Kevin MacDonald

From The Occidental Observer, September 6, 2009

I’ve managed to avoid the vast majority of the outpourings of praise for Sen. Kennedy. But I couldn’t help noticing Neal Gabler’s op-ed in the L.A. Times because it mentioned Kennedy’s notorious moral lapses. The article, titled (ironically) “Ted Kennedy, America’s conscience” notes that

after his brothers’ deaths and after he had inherited not the presidency but their political mantle, Kennedy compromised all that he had been given. It began with Chappaquiddick, continued with a decade of womanizing and debauchery, and climaxed with his nephew’s arrest for rape in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1991, on a night when Kennedy had induced the young man — who was later cleared — to go out for drinks at a local bar. He remained a great senator, but he was now also America’s fallen angel, his halo badly bent.

. . . Publicly confessing his errant ways, committing himself to do better, and then marrying a woman who helped him fulfill that promise, Kennedy achieved redemption. He fought even more ferociously for the powerless and voiceless. He demonstrated personally and politically what it meant to be rehabilitated. He reassumed his moral authority.

It was an extraordinary performance, not least because Kennedy’s personal psychodrama mirrored the nation’s. His divisions were our divisions; his struggles, our struggles. Kennedy was us.

Well, not many of us have been involved in the death of a woman-not-one’s-wife under circumstances that would have resulted in a charge of manslaughter for ordinary people.

And then there’s the matter of lying about the ethnic effects of the 1965 immigration law. Kennedy never retracted his statement that “it will not upset the ethnic mix of this country.” That law was the result of a long effort, mainly by Jewish organizations and activists, whose main goal was exactly that. But Kennedy was more than willing to lend his abilities to the cause, and he continued to be a pro-immigration advocate the rest of his career.

But let’s assume that what Gabler says is true: Kennedy managed to regain his moral authority despite his personal failings by fighting “even more ferociously for the powerless and voiceless.” Such a statement resonates with all we know about human psychology. Most people strive to get a good reputation and they are motivated to atone for their sins by loudly proclaiming their moral rectitude.

Of course, the problem is that the conventional moral imperatives are all on the side of the multiculturalists. Gabler can blithely call Kennedy “America’s conscience” in a mainstream publication and most people will agree.

This presents a great difficulty for people who see moral virtue advocating for a resurgence of White racial/ethnic identity and explicit assertions of White interests. Such assertions are met with a firestorm of moral condemnation and ostracism. These moral panics warrant any and all actions against the miscreant, including removal from one’s livelihood, or even physical assault.

So what is the morality of ethnic self interest? There are at least two ways to think about. One is that many of the people who are most eager to create moral panics about such ideas also have strong ethnic identities and interests of their own. This is one of the first things that struck me about Jewish political and intellectual rhetoric — that they managed to create a culture of critique in which only Whites had a moral obligation to disappear as a racial/ethnic entity while minority cultures such as their own were encouraged to hold on to their traditions and group cohesiveness.

This way of thinking goes back to Horace Kallen, an important Jewish intellectual who was the first to develop a vision of multicultural America, combining this vision with a deep attachment to Zionism. Obviously, Kallen’s prescription for America is quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state as a state for the Jews. The only thing these beliefs have in common is that they serve Jewish interests. This is an example of Jewish moral particularism — the age old “Is it good for the Jews?.” Kallen appeals to the tradition of Western moral universalism to attain the interests of his ethnic group.

Kallen had a major influence on Randolph Bourne who wrote a classic statement of a multicultural ideal for America in his famous “Trans-National America” that appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1916. All other ethnic groups would be allowed to retain their identity and cohesion. It is only the Anglo-Saxon that is implored to be cosmopolitan. . . . Read the whole article.

The middle class is not an income bracket. It is a group of people who share values that strengthen the individual. Their strength makes the middle class the most difficult class to rule.

Displacing the middle class has been the trend of recent history. Globalism concentrates wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which starves out the mid-tier of society. Particularly since the end of WWII , Western elites have focused on breaking the mid-tier’s ability to resist their own disenfranchisement.

In his Republic Plato recognized the power of middle class principles. Family loyalty, community participation, self reliance and prizing education are all things that help the individual resist the will of the State. Plato knew that a class of virtuous citizens needed these qualities in order to prevent the state from slipping into tyranny.

Plato also noted that would-be tyrants attack virtuous citizens in specific ways: they bring in foreign helpers to undermine the cultural homogeneity of the state; they set up slave militias to use against their citizenry; and they start propaganda campaigns specifically designed to wipe out middle-class values. When these attacks are successful the tyrant sets up a government which Plato called “The Tyranny of Slaves.”

“The Tyranny of Slaves” can only come about if enough people adopt slavish values — thereby allowing themselves to be manipulated by the despot. Slaves don’t take personal responsibility, they wait to be handed what they “deserve.” They don’t respect elders, are insolent, intemperate and extravagant. What’s worse, they don’t value reason and logic; they are only moved by emotion-based sophistical arguments. Slaves need a tyrant to rule them. They are people who seek instant gratification, do not consider consequences and are prone to senseless violence. They are mankind debased.

When he wrote the Republic, Plato was describing recent history and what he had seen happen in Athens during his lifetime.

But the pattern has been repeated many times since. Rome’s power was built on its army, which was made up of many landholding farmers. Wealth came after military success; land ownership was concentrated; and the new landlords replaced Roman farmers with a polyglot of slaves. Since that event the empire had to rely on Northern European conquests for soldiers and the City became the international cesspool that Juvenal describes in The Satires.

A similar thing happened with England’s yeomanry. Brooks Adams describes their displacement during the sixteenth century in his book The Law of Civilization and Decay.

But the bad guys don’t always win. An inspiring example of the middle class resisting tyranny is the struggle of the Germanic farmers with Arminius against Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoberg Forrest. When Arminius tried to impose his own dictatorship, the farmers broke him too.

Since Plato’s writing, other philosophers have built on his observations. Plato naively thought that he could get rid of internecine conflict by extending the family relationship across an entire class — in other words, communal property and no nuclear family. Aristotle realized that only ownership made people care for things: traditional families were crucial to the well being of the middle class. In Politics, Aristotle suggested that abolishing private property would be ideal for the slave class, because the resultant discord would make them easier to control.

Plato’s and Aristotle’s work became especially relevant during The Enlightenment. Philosophers turned their thoughts towards how to reconstruct society.

The Marquis de Sade, a vicious French revolutionary, noticed that when people are bombarded with sex and stripped of family relations, they are distracted and isolated; this makes them totally at the mercy of the State. He recommended plenty of smut in the theater in order to convert the French into “revolutionary citizens.” See his Philosophy in the Bedroom.

Gustave le Bon, a French philosopher writing in the 1890s, saw that when groups of people are very diverse they have few feelings of responsibility towards each other and are more easy to manipulate. (See The Crowd.) The American Conservative‘s Steve Sailer noticed this too in his January 2007 article “Fragmented Future.”

1940s intellectuals inherited a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of society — and how to manipulate them. They started out as Marxists but became disillusioned with Marxism because the lower middle class in Germany in the end opted for National Socialism instead of communism. The response of these intellectuals was to develop theories based on psychoanalysis in which the middle class and any sense of social cohesion were pathologized. From their point of view, the problem was the family itself.

At the center of this onslaught on the middle class was a group of refugee Jewish intellectuals from a communist think-tank in Frankfurt called the “Institute for Social Research.” They are now commonly known as “The Frankfurt School.” The most prominent members of the institute were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.

