Civility and Civilisation

Western civilisation is in the awkward situation that nearly the only people who care about its preservation are utterly unfit to do so.

One might have expected great things from a resurgence of white identity. Western civilisation was built by white men, and continues to this day to be maintained mostly by white men, despite herculean efforts to include other populations. Some appreciation of this fact ought to do the Western world good — to straighten its spine at least.

But as of now, the vanguards of the movement are those with the least to be proud of.

Consider the rise of Mr. Trump across the pond. Who are his acolytes? People who crow about being “alpha”. People who lament the decline of masculinity in the West.

To some extent they have a point. The stigmatisation of masculinity and its rituals has left a great number of men — especially low-ability men who find it difficult to adapt — without a viable path to a satisfying life or a long-term mate. Rural decay and /r9k/ are two sides of this coin.

These are the men turning to white nationalism and Trumpism. Disaffected, loveless, and boorish. And they have taken the defense of Western civilisation onto their own shoulders. I’ll call them the “alt-right.”

In this new installment of the culture wars, the alt-right loves nothing more than to use the tactics of the left against them, most of all no-platforming: harassing dissenters until they become relenters. And, maybe more importantly, stigmatizing those who would stick to the rules of good-faith rational discourse. To the left, those people are tools of the oppressors. To the alt-right, they’re “cucks”.

In both cases, the basic problem is: these people can’t fathom why you’d agree to ground rules for engaging with people you disagree with.

But civilisation consists in those ground rules. And to the extent that it’s “masculine” to reject them, well, so much the worse for masculinity.

The basic problem is, white civilisation is rather “feminine” in the sense of being longsuffering. Whether this is a product of natural selection or pure culture, there can be no civilisation without it. If everyone acts like the defenders of white civilisation want us to act, there’s no white civilisation to defend.

Here’s the paradox, then, about the current debate over immigration. The proponents of a masculine Westernism find themselves supporting leaders who resemble nothing so much as the strongmen necessary to maintain order in the Arabic world. In fact, if you want to reintroduce brutish masculinity such as is exemplified by Trump’s army of trolls, there’s no better way to accomplish that than importing a bunch of Muslims. You’re sick of feminism and political correctness? You wish politics was more about the naked interests of your sect without any pretensions to the “public good?” Great — you’ll find ready allies in all the barbarians at Europe’s gates!

The opposite, of course, is just as paradoxical: the elite of a feminised civilisation struggling to maintain dominance over a resurgence of domestic reactionary brutes, for some reason finds foreign reactionary brutes to be sympathetic.

If there is anything in Western civilisation worth preserving, it is the fact that we have managed to suppress the brutish element and subsist on a measure of civility for at least a few centuries. It is the ability to agree with an enemy on basic ground rules, and then committing to keep them.

Let us hope that, among the defenders of civilisation, there are also left some defenders of civility.