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I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.
We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.
I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.
So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.
When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.
The culture that these people all seem to want to “R E T V R N” to is pretty explicitly not just Christian, but Catholic, isn’t it?
The idea they are supposedly criticizing, that human beings have dignity, is not a “slave mentality”, it is the foundational idea behind ending the standard where the vast majority of humans were subjects of their King. Christianity is a liberating ideology at its very core.
Of all the dumb, grifting things that people like Richard Spencer have said, this is perhaps one of the dumbest. This puts him into the same category as people like Andrew Tate; just absolute luke warm IQ people who would be working some low intelligence job if it were not for social media.
The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.
They wouldn't. Best they could get, they'd be some kind of household staff dealing with running the kitchens and stores for the real LORDS AND MASTERS. Worst case? They'd be ground down into the dirt. "But I am so smart and big-brain!" "Yes, and I have big sword. Which of us wins this contest?"
This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.
In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.
I am sure that with some people, this actually is a moral principle. Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people". There are a number of other such right-leaning (by modern standards) intellectuals who seem to have genuinely been motivated by at least some altruism.
A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission. Think of those Nazi uniforms and the Nazi cult of the virile young man, and the adulation of Hitler as some sort of almost living god, for example. and in general, think of the whole Prussian style of life, with its stern fathers and hyper-focus on discipline, social rank, and obedience. Or think of Mishima, whose life speaks for itself. In the modern day, think of the Bronze Age Pervert / Greek statue Twitter style of aesthetic, with its emphasis on toned male bodies and the constant dancing around the fact that many of the actual ancient Greeks enjoyed having sex with men very much. Nothing wrong with some gay sex, but it is funny to see the sublimation in action. Even if they have never heard the word, such people long to be part of a Koryos - although, if in reality they actually did get to be a part of some such group, with its intense hazing and male bonding, they might wish to flee from it quite soon. They have their admiration of masculinity bound up with their psycho-sexual natures. While they might be horrified at the idea of being an older ancient Greek man's young companion who gets both mentored and dominated, maybe even fucked, they long for the softer version of something similar that can be found in Fight Club, or in movies about the tight bonds between soldiers. There is a strong psycho-sexual need for an older brother or a "daddy" of some sort. Now, we all could use a nice older brother or a loving father, but among some of the highly online right it is clear that these archetypes have become fetishized.
Such people often have a powerful obsession with the idea that modern society lacks transition rites to turn boys into men, that it is missing a Koryos of some sort. The modern highly online right has a high over-representation of people who for some reason feel like they need to become men by doing something. Now, normally this just happens as one goes through life. One meets challenges, faces them, sometimes gets defeated and learns something to come back to the fray, at other times conquers the challenge and advances to new heights. Over time, one gains a stronger and stronger sense of one's own power.
Men who, for whatever reason, get stunted in this power process, to borrow a term from an infamous writer, make up a large fraction of the people who get drawn to extremist politics with strong sexual connotations. This is perhaps the grain of truth behind the meme of "young anime-loving autist boy has two possible paths in life: either become a super-leftist transgender with pink-and-blue socks, or become a Nazi LARPer who hates women and posts online going by the name of GasTheKikes1488". In either case, these people seem to have a powerful feeling that something key is missing in their self-image.
The 10% of the right that is made up of actual humane intellectuals is simultaneously struggling with the weight of the 80% of the right who have about the intelligence level of a piece of wood, and with another 10% of the right that is made up of raging, messed-up edgelords.
From 1943 letter of Tolkien to his son Christopher:
People see homoeroticism in things like this for the same reason they see it in pretty much every anime, TV show, and movie under the sun that appeals to the right crowd. Can you prove that Harry Potter isn't secretly in love with Draco Malfoy?
I believe the correct term is homosociality rather than homoeroticism, though there is an element of homoeroticism in some of these groups of course (like you can find an element of anything in some group involved in anything at all).