Herbert Marcuse

A perfect example of Frankfurt School thinking was Herbert Marcuse’s use of Plato’s idea of “The Tyranny of Slaves.” Plato saw the “Tyranny of Slaves” as the ultimate treachery and akin to patricide: a tyrant uses slaves to oppress his own people — the people who gave the tyrant birth.

Marcuse turns the idea of “The Tyranny of Slaves” on its head. According to Marcuse (following Freud), Western Culture was founded by a band of sons who wanted to sleep with their mother and killed their oppressive father (patricide). In guilt, the sons reestablished the tyranny of the father and the result was European Man. Marcuse speculated that Western tyranny will be broken through a cathartic event: minorities and women would rebel, crushing Western Culture and ushering in a fuzzy utopia that is liberated from logic and reason. This utopia will be led by Frankfurt intellectuals. Marcuse calls this catharsis the “return of the repressed.”

The Frankfurters attacked middle class values from every angle. They attacked the foundations of the Western educational system: reason became a symptom of “oppression,” what was “logical” was whatever supported the Frankfurter’s politics. Science was only useful if it could be twisted into propaganda. The Classics became unfashionable.

In reality, the Frankfurters were agitating for an education system that would dumb down the populace and make them less able to identify their own interests.

The Frankfurters adopted de Sade’s social destabilization techniques. Sexual perversion became “freedom”. Loving your race, family and culture became “authoritarian”— unless of course you were non-white. Mentally healthy people were those who rejected their family and looked with eager eyes toward the “return of the repressed.”

In reality, the Frankfurters were promoting diversity because it disrupts community — just as Le Bon had observed. Diversity is strength for oligarchical elites, it is not strength for subjugated people. Cultural and ethnic diversity undermine community and open societies up for tyranny.

After the Frankfurt revolution society would supposedly be freed from private property and the State would provide for everyone’s needs. Being “reified” citizens we would be happy rutting with egalitarian abandon and living our atomistic lives. Ulysses: nil, Lotus-Eaters: one.

The Frankfurters knew full well that distracted and isolated people are weak and the perfect material for the slave class. Single mothers, abandoned children, institutionalized men and the neglected elderly are all dependent on the State and will do as they are told — if they want their benefits.

The Frankfurt school was well connected to the government, particularly the US occupation administration in Germany after World War II. The resources of the Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA, were used to broadcast the Frankfurter’s morally weakening message across the globe.

In 1949 John McCloy (the American High Commissioner for Germany and CIA heavyweight) arranged a special posting for Max Horkheimer at Frankfurt University. Horkheimer had written that an outpost in Frankfurt would be necessary to monitor the effects of American ‘anti-prejudice’ programs on Germans. In 1950 McCloy funds supported the reestablishment of the Institute for Social Research, directed by Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

Many Frankfurt intellectuals found a home away from home in the American university system. After serving with the OSS/CIA they returned to the “Ivory Tower” and were given plush jobs. Herbert Marcuse went to Columbia University, Harvard, Brandeis and the University of California at San Diego; Leo Lowenthal (Office of War Information section chief) went to the University of California, Berkeley — from where their protégés continue to assert, repeat and spread the Frankfurt School contagion.

Frankfurters were given jobs analyzing television and radio content to make sure it had the right messages. Their suggestions in art and music were promoted at Allied-funded cultural events in Europe like the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” — the main organization of the anti-Stalinist left. The Congress was organized in 1950 by Michael Josselson with help from Melvin Lasky and Nicolas Nabokov. Sidney Hook and other New York Intellectuals were central figures. The Rockefeller-funded Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) was closely linked to the Congress. MoMA was a private conduit for promoting socialist-inspired art that the 1950s US Congress would not support.

The Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals developed a common front with non-Jewish elites in the Cold War struggle to attain the intellectual high ground against Stalinism. But it was an alliance made with the devil, because, as Kevin MacDonald has shown, the ideology promoted by the non-communist left came to be institutionalized as the ideology of Western suicide. The New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School—both movements dominated by strongly identified Jews — developed a widely disseminated theory, based on psychoanalysis (itself a Jewish intellectual movement), in which concern for ethnic displacement and the rise of minority power were indications of psychopathology. White people with no allegiance to their family, their country or their race were seen as the epitome of psychological health.

The Frankfurters and the New York Intellectuals had a great respect for Western Classical Literature. (This was typical of other Jewish-dominated anti-nationalist intellectual movements described by Yuri Slezkine.) Shakespeare and the other Western classics would survive the revolution of the non-communist left, but the rest of Western culture would have to go, as would the predominant racial group — White Europeans. They had read Plato and Aristotle very carefully, and for the most part accepted these writers’ conclusions. The Frankfurters were also familiar with De Sade and Le Bon — and recognized their relevance to Plato. From a synthesis of these ideas sprung a system for attacking the middle class.

It will not be lost on the reader that the time period in question was also the beginning of the “Civil Rights” movement; the “Sexual Revolution”; and massive third-world immigration to the West. What has been the effect of these things on our society? Are we as a people more or less able to defend our own interests and hold our government accountable? Plato would answer “less.”

From The Occidental Observer, August 3, 2009

I’ve seen this kind of talk amongst race realists before.  Asians suffer from affirmative action and NAM [non-Asian minority -- Ed.] crime, do well in school, and as an economically successful group are losers under any economic redistributionist regime.

Unfortunately, besides the mentioned article there’s no indication that liberals dislike Asians or vice versa.  The clearest way to see this is by looking at voting patterns.  In both 2004 and 2008 the Democratic presidential candidate won the Asian vote by about two to one.  In 1996 61% of California Asians voted against ending affirmative action.

How to explain this supposed paradox?   Interestingly, Asians as a group supported George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole during their losing campaigns of 1992 and 1996 respectively.  When you realize that voting is at least as much about making a statement as it is rational self interest these patterns make a lot more sense.

Before we can understand Asians, we have to take a look at American political culture in general and how it’s changed in just the last two decades.  For a few generations now, the elites had certain ideas about the direction they wanted the country to go.  The only problem was that the voters wouldn’t cooperate.  They came to hate the masses more and more.  But immigration continued, and without ever consciously planning it in recent years the liberals have found themselves as a group in permanent control no longer needing the consent of the majority they detest.  This disgust that they’ve built up has been given free reign. We now have New York Times articles explicitly celebrating the death of White America.  This would’ve been unthinkable in 1990.

I’ve seen the anti-white cultural trends in shows and comedians I grew up with.  In the late 90s I enjoyed watching comedian Bill Maher on his TV show Politically Incorrect.  He would describe himself as a libertarian and voted Dole in 1996.  I don’t remember him talking much about race, but his views on sex were certainly un-PC.  Today, he’s a standard liberal and foams at the mouth when talking about conservative whites.  The Simpsons used to be a great show, with actual characters that you cared about.  Today, Homer, Lisa, Mr. Burns, and the rest have morphed into political representations of what the writers like or dislike.

To be a Republican in 2008 doesn’t mean the same thing that it did in 1992.  Back then, voting with the conservative party said something about your economic views.  Today, it’s taking a cultural stand. The most prestigious institutions in society have heaped so much mockery and scorn on traditionalist whites that people of other races have gotten the hint.  White America has fought for the freedom of Korea and Vietnam, to feed Somalians, bombed Serbia and Sudan, liberated Kuwait, helped bring down the Soviet Union, and tried to build democracy in Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but didn’t lift a finger to stop themselves from being on their way to becoming a hated minority in their own country.  Who would want to be associated with these losers?

