Preach

But it also disagrees because all humans are equally made in the image of God. Without this transcendence, Bowden — like everyone else on the Right who abandons political liberalism but not philosophical naturalism — is left with only tribalism.

But race can’t sustain culture after its religious roots have been severed. Rome, for example, fell while remaining racially pure. So did countless other cultures, as Julius Evola noted.

They become what Spengler described as Fellaheen — spiritually exhausted, walking dead. According to The Cambridge Ancient History, Babylonian culture, for example, was in its final stages ‘spinning itself out only because there was no neighbour with enough force to cut even so thin a thread’.

IQ differences in the races, for example, do seem at least partly genetic, as Rushton showed. But it was Catholicism, not being Caucasian, that enabled European cultural achievements. Orientals have higher IQs but achieved less. Man cannot be reduced to the physical.

High IQ combined with secular liberalism results in bluetooth dildos.

It also results in what Bowden calls ‘total and utter atomisation’. Autonomy is the core of liberalism, and this weakens the sense of duty and community. Bowden says that ‘people are traumatised by liberal values and feel that they can’t stand against them.’ But prioritising materialism and small families, as most people in the West now do, is standing for liberalism. The idea of making sacrifices for parenthood as a civic duty is alien to them.

Given that a below-replacement fertility rate is, historically, the main symptom of cultural decline, they’re right. And they see the liberal West lacks a spiritual tradition demanding their allegiance. Nations exist in the state of nature with regard to each other — ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Tennyson put it. Weakness invites attack.

But because Bowden sees "Western civilisation as primarily, but not exclusively, Greco-Roman", his ideas about how to reinvigorate it are confused. Western civilisation is primarily Christian. According to one of the early Church fathers, Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165), the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers were "Christians before Christ." Plato, he believed, had laid the foundation for Christianity: God was outside the universe, timeless, and immutable. Because Greek philosophy recognised man’s divine gift of reason, it also recognised the reality of free will, and Justin saw Christ as the personification of "right reason".

If liberty and rationality was the Greek heritage, the Roman heritage was law. In the Aeneid, for example, Anchises’s shade, speaking to his son Aeneas, tells him that, although others will exceed the Romans in the arts, the Romans will "impose their rule on the peoples (these will be your arts) and add settled custom to peace, to spare the conquered and cast down the proud" (Aeneid 6.851–53). And after Rome became Christian, Christianity became, according to Rodney Stark, "a highly centralised bureaucracy modeled on the Roman state. Ironically, this new ecclesiastical structure was destined to long outlive the empire and to play a pivotal role in the rise of the West."

Pace Bowden, then, Western Civilisation is primarily, but not exclusively, Christ and the Catholic Church. Any schoolchild could tell you that from the fact that the calendar says BC/AD. Christ is the pivot point. The heritage of Greece and Rome culminate in Christianity. Thus modern decline starts at the moment when Christianity begins to weaken and splinter: the Reformation, liberalism in religious form.

Because of this decline, ‘the West is very weak but incredibly highly armed’. Over the last few decades, however, practically every time Western troops have been sent to fight in the “developing” world, they have lost. What does a culture have to fight for when its divine fire goes out? ‘Enthusiasm’ comes from the Greek entheos meaning "divinely inspired, possessed by a god," from en “in" + theos “god”. When the fires go out in the temples, a culture is burnt out.

He gives Mel Gibson as an example of someone who faced up to the assault of liberal cancel culture and ultimately ‘faced it down’. But Gibson, tellingly, is Catholic. He has the enthusiasm to resist. ‘We certainly are in a philosophically vapid phase because we’ve privatised our belief systems’

Many people ‘just want a quiet life, but their vanguards that given them the identity in the first place will inevitably tend into conflict’. No subject is more neglected by the liberal regime that military history. And human history is largely war punctuated by brief periods of peace. Thus the timebomb at the foundations of liberalism is that ‘many liberal humanists don’t really like the people that they protest to adore because they all want them to become Westerners’.

For now, however, ‘economy is all that matters to people because they’ve been told that it is.’ Pseudo-conservatives are willing to sacrifice anything on the altar of the market. Unfettered capitalism is economic liberalism. ‘I would prefer,’ Bowden says, ‘if people change their ideas, but people won’t, and therefore they need the pressure of material circumstances to do that, and that takes an economic form.’ As the Bible recognises, ‘all things obey money’.

