L. Reuteri Is Your Friend

A once common microbe in the human microbiome is L. reuteri (Limosilactobacillus reuteri; formerly known as Lactobacillus reuteri). It’s been central to mammalian evolution. But in modern humans, it’s in decline because of widespread use of antibiotics and farm chemicals, in the latter case specifically pesticides like glyphosate that has actually been patented as an antibiotic. “Recent studies have shown that low-level chronic dietary exposure to pesticides can affect the human gut microbiota” (J. Gama, et al, Chronic Effects of Dietary Pesticides on the Gut Microbiome and Neurodevelopment).

This is problematic since L. reuteri is such an important microbe for human health, demonstrating numerous health benefits. You’ll see wide array of scientific studies, articles, and videos that come up if you look at the Google results about several scientifically-supported strains of L. reuteri: DSM 17938, ATCC PTA 6475, ATCC PTA 5289, RD830-FR, and SD-LRE2-IT. It’s gotten a lot of attention in the alternative diet community. Dr. William Davis, of Wheat Belly fame, recommends making one’s own cultured dairy. There are many cheap yogurt makers, and some models of the Instant Pot have a yogurt making function.

In the past, humans could replenish microbes from food and environmental exposure. But commercial brands of probiotic foods like yogurt, kefir, and kombucha tend to lack L. reuteri; and, besides, they rarely contain high amounts of any microbe because they typically don’t let them culture long enough. And of course, for most of us, our environments and bodies have been hygienically cleansed. It’s part of the hygiene hypothesis, seemingly underlying the rise of many diseases, especially related to allergies and autoimmunity. This is unsurprising. After all, most of the genetics in the human body originate in non-human organisms.

That is why many people turn to probiotic supplements. There are several high quality and highly recommended products, some for general purposes and others more specific: BioGaia Gastrus, BioGaia Prodentis, and Seed DS-01 Daily Synbiotic (there are other products, but most companies don’t list the strains, CFUs, scientific research, and other info). These probiotic products can also be used to make one’s own cultured foods, which is actually more effective. Every three hours, the number of microbes doubles. So, the microbe count grows quite large by the time a standard 36 hour culture is finished.

According to Dr. Davis, over 90% of individuals in modern industrialized populations have entirely lost L. reuteri. In general, the contemporary microbiome, specifically in the West, is smaller and less diverse than that of traditional people. About L. reuteri specifically, it not only improves the health of gut, skin, immunity, joints, muscles, and much else. More interestingly, it helps the body to release the hormone oxytocin, the love molecule. Research has shown that, once reintroduced, human subjects feel calmer and more relaxed, kinder and more empathetic, closer and more understanding; while sleep and general wellbeing is improved.

Dr. Davis speculates that the loss of L. reuteri might be a causal factor in the psycho-social problems rampant in our society. And if so, he asks if reintroducing it might undo the damage. That fits into our own thinking and that of many others. There was a ketogenic study done on diabetic kids back in the 1940s or 1950s where the researchers noted that, besides health improvements, there were also behavioral improvements. Before that in the 1930s, Dr. Weston A Price observed that what he called moral health (happiness, friendliness, and pro-social behavior) was closely associated with physical health.

Directly relevant to our topic here, one might note that the traditional communities Dr. Price was looking at were eating probiotic foods and were not yet exposed to antibiotics, antimicrobials, farm chemicals, and industrial toxins. This is further corroborated with a wide array of evidence in Alan C. Logan and Susan L Prescott’s book The Secret Life of Your Microbiome: Why Nature and Biodiversity are Essential to Health and Happiness. It’s an intuitive view to take, that humans would be healthiest and act the healthiest when living in the optimally healthy conditions under which humans evolved.

Henry Fairlie’s Toryism, the Good King, and the People

“The king and the people against the barons and the capitalists.” That is the motto of the Tories, according to Henry Fairlie; or at least what he claimed Toryism used to represent for centuries until the Thatcher era. In this formula, the king was seen as representing the entire country and population, not merely one sector such as the ruling and economic elite. The monarchy was perceived, if a romantic conceit, as above petty and corrupt realpolitik. This goes hand in hand with the ideals of noblesse oblige, that with power comes responsibility; having informed early modern ideals of an enlightened ruling elite. Such an image of the monarchy was taken seriously by the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II who strove to maintain a clear divide between the Crown and all else, signifying that which is morally superior and lasting. Though an obvious myth in practice, it stands in for an ancient impulse toward a good society maintained by a righteous leadership (e.g., King Arthur, as the good ruler who brings healing to the land).

Fairlie was a respected, if not respectable, British journalist and essayist who ended up in the United States; most famous for having coined ‘the Establishment’ (sadly, later reappropriated by Margaret Thatcher, someone he despised). He might be considered ‘conservative’-like by bent, but decried modern conservatives, particularly in his adoptive home; which is precisely why he was an advocate, albeit cautious, of liberal reform. This is partly clarified by High Toryism, as traditional communitarianism, that resists the modernizing force of conservatism, while upholding certain Country Party positions (e.g., opposition to a standing army); a similar distinction Corey Robin makes in describing conservatives as anti-traditional reactionaries. Fairlie pointed out that the Tory tradition was lacking in America, and that so-called conservatives were a sorry replacement.

He hated Ronald Regan, of course, without any quibbling: “the Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy” (‘Mencken’s Booboisie in Control of the GOP’, Bite the Hand That Feeds You). But it was far from limited to Reagan Republicans. Describing American conservatism as “narrow-minded and selfish and mean-spirited,” he explained that, “This is one reason, although it is by no means the only one, why the English Tory feels at home with the Democratic Party, while the Republican party fills him with a puzzlement that gives way to desperation and at last to contempt” (‘In Defense of Big Government’, Bite the Hand That Fees You). That was written in 1976, years before Reagan remade the Grand Old Party into a capitalist whorehouse, although likely Fairlie’s mood was shadowed by the fall of Richard Nixon and Saigon; a low point for Republican pride. Imagine what Fairlie would’ve thought of Donald Trump’s presidency, likely saddened but not surprised.

He wasn’t merely attacking American pseudo-conservatism, for he had his own ideals rooted in British conservatism or rather traditionalism, as he may have felt the word ‘conservative’ had lost its value or else never had any value. “The characteristics of the Tory, which separate him from the conservative,” he wrote in that same essay, “may briefly be summarized: 1) his almost passionate belief in strong central government, which has of course always been the symbolic importance to him of the monarchy; 2) his detestation of ‘capitalism,’ of what Cardinal Newman and T.S. Eliot called ‘ursury,’ of what he himself calls ‘trade’; and 3) his trust in the ultimate good sense of the People, whom he capitalizes in this way, because the People are a real entity to him, beyond social and economic divisions, and whom he believes can be appealed to and relied on, as the final repository of decency in a free nation.” It is because of these defining traits that it’s “not unnatural that he [the Tory] often feels inclined, and in the past 150 years has often shown his inclination, to seek his allies among the Socialists.” Timothy Noah, who knew him, said that, this “description puts Tories well to the left of today’s Democratic Party, particularly when it comes to health reform” (Henry Fairlie, Health Maven).

Indeed, there have been numerous examples of Tory socialists without contradiction (related to the Red Tories that have influenced the Canadian Conservative Party to accept social reform and the welfare state, which makes one think of Abraham Lincoln’s Red Republicans that included Marxists). One might argue that socialism, specifically democratic socialism, is the inevitable or likely culmination of Toryism; if by Toryism we mean holding the public good, the commonweal above all else. According to Fairlie, the problem with American politics is not the threat of left-wing radicalism like socialism but, rather, the wrong kind of socialism. Noting the pervasive power of big government, including in protecting and subsidizing big business, he shared the argument that everyone is now a socialist. It’s just a matter of whether socialism serves the people or the plutocracy.

Modern government stands in for the role once played by the monarchy. So, is it the king and the people against the landed gentry or, instead, the king and the landed gentry against the people? In either case, it is ‘strong government’, as Fairlie put it. He concluded that, “it is time that it was acknowledged that there are now only two choices […] There is no longer a third way.” This is among the oldest of conflicts. Is the government legitimate and, if so, who does it serve? The determining factor, to his mind, was democracy. “It is time that we pointed out to the neo-conservatives that democracy has never been subverted from the left but always from the right. No democracy has fallen to communism, without an army; many democracies have fallen to fascism, from within” (‘Mencken’s Booboisie in Control of the GOP’, Bite the Hand That Feeds You).

To give an American example along the lines of ‘king and the people’, think about how Theodore Roosevelt styled his own presidency. With a genuine sense of noblesse oblige as part of old wealth, he saw his election as giving him the authority to paternalistically act on behalf of the American people and the public good. He not only broke up monopolistic trusts but ensured new ones wouldn’t form, in spite of knowing that it would destroy his political career, as doing right was more important; he aspired to be an enlightened aristocrat, achieving the natural aristocracy and disinterested aristocracy idealized by some in the revolutionary generation, the belief that the independently wealthy could resist the corruption of wealth and so rule fairly and wisely (a distorted version of this ideal was used by Donald Trump). When one robber baron sought Roosevelt’s help in building a transcontinental railroad where every aspect would be owned by him, he denied federal intervention to make it possible because that would give too much power to a single private corporation, potentially greater power than the government itself in being able to control transportation, trade, and hence entire markets across the entire country. In a democratic republic, nothing should be more powerful than the government that serves the people.

That first Roosevelt presidency comes close to Fairlie’s Toryism. The only other Republican president who may have approximated his ideological standards, as a ‘good king’, would’ve been Abraham Lincoln (The Social Importance of Morality Tales); although admittedly Lincoln was rather Whiggish in being in favor of laissez faire capitalism and in being rather corporate friendly. Fairlie wanted a Toryism for the country he came to admire in so many other ways. But is the Tory spirit really foreign to America? Does it need to be introduced by a well-meaning British immigrant? One might argue that we simply need to resurrect America’s own origins. After all, we were British colonies almost as long as we’ve been a separate country. Echoes of Elizabethan English (Queen Elizabeth I) is no longer heard in England and yet persists here in America (e.g., y’all from ye all). Maybe much else persists, if we simply dug a little deeper.

What Fairlie so highly praised might be found precisely where the elite rarely look, in public opinion (American Leftist Supermajority). Going by his definition, one could argue the majority of Americans are Fairlien Tories, with no small inclination toward democratic socialism or else social democracy — Americans haven’t lost faith in the need for good governance, as public polling shows, even as they’ve lost trust in a government that has been corrupted. Maybe this has always been present in the American people, but it was submerged below the bickering of the elite one-party state with two right wings. As Thomas Jefferson came to believe in his elderhood, though the constitutional experiment had failed right from the beginning, the spirit of democratic republicanism lived on in the people (“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”). That is to suggest that likely more Americans agreed (and still agree) with Fairlie than he realized.

What is this spirit of the people? It is none other than the Spirit of ’76, the revolutionary impulse. To bring things back around, it’s telling that the first instinct many American colonists had, in being oppressed, was to appeal to the king in the hope he would intervene and defend the people against the arrogance of a power-mongering Parliament. Sadly, this was a misunderstanding of the times. Even if King George III wanted to help, which he didn’t, the position of the monarchy had been defanged during the Glorious Revolution. There was no powerful king to stand up to a self-dealing aristocracy and plutocracy, the two beginning to overlap since the establishment of the English East India Company in 1600; later to become the infamous British East India Company that was the greatest foe of the colonists. That is why early American laws placed such stringent restrictions on corporate charters; only to be given to organizations to serve the public interest (infrastructure building, hospital management, etc); and generally to not last beyond the project’s completion or within a single generation, as defined by twenty years. But let’s step back, many centuries.

This failure of the monarchy to live up to the Tory ideal of a united front, the king and the people, was nothing new. During the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the peasants and their allies among the lower classes had, in seizing London, effectively taken hostage King Richard II. But they didn’t want to control the king, only to be heard by him. They thought the corrupt courtly advisers, not unlike J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue, were whispering lies into his ears; that if only he heard the truth, he would be won over to their cause. The king, under duress, agreed to their demands of justice and fairness but never honored them, after his troops regained control. The rebels were punished and killed for their efforts. Maybe in having learned this lesson, the next major populist revolt, the more successful English Civil War (AKA Wars of the Three Kingdoms), ended by beheading the king. From one revolt to the next, there was an emerging class consciousness amidst a worsening class war; with egalitarian rhetoric already heard in the 14th century and becoming proto-leftist leveling ideology by the 17th.

The political form this anti-corruption movement eventually took was the aforementioned Country Party, in opposition to the Court Party. The Country Party originated as “a coalition of Tories and disaffected Whigs,” more of a movement than an organized party, having “claimed to be a nonpartisan force fighting for the nation’s interest—the whole “country”—against the self-interested actions of the Court Party, that is the politicians in power in London” (Wikipedia, Country Party (Britain)). Interestingly, the opposition to a ruling elite didn’t form earlier because the aristocracy was still associated with feudal communalism, as distinct from royal officials. But such a distinction became moot over time, as later on the lords spent more of their time not at their estates near their feudal villages, but in the palace and the surroundings of London — a disruptive change detailed by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets. Yet the memory of the feudal intimacy between aristocracy and peasantry was still strong enough in the colonies that the two did unite in a common revolution, as they did in France as well. One might note, though, that there is a reason the main leaders of the American Revolution were country gentlemen from Virginia, still acting as paternalistic feudal lords, and not courtly gentlemen from South Carolina, the latter of which spent most of their time in Charleston when not in London.

The funny thing is how the monarchy became symbolic. When the American revolutionaries sought the king as an intercessor, following the example of the 14th century peasants, they were invoking the monarchy as representing English ethno-nationalism. What they were really demanding, at first, was the rights of Englishmen as citizens of England and subjects of the British Empire. The king as ruler of it all symbolized this sense of being part of the English populace, even as many American colonists had never set foot in England, along with many others not being of English ancestry at all. It was an imaginary identity and powerful at that. Likewise, the actual king himself was ultimately irrelevant for, if the king did not represent the people and the country, then he was no king of worth by definition of this Tory principle. This was seen in the English Civil War, “such was the popularity of the monarchy that this was the ground on which it was fought, even when they got to the point of trying and cutting off the head of the king, they really told everyone that they were fighting for monarchy” (The Jim Rutt Show, Transcript of EP 160 – Curtis Yarvin on Monarchy in the U.S.A.). The monarchy was a way of speaking about legitimate government as ultimate authority — actual monarchs be damned!