What’s true for the Asian masses holds especially true for the elites.  Particularly disturbing is the invention of the term “People of Color” (we should know by now to be on the guard for any new terminology or victim groups liberals create.  How long was it from the time “homophobia” came into the English language to when it became one of the ultimate sins?).  It was bad enough when blacks organized as blacks, Hispanic as Hispanics, etc. without whites being allowed to do the same.  Now, nonwhites aren’t just organizing based on what they are, but what they’re not (white).  Pat Buchanan wrote about one such group before the 2008 election:

On Sunday, 6,800 folks showed in Chicago for the 2008 quadrennial convention of UNITY: Journalists of Color. McCain declined an invitation. Bush had been booed at UNITY 2004, while John Kerry got a standing ovation. Featured speaker: Barack. Major concern of the journalists running the show: that their colleagues would lift the roof off the McCormick Place convention center when Barack arrived.

Said Luis Villareal, a producer of NBC’s “Dateline,” “I don’t think it’s such a bad thing if for 15 minutes you take off your reporter hat and respond to (Obama) as a human being at an event where you’re surrounded by people of color and you’re here for a united cause.”

And exactly what “cause” might the 10,000 members of UNITY be united behind? The hiring and advancement of journalists of color in all major news organizations in America.

For, as its emblem depicts, UNITY comprises four alliances: the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association and the National Association of Black Journalists.

“A New Journalism for a Changing World” is UNITY’s motto.

And the title of its July 22 press release reveals what the “new journalism” is all about. “Aim of New UNITY Initiative Is More Diversity in Top Media Management.”

“With more than 50 percent of the population projected to be people of color in less than a generation,” says UNITY President Karen Lincoln Michel, “the nation’s news organizations continue to generate dismal diversity numbers year after year. . . . ‘Ten by 2010′ is a significant step in the right direction.”

UNITY is demanding that 10 major U.S. news organizations, by mid-2010, elevate to a senior management position in the newsroom at least one journalist of color and provide “customized training to help prepare them.”

Notice how by 2004 being an educated PoC meant booing the Republican and cheering the Democrat.  And if businesses are forced to hire more nonwhites, and any nonwhites will do, what group can expect to benefit the most if not the one with the highest IQ?  Jared Taylor has written on Asians getting into the racial spoils system and calling for quotas in areas where they’re underrepresented.  If they’re allowed to partake in identity politics, we can’t expect them to resist.

Having been to college, educated Asians don’t only vote for liberal ideas but believe in them.  I used to be less afraid of bringing up HBD in front of Orientals than other minorities because the data flatters them.  Most, however, have been more shocked than the typical white college graduate. (Interestingly Arabs have been the most accepting.  I’ve never talked to an East Indian about these issues, but there seem to be a lot of them in the HBD blogosphere.)  This itself if evidence of HBD.  Asians are natural conformists.  They internalize PC dogma better than anyone else.  In their anti-whiteness they are more white than whites.

Asian American studies programs now exist at a handful of major universities and seek to institutionalize the cult of victimhood. The following is from the Wikipedia article entitled “Model Minority.”

While some Asian Americans hold pride in the model minority image, the consensus in academia and the field of Asian American studies is that the Model Minority Myth is detrimental to the Asian Pacific American (APA) community, used to justify the exclusion of needy APA communities in the distribution of assistance programs, public and private, and understate or slight the achievements of APA individuals. Communities that are especially affected are South East Asian communities, e.g. Cambodian-American, and the Pacific Islander community, e.g. persons with origins in Guam and Micronesia; these communities have much lower education rates and higher poverty rates. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Indian Americans are over twice as likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree than most members of other Asian-American groups. The Model Minority myth relies on the aggregation of success indicators, hiding the plight of recent first-generation immigrants under the high success rate of more established Asian communities.

Big surprise there.  An academic field of study that grew out of identity politics reaches politically correct consensuses.  Wikipedia will also teach you that all those who have studied “white privilege” agree that it exists.

If Asians have been too successful to be victims, they’ll associate themselves with less intelligent races in order to play the game.  In the backwards world of academia, failure brings prestige.  I thought the concept of Asian/Pacific Islander only existed as a census option but apparently it’s now a “community.”   Isn’t it strange how people who share nothing in common (genes, language, history, SES) are seeing themselves as a bloc (at least in academia) based on how some white government bureaucrats decided to divide up the races decades ago?  The Carter administration (or whoever) probably just thought that API sounded better than “miscellaneous.” (The Census Bureau in recent years has split Asians and PIs up.  The term still exists though, and there’s even a Pacific Asian Heritage Month.)

If the People of Color needs leadership, Asians are naturals to fill the role.  Take a look at the blog Racialicious, a meeting ground for spouters of every PC cliché there is.  The founder is half-white and half-Asian.  She saw that there was a market for anti-white propaganda, that the competition for the top slots wasn’t all that impressive, and she was intelligent enough to take advantage.  In the future, we can expect to see more members of the “model minority” doing the same.

From HBD Books, August 7, 2009

Wouldn't it be nice if THEY would seceede from us?

For any movement or system of thought to remain relevant or dynamic, it must possess the internal capability of periodically reassessing its present course and shifting its focus and direction. Thus far, political anarchism has experienced two distinct stages. The first of these was the era of “classical” anarchism. Roughly defined, this was the period between the Marx/Bakunin split in the 1870s and the defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s. The second stage began during the 1960s with the emergence of a brand of anarchism that internalized the ideological framework of the New Left, and it is this framework that still prevails at the present time.

The classical anarchist movement was primarily oriented towards proletarian revolution and the historic labor movement. This was appropriate as the “labor question” was the principal political struggle of the time. The New Left-influenced anarchist movement (“neo-anarchism”) oriented itself towards the movements that emerged during its own era. These included “anti-racism” (for instance, the movement against American and South African racial apartheid systems), “anti-colonialism” (opposition to the Vietnam War and other manifestations of imperialist aggression), “the womens’ movement” (second wave feminism), “gay liberation” (homosexuals were previously regarded as criminals, deviants or mentally ill by the wider society), the ecology movement, a variety of tendencies collectively known as “counterculturalism”  and other comparable but lesser known movements, all of which had the purpose of challenging traditional institutions, systems of authority, social practices, cultural norms and so forth. The overwhelming majority of contemporary anarchists continue to function within this particular paradigm.

However, the question needs to be asked as to whether this paradigm is really appropriate in the early 21st century. If it were found to be inappropriate, what might the alternative be? In more recent times, an number of tendencies have emerged within the anarchist milieu that have challenged the dominant New Left-derived paradigm. These include primitivists, eco-anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-monarchists, national-anarchists, tribal anarchists, anarcho-pluralists, a variety of ideologies that might be collectively labeled “free-market anti-capitalists”, post-left anarchists, Christian anarchists, and a number of other perspectives. While there are significant differences between these tendencies, and each of these rejects the dominant New Left paradigm with varying degrees of consistency or fervor, collectively they compromise a dissident force within anarchism that seeks to move past the current second stage in the history of anarchism and into a new era.

The two most serious weaknesses of contemporary anarchism are illustrated by the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on anarchism:

Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state (anarchy.)Specific anarchists may have additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism, and they often disagree with each other on what these criteria are. According to The Oxford Companion to Philosophy “there is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance.”

Among many contemporary anarchists, there is an observable tendency to ignore the struggle against the state, or the treat the battle against the state as only one matter on a laundry list of preferred causes, usually those of a conventionally leftist or countercultural nature. This is the first weakness. The other is the matter of sectarianism, i.e., setting an amount of “additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism” that is so large that it becomes self-defeating when it comes to the matter of building an actual movement that can wield political influence.