Given that the essence of the Left is equality, however, this is odd: Christianity is hierarchical. The Devil was cast out of Heaven for trying to equal God. Man is not equal to the angels. And the Psalmist has ‘hated and abhorred iniquity’ (119:163).

So what does Bowden mean? Remember he’s a Nietzschean. For Bowden, ‘paganism is natural law oriented’. And what he means by this is not what Aquinas means by it — "nothing else than the rational creature's participation in the eternal law" ( ST I-II.91.2). No, he means Hobbes’s state of nature where man is wolf to man. It’s in this sense, he claims, that Christianity is weak.

This is Nietzsche’s concept of resentment. Note this is not the same thing as resentment. A weak man might resent being weak. Resentment would be an inverted system of values whereby he tries to revenge himself upon the strong man by denigrating his strength. Weakness, he claims, is superior.

That’s the problem, Bowden, like Nietzsche, sees with Christianity. ‘I don’t agree with Christian ethics. Deep down, they’ve ruined the West, and we’re in the state that we are because of them.’ Nietzsche believed that, under Christianity, the slaves rose up against their masters, tricking them into praising forgiveness and compassion. For Bowden, this isn’t the way of nature. Nietzsche’s Blond Beast, happy and noble in his strength, is the ideal.

But what does this actually mean?

‘Become stronger. Move towards the sun. Become more coherent. Become more articulate. Cast more of a shadow….you’re doing it for yourself. IT comes from inside’.

If you think this sounds like Jordan Peterson’s blend, you’re right. Like him, Bowden blends Nietzsche and esotericism. And ‘doing it for yourself’ is ultimately a gnostic belief — salvation by knowledge — hence the similarity to Jung. For Bowden, religion is ‘really just based on ideas.’ So ‘you only have to change what’s in people’s mind. It’s very difficult though.’

But whereas Bowden struggles to explain this difficulty, for Christianity it’s because religion isn’t ‘just based on ideas’. Christianity is primarily about the will and the heart, not simply ideas. Religion ‘on its subjective side is the disposition to acknowledge our dependence on God, and on the objective side it is the voluntary acknowledgement of that dependence through acts of homage.’ In fact, strictly speaking, philosophy isn’t sufficient for salvation nor even necessary. ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’ Christianity also recognises, as Pascal said, that men hate religion are ‘afraid it may be true.’

By contrast, Bowden, baffled by why he can’t convert the masses, thinks it must just be because ‘Nietzsche is too strong enough meat for most people’. The idea that Nietzsche’s core ideas are nonsensical doesn’t cross his mind. Resentment makes no more sense that perspectivism. For Nietzsche, there is no truth. And that means no standards of true morality either. So what exactly could in principle be wrong with the weak inverting values? Don’t they thereby prove themselves stronger? If Christians really did defeat the heroic culture of the Blonde Beasts, they can’t have been very strong. According to Nietzsche’s view of the world, where only power matters, the Blonde Beasts deserved death. And then there’s the fact that Bowden’s — ultimately Nietzsche’s — view of nature is also wrong. It’s not relentless brutality. Animals work together for mutual survival.

Bowden wants to say ‘there are metaphysically objective standards outside life’. Since there is no way to get value from a Godless view of reality, however, Bowden — like Nietzsche — is ultimately reduced to idolatry. As Bowden explains, ‘the dilemma always in the West is what to choose. Back to Christianity or on to paganism?’ Nietzsche worshipped the Superman, and Bowden says he prefers ‘tribally based religions.’

Without transcendence, tribalism.

Those who forget the Lord ‘walk after strange gods’. With his rune pendant and talk of growing towards the sun, Bowden sounds little different from a hippy, yet he claims that ’the ‘60s revolution is a cultural revolution, not really an economic one, but a cultural and social revolution and it needs to be reversed or changed.’ How he proposes to do this is unclear. ‘The energy can be taken and changed and moved in a new direction, you see? Everything’s about energy. Master it, control it, and you can control the world.’ And this vision of man as master — man in control of the world — isn’t so different from the liberal dream of autonomy after all.