This is the background to Fairlie’s Toryism. He doesn’t mention a Country Party because, “The ideology of the party faded away in England but became a powerful force in the American colonies, where its tracts strongly motivated the Patriots to oppose what the Country Party had cast as British monarchical tyranny and to develop a powerful political philosophy of republicanism in the United States” (Wikipedia). So, of course, he didn’t find Toryism, per se, in America. British Toryism and the Anglo-American Country Party parted ways, but retained their shared origin in historical influence. It quickly gets confusing, though, since initially the Country Party in England was identified with Whigs, not Tories or rather only some of the latter: “Country party, which came ultimately to embrace radical Whigs and reconstructed ‘Tories'” (David McNally, “Scientific Whiggism”: Smith’s Political Philosophy, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism). The Toryism of that era (1670-80s) was for the divine right of kings, rather than a constitutional monarchy; and hence there was not necessarily Fairlie’s Tory alliance of king and the people; but it could be found in the Whig Party. The more respectable Whigs, however, dissociated themselves from these Country tendencies; and by the early 18th century the Whigs were now the Court Party; though the Whigs came back around to Country ideology later on.

It’s important to note, though, that in the Exclusion Crisis of the late 17th century the Tories and Whigs may not have indicated any coherent set of ideologies, still less consistent membership. The two sides were often using similar rhetoric, such as Tories likewise turning to populist appeals and fears. Jonathan Scott wrote: “there were no whig and tory ‘parties’ in 1678-83 partly because the ‘whig’ (anti-court) majority of 1678-80, and the ‘tory’ (loyalist) majority of 1681-1683 were mostly the same people. … From 1678 to 1683 people remained convinced of an imminent threat to the church and government; in 1681 they changed their minds about where the greatest threat was coming from” (quoted by Tim Harris in: Party Turns? Or, Whigs and Tories Get Off Scott Free; & Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660-1715). And: “What must be noted behind this consistency of rhetoric is the consistency of its constituency. In both cases we are dealing with a majority of the political nation. The rhetoric was the same partly because, in many cases, so were the people expressing it. To a large extent, and with the important exception of some hardliners on both sides, 1678’s ‘whigs’ were 1681’s ‘tories'” (quoted by the same).

Some of this might’ve been the case of the successful rhetoric of the early Whigs being emulated and co-opted by the early Tories, a common tactic of reactionaries as a way of neutralizing an opponent’s position. One distinction remained stable throughout this period, Whigs defended religious non-conformists and dissenters while Tories attacked them. There had been a growing religious divide, in the Western world, from the peasants revolts to the Protestant Reformation to the English Civil War to the American Revolution, where in each case heretical critics and leaders stood against church authority, hierarchy, and power; typically motivated by righteous denunciations of political corruption, concentrated wealth, and abusive power within organized religion — the American revolutionary Thomas Paine became an infamous pariah later on for having written Age of Reason, a deist diatribe and jeremiad against organized religion (Nature’s God and American Radicalism); very much a product of Country Party, with its anti-clericalism. It’s the same old conflict that has happened with every new religion or sect that challenged an entrenched theocracy or priestly class, such as with the original egalitarian Christians (Stephen J Patterson, The Forgotten Creed).

“In the same essay [‘Of the Political Parties of Great Britain] Hume points out that this basic difference [of two political temperaments] parallels a similar one over religion: partisans of the Establishment side naturally with the party of monarchy; those of the schismatic or heretical sects, with the ‘republican’ or ‘commonwealth’ party. This idea has also become a commonplace, and most modern writers on party have discerned the origins of the two historic parties in religious differences. [… Keith Feiling] traces the Whig and Tory parties back to the era of Reformation, pointing out that there were originally three parties: a Catholic ‘Right,’ an Anglican ‘Center,’ and a Puritan ‘Left.’ With the virtual disappearance of the sixteenth century there remained only two parties: that of the Church opposing that of the Sects. Ever since, the division between Whig and Tory (and between Liberal and Conservative) has reflected this division between Chapel and Church — Dissent and the Establishment” (Robert Walcott, The Idea of Party in the Writing of Later Stuart History).

It’s amusing that the author of that quote, writing in 1962, referred to Fairlie’s term ‘the Establishment’, coined in 1955; a 20th century idea being anachronistically projected as a frame onto the past. Anyway, by whatever language used to describe it, before the modern era, almost every uprising and revolt involved oppressed and silenced religions, religious factions, and religious cultures; and since the Axial Age, this has often been structured along the lines of authoritarianism (or social dominance) versus egalitarianism. So, about Country Party versus Court Party, all the British views on Crown and Parliament could be interpreted as secondary, as offshoots of religious structures and movements in competition and conflict in how groups sought the legitimacy of authority and authorization. Even today, a country like the United States remains highly religious, all across the political spectrum. How liberals and conservatives perceive politics has much to do with the historical development of religion, with the Roundhead dissenters of the English Civil War having settled in the northern colonies and the Cavalier Anglicans having established themselves to the south. Something to keep in mind.

Having gone into decline in England, the United States was more fully imprinted by the earlier form of the Country tradition, becoming what once was called Anti-Federalism but what today is no longer named at all, though remaining as an ideological undertow. “The writings of the country party were eagerly devoured by some American colonists who came to fear the corruption of the English court as the greatest threat to the colonies’ desired liberties. They formed a Patriot cause in the Thirteen Colonies and used the country party ideas to help form Republicanism in the United States. [James H.] Hutson identified country ideology as a major influence on the Antifederalists during the debate over the ratification of the United States Constitution. Similarly, Jeffersonianism inherited the country party attack on elitism, centralization, and distant government during the ascent of Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists” (Wikipedia). As a side note, it’s amusing that Thomas Jefferson, as a Cavalier aristocrat, narratized the revolutionary conflict as akin to the Anglo-Saxon tribes defense against the Norman invasion that would establish the Cavalier aristocracy; but such Country-like rhetoric appealed to him as a rural landowner, distant from Court power. We still require greater context to understand how Anti-Federalism formed, specifically what allied the likes of Jefferson and Thomas Paine; both, for example, having had advocated progressive land taxes to redistribute what they perceived as wealth and resources stolen from the former feudal commons.

Let’s go to the very beginning of Toryism. It is a word that comes out of old Irish, maybe related to the sense of being sought, pursued, chased, or hunted (from tóir). The dispossessed and displaced Irish Catholics were oppressed, early on under Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads; sadly, since both Irish Catholics and Cromwellian dissenters had been oppressed by the same Church of England. So, these Irish tories allied with the English and Scottish Cavalier’s on the side of the monarchy (similar to why many Native Americans allied with the British Empire during the American Revolution). The term ‘torie’ originally was associated with thieves and bandits, and so it came to refer to the political opposition. But it eventually was associated with the triune of ‘God, King, and Country.’ Right from the start, it had a mix of meanings; and one might sense hints of the odd usage by Fairlie. The Country Party has an even more mixed history, not always clearly associated with any single actual party but more often a term to indicate a coalition of interests. But it too had a meaning of opposition: “dissenters of all kinds will be of the Country party” (David Hume, Of the Parties of Great Britain).

Patriotism, as loyalty to country (ethno-nationalism, the land and the people), was early on synonymous with a Country ideology. One thing that sometimes brought Toryism and Country Party together was a republican idiom, even when not actually opposed to monarchy itself; which is odd since republicanism, by definition, means rule without monarchy. Once again, it’s what monarchy represented, not necessarily monarchy itself. It was, instead, “opposition to the government, the centre of which was the court,” such that the monarchy was seen as something separate and above, the ‘Court’ being what today we’d think of as the bureaucracy, the deep state, and the military-industrial complex (Max Skjönsberg, Patriots and the Country party tradition in the eighteenth century: the critics of Britain’s fiscal-military state from Robert Harley to Catharine Macaulay). In the 18th century, the radical Whig Catharine Macaulay wrote approvingly of the regicide during the English Civil War; and yet also hoped for “a patriot king and a patriot ministry co-operating with the body of the people to throw off the shackles of septennial parliaments” (History of England, Vol. 8) — that is the kind of attitude that likely so incensed Edmund Burke, not fear of regicide in distant France but the regicidal tradition right at home. To confuse things further, “the ‘libertarian’ Country party platform had an imperial dimension, which can be connected with the Tory blue-water foreign policy of the early eighteenth century” (Skjönsberg). That last part touches upon Fairlie’s Toryism, in which his having been far from an anti-imperialist or opposed to big government in general, including when it came to war.

In a more distorted form, one can think of those self-styled American ‘patriots’ who attack the ‘government’ all the while praising the police state and the military empire (what, in the past, would’ve been thought of as support for the king and the king’s army, in distinction from Parliament); or decrying authoritarianism while supporting theocracy, white supremacy, and an aspiring strongman. Such strange ideological tendencies can go off in many directions, some quite contradictory. Out of this emerges modern populism, sometimes right-wing but at other times left-wing, but often inconsistent. It’s dual form took shape early on. In the way the Cromwellian army operated, and in line with the earlier rhetoric of the peasants revolts, the Country Party had a genuine component of egalitarianism: “The Country Party began having regular meetings in London, calling itself the Green Ribbon Club. The Club was an open political and social organization that encouraged membership from all classes, and the members freely mixed to exchange ideas” (Elizabeth Breeden Townes , Contemporary reactions to the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis). At the same time, many of its leaders found it convenient to incite xenophobia and paranoia. So, there would be simultaneous denouncement of both slavery and Catholicism, expressing fear of oppression and the demand to oppress others — sounds like the present reactionary right here in the United States.

In the century following the English Civil War, this raucous confusion took a particular form on this side of the pond, and with the same force of populist zeal. But when imported to the American colonies, the meanings of words morphed: “Like their British predecessors, the ‘Jeffersonian Republicans’ feared the growing power of the executive and its influence over the legislative power that risked upsetting the constitutional equilibrium. As avid readers of Bolingbroke and Catharine Macaulay, they were steeped in the Patriot and Country traditions. These traditions were called ‘Whig’ in America, but they had in fact been predominantly associated with Tories during the years of Whig oligarchy after the Hanoverian Succession, and they could occasionally unite Tories with opposition Whigs. Jeffersonian accusations against Hamilton of being ‘Tory’ illustrate how this could lead to confusion, as his financial system was modelled on Whig politics against which British Tories protested for decades” (Skjönsberg). Most members of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party joined the Democratic Party, while a smaller portion turned to the Whig Party and National Republican Party (no association to present GOP); many of the Whigs later joining the present Republican Party. For this reason, outsiders assumed that the Democrats, in opposing the Whigs, must be Tories.

Indeed, the Democrats, in having grown beyond their Anti-Federalist roots (e.g., a strain of abolitionism), became more neo-traditionalist in some ways (e.g., actively defending neo-feudal slavery); where revolutionary liberty was whittled down to that of privilege, even as the political franchise began to expand to all white males. To further complicate, consider that supposed godfather of modern Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke, was a member of the liberal and progressive Whigs. Yet like the Tory Fairlie, his demands for reform were simultaneously strong and moderate, depending on what he was responding to. Burke criticized the British East India Company and initially supported the American Revolution, but once war broke out his loyalty was ultimately to the British Empire. Despite claiming him to support their own legitimacy, the main thrust of American conservatism has been decidedly anti-Burkean, just as much as it has been anti-Tory — Reagan went so far as to quote from the optimistic vision of Thomas Paine, the ideological enemy of Burke. Meanwhile, British conservatism has for the past couple centuries been freely mixing the old elements of both Whigs and Tories. One might throw one’s hands up in despair of making sense of it all, but what is important are the steady and continuing undercurrents.

Of course, we must emphasize again the point that Tory and Whig haven’t had singular unchanging definitions across history. In the 1670s, the radical Whigs challenged the standing army, in favor of local militias, as the military represented the king’s power beholden to no one else; whereas a constitutional monarchy would limit the king’s authority. But over the following 18th century, fear of standing armies drifted over into Tory rhetoric (Lois G. Schwoerer, “No Standing Armies!”). In both cases, this opposition to excessive and oppressive military was a defining feature of the Country Party, a party of no specific party but always shifting. This view on a standing army came to be a major point of complaint among the American Anti-Federalists and other true Federalists. This suspicion of martial power could be seen with the moderate Federalist and reluctant revolutionary John Dickinson, draft author of the Articles of Confederation (revised by Anti-Federalists and so the single greatest Anti-Federalist document); such as with his related argument of Purse and Sword, positing that freedom was not possible if the same ruler, political body, or level of government controlled both taxation and military.

Of course, Fairlie was never against a standing army. But then again, almost no one today would be, not on consistent principle as could be the case many centuries ago. That goes to his argument that we now live in a world of strong governments and hence national militaries, it only being a matter of who is served by them. It’s largely become a moot issue and so a consensus has formed across the political spectrum, although the rhetoric of militias still rings potently, if only among a small reactionary fringe of militant extremists actually takes it seriously. A modern nation-state simply can’t operate without a standing army; and so to oppose it is to oppose modernity as we know it and all that goes with it; and even among the most reactionary, few actually want to return to feudalism, the last time standing armies were rare. On that point, the Court Party has won out, both in practical politics and public imagination.

Someone like Fairlie was very much a modern figure, generously borrowing from both the Country and Court traditions. He definitely drew upon that long established egalitarian populism of the Country Party, having formed before any peasants revolts — listen to the libertarian rhetoric of the ancient world, such as inspired the anti-authoritarian messages of prophets and teachers (e.g., Jesus) and numerous anti-authoritarian uprisings (e.g., the gladiator revolt led by Spartacus, his wife having been a Dionysian prophetess, a religion associated with liberty). On the other hand, as opposed to the Country worldview, Fairlie was firmly in the camp of an activist government; drawing upon a liberal progressive strain of the Court ideology, a strain that preceded the American Revolution by more than a century. As representing a Court platform at its best in terms of interventionist government, by the early 19th century when Country-minded egalitarianism had been mainstreamed, “the Whig political programme came to encompass not only the supremacy of parliament over the monarch and support for free trade, but Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery and expansion of the franchise (suffrage)” (The Politics of Britain Wiki, Whig (British political party)). As such, Fairlie’s Toryism inherits much from the old radical Whigs. Still, he is clearly a Tory through and through in his detesting laissez-faire capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, inverted totalitarianism, financialization, and regressive taxation; old issues that tightly bound earlier Toryism to certain Country inclinations.

