins, per Carlyle, wore the scalps of their executed enemies and flayed the skins off of men and women alike, using the men’s skin as leather because female skin was too soft for serviceable material:

Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not mentioned among the other miracles of tanning! ‘At Meudon,’ says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, ‘there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying of which perfectly good wash-leather was made.’ for breeches, and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness (consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture!

We must notice that, under a régime of equality, the forces of justice do not spare women from the skinner’s knife, even though their hides make for poor material. Perhaps feminists ought to be careful about what they ask for in this world.

The darkly funny aspect of this is that whereas Holocaust Denial is an unforgivable sin for Americans, Terror-Denial and Terror-Minimization is part of the curriculum in American higher education. Perhaps even worse than the deaths at the guillotine are the deaths by starvation and malnutrition, caused by the political mismanagement of the Republican regime. Such deaths are common under leftist regimes always — Stalin’s gulag killed fewer than the famines, and Mao’s Red Guards killed fewer than the starvation that his policies caused.

We see this return to barbarism routinely when the left attains power, shortly before the factions auto-cannibalize.

It is just so in Venezuela today, as I write, and will be so again if the American Jacobins, those warriors de la justice sociale, achieve their ends.

Intellectuals like to think that ideas matter more than anything, and that designing order for a country is the most important and challenging part of maintaining order in that country. We saw this sort of conceit operating throughout the 2000s as the American foreign policy establishment attempted to remake the Middle East under a new order of Constitutions by force of arms.

One of the chief themes that Carlyle tries to communicate is the general fruitlessness of parliamentary debate as a means of solving existential problems within a nation. The nature of debate is that there are rarely real winners. When someone wins a debate by force of the pen, the loser can come back the week afterwards as fresh as ever. When someone wins a battle by the sword, the loser can’t just come back the week afterwards, because they’re dead.

It’s tempting to be drawn into Parliamentary-war, but there can be no lasting resolution to such wars, because they’re only rhetorical. A debate can feel as dramatic as a duel, but a duel has a clear resolution, whereas most debates do not.

When one considers that the problem of public order is not really a design problem, but instead a problem of maintaining public virtue with no means of enforcing it in a cosmic sense, as in it’s not possible for a human dictator to command that order using a magic wand, even if magic wands tend to be effective symbols of power, everything becomes much trickier.

The point that I draw from this epic is that for civilization to remain in place, the leaders must be Good, and the people must want to be Good and be overall oriented towards maintaining order. Once chaos begins to take hold, social coordination breaks down, and people begin to get into insoluble, dis-coordinated conflicts. Re-establishing order can take centuries if it becomes at all possible, and maintaining it becomes even more difficult.

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