Healthier, Smarter, Stronger
Politics suffers from a confusion of language. Ezra Pound would point us back to the teachings of Confucius on “the rectification of names”—call things what they are, use accurate terminology. If you don’t, communication is not possible. The terms right and left are at least a hundred years out of date in politics. Each of them has accumulated a bunch of ideological dross that sticks to them and mucks them up. Sometimes this serves to disguise it, to hide its true nature, as when anti-white hatred and resentment calls itself “anti-racism” or “equity” or some other more benign-sounding term. Other times it serves to prevent even would-be adherents from understanding what they support, or should support. Ideologies tend to come pre-fabricated and bundled; people buy the whole set of ideas rather than deciding each issue individually, because they are intellectually lazy, and because ideologies are tribal and people want to feel that they belong to the group.
Rather than attempt to redefine the right-left distinction from the bottom up, I would like to focus on one particular term, “Progressivism.” During the Bush and Obama years, my dad liked to watch Glenn Beck on Fox News. Beck’s great boogeyman at that time was “Progressivism.” He had programs about Progressivism’s sinister origins during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and how “the Progressive movement” was the root of virtually all modern ills such as feminism, abortion and socialism. That is not a particularly wrong view. Historical Progressivism was a left-wing movement which promoted all of those things.
One of the things Beck and others liked to talk about as being associated with Progressivism was eugenics. To go along with “the Nazis were SOCIALISTS!” and “Dems are the real racists,” they would say that eugenics was a project of the left, of the progressives. There were left-wing proponents of eugenics, such as George Bernard Shaw, but the vast majority were on the right, and many were Nietzscheans. Many of the first generation of Nietzscheans in the Anglosphere, such as Alexander Tille, Thomas Common, J.M. Kennedy and Thomas Chatterton-Hill, were proponents of eugenics and found in Nietzsche a philosophical support for that view. (See the book Breeding Superman by Dan Stone for a comprehensive overview.)
Today, eugenics has been disavowed by the remnants of the Progressive movement, and is seen as perhaps the most extreme position of the extreme right—absolutely no one within the bounds of normality on the political spectrum would say that they favor eugenics. This is because today people think that eugenics means sterilizing and/or killing the sick and the inferior. Like Nietzsche’s philosophy, it lives in the shadows of World War 2. But that isn’t what eugenics means at all. “Eugenics” literally means “good breeding.” That’s it. It means taking conscious control of the process of human reproduction and trying to direct it towards consciously willed, particular aims, such as healthier, smarter, stronger human beings. Proponents of eugenics have always said that if we as a species do not take control of our reproduction to direct it in this way, the default process will instead be dysgenics, “bad breeding,” breeding downwards towards ever-worsening results: sicker, stupider, weaker human beings. They would argue that today, in the face of unprecedented environmental and social threats to health and in the absence of any positive eugenics program, that is exactly what we are doing. (See the documentary film Idiocracy.)
For the sake of clarity, let’s distinguish between positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics is simply the encouragement, through various means, of the production of superior humans: healthier, smarter, stronger. Today we have more means of doing this than ever before because of advances in science, though we also face new challenges that didn’t exist before, such as mass pollution with endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We will leave aside for now the question of whether other traits, such as being more compassionate, would also be superior.
Negative eugenics is the elimination, through sterilization or outright killing, of inferior humans. Again, we will leave aside for now the question of how exactly to define who and what “inferior humans” are since this ends up being much more subjective and disagreeable than defining what is superior—ask a liberal or leftist if they would favor sterilizing or even killing all the “racists.”
The Nazis had to hide their negative eugenics programs from public view, because aside from murderous resentful shitlibs, most decent people find negative eugenics morally repulsive. Or do they? Legalized abortion, which most people accept, is in some respects a eugenics program, especially in cases where people abort because the fetus is known to have Down Syndrome or some other disease. Most people today accept that, they just don’t accept calling it what it is: eugenics. But abortion is also a dysgenics program insofar as it also serves to abort children who would be healthy, intelligent or otherwise gifted and likely to be a net positive for society. There is no selection process beyond individual choice. (This is actually the difference between a right-wing pro-abortion position and that of the left: the left, being anti-health, anti-beauty and ultimately anti-life, supports the abortion of healthy babies above all others. Those are the abortion cases which they consider almost a religious sacrament.)