There needs to be a revolution within the anarchist movement itself. This should be a revolution that re-orients the anarchist movement towards the primary anarchist objective of state abolitionism. Second, there needs to be a shift in contemporary anarchist thought and action that involves a retreat from the current tunnel-visioned focus on ultra-leftism and counterculturalism. A new focus that is broader and that speaks to a wider variety of issues and population groups is necessary. Third, there needs to be an evaluation of tactics, and the adoption of new tactics that are relevant to current political realities.

An interesting list of historic anarchist communities can be viewed here. One thing that is immediately noticeable about these anarchist polities from the past is how different many of them were from one another. Consequently, it is probable that in a civilization where anarchist communities became widespread there would be wide variation in the specific ideological, cultural or structural content of these communities. This automatically means that the sectarian differences between competing strands within anarchism are irrelevant. Different kinds of anarchists will form different kinds of communities in those geographical regions where their own tendencies are prevalent. For instance, anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists, leftist anti-racist anarchists and national-anarchists, anarcho-futurists and primitivists, gay anarchists and Christian anarchists, anarcha-feminists and anarcho-monarchists, may not even consider one another to be “true” anarchists, but these battles simply do not matter if different kinds of anarchists are simply “doing their own thing” within the context of their own communities, institutions and organizations.

How, in a nation-state like the United States, could an anarchist movement become large enough, or influential or powerful enough, to actually carry out a revolution rivaling that of, for instance, the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s? Clearly the anarchist movement in North America could never do such a thing, given its small size and narrow focus. But what about a much larger popular movement, in which anarchists assume leadership roles, and with a much broader focus than what is found in the anarchist milieu at present?

Read this essay by the military historian Martin Van Creveld on the present decline of the state as an institution. Now, read this series of articles on the possible scenarios that will bring about the downfall of the American regime itself. Then read this review of a book that describes how Americans are in the process of sorting themselves out into communities specifically oriented towards their own political, cultural or lifestyle interests. Now, take a look at this opinion poll showing the amount of support for secessionist movements in the U.S., and the surprising nature of these numbers. Then take a look at two books (here and here) which offer us an alternative economic paradigm beyond the standard “big business vs big government” false dichotomy.

My friends, these works contain the ideas and information necessary to develop a popular revolutionary movement in North America. This essay is an attempt to synthesize these ideas and develop a comprehensive strategy for their application. No single reader is likely to agree with every argument or position taken in that essay, but its purpose is to “get the ball rolling” concerning the debate as to how anarchist revolution in North America will actually be carried out. And this essay is a discussion of considerations concerning time frames.

The single idea of state abolitionism will never be popular enough to become a mass movement. Most people simply are not that averse to political authority. However, the idea of secession has its roots in American history, culture and tradition. Therefore, anarchists should simply work to develop their own independent enclaves reflecting the value systems of their particular sect of anarchism, encourage other secession movements, and work to popularize the idea of secession. An effort should be made to appeal to those demographic groups most under attack by the state, those with single issues that put them in conflict with the state, and those who have the least to lose and most to gain by rejecting the state.

Further, anarchists should position themselves as the upholders of the economic interests of ordinary people. This opinion poll indicates that the issues of most concern to the public at large at present are unemployment, government spending and healthcare. What, if anything, do anarchists plan to do about these matters? How many individual anarchists have even given any thought to such topics? There are some ideas on these here, here, and here. If you do not like these, then come up with something of your own.

Particularly problematic is the question of people and groups with polar opposite views on many issues participating in the same movement. For instance, the conflicts between the various anarchist sects (Anarchist People of Color and Crimethinc come immediately to mind), or the conflict between secessionists holding opposing cultural or ideological perspectives. No doubt, there are some people who will not enter into a movement that includes others with whom they strongly disagree on certain questions no matter what. These individuals will simply have to fall by the wayside. The proper response to such questions is the “good riddance” argument.  In a decentralized political system, with voluntary association and community autonomy, leftist anti-racist anarchists and national-anarchists need not have any association with one another, nor anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists, nor gays and religious conservatives, nor racists and racial minorities, nor snobby rich people and slummy poor people, nor druggies and straight edges, nor feminists and male chauvinist pigs. Nor Crimethinc and Anarchist People of Color. Everyone wins but the state, the ruling class, and the empire.

From Attack the System, August 11, 2009]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-revolution-within-anarchism/feed/ 0 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/power-trip/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/power-trip/#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2009 04:00:57 +0000 Samuel Francis http://www.toqonline.com/?p=3266 Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy
by Paul Gottfried
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003

Sam Francis (1947 - 2005)

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is the sequel to Professor Paul Gottfried’s earlier volume, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, published by Princeton University Press in 1999. In both books Professor Gottfried, a prominent paleo-conservative polemicist, intellectual historian, and Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, tries to account for the emergence of “post-liberal” trends in political thought and behavior, especially the rise of such phenomena as “multiculturalism” and what is popularly called “political correctness.” The problem underlying his efforts is that such political and cultural views are so self-evidently absurd, based on such transparently false beliefs about history and culture, and so evidently harmful to intellectual freedom and social cohesion, that it is a mystery why anyone believes them at all, let alone why they have become such powerful and all but irresistible trends in academic, intellectual, and political life. Is the acceptance of such views by various key elites in Western society genuine, and to what extent does their acceptance point either to some hidden agenda reflecting the material interests of these elites or to some equally obscure irrational motivation, a collective “death wish” on the part of the leadership sectors of the modern West? This is perhaps the central problem Mr. Gottfried’s series seeks to answer. Aside from what I take to be certain flaws in his presentation and argument, both books are well worth reading, and not only for the large amount of anti-Western foolishness that he documents. They are major contributions to our understanding of what is happening to the Western world and why.

Both books take off from the common assumption that the United States and most of the Western world are now governed by what Gottfried calls the “managerial state,” a term and concept that derive from conservative theorist James Burnham in his The Managerial Revolution of 1941 and which I to some extent reformulated in various essays, columns, and books in the 1980s. Gottfried’s usage of them, however, is quite different from their meaning as defined by either Burnham or me.

In the first place, Burnham was writing under the influence of a Marxism from which he had only recently defected and of the largely Italian school of what are known as “classical elite” theorists, in particular Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, which he had recently discovered. Hence, his theory, as well as the reformulated version that I developed, is framed in terms of elites—relatively small groups within a population that share a common relationship to the instruments of power within a society and a common interest in how those instruments are used and which exclude the majority of the population from access to power. The key concept for Burnham, then, was a “managerial elite,” a “managerial class,” or a “new class,” which was displacing the older elite or ruling class in modern society. He saw this process going on simultaneously in Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the United States of the New Deal era. The new elite, like the old, dominates the state, the formal apparatus of government, but also extends well beyond the state in its control of the economy (as a corporate elite) and of the culture (the structures of ideological formulation, education, and mass communications). In both the original and the reformulated versions of the theory, the behavior of the managerial elite is largely determined by its consciousness of its power interests and its pursuit of those interests, and its ideology is constructed by a managerial intelligentsia (academics, journalists, think tank verbalists, etc.) to justify its interests.

Gottfried’s work, by contrast, owes little to elite theory, and he seldom speaks of a “managerial elite” or “managerial class” at all. Instead, his discussion focuses almost exclusively on the state itself. Large corporations, unions, foundations, mass media, and schools and universities play far less of a role in his model of managerial dominance than in Burnham’s or mine, and his concept of what motivates the thinking and behavior of those who control the managerial state is also radically different.