Ultimately, he often seems to side with Court ideology, ignoring party labels, in lamenting American conservatives undermining of government and unwillingness to accept political responsibility; specifically in relation to consent of the governed, noblesse oblige, public good, culture of trust, and similar ideals representing a shared society as a moral community. But then again, Country criticisms of government tended to be selective, not sweeping; not necessarily, on principle, opposed to strong or large government, as long as it was good governance. Whereas Republicans dismiss out of hand the hard work necessary to run a modern government, preferring to merely attack and tear down, dismantling it and selling off the parts for short-term profit and self-interest, eating the seed corn so that there can be no next year’s crop; all part of strategy of Starve the Beast. That is the dark side of Country ideology, pushed to a reactionary extreme without any counterbalance of Country virtues. Though there was always a genuine populist impulse in speaking for certain segments of the lower classes, the Country Party too often in practice ended up being a cover for the interests of the capitalist class (merchants and large landowners) who wanted to cut government down to size, small enough that it could be drowned in a bath tub — not so that a more direct self-governance could fill the void but so that there would be no outside restrictions on their own oligarchic dominance, local and/or private.

Think of the original states rights argument of Southern aristocrats which, in opposing federal treaties, sought to steal Native American land; and then justified it with populist appeals of opening the land for white settlers. That is kind of the right-wing populism that so worried the likes of Richard Hofstadter when he wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics. But that unfairly dismisses millennia of genuine populism, built on an emerging class consciousness that made all of modern leftism possible, no matter how the reactionary right has co-opted it. The merchants and large landowners wouldn’t have taken up such rhetoric, if they hadn’t been preceded by a centuries-long grassroots movement of working class revolt; not merely limited to agrarianism, if sometimes taking that form; much less identical to the extremes of reactionary politics such as anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and McCarthyism. Hofstadter too came around to admitting he was wrong, that genuine populism was much more diverse and very often radically left-wing in its egalitarianism (Anton Jäger, The Myth of “Populism”).

One wonders if, in following in this ancient pedigree, Henry Fairlie recognized his debt not only to the Court Party but also to the Country Party. Did he understand its importance to the American founding and the potential it has continued to hold? Did he understand how the Country Party and Court Party had intertwined across Anglo-American history, each in its way influencing his vision of Toryism?

The Beastly Word Magic of Law

The imperial court of law, the traditional seat of power where assembled the great offices of the empire, was one of the most majestic of architectural feats, built out of the finest limestone buffed and polished to a sheen. There were two sprawling wings with towers that thrust so high as to seem precarious, and looming above the broad stairway were vast balconies from which, in the distant past, legal proclamations had been made and great speeches given to gathered throngs.

The great temple, having been rebuilt and extended upon in numerous styles, stood some distance behind the court building. There once had been a large open space of lawn and gardens between the two institutions of authority, but now even the remnants of it were buried and overgrown. In approaching the main entrance of the court building, the temple was entirely obscured, as if it weren’t there at all. Standing before the court building, the awe of the edifice, covered in intricate stonework, crowded about with statues and gargoyles, entirely dwarfed the individual’s view. The impression it gave imperial subjects was that law and order had always been and always would be.

But not all was as it appeared. A secret underground tunnel connected the two buildings of the establishment, a passageway that had only ever been known and used by the highest powers of the land. It was a dimly-lit tunnel with water leaking between the settling and crumbling bricks overlaid upon rough-hewn stones, allowing a black mold to cover the walls that glistened in the flickering light. Among the keepers of archaic knowledge, it was believed that the tunnel was older than any other structure, the names of its early builders and their original purpose lost to memory.

It was so well hidden that, over time, fewer and fewer of the respective elites of court and temple realized it was there at all, each realm of power having become publicly treated as separate; if there lingered vague rumors of conspiracies that, of course, were never uttered out in the open among respectable company. Some of the ancient patriarchs, long ago having harnessed the magic of longevity, were the only ones remaining who held the knowledge of how to find and open the concealed doorways deep down in the underground labyrinth of corridors.

Though long-lived, one by one, almost all of the last old nobility died off. Those who survived were the most conniving and dangerous. Yet power had shifted across the centuries, and the old ones receded further into the shadows. The two buildings, facing in separate directions, had become almost entirely isolated in their spheres of activity. Gradually over the generations, the area between them had grown unruly with vegetation and was overtaken by a thick woods. Neither building could any longer be seen from the other, as if they existed in their separate worlds. Yet some of the ancient ones still traversed the passageway, holding their secret close because the fewer who knew about it the greater the power for those few.

What had changed within the imperial bureaucracy was an incoming coalition of young wealth and aspiring reformers, with little concern for entrenched customs. This new governing class knew nothing about the history of the institution they had inherited. Nor did they know the true identity of the old guard. The old ones, having in the past been accepted as aristocracy, increasingly came to hide behind other identities. Few realized how old they were, as living memory no longer reached beyond the buzz of events that occupied the public arena. It wasn’t only that these figures of the establishment were well up in age. The spells of long life had altered them. They were no longer human.

This was the darkest of secrets, around which the wildest of rumors couldn’t imagine. These powerholders hadn’t merely devolved to apes but further back to the reptilian ancestor of all mammals. It took all their guile, sorcery, and enchantment to disguise their true forms. This required so much of their strength and energy that they had little left over for other purposes. Even so, as long as they remained hidden at the heart of power, they could wield their dark magic. And the greatest spells they cast were the laws of the land, not mere codes and rules but words of power.

Without their legislative witchcraft, their masks of human appearance would dissolve and fall away. They didn’t impose laws to control the population but to control themselves, to maintain their false appearance. The most important of these laws, as symbolic incantations, involved animals for that is what they had become, subhuman. There were rules, restrictions, and regulations on which animals could be kept and how, the conditions of raising and slaughtering animals, in the preparation of food and what could or could not be eaten. But more than anything else, the linchpin of their magical order was the anti-bestiality laws, for the beastly lust of the old ones was barely suppressed. The greater control they had, the more they needed a system of control; for they had no control of themselves.

For this reason, though the true believers worshipped at the temple in the respectable formality of traditional rituals, the mainspring of theomorphic power had always been in the court, a place of concealed wizardry where the old gods, forgotten to all others, were still worshipped. The eroding command and authority among these licentious lawmakers was a threat to their very existence. If their dark nature was revealed, their whole charade would end and they would forever fade from the human world, never to again regain their position of dominance. They used every machination they had devised over the eons. But most of all, word magic, underlying the sway of legislative governance, was the ultimate source of their rule.

They did not so much oversee the governing bodies of the empire as they mastered the human mind. If thoughts and identity could be molded and shaped, then those under such influence could be pulled this way and that like puppets. The incantation of words, not only in law books but also in the voices of town criers and decrees etched on stone pillars, was what put the spell on the public mind. They couldn’t actually alter or even hide their scaly skins, their unblinking lizard eyes, the stench they exuded. But they could cause the people to not perceive them as they were, and to not see is to not know. The enforcement of laws in the world was less significant than the imposing of the laws on the human psyche. Appearance was everything. And so they invested nearly all their wealth in spectacles of power.

All of that was to obscure what happened behind closed doors, far uglier than any corrupt dealings and crony machinations. If it was ever discovered the wild abandon of beastly orgies they committed in the bowels of the court building, the last vestige of deception would be undone. What was seen could never be unseen, what became public knowledge could not be undone. Yet their facade of respectability had long ago begun to peel away, had already revealed glimpses of what lay underneath, but only the briefest of peeks and only for those who were looking. Even then, not many could quite believe it for the ruse of word magic was quickly again invoked in comforting stories, even if it left a spreading sense of unease — it could not be true, it was too horrifying to even allow into consciousness.

This put the lizard people in a state of precarity, for eventually the pretense of denying the undeniable would fracture and with it the foundation of their world. In their terror, they pushed ever harder the lever of legalistic power, constantly layering spell upon spell such that it barely held together. It was all they had left. Their sneers of narcissistic confidence belied a fight for survival and, in desperation, their actions became ever more extreme, their word magic ever more obscene. The suspicions that had already floated in whispers were then being spoken out loud, if at first only outside the halls of power. They still held key leadership positions, in having maintained their grip over the court, so as to invoke their public glamor. But for how long could that last?

Our Life Among the Reactionary Right

The Left and the Right in Relationship

We find that, in our location and life circumstances, we are in contact with a variety of people across the ideological spectrum(s), along with across cultural differences. This diverse town is a major medical and research center centered around a liberal state college. The writers workshop here is the oldest of its kind. Though relatively small, the community draws people from all over the country and all over the world; and it’s situated amidst farmland, pulling in many residents and workers who grew up in rural communities and small towns as well; thus balancing out the middle class WEIRDness (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). But our own bias is mostly that of a local yokel, if someone who at times has lived in other states and regions of the country. Most of our life has been in this town and, though without a college degree ourselves, we fit in just fine with our intellectuality, love of learning, and book obsession. All of that, of course, goes along with our liberal-mindedness.

Yet, as radically left-liberal as we might be, we were raised by conservative parents who are rightward socially, religiously, and economically, if they are somewhat moderate; and we spent our teen years in the conservative, nay right-wing authoritarian, Deep South. Even now in being surrounded by liberalism, for various reasons, we somehow end up spending much of our time talking with those on the right, some more reactionary than others: Republican partisans, fundamentalists, Tea Partiers, MAGA supporters, and alt-righters. Some are family, while others are friends and coworkers. They are a diverse bunch and so they wouldn’t agree on a number of issues, but among them there is a common disconnect that comes up again and again. It’s certainly frustrating, to a leftist, and often just plain strange and disconcerting.

We probably spend more time thinking about such people than they spend thinking about us, and so here we are. Let’s give an example. There is one guy we’ve personally known for a long time. He is an all around conservative Republican trapped in a right-wing media bubble and echo chamber. His views tend toward the conventional, though increasingly reactionary as he ages. He more or less fits the stereotypical profile of demographics and life experience that one might expect, though not relevant for our present purposes. Among our right-wing relationships and acquaintances, he is the one we talk to the most regularly and the most engagingly, for the simple reason we’re around each other a lot. So we are particularly familiar with his worldview and what motivates it. We are informed of his background and what has shaped his life.

He is smart and educated, as is the norm around here, and yet his understanding is so narrowly confined as to give him no larger perspective. Admittedly, he has physically seen more of the world than we have. Intellectually, though, he is less well traveled. Anything that disagrees with his beliefs and biases is often dismissed out of hand. Though retired from the educational field, he simply doesn’t have much curiosity outside of what he already knows or thinks he knows, and having been an expert in his field he is prone to the smart idiot effect, in believing he doesn’t have to research a topic for himself to have a relevant opinion that is to be taken seriously. When point blank given evidence that contradicts his views, he’ll typically refuse to look at it and just digs in further; the standard backfire effect that research shows is more common on the Right, and well-educated conservatives most of all (an interesting phenomenon we won’t discuss further here).

All evidence that doesn’t confirm his bias is asserted as having a liberal bias or is somehow wrong, faulty, or whatever; without any need to prove it (e.g., climatology science is false, manipulated, and corrupt because he read one right-wing book on the topic and so no further information is needed). He won’t offer counter-evidence, just assumes he is right until he is proven wrong, which is impossible to do in his own mind since he already knows he is right. How does one respond to that? Of course, when this anti-intellectualism is pointed out, he gets defensive and asserts that, as someone on the left, we’re just calling names. No, we’re not. We’d love to have a meaningful intellectual discussion with him about many topics, but his intellectual willingness in many cases is not up to match, though not for lacking general intelligence, far from it.

A Liberal Mind Amidst Right-Wing Media

If this otherwise nice fellow were merely stupid, we wouldn’t bother talking to him in the first place or at least we wouldn’t engage with him beyond casual chatter. Yet in having been bottle-fed on early Cold War propaganda, he lacks intellectual defenses against manipulative media. He tends to mindlessly repeat the rhetorical framings, narratives, and talking points he hears from right-wing media and political elites. Unlike us, his media consumption doesn’t extend very far, pretty much limited to sources that conform to the same basic set of scripts. He doesn’t have exposure to any left-wing media or even moderately liberal media, in the way we are constantly exposed to right-wing and conservative media. Part of the reason for this difference is that we have an uncontrollably driven sense of curiosity that ends up leading us all over the place, along with what we inadvertently pick up from the surrounding cultural and media milieu.

As a liberal-minded liberal, it’s hard for us to imagine not wanting to know other perspectives. Besides, even when trying to mind our own business, it’s impossible to ignore right-wing media when it’s constantly in our space, such as televisions playing in the background and newspapers laying about. Keep in mind that all corporate media has a right-wing bias, if only in terms of the capitalist realism and class war of the ownership class (i.e., the super-rich elite who own most of the corporate media that is concentrated in a few transnational corporations). Also, consider that, if you go anywhere in the United States, the most common channel to be playing in any place of business (restaurant, bar, hotel lobby, etc) is Fox News. This isn’t a right-wing country, at least not in terms of supermajority public opinion, but we are ruled by a right-wing elite, media and otherwise.

That is the thing. In our having liberal-minded thin psychic boundaries, it’s not part of our capacity to block out what is in the world around us, whether or not it would be our preference. We are hyper-attuned and sensitive like a staticky shirt picking up lint everywhere we go, the kind of cognitive tendency that comes up in studies on what distinguishes liberals and the liberal-minded. It’s an expression of high openness to experience, and it has other affects as well, in terms of the dual trait openness/intellectuality. Though we may be an extreme example in our roving curiosity, surveys show that liberals in general consume more conservative media and alternative media than do conservatives of liberal media and alternative media; partly because liberals are on average younger and spend more time on the media-diverse internet. Then again, it’s hard for a liberal to do otherwise, of any age group, as right-wing media is pervasive, while leftist media is mostly excluded from the ‘mainstream’.

Anyway, it’s just in the nature of liberals to be liberal-minded, that is to say motivated by intellectual curiosity and cognitive complexity, and so seeking out a greater variety of views and sources. One of the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal-minded personality trait openness is that the boundaries of the mind are thin and porous, that is to say the opposite of highly focused and narrowly confined. To the degree one is liberal-minded one would not be content and satisfied listening to the same set of opinions over and over, hearing talking points parroted. With wandering and sprawling minds, curiosity tends to get the better of liberals. We on the left are vulnerable to being drawn into the corporate-controlled media environment, just because we’re curious and that is mostly what is available. It takes a lot more conscious effort and intention to look for underfunded leftist media.