Eugenics is, by definition, anti-dysgenics; it necessarily entails the suppression of negative qualities in the population. In negative eugenics, this suppression is active. In positive eugenics, it is passive. In theory and in practice, there could be a eugenics program that has nothing to do with sterilization or euthanasia at all. There could simply be the promotion of positive qualities in the species, with the hope that the healthy and strong would overtake the sick and weak through natural process, without any need for actively “culling the herd.” This would be like encouraging the growth of beneficial bacteria in the intestines through diet and supplementation without taking any active measures to kill the unhealthy bacteria. This is essentially what the MAHA movement is: a very mild program of positive eugenics. A leftist will jump on this description as a gotcha and say “See? MAHA is fascist, this right-wing guy even admits it!” But it isn’t fascist at all, it’s quite tame. Notice what MAHA is not: it’s not racist, it’s not discriminatory at all, it’s not coercive (in stark contrast to vaccine mandates), it has no negative eugenics aspect whatsoever. Liberal Canada’s legalized euthanasia program is far more extreme than anything in RFK’s HHS. MAHA is a very weak attempt to promote health over sickness through purely positive eugenics.
What we actually have in practice today is the almost total absence of positive eugenics programs (unless Elon has a secret island laboratory somewhere like in Twins) and many occulted, de facto pro-dysgenics programs. The entire IVF industry is devoted to taking couples who by nature cannot conceive and going against nature to make them conceive. I’m not saying such couples have no right to have children—many of them could do so naturally if they became healthier by finding and fixing the root of their infertility, which is almost always a symptom of a larger systemic health issue. But IVF does nothing to make them healthier; it pushes an unhealthy body into an even more unhealthy state by trying to force it to do something it is not ready to do. Then there are the various government aid programs which support and encourage having children among those who otherwise could not support them. The direction in which all of this is headed is not good.
Not Equality, But Excellence
Progressivism as a political ideology hinges on the definition of “progress,” which entails value judgments about what is good for human beings and human society. Progress as such simply means improvement. So what does the improvement of human society and the human species look like? Jonathan Bowden said that the core belief of the left is the belief in equality as a moral good. They believe that people are all equal—meaning “of the same quality”—or rather, that they should be equal, but because they are not, the moral good is whatever makes them more equal, more the same. Conversely, “the right stands for nature, and for that which is given.” In the rightist view, inequality is a natural and ineradicable feature of difference, of diversity. To impose an artificial equality onto nature is like Procrustes chopping off limbs to make everyone fit in his bed—it’s not only immoral but doomed to failure. It can only have the effect of stunting and repressing the higher in order to achieve “equality” at the level of the lowest common denominator. John F. Kennedy said, “we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures.” That might be enough to prevent us from bombing each other back into the Stone Age, but it isn’t a formula for excellence—it’s not what got us to the moon.
The cardinal value of the left is equality, but the cardinal value of the right is excellence. This is our inheritance from the Greeks, whose watchword was arete, “excellence.” “Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head up high above all the others. Never disgrace the generation of your fathers.” This quotation from The Iliad used to adorn the walls of schools all over Europe and America, from a time when it was understood that the engine which produces excellence is competition. Ironically, it was Progressivism and its new theories on education which removed this idea from the schools and from the society, because the “progress” they sought was the leftist vision of progress: more equal, more leveled, which meant, in effect, more dumbed down.
When left-wing Progressivism emerged in the late 19th century, it was an attempt to take a scientific approach to human affairs, to engineer society according to scientific principles. It failed, because it was actually unscientific, or became so later. Instead of following science, they followed “social science,” and the result is the confused mess of ideas that is the contemporary left.