Secondly, and consistent with his abandonment of elite theory, Gottfried’s usage of the term “managerial state” itself is quite different from that of the Burnhamite school. In the latter, much as in classical Marxism, the state is largely the “executive committee” of the ruling class—in Marx’s case, the capitalist bourgeoisie; in the Burnhamite case, the managerial bureaucracy, which is closely wedded to the corporate and cultural managers. In the absence of the elite theory concept, however, Gottfried’s “managerial state” appears almost spontaneously, merely as the product of liberal ideology combined with political ambition. For Gottfried, the “managerial state” seems to be mainly a synonym for what a Goldwater conservative of the 1960s would have called “big government”—the centralized federal government that regulates the economy, dishes out welfare and special benefits to selected constituencies, and overrides state, local, and private authorities as vaguely defined “mandates” or “social needs” dictate—but neither the interests of the elite that runs the state nor those of sister elites with which it is allied seem to constitute significant driving forces for its behavior and policies. There is therefore little connection between Gottfried’s usage of the term “managerial” and the special sense in which Burnham developed the concept of “manager”—specifically, one who holds power through proficiency in modern technical and managerial skills.

Those who hold such skills are able to dominate the state, the economy, and the culture because the structures of these sectors of modern society require technical functions that only specially skilled personnel can provide. The older elites simply lack those skills and eventually lose actual control over the key institutions of modern mass society. As the new, managerial elites take over, society is reconfigured to reflect and support their interests as a ruling class—interests radically different from those of the older elites. Generally, the interests of the new managerial elites consist in maintaining and extending the institutions they control and in ensuring that the needs for and rewards of the technical skills they possess are steadily increased, that society become as dependent on them and their functions as possible.

Little of this analysis is apparent in Gottfried’s discussion, however, and it is never entirely clear why he is using the term “managerial state” at all or what the relationship between his usage and that of Burnham is. Indeed, the bulk of his second volume is concerned with how and why the “managerial state” evolves into what he now calls the “therapeutic state,” which undertakes “therapeutic” functions intended to “cure” the pathologies of bourgeois society—its “racism,” “sexism, “homophobia,” etc.—and which adopts what is now called generally “multiculturalism” as its dominant ideology. Whereas the old “managerial state” was concerned principally with the public administration of material welfare, the new therapeutic state is concerned mainly with the instillation of “correct” mental and psychological attitudes and behavior.

Social guilt, antifascist education, and the search for subterranean prejudice are integral to the moral mission of European politicians and intellectuals as much as it is for their American preceptors. The mental cleansing that European sensitizers desire must go so deep that it can never be brought to completion. The road is indeed everything, but on the never-ending road toward the unattainable goal, the prescribed reeducation warrants a draconian control over citizens, who remain susceptible to old ways (p. 10).

As Gottfried demonstrates, adopting therapeutic functions does not mean that older managerial functions vanish or significantly diminish, despite the claims of neo-conservative champions of “democratic capitalism” that “socialism has died” or the “era of big government is over.”

But while it is clear that the therapeutic functions have been added onto the older ones, it is not so clear that the “therapeutic” state is as fundamentally different as Gottfried seems to claim. “Therapy,” after all, is merely one kind of technical skill that more recent managers have adopted and applied as an instrument of power and social control. The metaphor of a “sick society” that requires therapy is indeed more recent than the older managerial one centered on the idea of “social engineering,” but the concept of “therapy” does not deviate from that of a technically skilled class (even if the skills are largely pseudo-scientific) asserting hegemony over the rest of society. “Therapy,” in other words, is merely the current codeword by which the managerial class rationalizes its dominance over other social and political forces and especially its claim to reconstruct the human mind itself through the manipulation of emotions, attitudes, and social relationships. Even though the new therapeutic regime reaches much further into the psychic and social roots of behavior to inculcate submission, it is not essentially different from the Burnhamite concept of managerial totalitarianism. It should be recalled that Orwell based 1984 on Burnham’s work, and the consummate achievement of therapeutic managerialism in that novel is the engineering of love for Big Brother, at the expense of all other human affective relationships. Brainwashing masked as “therapy” was thus by no means unknown to the older apostles of managerial domination.

Yet Gottfried’s “managerial” or “therapeutic” state by itself seems to be harmless enough; its drive toward tyranny does not, in his view, derive from its own structure or the interests of its controlling elite. If we could somehow take out the ideology, change the minds of those who control the state, and convert them into paleo-conservatives, the state apparatus itself would be neutral. What really animates its drive toward a totalitarian conquest and reconfiguration of society and the human mind itself comes from the ideology that the masters of the managerial state have adopted, a force that is entirely extraneous and largely accidental to the structure by which they exercise power. In Gottfried’s view, this ideology derives from and is largely identical to what he calls “Liberal Protestantism.”

As Gottfried writes, “A religious worldview gives direction to the managerial state’s progress toward a therapeutic regime concerned with the self-esteem of victims. This worldview is liberal Protestantism, understanding that term in the current sense and not in the way it might have been taken in the past” (i.e., not as a movement to adapt Protestant theology to modern scientific and political trends so much as a theologically based ethic demanding recognition of and collective repentance for such “sins” as “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “anti-Semitism,” etc.).

Gottfried is no doubt correct to point to recent expressions of guilt and guilt-mongering among various Protestant theologians in Europe and the United States, but there are two major problems with his use of such maunderings as an adequate explanation for the practices of the managerial state. In the first place, he fails to establish any significant connection between this body of theological thought, on the one hand, and actual members of the managerial elite (or administrators of the managerial state, if you will), on the other. The closest he comes is a brief account of a speech by ex-President Bill Clinton not long after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which Mr. Clinton spoke of the collective responsibility of the West for atrocities committed against the Moslem world going back to the Crusades. That sort of rhetoric is common enough, of course, and it may in fact derive from what Gottfried means by “liberal Protestantism.” But there is little reason to take anything Bill Clinton says very seriously except as an expression of his own personal and political interests, and no reason to think that serious feelings of guilt derived from liberal Protestantism really animate the managerial class as a whole.

In the second place, such expressions are by no means limited to Protestants or to liberal Protestants. As Gottfried acknowledges, the so-called “Christian Right” is not exactly immune from emoting about the “sins” of “racism,” and groups like Promise Keepers (before its collapse) specialized in “overcoming guilt” and actually promoted interracial marriage. Gottfried also cites a rhetorical belly crawl over Christian guilt for anti-Semitism by Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed before the Anti-Defamation League in 1995 as illustrating that “the politics of atonement has spilled over to the American Christian Right, the side of the religious spectrum where one might think it would be hardest to find.” But such performances do not derive from the kind of liberal Protestant theology of sin and guilt that Gottfried is talking about. They are more likely either a kind of public theater intended to avoid charges of “racism” and “insensitivity,” or else reflections of the real guilt experienced by various religious neurotics and oddwads who compose the leadership of the “Christian Right.”