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I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
I think that for the most part, I came to these conclusions independently, being a big history buff. The intense psycho-sexual atmosphere of the typical authoritarian childhood upbringing and the homoerotic, fetishistic quality of fascism and Nazism are so obvious that it doesn't really require any profound insight to notice them.
To be fair to the far right, leftist totalitarianism also has this homoerotic, fetishistic quality to some degree.
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I agree. I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields (economics and psychology, respectively). Not even repudiated, really, it's more like "not even wrong"- they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls. No doubt it was shocking stuff to the victorians to talk about labor revolutions and sex but it's not that shocking today, and we have a lot of real social scientists studying this stuff.
And yet, they're still taken as this huge intellectual cornerstone to the modern humanities. It's like not even questioned, just of course marx and freud* were right, the real question is how do we go beyond their work to update and adapt it for the latest developments. So they take Marx's idea of a class struggle between an oppressive conspiracy of capitalists vs the mass of oppressed proletariats, and mad-libs that to every single other priviledged/underpriviledged group under the sun. it's really amazing. Why can't they read a different book?
Hell, there's even a term for it: Freudo-Marxism. I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing. You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.
With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:
Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear. We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions. But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.
Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something. We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time. I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases. Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.
Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain. You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates. For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all. But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.
Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project. Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there". You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire. And what criteria do you use to make this inference? There are a lot of difficult edge cases. Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.
Are these cases of genuine desire? If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire. But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here. The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has. We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.
But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria? What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time? Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse. She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here. On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships! She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire. (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on). If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident. So, does she have this type of desire? If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like. If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.
So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it. But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story. Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable. Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling. You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.
The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement. There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is? How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
I'm not any kind of expert myself- just a couple undergrad classes and what I've skimmed from wikipedia. So I'm not trying to do battle with you here. If you tell me that you've studied it extensively I'll believe you.
But, from what I've read, this really doesn't seem like an accurate summary. It seems more like you're talking general phenomenology/theory of mind stuff. Lots of philosophers have talked about that, and it goes back way before Freud. (I'm not sure what the first would be- at least Descarte, and arguably all the way back to the Greeks). Of course it's a hard problem. Still, psychologists have found ways to grapple with it. At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
If anything Freud was the opposite. He seemed to believe that he could accurately diagnose people's subconscious minds and innermost desires, even better than they themselves could. Like he somehow came to believe that all his patients who came to him with horrific tales of being sexually molested as children, were in fact just lying and telling him a fantasy of what they wish had happened. Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor". He made all sorts of really bold claims about other people's minds.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell. And even better, it's a perverted sexual desire, which most people aren't comfortable talking about. No one wants to have a public debate to try and prove that "actually no I'm not trying to have sex with my mother." So you can win a whole swath of arguments by tarring your adversaries with dark accusations. It's like the Oscar Wilde quote- "Everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power."
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I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I think the appeal is that both of them describe how people are shaped by their environment, thus implying that intelligent control of the environment could allow shaping of people, which is an incredibly seductive idea even if most people won't admit it. The contradiction is that Freud says that people are shaped by their families and social circles, and Marx says that people are shaped by their socio-economic class and the economic structure of society.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
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Yeah, as I'm reading about it now that sounds right. To be more specific it was this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Civilization which really argued the idea, and it got popularized by the Frankfurt school and spread through all of the postmodern academic humanities. What a trip.
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Marxism is popular because its the only anti-state movement that managed to on the face of it capture a powerful state entity. Syndicalism, anarchism and other movements all failed to capture states, so there is no extant example to suck in all the intellectual energy. Marxism, by having ostensibly captured one major european population, points to a proximate success story to coalesce intellectual energy around. That marxism/stalinism/communism collapsed into failure is attributed to how It Wasn't Real Communism, and when there was Real Communism it was glorious.
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There certainly can be an intimate link between politics and sexuality. But I don't view this as inherently delegitimizing or discrediting. The type of phenomenon you describe (and other analogous phenomena) certainly could be a perfectly legitimate expression of individual will, individual creativity, etc, although this determination ultimately has to be made on a case by case basis.
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