A right-wing Progressivism, whether by that name or some other, would be dedicated to excellence in all areas of human life. It would be dedicated to the pursuit of science, which simply means “knowledge,” human knowledge about the world and how things work. Rather than attempting to level everything, it would seek to maximize difference, not to keep anyone down, but to allow those who can to rise as high as possible, “the best and brightest,” as they used to say as late as the 1980s. A right-wing Progressivism would be based on the idea that these exceptional individuals or exceptional groups are the engines which drive the progress of the society and the species as a whole—but “benefiting society” is not necessarily their purpose in doing what they do.
If this sounds like a rehashing of older ideas rather than anything radically new, it’s because this is what America was during its golden years of achievement, or at least, this was the ideal to which it aspired. Although there were always counter-forces at play, those counter-forces did not prevail until the revolutions of the 1960s, when the ideal of “equality” definitively displaced the ideal of “excellence” as the core value of American society.
Secular vs. Religious?
I am in agreement with BAP and others about the desirability of a secular right, but I think that, in America, a secular right will necessarily be cloaked in a religious posture, even if only vaguely. I can’t think of a single successful politician who is openly atheist or irreligious. We point to Trump as an example of someone who won support from evangelicals despite being a New York playboy rather than a Con Inc closetcase, but Trump is not an example to follow. He is unique, he is the Man of Our Time, he can do things that you can’t, that no one else can. I wish it wasn’t so … but it do be like that, Mr. Stancil.
The real dichotomy, however, is not between religion and secularism—it’s between science and mythology, whether religious mythology or secular mythology. The left represents a falsified, politically correct distortion of science, a pseudoscience created by fiat, a manufactured, coerced consensus of “scientists” who are actually just lackeys and lickspittles, not unlike what we used to hear about in the Soviet Union, where science had to conform to pre-existing government doctrines, to the point of absurdity. Those who dissent from this pseudoscience mock it as “The Science” or sometimes ¡The Science! to emphasize and ridicule the zealotry and fanaticism—dare I say, the faith—of its devotees.
Followers of The Science like to be derisive and dismissive of religious people, who they regard as anti-scientific, believers in myth and stories over objective fact. And they are partly right about that. There is no inherent problem with being religious and scientific—many scientists are religious in such a way that it doesn’t contradict or interfere with their work. But in practice, much of American Christianity has tended to adopt an anti-science attitude because they reject the theory of evolution in favor of the Biblical story of creation. This rejection of evolution then spills over and metastasizes into a more general distrust and rejection of science. The irony of this is that insofar as science has become distorted by various interests, insofar as it has become itself a dogma, a manufactured pseudo-truth, the religious distrust of science has actually saved them from some of the ill effects of Trusting The Science. The most obvious example are those people who objected to the covid vaccines for religious reasons. They were spared the side effects of these unsafe, experimental drugs, because they opposed them on religious moral grounds. Less obvious examples would be religious people who still believe in the reality of race and the existence of distinct nations on Biblical grounds, in opposition to the consensus of left-wing pseudoscience which says that borders are just arbitrary lines, race is just a social construct, and there are no biological differences between peoples or even between genders.
Liberals used to be able to say that they were the ones who adhered to reason and science, in contrast to the conservatives, who were “superstitious.” But the left abandoned reason for the new secular religion of woke ideology, with its unscientific myths of equality and interchangeability. Real science—knowledge and technique derived from the scientific method—is the crown lying in the gutter waiting for someone to pick it up. Neither the dogmatic left nor the religious right will touch it, each for their own superstitious reasons.
The argument for a secular right is not necessarily an argument for secularism as a mass belief. It simply means that regardless of the religious beliefs of the base, the leadership should make decisions based on reason, not mythology or superstition. It means no more George W. Bush telling the President of France that “Gog and Magog are active in the Middle East.”