Let’s consider some specifics. For instance, according to audience data, a liberal is more likely to watch Fox News than a conservative is to listen to NPR, even though the former is much further right than the latter is to the left; as even NPR is mostly privately-funded (i.e., corporate-funded) and, according to one analysis, gives more airtime to right-wing think tanks (an analysis that was already biased in labeling centrist think tanks, to the right of the American public, as ‘liberal’). To find a leftist equivalent of the extremist rhetoric heard on Fox News, one would have to look even further left to alternative media, but such media territory is a complete blindspot for most conservatives, as well as for many liberals. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the United States who is not intimately aware of Fox News, what it spouts, and the effect it has. It’s strange considering most Americans, on most issues, are to the left of the political elites, including the DNC elite. Yet majoritarian left-liberal views are so silenced in ‘mainstream’ media, even supposed ‘liberal’ media, as to be treated as near non-existent.

This is part of a larger pattern of ideological divide. Similarly, someone on the left is more likely to be familiar with genetic determinism than someone on the right is to be equally familiar with epigenetics, and the same for numerous unequal disparities of knowledge: leftist knowledge of corporate capitalism versus rightist ignorance of Marxism and communism (or even ignorance of the anti-corporatist capitalism of the American founding generation), leftist knowledge of neoliberalism versus rightist ignorance of anarchosyndicalism (or any other similar variations of socioeconomic leftism), leftist knowledge of right-libertarianism versus rightist ignorance of left-libertarianism (despite left-libertarianism being the original meaning of ‘libertarianism’), leftist knowledge of fundamentalist apologetics versus rightist ignorance of pagan parallels in Abrahamic religions (the latter of which was written about by Thomas Paine, the main inspiration for the American Revolution), and endless other examples.

So, one side is always coming to the table with greater familiarity with the other side, but it is not mutual to an extreme degree. Instead of knowledge, right-wing rhetoric turns leftists into inane cartoon characters. In listening to Fox News, one lady we know is always saying how absurd and crazy is the political left, by which is typically meant the DNC elite. Indeed, if one were to mostly watch Fox News and little else, it would be hard to not be shocked by leftist politics that, as portrayed, makes absolutely no sense. But what doesn’t occur to the indoctrinated reactionary mind is that maybe it’s the media caricature, not the target of derision, that is absurd.

Getting to Know the Reactionary Right

Because of a lifetime of such a media environment, and because of being liberal-minded in our curiosity, we have become quite conversant not only with conservative ‘mainstream’ media like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal but also have gained long familiarity with more alternative stuff: Reason Magazine, Epoch Times, Imprimis, etc; along with the websites, blogs, and Youtube channels of religious apologists (e.g., Stephen J. Bedard), racists (e.g., Richard Lynn), white supremacists (e.g., Steve Sailer), genetic determinists (e.g., HBDchick), anarcho-capitalists (e.g., Stefan Molyneux ), and on and on; ad nauseum. Also outside the bounds of respectable society, we’ve listened to the likes of Alex Jones, Stephen Bannon, and Jordan Peterson long before most on the Right had even heard those names.

After seeing him in Richard Linklater’s movies in the early Aughts, it was from Alex Jones that we first learned of the concept of a false flag operation; that was when he had yet to go full Looney Tunes, if he was already teetering on the edge of sanity. As that decade ended, during the Obama administration, Stephen Bannon came out with a documentary on generations theory that we saw; and we quickly recognized it as propaganda. Our parents were watching a lot of Fox News at the time and Glenn Beck became a common presence in our life. On our own, around then or maybe earlier, we checked out the largely unknown Greg Gutfeld on his late show on Fox News, but found it boring; and now he is the new primetime comedian commentator to fill Beck’s absence. It was during that period when we first came across talk of Jordan Peterson, his not having been politicized back then and, instead, mostly known for his 1999 book Maps of Meaning. It was actually a Canadian liberal who introduced us to him; prior to his having embraced the alt-right, having become an IDW (intellectual dark web) figure, and having turned his life into political spectacle.

In the past, we used to actively seek out such interesting and intriguing, sometimes bizarre, stuff and would look into almost anything, as we felt morally obligated and intellectually compelled to understand what was going on in the world, including what was bubbling up in the reactionary mind. At times, depending on our mood, we could and still can be openly curious to almost any alternative view, if sometimes just for shits and giggles. The most extreme paranoid fantasies and rantings, in the more innocent times of decades past, could be taken as mere entertainment; because there was no mass movement and corporate media pushing them to the extent seen now, and certainly there had yet to be a Donald Trump presidency and a MAGA insurrection. Our alternative-loving mentality has had a way of leading us down strange, sometimes dark, paths; a habit we blame on our tender young psyche having been imprinted upon by Robert Anton Wilson and Art Bell; what once were gateway drugs for the curious liberal.

We don’t regret our past explorations. It made possible for us to follow all the lines of influence that eventually formed into the present deranged reactionary right, though it would’ve been hard to have predicted what it was to become in its full glory. We were right there at the beginning and it’s fascinating to think back on it. We came of age in the ’90s and viscerally felt the changes in the air. When still in high school, while down in South Carolina, we’d sometimes catch the early right-wing radio talk shows, such as Laura Schlessinger and Rush Limbaugh, along with occasionally listening to fire-and-brimstone preachers as they can be mesmerizing. Following that, we spent several summers in the Bible Belt region of North Carolina, where we worked at a Christian camp and, also while dating a local girl, got to know far right fundamentalists up close and personal.

All in all, the world of the reactionary right is not alien to us, even as it will always be something outside our own mentality. We’ve lived with it, grasped what it is, watched it develop, felt its impact in our gut, and seen what it does to others. It influenced us as well, if only in determining what we didn’t want to be. Now we’re in a different place in our life. We’ve tried to learn to be more discerning in what we put into our mental space, as we’ve found too much of the crap out there to be torturous and usually pointless, not worth wasting one’s time upon. Concern for mental health required us to stop such bad habits of wide-open curiosity, if we still prize an open mind. Nonetheless, it’s not like we can isolate ourselves. Even now, we know the exact talking points that are popular right at this moment on Fox News. We absorb it all like a sponge, all the more reason to set clear boundaries.

No Shared Knowledge, No Mutual Communication

To get back to the conservative guy we mentioned, for all the above reasons and more, we know where many on the right are getting their thoughts and ideas from, whereas few on the right have any clue about where those of us on the left are coming from. It’s a immense chasm to cross, and so it makes actual and mutual communication a rarity, but it can happen at times and that is what motivates us to reach out to the right-wingers within our personal world. Frustration aside, we do enjoy dialogue with those of other views, and that is why this particular conservative has occupied so much of our attention. When not taken in by right-wing fears, he actually is capable of nuanced thoughtfulness and so talking with him is far from a waste of time. Plus, we simply value our relationship with him on a human level; not everything is about overt ideology.

Because of our larger perspective with a broader knowledge base, we are able to sense our way into his worldview; and so we sometimes can couch our own views in the language, ideas, and frames that make sense to him. Yet he can’t return the favor, as it simply is not in his capacity. Our holding all the responsibility for translation can be tiresome. Even then, only on occasion do we successfully manage to lure him out of his reality tunnel of ideological realism and groupthink. At those times, he is able to be somewhat clear-minded and critical, if only briefly for he soon falls back into a more comfortable stance. The only reason we’ve been able to reach him at all is because the political right is fractured and the cracks offer opportunities for light to shine in, creates weak points to gain leverage and wedge open just enough before the openings snap shut again.

In contrast to his GOP partisanship, we are an equal opportunity critic of the entire two-party duopoly. This is useful in that we can get him to lower his defenses by our attacking the DNC elites, particularly the Clintonistas, of which we despise all the more as they stand in for the entire Left on corporate media spin, while in reality third way politics mostly triangulates itself between the moderate right and the corporate right, with some liberal sugar to help the poison go down. In talking to him, we can segue from such criticisms of Democrats into even harder hitting critiques of the totalizing corruption of both parties within a common power structure that dominates society. This usually works in drawing out his semi-libertarian streak, but his defenses return at the slightest hint of ideological threat. We have to be cautious in not being too provoking, and our success is spotty at best.

Still, we can often get him to agree, surprisingly, with rather leftist views (on the problems of neoliberalism, excessive CEO pay, near monopolies, externalized costs, harmful inequities, culture of trust breakdown, monied corruption, etc). That is as long as we don’t point out that we are expressing leftism. The main challenge is that, no matter what, he will always mentally still be living in the early Cold War. A McCarthyist battle against authoritarian Stalinism and in favor of authoritarian fascism will never end in his Burkean moral imagination, and no non-authoritarian third option is quite possible as a viscerally real choice, despite his being able to intellectually conceive that non-authoritarianism sounds nice as an ideal and in theory. Basically, like most on the reactionary right, he has no actual understanding of democracy or genuine concern about it. How could he when all he hears is anti-democratic rhetoric on right-wing media?

Democracy is just a word to be bandied about and, in reactionary style, defenders of democracy get caricatured as attacking ‘democracy’ (i.e., the status quo of the Establishment). Yet, since he is part of the respectable classes, he can’t admit that he is anti-democratic (i.e., right-wing authoritarian) and anti-egalitarian (i.e., social dominance orientation), if not entirely (like many Americans, he is ideologically schizoid). Such an admission would be politically incorrect, even on the political right. This is the double bind we are caught in as a society. Many individuals can’t openly declare and commit to what they actually value, believe, and uphold. Another obvious example is how racists these days deny being racists, whereas in the past they’d have been proud of their racism, to the point of open supremacism and eugenics. This goes hand in hand with the political right co-opting the label of classical liberalism, while eschewing the ugliness of classical conservatism, but eschewing it in name only.

Reaching Out to the Closed Mind

To this conservative guy, old school neocon President Joe Biden is a communist or else he is a communist puppet under the control of Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. And the corporatist Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) is likewise communist, despite it increasing the wealth and power of the private oligopoly of insurance companies, and despite it having originated in a right-wing think tank and having been first implemented by the Republican Mitt Romney (it would make more sense to call it Romneycare). Everything that isn’t far right is communist, or anything that is right-wing but then adopted by the Democratic Party. And whatever you do avoid the topic of postmodern Marxism, a complete oxymoron since postmodernists and Marxists are historically bitter enemies, to such an extent that declassified records show that the CIA intentionally promoted postmodernism to combat Marxist influence. Such facts are irrelevant, though, in speaking to those on the Right.

In not knowing themselves, in refusing to know themselves, right-wing reactionaries know the other side even less and know the larger world not at all. So, lost in such darkness, they are prone to frightening nightmares, where what they project outward is cast back upon them as shadows; with all the shadow boxing that entails, wild punches being blindly thrown and haphazardly landing upon the innocent. Their only sense of the entire Left is a fantastical phantasm that would instantly dissipate in the light of self-awareness, but that would require them to lift it up into open-eyed scrutiny. How does one talk to someone on the Right when their words drop off into empty air filled with the insubstantial imaginings and frightening specters that only they can see? Yet in being part of the same society, how can we not talk to these others, how can we not attempt to reach out? After all, they are our family and friends, our neighbors and coworkers. They aren’t really other, even if that is how they perceive us or rather how the media they consume portrays us.

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today. All those people who created traditions, created countries and created rules…they are dead. Why don’t you start your own world while you’ve got the chance?”
~ Bill Hicks.

What is rarely, if ever, taught in public education, much less heard in elite institutions of politics and media, is that this anti-authoritarian demand to be free of the past was one of the main views of the American revolutionaries, including many major leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, having openly defended direct democracy and majoritarianism. They often spoke of this problem as the ‘dead hand’; a criticism applied to any established institution, tradition, custom, norm, law, constitution, or holy book. Freedom is always in the present because it is the only moment in which to act freely. To live shackled to the past, in being beholden to the dead, is to not be truly alive; instead, it’s to be infected with the soul sickness of the zombified living dead. One of the greatest of oppressions is to be haunted by a past that controls one’s mind, identity, and ability to act; held with the vice-grip of commanding voices that possess the victim, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of King Théoden of Rohan.

During the American Revolution, the radical advocates for the living generation and living constitutionalism came to be called the Anti-Federalists, only because they lost the war of rhetoric when the so-called ‘Federalists’ took control in dismantling the Articles of Confederation and enforcing centralized government controlled by elites (this kind of radical critique, such as when Bill Hicks speaks it, is now identified as ‘liberal’ or ‘leftist’). But in reality the ‘Anti-Federalists’ were the strongest defenders of actual federalism as decentralized power and self-governance. Levi Preston, a revolutionary veteran, as an old man simply stated what the American Revolution was about, “Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”  He clarified exactly what he meant. Right before that, he said, “Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” It was not a tax revolt, as if early working class Americans were willing to fight, sacrifice, and die in defense of capitalism. Their sense of freedom denied was much more visceral and communal, with political implications right from the start. They were social justice warriors. They understood that the political is personal and the personal is political.

Such righteous assertion of self-independence, self-autonomy, and self-governance — the Spirit of ’76 living in the Spirit of the People — is not possible if one places the authority of corpses and ghosts over one’s own self-authorization and self-authority, any more than one can be free by submitting to the power of an aristocrat, king, or pope (or dictator, demagogue, etc; or partisanship and lesser evilism). Every living generation, morally and practically, has no choice but to choose for themselves, again and again. Even choosing submission to the dead is a choice of the living and so responsibility for the consequences of that choice cannot be denied. That sense of freedom-loving, almost anarcho-libertarian, independence is why many of the revolutionaries didn’t see the revolution as having ended with the defeat of the British Empire and so continued to fight against corrupt and oppressive elites, including against the plutocratic and oligarchic Federalists (e.g., Shays’ Rebellion); with the Spirit of ’76 never having gone away. Jefferson’s hope and Paine’s promise spring eternal; as evidenced by the thousands of riots, revolts, uprisings, insurrections, protest movements, and mass strikes that have happened since that time.

The colonial working class radicals and revolutionaries weren’t the only ones who bucked against new oppressions replacing the old, even ignoring rare aristocrats like Jefferson. Many others understood or suspected that leading Federalists like Alexander Hamilton were consciously modeling the new ‘constitutional’ republic on the British Empire and the British East India Company, if those like James Madison figured it out too late. These Federalists aspired not to be free but to be the next ruling elite of an even greater global superpower. Such schemes were a real threat, as we can see with what the United States has become, but it’s obviously not like no one saw it coming. Consider moderate and principled Federalists like John Dickinson, initially resistant to revolution at all and later the draft author of the Articles of Confederation, who feared such imperialistic centralized and concentrated power; as expressed in his purse and sword argument (basically, an Anti-Federalist argument; and the Articles did become a touchstone of Anti-Federalist thought). Even the Anti-Federalist Abraham Clark, supposedly the one who suggested a constitutional convention, was unhappy about the results; to such an extent that he warned, “We may awake in fetters, more grievous, than the yoke we have shaken off.” That worry turned out to be prescient, like so many other Anti-Federalist warnings and predictions.