For that matter, Pope John Paul II in the last few years has taken up the habit of crawling about on his hands and knees in a protracted apologetic to Protestants (for the Inquisition), Jews (for “The Holocaust”), Moslems (for the Crusades), and even Eastern Orthodox Greeks (for “intolerance”). Whatever the meaning of “liberal Protestantism,” guilt is hardly confined to it, but again there seems to be no special linkage between feeling such guilt or acknowledging its legitimacy and the policies of the managerial state. While Gottfried argues, perhaps accurately enough, that Protestantism harbors inherent tendencies toward guilt and repentance for sin and the rejection of social hierarchies and authority in favor of individualism, he also tends to ignore the profoundly conservative and anti-liberal Protestant heritages of the American South, the pre-twentieth century Church of England, Prussian Lutheranism, and South African Calvinism, among other expressions of Protestantism that fail to suit modern managerial ideological needs. What he seems to have identified is not so much “liberal Protestantism” as “liberalism” itself, which rejects authority and hierarchy explicitly, has succeeded in permeating virtually all Christian sects in the course of the last century, and has evolved into what the late Revilo Oliver dubbed the “succedaneous religion” of the modern West that leads it to racial and cultural suicide. There is no special reason to blame Protestantism for this development and less reason to blame it than other forces.

Searching for such forces that help animate the managerial-therapeutic state’s war on Western culture, we should extend our inquiries to other religious and ethnic formations besides those of Protestants. If we are looking for the sources of the collective consciousness of “sins” such as “racism,” “sexism,” etc. and the systematic, politically enforced reconfiguration of American society, then the Jewish role in promoting racial egalitarianism, promoting feminism and subverting male social roles, instilling collective guilt, promoting mass immigration, and pushing multiculturalism (through Franz Boas and his disciples in anthropology, the civil rights movement, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, any number of Marxist and New Left movements, Jewish feminist ideologues like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sontag, pro-immigration lobbying by Jewish “public interest” groups and individual political figures, and the major architect of multiculturalism, Horace Kallen, not to mention the largely Jewish “neo-conservatism” of recent years) can hardly be ignored. Gottfried, however, does ignore it almost entirely, though he gives a casual and not very complimentary nod to Kevin MacDonald’s work, which he characterizes in a footnote as “methodologically uneven but occasionally illuminating.” (p. 42, n. 5; and see also p. 15, n. 21) In short, even if we grant, as Gottfried seems to think, that the managerial elite has no inherent tendency to wage war on traditional Western institutions and values and even if we resort to extraneous forces such as religious and theological movements, there are any number of such forces present in modern society that are at least as plausible as the “liberal Protestantism” Gottfried accuses.

Finally, Gottfried argues that “a transformation of the self-image of the majority population would have had to take place in order for the therapeutic state to have reached its present strength,” and it is the “altered religious consciousness that has affected Protestant majorities in the United States and in other Anglophone countries” that has brought about this transformation. Yet he also points out the “catastrophic” (his word) decline in mainline Protestant church membership and attendance and remarks that “More and more of the 58 percent of the American population consisting of churched Protestants are joining Fundamentalist and Evangelical denominations” in protest of the liberalization of the mainstream churches. In other words, American Protestants, so far from having their religious consciousness altered by liberal Protestantism, are in fact fleeing it.

Moreover, it is not to my perception true that any “transformation of the self-image of the majority population” has taken place at all or that such a transformation is necessary for the dominance of the managerial state, even if the managerial state today is granted the power Gottfried attributes to it. Challenging the possibility of a nationalist, populist political reaction against the managerial regime, Gottfried remarks that “nothing connected to American nationalist politics resonates as strongly as the concern registered in polls about ‘fighting discrimination in the workplace.’ Not even quotas and affirmative action in education, issues that engage the entire American Right, have aroused a national opposition as noticeable as what is counterpoised on the other side.” (pp. 116-17)

The main foundations for these claims that the bulk of the American population now embraces the anti-discrimination policies of the liberal managerial state (as well as mass immigration) are various opinion polls that Gottfried adduces, including one from 2000 showing that 53 percent of the public approves of the federal government “guarding against discrimination in hiring.” But opinion polls often show different attitudes at different times, depending on how the questions are asked, and a mere 53 percent approval of what is an essential function of the managerial-therapeutic state is actually somewhat encouraging. Virtually all polls up to 2000 showed solid majorities favoring reduced immigration, but Gottfried uses one from that year that reported only 45 percent of the public favoring reduction as the basis of his claim that “a majority of Americans have become benignly indifferent to or positive about the government’s immigration policy.” (p. 144) Yet only four pages later he cites a Roper poll of 1996 that showed that 83 percent of the public favored reduced immigration. More recent polls since the 9/11 attacks have shown that a majority again favors reduction. It is likely that most respondents answer such polling questions not after long and deep reflection on and study of public issues but on the basis of vague associations, implanted images, and exposure to mounds of carefully selected information and misinformation about issues like race, affirmative action, and immigration. How reliable any polls on such issues can be for divining what “most” Americans “really” believe is questionable.

Yet in any case, it is not at all clear that Gottfried’s assumption that such a transformation of the majority population is necessary for a therapeutic state to function is true. Elites and states function continuously in most societies, imposing policies to which most citizens have not actually consented and do not even understand. The manufacture and manipulation of “consent” by elites skilled in propaganda and public relations is the foundation of what the state does, not what its citizens really support. Indeed, if Gottfried were correct in his analysis—that a majority of the population, influenced by their religious persuasions, has accepted the legitimacy and necessity of “curing” themselves and their institutions of various repressive pathologies—he would have largely removed most grounds for objecting to what is going on. If most Americans support multiculturalism, why object to it?

Gottfried’s reliance on liberal Protestantism as the animating force behind the managerial-therapeutic state’s war on traditional culture is one of the two main flaws in his thesis. The other main flaw in his argument is his conviction that the managerial state and those who run it are not driven so much by what he calls “calculation” of self-interest on the part of the elite as by “a Protestant culture of social guilt and of individuals ashamed of their collective past.” Such irrational motivations no doubt are always operative in any social or political group, but reaching for irrationalist explanations is never as persuasive as looking for perfectly rational reasons why an entire class thinks and behaves the way it does.

In the case of the managerial class in the Burnhamite analysis, such reasons are not hard to locate. The managerial elite as a whole shares a vested interest in making sure that political, economic, and cultural organizations are dependent on the skills that only the elite possesses. Unlike earlier elites in history, the managerial class does not depend on the transmission of property, power, or status through the family but on skills that cannot be inherited or passed on. Hence, institutions such as large accumulations of private property and the family are relatively unimportant to it. So are the specific identities that multiculturalism combats. As Burnham argued, the reach of managerial power is transnational and supranational; national boundaries, sovereignties, and identities present mainly obstacles to managerial power, and Burnham explicitly predicted the managerial movement away from traditional nation-states and toward supranational organization. For much the same reason, the managerial class is at best indifferent and actually hostile to most other specific identities such as those derived from class, ethnicity and race, religion, region, and gender. Managerial power is heightened by the eradication of such identities and by the triumph of a universalist ideology and ethic that celebrates such abstractions as “humankind.”

Movements like “multiculturalism,” which ostensibly defends the legitimacy of many different cultural and ethnic identities, would seem to be the opposite of the abstract universalism that the managerial system prefers, but in fact the main social and political function of multiculturalism as it is deployed in schools and government policies today is to undermine white, Christian, male-oriented, bourgeois values and institutions—those, in other words, that remain the principal institutional constraints on managerial reach and power. Despite a good deal of play with such ethnic heritages as those of American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc., the real “cultural” bonds that discipline these different groups are those created and deployed by the managerial regime—through government bureaucracy, educational manipulation, mass routinization by the economy of managerial capitalism, and disciplining by the mass media. Managerial elites can clearly afford to patronize tribal, often paleolithic, practices such as musical styles, clothing, cuisine, and religious rituals; there is little danger that such folkways will seriously interfere with real managerial control and interests, and the elite neither expects nor desires them to do so. The main use of such diversions is to embarrass and discredit their Western counterparts as repressive, genocidal, boring, and uncreative, not really to elevate primitive and Third World cultural strains into the dominant culture created and controlled by the managerial class. The multiculturalist ideology promoted by the managerial regime is supposed to remain subordinate to and controlled by the “color-blind” universalism and egalitarianism that the regime also sponsors.