Heed the Words of Hassan i Sabbah
Hassan i Sabbah was a Shi’ite Muslim leader of the sect of the Assassins. His doctrine had an exoteric teaching and a secret, esoteric core. For the uninitiated, strict Islam with all its prescriptions and prohibitions. For the elect: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Hassan understood what Jonathan Bowden said about human beings: “we are hard-wired for belief, we have to have it, as a species.” To oppose religious belief on a mass scale is a fool’s errand—you will just end up with either people who double down on their belief because of the pressure, or people who become fanatics about something else, which is exactly what woke leftism is. Religion is a means of organizing society and harnessing its energies for particular uses. Wise leaders understand this and use it accordingly.
Neoconservatism was basically a secular right. It’s Jewish, but not Judaic, by which I mean that it’s rooted in ethnic Jewish identity, not in Jewish theology. Zionism was largely a secular movement, opposed by religious Jews who believe that there should not be a state of Israel at all, because God—sorry, G-d—doesn’t want that. Neoconservatism is also not Christian, at all, but it uses Christianity through a particular interpretation which claims that support for the modern state of Israel is Biblically mandated. Is that cynical, Machiavellian, Straussian? Yes, absolutely. And it works, because they spend a lot of money and effort to promote it. Neoconservatism has ruled American politics for more than thirty years, and still holds considerable power now, as should be obvious from the continued, fanatical support of Israel by both the U.S. government and American evangelicals.
Like neocons, Democratic Party politicians also practice a kind of taqqiya—the Islamic practice of hiding your real belief. As with Republicans, the vast majority claim to be Christians. Joe Biden says he’s Catholic, but he’s pro abortion, pro gay marriage, pro transgender, and pro a hundred other things that go against Catholic doctrine. And for the most part, nobody cares. The Church doesn’t excommunicate him. Certainly he himself doesn’t care, he doesn’t feel pangs of conscience for saying he believes something that he doesn’t really believe. His supporters, some of whom also claim to be religious, don’t care either, because they’re the same way. The only people who care are religious conservatives on the right who shout “Hypocrite! Doctrinal inconsistency!” and think that this carries any weight at all. It doesn’t.
The vast majority of people who support a particular ideology arrive at their support not through reason but through feeling. As Jonathan Bowden said, people are attracted to certain ideas, or not, before any process of analysis and reflection even begins. They rationalize their support after the fact, they don’t reason through to a conclusion beforehand. This holds true for religion as well, which in a sense is just another ideology, a set of ideas that one either accepts or rejects. The world’s religions have formed around particular human types, often particular ethnic groups. It has been argued that the three major branches of Christianity—Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant—reflect the differences between southern, eastern and northern Europe more than they reflect different theologies. Within the subdivisions of religion, such as the various Christian denominations, you often see different human types reflected in the membership: the Christians who attend the traditional Latin mass are not the same human types as those who attend a liberal Methodist church.
This being the case, I think that the most practical way of dealing with the religious question in American politics is to do exactly what the neoconservatives did: construct a version of Christianity that suits our purposes, that is amenable to the political positions that we would like to see gain support, and which is attractive to the particular types of men whose support we would like.
“What?! Oh my god, that’s heresy, that’s blasphemy, that’s an affront to truth itself, that’s relativism and postmodernism and heckin nihilism!!!” Yes, it’s all of those things. It’s also what everyone else already does and always has. You don’t want to think that about your particular church or variation of theology … but it do be like that, Mr. Stancil. What do you think the Council of Nicaea was? Why do you think European princes supported Protestantism? Why did Henry create the Church the England? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the split between Orthodox and Catholic happened to mirror the political divide between the Eastern and Western empires.
The Democratic Party has a secular leadership, or had one, before it became increasingly infected with the religion of wokeness. The GOP has a secular leadership insofar as it is neoconservative, but the problem with neoconservatives is that they’re not pro-American, and they’ve systematically undermined America for thirty years. What I would like to see is the emergence of a new order composed of a secular leadership on the right which is pro-American, pro-Western, above all pro-excellence. A leadership committed to progress and advancement, to new discoveries and innovations, to maximizing the potentials of life, to making healthier, smarter, stronger human beings of the future. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the government or anyone else needs to impose a secular or atheistic worldview. I think that would be a disaster. The communist countries tried that in the 20th century and it failed miserably. What is needed is simply an interpretation of Christianity that doesn’t conflict with these goals.