Decades later, Jefferson would admit in private correspondence that the experiment of constitutional republicanism had been a failure because the founders failed to understand the mother principle, that of democratic self-governance. He said that the Spirit of ’76 only lived on in the spirit of our people (and in the “will of the people”; not in the constitution or government), the only hope that the gains of revolution would not be entirely lost. The people, as advocated by the Anti-Federalists, understood the soul of the American Dream better than the elite, as promoted by the faux Federalists. That fundamental conflict is what our country was founded upon and it remains with us to this day. Not even the American Civil War was able to undo that moral corruption and political foundering because there was no one in leadership who was wise enough and brave enough to throw the Ring of Power into Mount Doom when they had the chance, and indeed there were numerous opportunities to course correct, to revive the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian vision of the Articles of Confederation.

None of this is merely about the past but about the ever present choice of each and every new living generation. That is why Bill Hicks’ words resonate with us today, the same reason the words of the Anti-Federalists inspired revolution back then. The authority of those words are not in who said them, be it a comedian or a ‘Founding Father’. The force of those words is in knowing they speak truth for time immemorial, as we can verify that truth in our own minds, hearts, and souls; can observe it, test it, and prove it in our lived experience; can touch it, feel it, and know it in the world around us. The sense of being a living generation of people is not an abstraction but what cannot be denied. First appearing in the Axial Age, there was the notion that all living people, as individuals or communal selves, can have direct access via experience and relationship to ultimate truth, natural law, higher reality, or divine being.

The message of Hicks and the Anti-Federalists is ancient, fundamentally spiritual and religious in nature — as Levi Preston explained, “We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.” The point is that they read these texts for themselves, as literacy was becoming common, and so the words were brought to life by their own voices. Rising literacy rates and availability of reading material, including radical pamphlets written by Paine, was the main force behind the revolution of mind that preceded the revolution of government and society. With an emerging independent-mindedness, the once mostly indentured and wretchedly oppressed colonials were gaining confidence in themselves. Unlike in earlier eras, they could read for themselves, interpret what they read for themselves, think for themselves, and so act for themselves.

There was a change not only in mentality and identity, for it was part of an ongoing shift in an entire worldview, a transformation of experienced reality; what first was planted in the Axial Age, took root in the Middle Ages, and finally was coming to fruition in early modernity. It’s a sense of being enmeshed within and inseparably part of a living world. This is what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God being all around us. And it’s what the 14th century peasants meant, in revolting, when they demanded equality on Earth as it is in Heaven. That is what then inspired those like the Quakers, having come into their own during the radicalism of the English Civil War, to formulate their view of living constitutionalism; the source of John Dickinson’s thinking, as he was raised Quaker. Living constitutionalism, according to the Quakers, treats a constitution as a living document, not a dead piece of paper; for it is considered a compact between a living God and a living community, a specific living generation of people. Ironically, the reactionary right tries to cast shade on living constitutionalism as anti-traditional, when they know nothing of the traditions our society are actually built upon.

No one, not in the past nor in a distant place, can speak to anyone else on behalf of God or speak for anyone else in relationship to God (i.e., the highest truth, reality, and authority). We are all responsible for our own connection to and discernment of the ultimate. This is why natural law, now often co-opted as reactionary rhetoric, could in the past be perceived as radically dangerous in challenging the entire basis and justification for human law, as politically-established and government-enforced. That is what Jesus was invoking in challenging Jewish and Roman hierarchical authority and social institutions, casually dismissing them as if irrelevant with a zealous and charismatic confidence that the truth he knew could not be denied or harmed, no matter what the ruling elite and Roman soldiers may do to his body. In the living moment, he acted on, demonstrated, and proved the truth he spoke; emphasizing he was not special in this manner by telling others that they too were gods, of the Holy Spirit. The living God is not far away in Heaven but here on Earth. The living Revelation is not in the ancient past but right now. The living Word is not in a book but in the world. The living Reality is experienced and known by those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

* * *

Let us make a small note here. We briefly mentioned the reactionary but didn’t go into further detail, as it wasn’t our present focus and we’ve talked about it plenty elsewhere. But as always, it can’t be ignored. What we did mention is how the reactionary has largely co-opted the rhetoric of natural law and so repurposed it to regressive ends. The deeper point, though, is that natural law originated in the radical, not the reactionary. A similar thing can be said of living constitutionalism. Sure, the reactionary can co-opt the social force and political results of living constitutionalism, as it can co-opt almost anything and everything. That is unfortunate, if it also shows the weakness and limitations involved. What the reactionary can never do is co-opt the moral force and motivating essence of natural law, living constitutionalism, and such. That is the beating heart that we are speaking of. The reactionary is always deadening. It is death and brings death to everything it touches, most of all rot of the human soul. It’s love versus fear, vitality versus anxiety, life versus death; but the two sides are far from being equal. One is light and the other mere shadow.

The living moral force of the living truth and reality is inherently and fundamentally radical and forever retains the radical; it is progressive and never regressive, liberating and never oppressive. All that radical literally means is a return to the root; and hence a return to underlying nature, fundamental truth, first principles. That is the point of showing the long history of this shared inheritance of profound wisdom, making clear that the roots of the radical go deep into human nature and human society. Not mentioned at all here is that the notion of a living experience of a living world is rooted even further down into the most archaic layers of our shared humanity, back to bicameral and animistic societies. No amount of reactionary co-option can undo this power. That is because it originates and is sourced within us, individually and collectively. As long as humans exist, the radical living challenge will remain potent and threatening. That is the whole point of why the reactionary feels compelled to co-opt the very thing that undermines it, in grotesquely wearing it like a superficial mask. This is the reason that a probing intellectual, spiritual, and moral discernment is of the utmost.

Yet it’s not only that the reactionary can’t undo the radical for neither can it stop it from spreading. That is precisely what has been happening these past millennia, as a new mentality has been taking hold, beginning as a spark and catching fire again and again. The Holy Spirit is a burning fire, the world aflame in light. The mistake many make is thinking that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought is merely about a dully simple, reductionist, and materialistic individualism. But that false understanding is because the radicalism of the past has been obscured, as has been the radicalism of Western origins and the radicalism of the American founding. For instance, take the appearance in the ancient world, as if out of nowhere, of the idea that there is a common humanity, a universal human nature, a shared world, a single cosmos. During the Axial and post-Axial ages, that radical understanding came up in the words of numerous prophets, philosophers, wisdom teachers, gurus, and salvific figures. Human identities have grown ever broader over time. The peasantry, in revolting, came to an emergent class consciousness. The colonists, in revolting, upheld the ideal of global citizenship. Such an expanding and inclusive worldview keeps on growing, with each age of tumult bringing us to new understanding and a greater identity.

So, there is what is ancient to human society, even primal in having originated within the human psyche from millions of years of hominid evolution. To experience the living fusion of self and world, human and non-human is the undifferentiated state that forms the baseline of human existence. That isn’t to say differentiation, therefore, is bad; of course not. But starting millennia ago, a divide began to form, a mere crack at first, that has since fractured and splintered into modern psychosis. The radical impulse has never been to resist or deny differentiation that has made possible modern individuality, but neither has it sought to dismiss and devalue the communal identities of the past, the very ground of the bundled mind that we stand upon. Instead, what radical thinkers have advocated is how to transform and reform past communal identities, such that collective health and sanity can be maintained. Abstract identities, however, disconnect us from the living sense of belonging to others and to the larger world. For most of human existence, belonging has meant an identity of tribe built on a deep sense of place. That concrete immediacy and sensory immersion remains essential and necessary. Yet in a globalized interconnected society our ability to perceive a shared living reality is potentially immense; the imaginative capacity to sense, feel, understand, and know that other people are equally real. It’s the task before us, the ancient ideal and aspiration that guides us.

* * *

Roger Williams and American Democracy
Founding Visions of the Past and Progress
Whose Original Intent?
Anti-Partisan Original Intent
US: Republic & Democracy
 (part two and three)
Democracy: Rhetoric & Reality
Pursuit of Happiness and Consent of the Governed
St. George Tucker On Secession
The Radicalism of The Articles of Confederation
From Articles of Confederation to the Constitution
The Vague and Ambiguous US Constitution
Wickedness of Civilization & the Role of Government
A Truly Free People
Nature’s God and American Radicalism
“We forgot.”
What and who is America?
Attributes of Thomas Paine
Predicting an Age of Paine
Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
About The American Crisis No. III
Feeding Strays: Hazlitt on Malthus
Inconsistency of Burkean Conservatism
American Paternalism, Honor and Manhood
Revolutionary Class War: Paine & Washington
Paine, Dickinson and What Was Lost
Betrayal of Democracy by Counterrevolution
Revolutions: American and French (part two)
Failed Revolutions All Around
The Violence of Bourgeois Revolutions and Authoritarian Capitalism
The Haunted Moral Imagination
“Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.”
“…from every part of Europe.”

The Fight For Freedom Is the Fight To Exist: Independence and Interdependence
A Vast Experiment
The Root and Rot of the Tree of Liberty
America’s Heartland: Middle Colonies, Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest
When the Ancient World Was Still a Living Memory
Ancient Outrage of the Commoners
The Moral Axis of the Axial Age
Axial Age Revolution of the Mind Continues
A Neverending Revolution of the Mind
Liberalism, Enlightenment & Axial Age
Leftism Points Beyond the Right and Beyond Itself

Jo Walton On Death

At present, we’re reading a fiction book, Jo Walton’s Or What You Will, and enjoying it. We’ve never read the author before, but plan on looking for more of her writings. This book has elements of postmodernism about it, in how the narrator and some of the characters speak about the story, storytelling, and such; the breaking of the fourth wall. But it’s probably better described as metamodern, the combining of how modernity takes itself seriously and how the postmodern stands back in self-conscious critique, mixed together with experimental playfulness and sincere inquiry; all the while touching on various themes and topics, casual and weighty; but always coming back to what a narratizing voice(s) means, dipping into the territory of the bundled mind.

A focus of concern the author returns to throughout the book is mortality and the desire for immortality; how the human relationship to death has changed over time, how we speak about it and narrate it, and how it shapes us and our culture. Besides comparing present attitudes and responses to earlier times, at one point she contrasts the modern detachment, confusion, and discomfort with human death with the modern ‘extravagant grieving’ over pets. Anyone in our society is familiar with what she is talking about. A coworker of ours, when her lizard died, was so distraught she couldn’t talk about it, to the extent that she became upset when we brought it up, in our trying to be consoling; as we had often talked about her lizard in the past. She was not consoled. It might be the most inconsolable we’ve ever seen anyone about any death of any species.

For whatever reason, we’ve never been that way about death, be it human or non-human; even with a cat we had for more than 20 years, a cat that had sometimes been our sole companion in dark periods. So far, we’ve tended to take it all in stride, with what acceptance we can muster. It’s sad, but so much of life can be sad, if one thinks about it; the world is full of pain and suffering, where death is the least of it and sometimes a blessing. Maybe a lifetime of depression and depressive realism has inoculated us to such things. Death is death. There’s nothing to be done about it, other than to avoid it for as long as is possible and desirable. But as someone who once attempted suicide and used to contemplate it often, we don’t hold it against people who decide to opt out early. Most modern people, though, don’t have this perspective.

p. 111-113:

“If you are a modern person, in our world now, it’s not unlikely that you might not have known the true grief and loss caused by the death of someone close to you until well into adulthood. […] The estrangement from grieving is a change in human nature, and one that has happened over the course of Sylvia’s lifetime. Young people today are not the same as they were when she was young. […] Death comes to them as a stranger, not an intimate. She notices it first in what she sees as extravagant grieving for animals, and then starts to notice it more when her friends lose parents at older and older ages, and take it harder and harder. […] Then she observes a growing embarrassment in younger people around the mention of real death, where people don’t know what to say or how to reaction, until talking about it is almost a taboo. Simultaneous with this came the rise of the vampire as attractive, sexual, appealing, rather than a figure of horror. […] Other undead have also undergone this process in art, even zombies by the first decade of the new millennium. Friends with no religion, who mock Sylvia for her vestigial Catholicism, revert to strained religiosity in the face of death because they have no social patterns of coping.

“Look at it this way: Freud wasn’t necessarily wrong about Thanatos. But he was living in a different world, before antibiotics. His patients were very different people from the people of this century. They would all and every one of them have lost siblings, school friends, parents. […] We read Freud now, and wonder how he could have thought of some of these things, but his patients lived crowded together in houses with one bathroom or none, where they shared rooms with their dying siblings and fornicating parents, and where death was a constant and familiar presence. Nor did they feel grief any less for the familiarity of loss. Read Victorian children’s books; read Charlotte M. Yonge (as Sylvia did as a child in her grandmother’s house) and see what a constant presence death is, almost a character—and not necessarily violent death, but death by illness or accident, inevitable death that simply cannot be cured. We mock their wallowing in woe, the crepe, the widow’s weeds, the jewelry made of jet and hair, the huge mausoleums, the black and purple mourning clothes, until we are faced with our own absences in emptiness, with nothing at all to console us and no signals to send to warn others to tread lightly. […]

pp. 115-116:

“Death in fantasy, is generally defanged. Ever since Tolkien brought Gandalf back, and Lewis resurrected Aslan, both of then in conscious imitation of Christ, and right at the beginning of the shaping of genre fantasy, death in fantasy novels has been more and more negotiable. It’s more unusual for a beloved character to stay dead than for them to come back to life. Death is for enemies and spear carriers, and the way a spear carrier death is treated is that the main characters will have a single dramatic scene of mourning and then rarely think of them once they turn the page at the end of the chapter. Boromir’s death resonates through the rest of The Lord of the Rings but the imitations of it lesser writers put in do not. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Great War, and saw as much death as anyone has. Their imitators are modern people, whose understanding of death is much less visceral. Modern fantasy, even, and perhaps especially “grim-dark” fantasy, is often written by people without much close-up experience of death. The horror of the Dead Marshes, in Tolkien, comes direct from Flanders field. They are not there for thrills.

“As for resurrections—she goes to San Marco and sees Fra Angelico’s paintings of the angel in the empty tomb, and Christ harrowing Hell and opening the door that has been closed for so long and letting in light where there was only darkness. The easy way people come back to life in fantasy cheapens resurrection. The ultimate mystery of Christianity becomes commonplace, with the extreme version of the cheapening happening in computer games where there can be an actual fixed price in gold for bringing a party member back to life.”

