[lbo-talk] creepy journal

Shane Taylor s-t-t at juno.com
Wed Jul 30 08:37:50 PDT 2003


Doug Henwood wrote:
> Anyone know anything about a right-wing journal
> called The Occidental Quarterly? Reads like high-end
> intellectual racism. But it sounds a lot like some
> antiglobo activism - your average International
> Forum on Globalization partisan of "community"
> might half-agree with this conclusion from an
> article by Alain de Benoist:
>
<http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol3no2/adb-democracya.html>
>
> "Therefore, to return to a Greek concept of democracy
> does not mean nurturing a shallow hope of 'face to
> face' social transparency. Rather, it means
> reappropriating, as well as adapting to the modern world,
> the concept of the people and community-concepts that
> have been eclipsed by two thousand years of
> egalitarianism, rationalism, and the exaltation of the
> rootless individual."

What was the old Buckley quote on conservatism? When he described it as the act of braving the tracks of the 20th century, raising a hand to the locomotive of modernity, and commanding "Stop!" Something like that. You mentioned it once before.

Anyway, all this reminds me of something. The following is from a collection of essays by George Orwell on the different camps of "the intellectual revolt" to the mid-century breaks from laissez-faire capitalism:

3. The Christian Reformers

<snip>

Finally -- and in a way this is the most interesting group -- there are those who admit the injustice of present-day society and are ready for drastic changes but reject Socialism and, by implication, industrialism. As long ago as 1911 Hilarie Belloc wrote his very prescient book "The Servile State," in which he foretold that capitalist society would soon degenerate into something resembling what afterwards came to be called Fascism.

Belloc's remedy was the splitting-up of large property and a return to a peasant proprietorship. Belloc's friend, G. K. Chesterton, made this idea the basis of a political movement which he called Distributism. Chesterton, a convert to Catholicism, had the mental background of a nineteenth-century radical, and his desire for a simpler form of society was combined with an almost mystical belief in democracy and the virtues of the common man.

His movement never gained a large following, and after his death a few of his disciples drifted into the British Union of Fascists, while others looked for a remedy in currency reform. Nevertheless, his doctrines reappear, essentially unchanged, in T. S. Elliot's idea of a Christian society. The significance of Chesterton is that he expresses in a simplified -- indeed, a caricatured -- form, certain tendencies that exist in every Christian reformer.

The specifically Christian virtues are likeliest to flourish in small communities, where life is simple and the family is a natural unit. Therefore the tug of Christian thought, even in those who admit the necessity for planning and centralized ownership, is always away from a highly complex, luxurious society, and towards the mediaeval village. Even a writer like Professor Macmurray, who can accept Russian Communism almost without reservations, wants people to live in what he calls "a workaday world," where life will not be too easy.

Mediaevalism, as it is presented by Chesterton, or even by Eliot, is not serious politics. It is merely a symptom of the malaise which any sensitive person feels before the spectacle of machine civilization.

<snip>

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