Yet Gottfried’s analysis, despite the flaws on which I have perhaps dwelled too much, remains a compelling one, and we can agree that even if “liberal Protestantism” is not the major animating force in the managerial regime, it is certainly capable of providing an influential ideological rationale and justification for managerial guilt-mongering, especially in cultural regions where a Protestant heritage remains prevalent. We can agree also that while the “managerial state” is by no means the only structure constructed and deployed for the pursuit of managerial power, it is the major one, and increasingly in both Europe and the United States, cultural and economic control and manipulation of mass society are dependent on the state itself. There are therefore points of congruence between Gottfried’s analysis of “managerial” power and that of Burnham.

Gottfried concludes his book with a warning that the multiculturalist and immigration policies of the managerial state may well be undermining its own power and the stability of the system it dominates (this is a major element in his argument that managerial policies reflect irrational motives rather than rational interests). Thus, the managerial state

will not benefit and may destroy that [managerial] order if the culture shifts in ways that diminish its control. If a certain kind of multiculturalism may have that effect, reasoning leaders will try to prevent it from destabilizing society. This has not happened with immigration: Short-term gain and ideological commitment have both driven the managerial class and its media and academic priesthood toward “empowering” those who live parasitically on multicultural institutions. Hispanic racialists, Third World patriarchs, and Mexican irredentists will likely eat up the present regime, if given the demographic chance. What will then ensue will not be a return to what the managerial state supplanted. At most a precarious truce may be struck, before the advocates of group rights resume their competition for power. (p. 147)

Of course, the managerial class would have a ready answer—that the Balkanizing forces against which Gottfried warns will themselves eventually be assimilated into the managerial stewpot, that managerial techniques of social control will neutralize any such forces, that Gottfried exaggerates them anyway, and that anyone who mentions such problems is probably a “xenophobe,” if not an outright “racist.” Nevertheless, Gottfried has an entirely valid and indeed powerful point, that the dynamic of managerial power undermines its own regime. In particular, what he is alluding to in this passage is the emergence of a non-white and indeed anti-white racial consciousness among the immigrant populations and subcultures (though by no means confined to them) that does not yet fit into the managerial superculture and which has emerged in the course of the last century as an entirely independent force, the “rising tide of color,” the rebirth of non-white and anti-white racial consciousness on a mass scale.

As noted, it is of course the conceit of the managerial class that eventually the threat of Balkanization that such consciousness and the population streams that carry it will be “assimilated” into the superculture through application of its universalist policy of “color-blindness” and the disciplines of economic reward and that they present no long-term threat. What Gottfried is suggesting is that the emergence of Third World racial consciousness cannot be assimilated, that it is impervious to managerial bribery and manipulation, and that it presents a far more serious threat to the stability and functioning of the managerial regime than the masters of the regime realize or — given their ideology — are able to understand.

“Thinking these leaders govern through calculation disregards the fantasy aspect of their vision,” he writes on his last page. Perhaps so, though interest and the greed and lust for power that it engenders can blind ruling classes just as easily as fantasies. While Paul Gottfried has analyzed the irrational and fantasy aspects of managerial power admirably, he fails to dwell sufficiently on the obvious truth that no elite can come to power or remain in power unless its ideology and behavior allow for a considerable amount of accurate calculation of its power interests. The managerial class that has now become the dominant force in American and European societies is at least as calculating as any other in human history, and its power cannot be fully or accurately understood without grasping this truth.

David Herbert Lawrence, 1885 - 1930

“What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

“And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.” — D. H. Lawrence

“Herman Melville’s Moby Dick“
chapter 11 of Studies in Classic American Literature

MOBY DICK, or the White Whale.

A hunt. The last great hunt.

For what?

For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow-white.

Of course he is a symbol.

Of what ?

I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it.

He is warm-blooded, he is lovable. He is lonely Leviathan, not a Hobbes sort. Or is he?

But he is warm-blooded and lovable. The South Sea Islanders, and Polynesians, and Malays, who worship shark, or crocodile, or weave endless frigate-bird distortions, why did they never worship the whale? So big!

Because the whale is not wicked. He doesn’t bite. And their gods had to bite.

He’s not a dragon. He is Leviathan. He never coils like the Chinese dragon of the sun. He’s not a serpent of the waters. He is warm-blooded, a mammal. And hunted, hunted down.

It is a great book.

At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won’t do.

And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it’s not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. He preaches and holds forth because he’s not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

The artist was so much greater than the man. The man is rather a tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical-transcendentalist sort: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humour. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that’s what I want just now.

For my part, life is so many things I don’t care what it is. It’s not my affair to sum it up. Just now it’s a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.

One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!

But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.

In his ‘human’ self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out. He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do. In this he is like Dana. It is the material elements he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist long before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all. So often, it is almost over the border: psychiatry. Almost spurious. Yet so great.

It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things. There you are: you see Melville hugged in bed by a huge tattooed South Sea Islander, and solemnly offering burnt offering to this savage’s little idol, and his ideal frock-coat just hides his shirt-tails and prevents us from seeing his bare posterior as he salaams, while his ethical silk hat sits correctly over his brow the while. That is so typically American: doing the most impossible things without taking off their spiritual get-up. Their ideals are like armour which has rusted in, and will never more come off. And meanwhile in Melville his bodily knowledge moves naked, a living quick among the stark elements. For with sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvellous wireless-station, he registers the effects of the outer world. And he records also, almost beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact.

The first days in New Bedford introduce the only human  being who really enters into the book, namely, Ishmael, the ‘I’ of the book. And then the moment’s heart’s-brother, Queequeg, the tattooed, powerful South Sea harpooner, whom Melville loves as Dana loves ‘Hope’. The advent of Ishmael’s bedmate is amusing and unforgettable. But later the two swear ‘marriage’, in the language of the savages. For Queequeg has opened again the flood-gates of love and human connection in Ishmael.

As I sat there in that now lonely room, the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain: I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.

So they smoked together, and are clasped in each other’s  arms. The friendship is finally sealed when Ishmael offers sacrifice to Queequeg’s little idol, Gogo.

I was a good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with the idolater in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship?–to do the will of God–that is worship. And what is the will of God?–to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me–that is the will of God.

–Which sounds like Benjamin Franklin, and is hopelessly bad theology. But it is real American logic.

Now Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must unite with him; ergo I must turn idolater. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salaamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat. How it is I know not, but there is no place like bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, lay I and Queequeg–a cosy, loving pair–

You would think this relation with Queequeg meant something to Ishmael. But no. Queequeg is forgotten like yesterday’s newspaper. Human things are only momentary excitements or amusements to the American Ishmael. Ishmael, the hunted. But much more Ishmael the hunter. What’s a Queequeg? What’s a wife? The white whale must be hunted down. Queequeg must be just ‘KNOWN’, then dropped into oblivion.

And what in the name of fortune is the white whale?

Elsewhere Ishmael says he loved Queequeg’s eyes: ‘large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold’. No doubt like Poe, he wanted to get the ‘clue’ to them. That was all.