The Unoriginality of Fundamentalism

In researching religious history, one major conclusion stands out. Modern world religions are syncretic products of the worldviews and traditions that co-existed with them and preceded them; based on many millennia of cultural development and inheritance. That is seen East and West (and presumably everywhere else), in how every new successful religion that comes along incorporates the cultural practices, rituals, beliefs, imagery, symbolism, holy sites, and sometimes even objects of worship from the prior religions of the converted; even to the point of repurposing holy buildings. This is as true for the Abrahamic religions as any others, despite the denial of fundamentalists. One might argue it’s particularly true of the Abrahamic religions that grew amidst such vast religious, philosophical, and cultural diversity; and we their inheritors rarely hear the other side’s take on what happened; although interestingly some early voices on Christianity and Islam mentioned pagan origins.

There was much destruction and loss as the various world religions came to power, but a surprising amount of the so-called paganism and heathenism survived, if in hidden and altered forms. Many of the major theological arguments and defenses (i.e., apologetics) that modern monotheists make are fundamentally no different than what non-monotheists have been saying for even longer. That is because nearly everything in Abrahamic monotheism originated in paganism. Even the earliest evidence of monotheism in Egypt preceded Abraham, likely where Jews got it from. There is almost nothing original to Abrahamic religions. Strip away all the pagan and secular accretions from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Mesopotamian mythology, godmen resurrection narratives, virgin mother motif, pagan stone worship, intercessory rituals, etc); and there might be nothing left of substance. Everything has paganism in it because paganism was everywhere and, at one point, everyone was a pagan. There is no escaping the past out of which our society formed.

So, in that case, what is monotheism, what do we think it is, and why do we think that way? Consider that some ancient Jews referred to their God as Zeus-Yahweh. They perceived the Father God of the Greeks and Jews to be the same ultimate deity or rather each being symbolic of the same ultimate divine reality, the same shared Cosmos of all people. Some pagans had been talking about a singular ultimate Father God, Godhead, or Reality for longer than Abrahamic monotheists have existed. That is seen, for example, in Hinduism going back many millennia into the Bronze Age. Similar thinking is also found back in Classical Greece and carried forward. This is why some ancient Jews also joined Greco-Roman mystery schools. No contradiction or heresy was seen by these spiritual aspirants. With a bit more controversy, there is Mohammad’s Satanic verses, indicating the syncretism also of early Islam; prior to an authoritarian backlash. Higher truth and reality isn’t owned or controlled by any single religious authority, certainly not by self-proclaimed theocrats pretending to speak for God.

Take the idea of worshipping a holy statue, object, etc not as an idol but for what is behind it or else using it as a way of orienting to a higher truth or as a practice to bring the faithful together. That is an archaic pagan spiritual understanding, the notion that there are layers of truth and/or levels of religious practice; with something that transcends, if interpreted variously. Many pagans didn’t perceive their foci of worship, prayer, and contemplation as idols to be treated identical to a god or whatever. They understood these things weren’t the divine itself but a visceral way for humans to see, hear, and grasp the divine; a way to orient to and relate to the divine. Yes, there were many other pagans who did tend toward idol worship, but then again most Jews, Christians, and Muslims have also fallen into various forms of idol worship. This certainly doesn’t distinguish supposed ‘monotheistic’ religions as different from all the rest, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Paganism can’t be scapegoated for the sins of monotheists, but paganism might offer a better understanding than ‘sin’. Since the Abrahamic religions took on so much paganism, maybe we should look to how the pagans understood what we took from them.

For example, there was the original pagan Kaaba, apparently the same as the present Islamic Kaaba. Even after being taken over by Muslims, they continued to use the exact same pagan worship practices, including ritualistically walking around it in a pagan circular procession and kissing the same pagan black stone. Along with a pagan version of Ramadan, these are all the practices that Mohammad did for most of his life as a pagan before he invented Islam, as his family were the official pagan caretakers of the pagan Kaaba. He got rid of most of the pagan statues, but kept the pagan black stone because it held too much symbolic power for his culture. That is not to dismiss Islam, any more than to dismiss all the other religions that similarly borrowed. There is no shame in cultural traditions persisting from one religion to the next. Here is the point. If the pre-Islamic pagans were idol worshippers, then so are Muslims. But if Muslims are not idol worshippers, then to the same degree neither were those pre-Islamic pagans. The same goes for Christians, Jews, Bahai, or anyone else. Acknowledging one’s own historical origins is not a point of shame. Instead, we should greet such knowledge with curiosity and see pagans as part of this ongoing civilizational project. After all, they are our ancestors, and so we should show respect. In fact, pagans are still among us and sometimes they may be the best among us.

That isn’t to say that idolatry isn’t potentially a stumbling block for the faithful, but this kind of wisdom is not limited to the Abrahamic religions. In fact, other traditions may have essential understandings that would otherwise be lacking. We need to broaden our view of what is the actual concern. Anything can be an idol (statue, picture, symbol, rock, remnant, marker, book, building, institution, authority figure, ritual, etc), when it stands between you and the divine, stands in place of relationship to and experience of what is greater; or the very same thing could be used non-idolatrously as a vehicle to carry you to the divine. Idolatry is in the intent and attitude of the individual worshipper, not inherent to any given thing. In not understanding what is an idol, what is the deeper significance of warning and wisdom, one is all the more likely to fall prey to idol worship without realizing it. Idolatry is not evil. It’s simply a spiritual mistake that, when one learns to see it, one can correct it. But it shouldn’t be used as a cudgel to beat upon others as judged inferior, or to threaten them as damned, or to mock their faith. It’s simply a common error of our shared human nature. Interestingly, at an earlier time in Asia, there was intercultural dialogue between Muslims and Buddhists about idolatry.

That attitude of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness, however, is not typically shared by most fundamentalists; and so maybe sometimes fundamentalism itself becomes an idol, in replacing direct experience with human claims. The thing about fundamentalists, in particular, is specific to their psycho-social disposition and ideological worldview; far beyond religion. The most obvious link is to right-wing authoritarianism, of which research shows fundamentalists measure the highest of any group. But it doesn’t end with that. Tellingly, though religiosity is negatively correlated to individual narcissism, it’s positively correlated to group narcissism. Fundamentalists, in particular, want to believe that they are unique, their group is unique, and maybe that their moment in time is unique. It’s chauvinism, plain and simple (i.e., narcissism). They want to believe they are special snowflakes, that their ego-bound opinions are righteous truth and that they have a divine monopoly. That is arrogance, not righteousness.

But the reality is that fundamentalists are the complete opposite of unique and special, since in being high in right-wing authoritarianism they tend toward conformity; hence they have no talent for originality and so are forced to co-opt and claim other people’s originality, as if it were their own. In the end, this is simply the same old reactionary mind that comes up in so much else. Stealing ideas, rhetoric, practices, etc from others without giving credit, without a sense of mutuality and commonality; that is simply what reactionaries do and have always done for as long as they’ve existed, going back at least to the Axial Age. Then the fundamentalists spend centuries or longer erasing the knowledge and destroying the evidence of that history, often involving book burnings and textual interpolations, with not even their own holy scriptures being safe from their zealous and censorious wrath (all of the Abrahamic holy books show evidence of having been altered early on). There is nothing wrong with the act of borrowing what is worthy from other traditions, but it should be done with mutual respect, rather than social dominance, wanton destruction, and sometimes outright terrorism and genocide.

Fundamentalists and others of a similar ilk either lack knowledge of the larger world, specifically of the longer and broader history of the world, or else they hypocritically dismiss and conveniently ignore it, then seek to obscure and hide it. There is nothing unique about any of the major fundamentalist religions, not unique now and not unique when they first formed. This historical amnesia, one might call it willful ignorance, is the same undercurrent that causes endless moral panic and culture war; as if this time everything really is different, as if this time the world really will come to an end. In study after study, social conservatism as right-wing authoritarianism ultimate comes down to fear and anxiety, and nothing else. It’s a dark worldview that closes the mind, heart, and soul. They cut out their own eyes for fear of what they might see. Their claim that others don’t understand them is projection for they don’t understand themselves. How could they? There is no humanity other than our common humanity. To deny that is the ultimate betrayal, of humanity and whatever is greater than humanity.

Fundamentalists use fear to reinforce their group narcissism and groupthink, keeping at bay any knowledge that would challenge their spin, disinfo, and lies; for light threatens to dispel the darkness. Fear-mongering is highly effective, as long as a society can be kept sickly, stressed, and traumatized; something too many of us have come to take as normal, such that we don’t even notice it. The chronic fear and anxiety is in the background, and we wonder why so many people are pulled into the reactionary mind, not realizing we too have become vulnerable to it. So, the average fundamentalist is as much a victim as anyone else, not to be scapegoated in the way they do with others. They genuinely know not what they do for they don’t have eyes to see. Some of the greatest spiritual teachers, such as Jesus, came to challenge this very soul sickness, particularly of false religiosity; came to demonstrate another way is possible. Rather than being unique and special, we all share in a common humanity and a common divinity. What if what unites us is more important, more real and true, than what divides us? What if only that is worthy of worship?

Erotic Fantasies of Moral Imagination

“[A]n unalterable fact about the body is linked to a place in the social order, and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.”
 ~ Lewis Hyde

Conservative Sexual Fetishism

Conservatives, as you might’ve noticed, have always had a fetish about other people’s sex lives, an obsessive-compulsion that drives their reactionary minds like a dominatrix wielding a whip; and in the Burkean wardrobe of the moral imagination, conservatives really do like to kink it up. Particularly titillating to fantasize about is that of other people having perceived illicit sex, be it pedophilia or bestiality or simply garden-variety homosexuality (i.e., anything religiously proscribed, consensual or not, that will get you a one-way ticket to Hell). There is the irresistible allure of the taboo, and large swaths of human experience are taboo in conservative ideology. That is a lot of material to work with in scripting and staging morality porn on the inner stage of the conservative soul. So, what could otherwise be a normal, healthy, and pro-social expression of sexual freedom, in being denied, becomes distorted and demented. This perverted mentality is motivated by the same vexatious urge behind the preoccupation over other people not having sex as well, the barely submerged eroticism bursting forth like the plump bosom underneath a tightly-bound bodice on the cover of a romance novel. Even in negation, suppressed sexual energy overwhelms like being told to not think about pink elephants.

The unnatural concern in having one’s focus neurotically drawn toward others not having sex is evidenced by the popular Christian genre of virginity porn (e.g., the Twilight novels written by a conservative Mormon); the sexualized obsession with innocence that, to consider another category of culture war fantasy, also underlies right-wing conspiracy theories of pedophilia, innocence harmed and defiled. Or think about the weird phenomenon of purity rings, where a young woman’s public identity of moral purity and social worth is constructed according to the imagined non-act of avoiding vaginal penetration, whatever sexual acts she actually does or does not do secretly in her private life; it then being a question of how far can she go (kissing? groping? heavy petting? fellatio?) while maintaining this prized ‘virgin’ status that, according to belief, is ultimately determined by an omniscient, intrusive, and voyeuristic father-god who, like a peeping tom, watches his human children’s every sexual act or non-act, as the case may be, and judges it like giving an ice skating score (for humor: Garfunkel and Oates, The Loophole). Praise be! Now there is a fascinating fetish. The intensity of thwarted desire, like floodwater building behind a dam, combined with a sadomasochistic religiosity; that could become immensely intoxicating.

It’s amusing that Edmund Burke made famous the conservative-style moral imagination in his lurid portrayal of a wild mob, seemingly with lecherous and lascivious intentions, having violently ripped away the French queen’s delicate underclothing; presumably revealing her tender flesh and womanly parts to the prying eyes that sullied her purity, innocence, and nobility — basically, it was a rape fantasy and it obviously got Burke all worked up and excited. It was an invented scene of repressed sexual frenzy being messily released like a young boy’s ejaculate, not an accurate historical account of sociopolitical events during the French Revolution; and it is to be suspected that the pent up libido, one of the few real and accurate details, was based on Burke’s personal experience. That writing has set the tone for the reactionary mind ever since, and it helped liberals like Thomas Paine to make clear what was so dangerous and perverse about such untethered frothing. In any case, it was Burke who named this kind of ideologically-motivated and collectively-expressed fantasizing as ‘moral imagination’ and, in demonstrating it’s compelling persuasiveness for the reactionary mind, the practice of it has stuck as the main weapon of culture war and moral panic ever since.

Conservative Projections of Shame

Such inventive eroticism, equal parts lustful and prurient, is symbolic of all things illicit, far beyond being limited to any possible variety of sex act (described or implied, denied or suppressed); as representing the bestial nature of the body, an expression of Adam’s Original Sin, the eternal field of battle between God and Satan, good and evil. It doesn’t matter what other people are actually doing or actually want to do, nor necessarily about the fantasist’s behavior either. This is entirely about the conservative’s carnal nightmares that they are trapped in, as they can’t escape their own mind; and, indeed, they apparently get off on it, which surely further adds to an endless cycle of masochistic shame that draws them ever back into the shadow of their own unresolved issues. It certainly makes for a time-consuming hobby, if one is worried about getting bored; and the reactionary mind, in particular, despises boredom. That is the necessity of melodramatic political theatre and political spectacle — it is entertainment, pure and simple; as much or more to entertain the one telling it, in how the purpose of evangelizing is mostly to further entrench the conviction of the evangelical, not about converting unbelievers and saving souls.

All of that might be fine, if conservatives were able to keep such dark fantasies and fetishes as a private psychosis and delirium, and as long as no illegal acts were committed (each to their own, live and let live; as a liberal would say), but no such luck. The freedom of personal imagination and the responsibility of personal conscience, as idealized and practiced in a secular liberal democracy, has never been the keystone of conservative moral order inseparable from conservative social order. The problem is that, as part of their lust for power, they are always trying to use their own perverse imaginings as rationalizing fodder for culture war in order to supposedly stop other people from doing what conservatives do in their own minds, whether or not acted out in their own private lives. They can’t stand their sense of self-disgust and so feel compelled, if in a state of horror, to set it loose on the public stage. It’s a cry for help, but the rest of us aren’t sure how to help them. Should we have a national intervention for the sake of public health?

Conservatives are forever trying to pass, reinforce, and defend laws against what they deem immoral behavior, sexual and otherwise, not because of what non-conservatives might do but because conservatives fear, maybe for good reason, that they can’t control their own behavior. They think they know what others would do because they know what they would do, if they had the opportunity, for they are fantasizing about it all the time. So, they seek to apply a distorted Golden Rule: Rather than do unto others as you would want others do unto you, it’s stop others from doing what you believe is wrong as you would want others to stop you from doing as bad or worse. That is how the reactionary mind assumes social order must be maintained, by way of authoritarian systems of social control, since people are treated as inherently bad and untrustworthy. Everyone, after all, is a born sinner; an old theological dogma that persists even into the secular thought of many non-religious individuals.

