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One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.
I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.
I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history, ostensibly over Danzig, and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. Not that you agree with the framing, but I question the relation of that behavior to chivalry and feudalism.
Martin's critique of classical virtues fails because he has not and it seems cannot finish the story. So people who find Martin's critique cogent should also realize he was unable to finish the story, likely because he is unable to do so without leaning heavily on the values and archetypes he has deconstructed.
Those wars were only as destructive as they were because of the level of technology available to the combatants at the time. Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.
I think it’s very difficult to argue that the world is not more peaceful now — less wars per year, and less wanton destruction and predation toward civilians during the wars that do take place — than it was under feudalism. The nations of Europe were in a state of near-constant military conflict with each other for over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Which was itself a massively violent expansionist military power engaged in constant wars.)
Obviously I’m not in favor of the World Wars. I was tearing up just a few hours ago listening to the famous anti-war WWI ballad “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The worst thing about those wars is that they were (in the minds of the powerful men who engineered them) fought for the same reasons as feudal wars were: competition over territory and resources, imperial competition, grievances between powerful individuals, etc. But they were sold to the public as being fought for liberal, messianic reasons — every bit as moralized and totalizing as the “traditional chivalric virtues” which those liberal values had originally hoped to supplant. And clearly to some extent this is still happening (the Iraq Wars and the current Ukraine conflict come to mind), but the fact that there hasn’t been a war of anywhere remotely near the destructiveness of the World Wars in 80 years is, I think, instructive of the fact that globalist liberalism is, overall, more conducive to peace than feudalism was.
The demand for unconditional surrender was justified on liberal precepts and was very much unlike all those feudal wars throughout history in which it was SOP to sue for peace and come to a political arrangement. In WWI this outcome was disrupted by American intervention, and in WWII this outcome was enforced on the altar of liberal values. So the liberal/Marxist demand for unconditional surrender, directly related to their own fantasy-crafting about the "good vs evil" nature of the conflict, has to be related to the massive destruction of that war in addition to the technological improvements. And likewise the technology has to account for the 80 years of relative military peace due to the threat of MAD from not just nukes but conventional warfare.
But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.
Edit: January 1943, that's when Roosevelt and Churchill publicly and officially made the war aim "unconditional surrender." How does that not make you rage with anger? That is justified with liberal platitudes, show me a feudal conflict like that, as bloody as they were...
The allies demanded unconditional surrender citing the "barbarian leaders" of the enemy and then proceeded to firebomb and nuke hundreds of thousands of civilians while declaring themselves the blameless heroes. You can't let liberalism off the hook for this or even compare it to feudal conflicts which do not at all appear to have been motivated by this distinctly modern "good vs evil" narrative-crafting.
Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?
Oh I agree we are in a Globalist Age, and many others on the Online Right are wrong to deny this or think it's even avoidable. But is clinging to Liberalism really the best path forward given this reality? Pax Americana is not even close to a worthy justification for clinging to the noble lies of Liberalism. It's actually a reason to jettison it.
I think Liberalism can be tweaked and refined significantly. For example, its claims of universal human equality made more sense in the context under which they were developed. However, now that we have a much larger exposure to the full breadth of global humanity, we can observe conclusively that this supposed equality is not the reality on the ground. So, we can refine liberalism to take that into account - either by limiting its universalist commitments, or by using the technologies we have available — and the even better ones yet to be developed! — to actually make that equality a reality through eugenics.
Liberalism is built for 130-IQ Anglos — so, let’s make the rest of the world more like 130-IQ Anglos! I also think we can syncretize liberalism with the more communitarian aspects of Asian societies, strengthening both traditions through fusion. There’s a lot of room for intellectual and political developments to obviate some of the worst and most deluded/obsolete aspects of Classical Liberalism.
Liberalism was built by and for 130-IQ Anglos, which leaves me wondering why you think the rest of the world will be as passionate about muh Social Contract. It was created as a post-hoc rationalization for their own political and imperial and separatist ambitions. Muh Social Contract and "inalienable rights" are nothing except noble lies they made to justify their own expansion of power. It's not suitable for the Globalist Age foremost because it's not true, and secondly, like you said, it was made by and for them, not for a Globalist Age.
Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.
Can you explain? It is not obvious to me. Though that might be due to me confusing "Liberal Values" for "Values that are Liberal" such as morphological freedom.
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