Jonathan Bowden, great prophet that he was, spelled out the way in his 2007 “Credo” speech, widely considered his best recorded speech:
“I believe that in the Greek civilization, a peasant woman could kneel before an idol, and could have a totally literalist — it’s called metaphysically objectivist — view of the religion. She believes in it absolutely. A fundamentalist in contemporary terms. And you can go right through the culture to extremely sophisticated intellectuals, some of whom were agnostics and atheists who supported religion — yes they did!
Charles Maurras was believed to be an atheist, but he led a Catholic fundamentalist movement in France. Why? Because if you are Right-wing, you don’t want to tear civilization down just because you privately can’t believe. You understand the discourse of mass social becoming. What does a wedding mean? What does a death mean? What does the birth of a child mean? Unless there’s something beyond it? What does a war mean? Just killing for money? Unless there’s another dimension to it.”
Nietzsche said that religions—which he regarded fundamentally as works of art—are created by great lawgivers who mold human beings and human society the way a sculptor molds earth and metal. This obviously goes against the religious view which holds that religions are created by God and are merely revealed to men, or rather, to one individual man, such as Moses or Muhammad. But both views recognize the importance of great men in leading movements. It’s possible that some charismatic, prophetic figure will arise in American society to create and lead a new religious movement, which I think will necessarily have to be Christian or at least Christian-friendly, Christian-adjacent. Tony Robbins probably has the talent to do something like this, but he seems to also have the good sense not to try. In the early 00s, Mark Driscoll made an earnest attempt to bring implicitly right-coded Calvinism to the left-wing Pacific Northwest. He emphasized masculinity and warrior virtues, famously taking his congregation on field trips to MMA fights, and he showed a keen understanding of social dynamics:
“Most churches don’t know what to do with young entrepreneurial type leaders. Most of the time they think they’re troublemakers, ‘cause they’re critical, they say ‘I do it differently,’ ‘I think we should make changes.’ The question is: are they critical, or are they leaders? Are they young guys who are a little brash and unpolished, but if we assess them and really knew that they were gifted, could we redirect them? … The question is, if you want to be innovative: How do you get young men? All this nonsense on how to grow the church, how to do this thing—one issue: young men. That’s the whole thing. They’re gonna get married, make money, make babies, build companies, buy real estate—they’re gonna make the culture of the future. If you get the young men you win the war, you get everything. You get the families, the women, the children, the money, the business, you get everything. If you don’t get the young men, you get nothing. Most churches are built to cater to forty-something year old women and their children. And the guys are nowhere to be found.”
However, he was soon taken down by a coordinated campaign which shamed him for posting as an anon on a forum some years prior, where he made some politically incorrect statements (all quite tame actually) and also for paying money to have one of his books boosted on the bestseller list, a standard practice in the world of publishing. The church which he founded, Mars Hill—named for the place in Athens where Paul preached to the pagans, a site dedicated to the god of war—was destroyed by the scandal, and although Driscoll still preaches elsewhere, he is older now and doesn’t seem to have the same zest for fighting the culture war that he had twenty years ago.
A movement like Driscoll’s, who by all indications is a sincere, true believer, could probably be amenable to a right-wing progressivism in some respects, but not in others. (It could also be completely antithetical if the leadership purity spirals.) A different interpretation of Christianity could be “custom made” by someone else, but without a charismatic leader to draw people to it, it has no value.
It remains an open question what kind of religious movement will arise—the new vision of a true believer, or a cynical creation like that of the neoconservatives. Perhaps neither, and religion as such will simply continue to wither and fade in power. But I don’t think so. Nietzsche said, “We have art lest we perish of the truth.” Remember that religion, in Nietzsche’s view, is art. It may be that religion, in the classical forms in which we conceive of it, will fade, but something else, another work of art, will arise to take its place, because people require it, because they need something to believe in.
https://semmelweis7.substack.com/p/healthier-smarter-stronger