Conservative Social Control Replaces Self-Control

In the dark corners of the reactionary mind, the terror and torment is that these shameful fantasies, repeating over and over as hidden sins and repressed lust, will escape out into the real world and make for interpersonal messiness; but, as Jesus warned, even a sin of thought is still a sin; no doubt a condemnation that plagues the worried soul of many a conservative. It must be frightening to have such a libidinously demented fantasy life that always feels out of control, like a demonic force ever tempting one to horrific wrongdoing and moral depravity. We might not want to be too harsh considering that conservatives, in respect to themselves, might be correct about the need for external power and hierarchical authority of behavioral control. They might really become dangerous, if they ever stopped collectively suppressing their anti-social tendencies and harmful desires. Maybe they need all the assistance they can get.

No doubt, the persistent sexualizing that is played out on the inner stage of the conservative mind isn’t merely that of innocent and impotent passing thoughts, as the reactionary mind is addicted to what it denies, pulled toward what it pushes away. This oppressive repression acts as a fuel to the fire of their anxiety-driven righteous anger of self-loathing, what makes them so worked up in a way that liberals have a hard time understanding. Such sexual repression, as endless examples show, really does increase sexual compulsion and/or malbehavior. Think of how many gay-hating preachers later were found out to have been covertly following an active gay life, sometimes using church funds to do so. Or think of all those priests who, in having taken vows of bachelorhood and abstinence, ended up taking advantage of the children under their care. Conservatives are warning about the darkness they know intimately in their own hearts. It’s an indirect admission of an uncomfortable secret and an unpardonable guilt that they can’t give voice to in a more straightforward manner, for the public humiliation would destroy them.

So, they express these uncontrollable urges as dark temptations and harmful inclinations projected onto those other supposedly bad and dangerous people: leftists, liberals, and atheists, or else minorities and the poor, strangers and foreigners, those perceived as deviant or different, basically any target that can be conveniently othered and scapegoated (literally, living beings to be sacrificed after symbolically placing the community’s sins upon them). One such immorality play, particularly powerful, in the conservative imaginary is bestiality, and there isn’t much else like it. As with the exaggerated emphasis on and disturbing obsession with pedophilia, the conservative holds bestiality aloft as a caricatured sexual extremism that stands in for nearly every sexual act other than missionary style between a religiously married man and woman; although, within a conservative patriarchy, there is greater forgiveness toward a heterosexual male’s non-marital or extramarital sexual activities (men have needs, so goes the argument), and there is some wiggle room about age of consent for many conservative societies.

Conservative Symbolism and Imagination

Intriguingly, within a worldview of debilitating anxiety over impurity and perceived threats, the moral imagination of the reactionary mind has often used animals to make its points about the needs and claims of cognitive certainty, shared identity, group boundaries, social order, class/caste hierarchy, and moral worth: peasants and slaves as beasts of burden, the indigenous and backwoods whites as wild creatures, Africans as monkeys, Irish as white gorillas, Jews as a sub-species, immigrants as diseased rats, homeless as stray cats, and on and on; such bizarre metaphorical stereotypes being endless. As another example, ethnic Catholics, in the WASP imagination, were historically likened to ‘animals’ breeding out of control; in justifying xenophobic demands of anti-immigration, oppression, segregation, and eugenics. Ironically, this anti-ethnic and anti-Catholic prejudice was the reason that most American Protestants (in both main parties), during most of the 20th century, supported family planning clinics, birth control, and abortions. Civilized humans, in their superior self-restraint, supposedly don’t give into the wild lust of wanton bestial copulation and procreation.

This brings us to the proper role of the proper kind of sex, and hence what is improper. Within this ideological worldview, if all other humans unlike oneself (non-WASPs, non-Americans, non-whites, etc) are mere animals or are animal-like, then someone of the right group having sex with someone of the wrong group is akin to committing bestiality, incurring moral impurity for all involved and requiring punishment or exclusion to reinstate the moral order, to make the world right again. The perception of the natural world, be it sincere belief or cynical rhetoric, has long been implemented as a metaphorical model for the human world; most powerfully symbolized by the physical body. So, bestiality is never really about bestiality, in all its glory of ideological resonance; and, more broadly, sexuality is never merely about sexuality; similar to why conservatives preaching on abortion aren’t actually talking about the claim of killing fetuses and aren’t actually expressing concern for the sanctity of human life.

Filtered through symbolic conflation, every culture war issue means something else, all rhetoric of moral panic points elsewhere. It’s just distraction of ideological sleight-of-hand. This might be why bestiality, something that doesn’t actually come up in normal life all that often, plays such an outsized role on the American right in their social commentary, culture war, religious moralizing, and political narratives. It gets awkwardly mentioned way too often that it starts to make the rest of us feel a bit uncomfortable. What is up with this strange obsession? Outwardly stated, the eternal warning of social conservatives is that, if as a society we allow gay sex or whatever, it will inevitably lead to a libertine free-for-all where sexual deviants will roam the land anally-raping cows and molesting children; or something like that. In that moral worldview, there are only two possibilities, total repression or mass orgy; with the wrong choice leading to bad consequences — first anarchy and chaos will burst forth upon the streets and into the schools, preying upon the innocent, and then social breakdown and societal collapse will follow in its wake.

Conservative Storytelling and Fearmongering

Do many conservatives really believe any of this? Probably not. That is besides the point. It’s make-believe and useful-fiction, if still powerful, both powerful as social control and powerful as political theatre. It’s not uncommon for people to act according to what they, deep down, know isn’t true; for suspension of disbelief is required to some degree in any fictional narrative or fictional enterprise. And humans have a talent for knowing and not knowing something at the same time. It’s all about telling a ‘good’ story. We liberals get confused because we have a tendency to take conservatives at face value, since they are always proclaiming their own literalism. Of course, they could never admit that narrative matters more to them than truth because, then, the spell of the narrative would be broken. The story told is more comforting than would be reality disclosed because, no matter how fearful and discomforting that story, the conservative doesn’t want to become aware of what they really fear, what is in their own heart and mind. This is why their moralistic storytelling is often confused and doesn’t quite add up, when rationally analyzed. The purpose is not to make sense but to make nonsense, to disconnect one from direct and visceral sensory experience of reality. Such a way of thinking is shown with an amusing example, going back at least to the 1990s but probably earlier.

An old conservative argument is that the Western Roman Empire fell, not because the Christians turned it into a self-destructive theocracy, but because the Roman population suddenly started having too much butt sex. Strangely, Romans were supposedly less gay when they were pagan worshippers and only turned to a widespread fondness for men-on-men action once Christianized in the last centuries of Roman reign. It’s not clear how that puts Christianity in a positive light, but for whatever reason a significant number on the religious right find it a compelling argument for why they should once again be allowed to return to their nostalgic dreams of theocratic longing, to Make Rome Great Again! But was the Empire ever great in the first place? In any case, there is no decline of the Empire for a simple reason: The Empire never ended. That is how a wise philosopher once put it, in talking about the authoritarian right-wing of his own time. It has never ended because the power-mongers will never let it end, in reality or imagination. Yet, if you listened to them, you’d think the Empire is in a constant state of threat; that at any moment the radical left and/or the dirty masses will rise up to finally defeat and destroy the Forces of Order for all time, bringing on an Age of Darkness and Despair, the End Times foretold in Holy Scripture.

But the reality is the Empire can never end as long as its foundations remain protected within the insurmountable walls of the reactionary mind. God and His Kingdom, like the supernatural beings of fairyland, are always receding as the Age of Miracles and Magic disappears into the hazy past; while the reactionary mind longs for the return of the archaic voices of authorization, in their comforting certainty. In the reactionary mind, the Queen is forever being violated and ravished, and yet the Empire somehow remains forever in place. The Queen comes out every day, like a Disneyland worker putting on her costume and acting out her role, to the delight of her audience. The other ghosts of the haunted moral imagination, in various guises, likewise get trotted out to keep the whole charade going. It is sort of amusing, when one takes it as a strange and deranged form of entertainment. Along with watching actual porn on the internet, the conservative creates ideological porn to be viewed on an inner screen. By the way, according to internet data, porn viewing rates are highest in the Bible Belt, specifically with the highest rates of gay porn. When religious conservatives preach about the evils of sexuality, the sins of the flesh, they have many porn viewing hours under their belts to assist their mentally visualizing in great detail what they claim to hate so much. Let’s just say they Biblically know what they’re talking about. The moral imagination of the reactionary mind is so vivid for a reason.

Conservative Fantasizing About Bestiality

All of this craziness was brought back to our attention because of a particular case of right-wing moral panic, involving the right-wing’s beloved bestiality fetish. The self-identified conservative Ryan Farmer, just some random dude online who salivates over people having sex with animals, earlier this year wrote critically about Maryland’s House Bill 209 that is a repeal of Section 3-322 of Maryland’s criminal code, what has been called the ‘perverted practice’ statute. That statute “is built on a foundation of animus against homosexuals, but goes substantially farther, likening oral sex—which surveys demonstrate is practiced by upwards of 80% of adults—to bestiality” (The Honorable Luke Clippinger, HB0209 2022-01-21 Testimony to House Judiciary Committee). It was already technically unconstitutional and effectively unenforceable because of an earlier federal court decision, but police officers were still charging gay men with violating it (Bradley S. Clark, Why does Maryland law still prohibit sexual contact between same-sex couples?). The morally outdated law was simply being used to harass individuals, as motivated by the immoral bigotry of police officers who were using it as a cudgel of prejudice.

That was the real issue. Socially acceptable and consensual acts of sexual freedom, even something as simple as fellatio, were being conflated with bestiality; and homosexuality was being implicated as well. To reinforce this evil caricature of otherwise normal and healthy sexual behavior, Farmer stated that, “Effectively, this is legalization of bestiality, as these Delegates have no clear interest in re-enacting the criminality of performing sex acts with an animal” (2022 HOUSE BILL 209: MARYLAND DEMOCRATS SEEK TO LEGALIZE ACTS OF BESTIALITY). That is, as always, total bull shit. Being “a proud Marylander,” he had to have known that House Bill 641, signed into law a few years ago, had already made bestiality illegal separate from all the rest (Dawn White, Gov. Hogan Signs Bill Making Bestiality A Felony). So, why is he lying? Well, to the reactionary mind, there never needs to be a reason to deceive and manipulate, as long as it gins up fear and anxiety; that is all the justification that is required, mere moral panic for the sake of moral panic. It’s what the conservative craves, the state of agitation that feels normal to the permanently agitated psyche.

As a side note, one might strongly suspect that, as with gay porn, bestiality rates are probably higher in the Bible Belt and in other conservative areas, considering all of those lonely conservatives out in rural areas (what happens in the barn stays in the barn), and who knows what is going on beneath the thin veneer of normality out in the conservative suburbs (always a favorite setting for horror stories); but unfortunately, it’s doubtful there is good data on such things. In all seriousness, that is an interesting thought. Maybe conservatives are rightfully concerned about bestiality because they know or suspect that it’s common in their own conservative communities. It’s a similar logic that led Edmund Burke, in being familiar with the English precedent of regicide, to focus on the beheading of the French king. His real concern, unstated because it was too threatening, was nearer to home. Rather than French events having influenced English society, it was actually the Anglo-American recent past of English Civil War and American Revolution that had inspired the French revolutionaries. That is precisely what made it so terrifying. Someone like the Englishman Thomas Paine, radical and revolutionary, was a homegrown product of traditional English culture; a strain of moral imagination that was best left unacknowledged.

Conservative Moralistic Authoritarianism

It does make one wonder. Of all things, real and imagined, why is bestiality in particular so horrifying? It’s not as if conservatives are generally and strongly motivated by concern for animal wellbeing, such as in terms of the fundamentalist belief that God created animals solely for the purpose of being used by humans. Many and maybe most conservatives apparently are fine with what those on the left would often consider cruelty and harm toward other species, involving laboratory testing, puppy mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, hunting, meat-eating, environmental damage, ecosystem destruction, mass extinction, etc; not that all of these issues fall along simplistic and dualistic ideological lines. Here is the point. If you were asked if you’d prefer that someone killed and ate you or had sex with you, which would seem the better option and which the worst? Assuming an animal had consciousness and intelligence, how do you think they’d answer that question? The sense of moral depravity and deviancy, in the conservative mind, has nothing to do with the animal’s rights and protections, the animal’s life and happiness; and has nothing to do with reduction of suffering, according to the least harm principle; nor is it about defense of consent, considering the most conservative (and most religious) countries and U.S. states have the lowest ages of consent for sex. What is perceived as wrong by conservatives is the perceived moral harm to the social order, the impurity that would infect society. So, the concern is not that of what a human does to an animal but what the taint of the animal does to the human.

The average individual on the political left would more likely be consistent in equally opposing both bestiality and carnivory, on principle, as neither could be deemed consensual acts and as both potentially betray the least harm principle; although application of principle can be complicated and nuanced, something a liberal would also be more likely to openly admit and intellectually justify (e.g., there are environmental and ethical leftists and liberals who eat meat, albeit they typically have environmental and ethical arguments for their dietary choice). At the other ideological extreme, more than a few right-wing libertarians would quite possibly perceive neither bestiality nor carnivory as problematic, at least not necessarily in terms of libertarian principle (if for other reasons), in that their concern is merely or primarily about human liberty; and not necessarily the ethics of animal rights and animal protection; but of course, the response of left-wing libertarians would be a different question with a different spin on ‘liberty’, probably more in line with the liberal. So, whether liberal or libertarian, there would be a consistent principle, albeit a different preference and application of principle, but the reactionary mind of the conservative has no similar consistent principle, other than defense of hierarchy for the sake of their own power and authority; and hence the reason social science research finds that hypocrisy is common among right-wing authoritarians, which research in turn links to social conservatism.

Conservative morality, though ideologically dogmatic, is not fundamentally and primarily about anything specific in a real world sense but whatever can get used as a rhetorical red herring while the actual purpose remains obscured, often hidden in plain sight. It’s not about sexuality, as it’s not about abortion, drugs, etc. And it’s not about the treatment or mistreatment of animals, children, or whatever else. Nor is it about rights and liberty. What it is about is denying the agency of the subordinate class, that is to say to keep the oppressed in their place; a rigidifying and stratifying of the social order by way of shutting down of the public mind and moral imagination, hence fear and anxiety as a potent psychosocial force. Social conservatism is and always has been a central component of authoritarianism, a defining feature in fact; and the viscerality of the body and bodily experience (sex, abortion, menstruation, motherhood, sexually-transmitted diseases, etc) is one of the most powerful tools through which to narratize, a point made by Lewis Hyde about metonymy, but also emphasized in Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. It is upon and through the body, along with physicality in general, that ideological worldviews and identities are interpellated, enacted, and enforced; although it’s through a return to direct sensory experience of embodiment that such an ideological trap can be undone, a reconnecting to what was disconnected.

Look to any authoritarian regime, organization, or group and you will always find an enforced submission to constrained and exclusionary sexual mores, identities, and roles; and punishment of oppression, violence, or banishment to anyone who doesn’t comply to group identity and groupthink (e.g., libertines), anyone who challenges the ideological system (e.g., feminists), anyone who otherwise doesn’t fit in (e.g., transgender), and anyone who is required as scapegoat (e.g., homosexuals); where the perceived consequence of punishment is taken as proving the merit and necessity of the moralistic system. The right-wing social order must be maintained at all costs, simply because social order is valued on its own terms; not justified by how it serves the people, for everyone must justify themselves in serving it because, if failing that, their continued societal membership in good standing might not be justified at all. A totalitarian order is considered a necessity because, in a dualistic worldview, without it nothing stands between civilization and the forces of anarchy, chaos, and destruction. But to the liberal-minded, such authoritarian order itself is the madness. That is the gut-instinct in pushing back so hard against sexualized culture war. Freedom, in all ways, is worth fighting for.

* * *

Trickster Makes the World
by Lewis Hyde
pp. 169-170

[A]n unalterable fact about the body is linked to a place in the social order, and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.

Before anyone can be snared in this trap, an equation must be made between the body and the world (my skin color is my place as a Hispanic; menstruation is my place as a woman). This substituting of one thing for another is called metonymy in rhetoric, one of the many figures of thought, a trope or verbal turn. The construction of the trap of shame begins with this metonymic trick, a kind of bait and switch in which one’s changeable social place is figured in terms of an unchangeable part of the body. Then by various means the trick is made to blend invisibly into the landscape. To begin with, there are always larger stories going on— about women or race or a snake in a garden. The enchantment of those regularly repeated fables, along with the rules of silence at their edges, and the assertion that they are intuitively true— all these things secure the borders of the narrative and make it difficult to see the contingency of its figures of thought. Once the verbal tricks are invisible, the artifice of the social order becomes invisible as well, and begins to seem natural. As menstruation and skin color and the genitals are natural facts, so the social and psychological orders become natural facts.

In short, to make the trap of shame we inscribe the body as a sign of wider worlds, then erase the artifice of that signification so that the content of shame becomes simply the way things are, as any fool can see.

If this is how the trap is made, then escaping it must involve reversing at least some of these elements. In what might be called the “heavy-bodied” escape, one senses that there’s something to be changed but ends up trying to change the body itself, mutilating it, or even committing suicide…

A Century of Obesity Epidemic

Why We Get Fat
by Gary Taubes

In 1934, a young German pediatrician named Hilde Bruch moved to America, settled in New York City, and was “startled,” as she later wrote, by the number of fat children she saw—“ really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.” Indeed, fat children in New York were so conspicuous that other European immigrants would ask Bruch about it, assuming that she would have an answer. What is the matter with American children? they would ask. Why are they so bloated and blown up? Many would say they’d never seen so many children in such a state.

Today we hear such questions all the time, or we ask them ourselves, with the continual reminders that we are in the midst of an epidemic of obesity (as is the entire developed world). Similar questions are asked about fat adults. Why are they so bloated and blown up? Or you might ask yourself: Why am I?

But this was New York City in the mid- 1930s. This was two decades before the first Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s franchises, when fast food as we know it today was born. This was half a century before supersizing and high- fructose corn syrup. More to the point, 1934 was the depths of the Great Depression, an era of soup kitchens, bread lines, and unprecedented unemployment. One in every four workers in the United States was unemployed. Six out of every ten Americans were living in poverty. In New York City, where Bruch and her fellow immigrants were astonished by the adiposity of the local children, one in four children were said to be malnourished. How could this be?

Fat in the Fifties
by Nicolas Rasmussen

Obesity burst into the public consciousness in the years immediately following the Second World War. Around 1950, the US Public Health Service (PHS) issued a brochure on “the greatest problem in preventive medicine in the USA”: obesity. The life insurance industry, working in collaboration with the PHS and the American Medical Association (AMA), launched a national drive, proclaiming “Overweight: America’s No. 1 Health Problem.” And no wonder, given that insurance company data and some local health surveys suggested that more than a quarter of the American population was significantly overweight or obese. By the typical measure of the day, anyone 10 percent above the “ideal weight” for a given height fell into the category of overweight—the ideal weight being that which the insurance industry found to predict maximum longevity. Those 20 percent overweight were classified as obese. The danger of excess weight was grave, because it was the leading predictor of heart disease, the nation’s top killer. […]

Stroke, cancer, and, most of all, heart disease leaped to the forefront as causes of death.20 By 1920 heart disease had taken the lead as the top cause of death; by the end of the decade, based mainly on evidence developed by Dublin and other insurance industry statisticians, health policy analysts came to believe that heart disease was also catching up with tuberculosis in terms of its total financial burden on the nation (despite the fact that heart disease tended to kill its victims later in their wage-earning years). Imposing double the economic burden of cancer, which would soon become the second greatest cause of death, heart disease had unquestionably become Public Health Enemy Number 1 by 1930. […] The [early 20th century] findings indicated a clear association between overweight and excess mortality. […] In 1930, Louis Dublin used this type of information as the basis for a groundbreaking actuarial study that specifically correlated overweight with heart disease.

Carbohydrates, Essential Nutrients, and Official Dietary Guidelines

“You’ll be reassured to know that you don’t have to eat carbohydrates to live. It’s not an essential nutrient.
“It’s one of the first things we learn in nutrition is what does the body not make and what you HAVE to eat.
“You won’t find carbohydrate on this list.”
~Eric Westman, There’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate

“Carbohydrates are not essential nutrients.”
~Denise R. Ferrier, Biochemistry

“Carbohydrates are not essential nutrients.”
~Simon W. Walker, Peter Rae, Peter Ashby, & Geoffrey Beckett, Clinical Biochemistry

“Carbohydrates are not considered essential.”
~Carie Ann Braun & Cindy Miller Anderson, Pathophysiology: Functional Alterations in Human Health

“No specific carbohydrates have been identified as dietary requirements.”
~Michael Lieberman, Allan D. Marks, & Alisa Peet , Marks’ Basic Medical Biochemistry: A Clinical Approach

“In the absence of dietary carbohydrate, the body is able to synthesize glucose from lactic acid, certain amino acids and glycerol via gluconeogenesis.”
~Jim Mann & A. Stewart Truswell, Essentials of Human Nutrition

“Even when a person is completely fasting (religious reasons, medically supervised, etc.) the 130 g / day of glucose needed by the brain is made from endogenous protein and fat.
“When people are “fasting” the 12 hour period from the end of supper the night before until breakfast (“break the fast”) the next day, their brain is supplied with essential glucose! Otherwise, sleeping could be dangerous.”
~Joy Kiddie, How Much Carbohydrate is Essential in the Diet?

Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids
from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
published by Institutes of Medicine
2005 textbook of the US Food and Nutrition Board

The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed. However, the amount of dietary carbohydrate that provides for optimal health in humans is unknown. There are traditional populations that ingested a high fat, high protein diet containing only a minimal amount of carbohydrate for extended periods of time (Masai), and in some cases for a lifetime after infancy (Alaska and Greenland Natives, Inuits, and Pampas indigenous people) (Du Bois, 1928; Heinbecker, 1928). There was no apparent effect on health or longevity. Caucasians eating an essentially carbohydrate-free diet, resembling that of Greenland natives for a year tolerated the diet quite well. However, a detailed modern comparison with populations ingesting the majority of food energy as carbohydrate has never been done.

Why Won’t We Tell Diabetics the Truth?
by Diana Rodgers

They base the carbohydrate requirement of 87g-112 grams per day on the amount of glucose needed to avoid ketosis. They arrived at the number 100g/day to be “the amount sufficient to fuel the central nervous system without having to rely on a partial replacement of glucose by ketoacid,” and then they later say that “it should be recognized that the brain can still receive enough glucose from the metabolism of the glycerol component of fat and from the gluconeogenic amino acids in protein when a very low carbohydrate diet is consumed.” (Meaning, ketosis is NO BIG DEALIn fact, it’s actually a good thing and is not the same as diabetic ketoacidosis that type 1 diabetics and insulin dependent type 2 diabetics can get.) The RDA of 130g/day was computed by using a CV of 15% based on the variation in brain glucose utilization and doubling it, therefore the the RDA (recommended daily allowance) for carbohydrate is 130% of the EAR (estimated average requirement).

Added sugars drive nutrient and energy deficit in obesity: a new paradigm
by James J DiNicolantonio and Amy Berger

Mankind has survived without isolated, refined sugar for almost 2.6 million years.48 The body—in particular, the brain—has been thought to require upwards of 200 g of glucose per day, leading to the often cited dogma that glucose is ‘essential for life’.1 While it is true that glucose is essential for sustaining life, there is no requirement for dietary glucose, as fatty acids can be turned into brain-fuelling ketone bodies, and amino acids and glycerol are gluconeogenic substrates.49 Indeed, in the relative absence of dietary glucose, ketone bodies may supply upwards of 75% of the brain’s required energy, with the remainder supplied by gluconeogenesis provided by amino acids (from dietary protein or catabolism of body proteins) and from glycerol (provided by the breakdown of triglycerides in adipose tissue).33 Thus, exogenous glucose (eg, from added sugars) is not essential for sustaining life in humans, and in most people, restricting dietary carbohydrates seems to produce no ill effects.49 In fact, according to the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies of Sciences, ‘The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed’.50

Administration of fructose or sucrose in humans has been shown to cause each of the abnormalities that define the metabolic syndrome (eg, elevated triglycerides, low high-density lipoprotein, insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, elevated blood glucose, elevated blood pressure and weight gain (specifically around the abdomen)),30 51–55 as well as features found in patients with coronary heart disease (eg, increased platelet adhesiveness and hyperinsulinaemia),56 57 all of which can be reversed entirely upon reverting to a diet low in sugar.47 52 56 58–60 Consumption of added sugars at current levels of intake is proposed as a contributing factor in a multitude of other diseases associated with early mortality, such as cardiometabolic disease,61–64 obesity,30 61 65–68 β-cell dysfunction and type 2 diabetes,6 20 69–71 hypertension,51 64 72 non-alcoholic fatty liver7 and atherosclerosis.6 73 74 Because of this, added sugars cannot be considered food.

What to Eat: The Ten Things You Really Need to Know to Eat Well and Be Healthy
by Luise Light, pp. 18-21, 

The alterations that were made to the new guide would be disastrous, I told my boss, the agency director. These changes would undermine the nutritional quality of eating patterns and increase risks for obesity and diabetes, among other diseases. No one needs that much bread and cereal in a day unless they are longshoremen or football players, and it would be unhealthy for the rest of us, especially people who are sedentary or genetically prone to obesity and diabetes. […]

At stake here, I told him, was nothing short of the credibility and integrity of the USDA as a source of reliable nutrition information. Over my objections, the alterations were included and the guide was finalized. I was told this was done in order to keep the lid on the costs of the food stamp program. Fruits and vegetables were expensive, much more expensive than breads and cereals, and the added servings of grains would, to some extent, offset the loss of nutrients from fruits and vegetables, the head of our division told me. However, the logic of that rationale escaped me.

Refined wheat products are what we called in the nutrition trade “cheap carbos,” stomach-filling food preferred when other, higher quality foods are unavailable or not affordable. They do little—if anything—to boost the nutritional quality of people’s diets and tend to add not only starch, but also fat and sugar to the diet. It was curious that there had been no discussion of the cost constraints of the food stamp program in any previous discussion over the many months we had been working on the guide. Intuitively, I knew I was being “played,” but other than stalling and requesting additional outside reviews I felt stymied.

Later, I remembered a Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) nutrition survey I had participated in during graduate school. One of our findings was a high rate of obesity among women in a particular region of the Caribbean country we were working in that had the lowest employment and per capita income. It puzzled me that the poorest region would have the most obese people until one of the physicians on our team explained that the prevalence of obesity was consistent with what he called an “impoverished diet,” too little nutritious food that caused people to feel hungry all the time, and with only cheap carbohydrates available to them, their hunger was never appeased, so they ate and ate and became fatter and fatter.

Was this inflated grain recommendation, I wondered, setting us up for a third world obesity scenario in our own country? Historically, the food guide was used to calculate the cost basis of the food stamps program. Did that mean we needed to develop two different sets of standards for nutrition, one for poor people and another for those better off, or did it mean that what was affordable in the food stamps program would determine what was best for the rest of us? Neither of these Hobson’s choices could be justified on scientific or ethical grounds. The changes that were made to the guide meant that any food product containing wheat flour, from white bread, Twinkies, Oreos, and bagels to pop toasters and Reese’s Puffs, would be considered nutritionally equivalent, which was not the case.

With my protests falling on deaf ears, the serving suggestions in the revised guide were incorporated into the regulations for the food stamps program, as well as the school breakfast and lunch, day care, and all other feeding programs administered by the USDA. Later, Congress set the serving amounts into legislative “stone” so it would be against the law not to serve the expanded number of grain servings that were in the new guide, a change that meant a financial windfall for the wheat industry. The new rules for school lunch programs increased the amount of bread and cereal products purchased for the program by 80 percent. For children in grades K through six, it meant eight daily servings of breads, cereals, and pasta, and for grades seven through twelve, ten servings.

For wheat growers, this meant an increase of 15 million bushels of wheat sold annually worth about $50 million and a retail sales boost of $350 million from additional sales of cereals, breads, and snacks. That didn’t include the extra sales resulting from the government subsidized food stamps program or revenues from the industry’s own efforts to shift public consumption toward more bread, pasta, and baked goods because of the new recommendations. Throughout the nineties, Americans increased their consumption of refined grain products from record lows in the 1970s to the six to eleven servings suggested in the new guide.

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Partial credit for some of the quoted material goes to Bill Murrin, from comments he left at the article Dietary guidelines shouldn’t be this controversial; published at Marion Nestle’s website, Food Politics.