The two men go over from New Bedford to Nantucket, and there sign on to the Quaker whaling ship, the Pequod. It is all strangely fantastic, phantasmagoric. The voyage of the soul. Yet curiously a real whaling voyage, too. We pass on into the midst of the sea with this strange ship and its incredible crew. The Argonauts were mild lambs in comparison. And Ulysses went defeating the Circes and overcoming the wicked hussies of the isles. But the Pequod’s crew is a collection of maniacs fanatically hunting down a lonely, harmless white whale.

As a soul history, it makes one angry. As a sea yarn, it is marvellous: there is always something a bit over the mark, in sea yarns. Should be. Then again the masking up of actual seaman’s experience with sonorous mysticism sometimes gets on one’s nerves. And again, as a revelation of destiny the book is too deep even for sorrow. Profound beyond feeling.

You are some time before you are allowed to see the captain, Ahab: the mysterious Quaker. Oh, it is a God-fearing Quaker ship.

Ahab, the captain. The captain of the soul.

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul!Ahab!

‘Oh, captain, my captain, our fearful trip is done.’

The gaunt Ahab, Quaker, mysterious person, only shows himself after some days at sea. There’s a secret about him! What?

Oh, he’s a portentous person. He stumps about on an ivory stump, made from sea-ivory. Moby Dick, the great white whale, tore off Ahab’s leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him.

Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a bit more besides.

But Ahab doesn’t think so. Ahab is now a monomaniac. Moby Dick is his monomania. Moby Dick must DIE, or Ahab can’t live any longer. Ahab is atheist by this.

All right.

This Pequod, ship of the American soul, has three mates.

1. Starbuck: Quaker, Nantucketer, a good responsible man of reason, forethought, intrepidity, what is called a dependable man. At the bottom, afraid.

2. Stubb: ‘Fearless as fire, and as mechanical.’ Insists on being reckless and jolly on every occasion. Must be afraid too, really.

3. Flask: Stubborn, obstinate, without imagination. To him ‘the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse or water-rat–’

There you have them: a maniac captain and his three mates, three splendid seamen, admirable whalemen, first-class men at their job.

America!

It is rather like Mr Wilson and his admirable, ‘efficient’ crew, at the Peace Conference. Except that none of the Pequodders took their wives along.

A maniac captain of the soul, and three eminently practical mates.

America!

Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals: Ishmael, Quakers.

America!

Three giant harpooners to spear the great white whale.

1. Queequeg, the South Sea Islander, all tattooed, big and powerful.

2. Tashtego, the Red Indian of the sea-coast, where the Indian meets the sea.

3. Daggoo, the huge black negro.

There you have them, three savage races, under the American flag, the maniac captain, with their great keen harpoons, ready to spear the white whale.

And only after many days at sea does Ahab’s own boat-crew appear on deck. Strange, silent, secret, black-garbed Malays, fire worshipping Parsees. These are to man Ahab’s boat, when it leaps in pursuit of that whale.

What do you think of the ship Pequod, the ship of the soul of an American?

Many races, many peoples, many nations, under the Stars and Stripes. Beaten with many stripes.

Seeing stars sometimes.

And in a mad ship, under a mad captain, in a mad, fanatic’s hunt.

For what?

For Moby Dick, the great white whale.

But splendidly handled. Three splendid mates. The whole thing practical, eminently practical in its working. American industry!

And all this practicality in the service of a mad, mad chase.

Melville manages to keep it a real whaling ship, on a real cruise, in spite of all fanatics. A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book, with an awful meaning, and bad jolts.

It is interesting to compare Melville with Dana, about the albatross–Melville a bit sententious.

I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a pro-boged gale in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my fore-noon watch below I ascended to the overcrowded deck, and there lashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal feathered thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked Roman bill sublime. At intervals it arched forth its vast, archangel wings–wondrous throbbings and flutterings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some King’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible strange eyes methought I peeped to secrets not below the heavens–the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. I assert then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell–

Melville’s albatross is a prisoner, caught by a bait on a hook.

Well, I have seen an albatross, too: following us in waters hard upon the Antarctic, too, south of Australia. And in the  Southern winter. And the ship, a P. and O. boat, nearly empty. And the lascar crew shivering.

The bird with its long, long wings following, then leaving us. No one knows till they have tried, how lost, how lonely those Southern waters are. And glimpses of the Australian coast.

It makes one feel that our day is only a day. That in the dark of the night ahead other days stir fecund, when we have lapsed from existence.

Who knows how utterly we shall lapse.

But Melville keeps up his disquisition about ‘whiteness’. I The great abstract fascinated him. The abstract where we end, and cease to be. White or black. Our white, abstract end!

Then again it is lovely to be at sea on the Pequod, with never a grain of earth to us.

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued, and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self –

In the midst of this preluding silence came the first cry: ‘There she blows! there! there! there! She blows!’ And then comes the first chase, a marvellous piece of true sea-writing, the sea, and sheer sea-beings on the chase, sea-creatures chased. There is scarcely a taint of earth–pure sea-motion.

‘Give way, men,’ whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; ‘there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There’s white water again!–Close to!–Spring!’ Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: ‘Stand up!’ and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.–Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet, their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boar, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound, as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curbing and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.

‘That’s his hump. There! There, give it to him!’ whispered Starbuck.–A short rushing sound leapt out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded motion came a push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale,  merely grazed by the iron, escaped–

Melville is a master of violent, chaotic physical motion; he can keep up a whole wild chase without a flaw. He is as perfect at creating stillness. The ship is cruising on the Carrol Ground, south of St Helena.–

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow –

Then there is the description of brit.

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless herds of ripe and golden wheat. On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip. As moving mowers who, side by side, slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of the marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue on the yellow sea. But it was only the sound they made as they  parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else–

This beautiful passage brings us to the apparition of the squid.

Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held her way northeastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall, tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide intervals, in the silvery night, that lonely alluring jet would be seen.

But one transparent-blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sunglade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining secrecy; when all the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast head.

In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet, is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo–

The boats were lowered and pulled to the scene.

In the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. And with a low sucking it slowly disappeared again.

The following chapters, with their account of whale hunts, the killing, the stripping, the cutting up, are magnificent records of actual happening. Then comes the queer tale of the meeting of the Jeroboam, a whaler met at sea, all of whose men were under the domination of a religious maniac, one of the ship’s hands. There are detailed descriptions of the actual taking of the sperm oil from a whale’s head. Dilating on the smallness of the brain of a sperm whale, Melville significantly remarks–’for I believe that much of man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are–’ And of the whale, he adds:

‘For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.’

In among the rush of terrible awful hunts, come touches of pure beauty.

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay not so much as a ripple or a thought, came up from its depths, what landsman would have thought that beneath all that silence and placidity the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!

Perhaps the most stupendous chapter is the one called The Grand Armada, at the beginning of Volume III. The Pequod was drawing through the Sunda Straits towards Java when she came upon a vast host of sperm whales.

Broad on both bows, at a distance of two or three miles, and forming a great semicircle embracing one-half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air.

Chasing this great herd, past the Straits of Sunda, themselves chased by Javan pirates, the whalers race on. Then the boats are lowered. At last that curious state of inert irresolution came over the whales, when they were, as the seamen say, gallied. Instead of forging ahead in huge martial array they  swam violently hither and thither, a surging sea of whales, no longer moving on. Starbuck’s boat, made fast to a whale, is towed in amongst this howling Leviathan chaos. In mad career it cockles through the boiling surge of monsters, till it is brought into a clear lagoon in the very centre of the vast, mad, terrified herd. There a sleek, pure calm reigns. There the females swam in peace, and the young whales came snuffing tamely at the boat, like dogs. And there the astonished seamen watched the love-making of these amazing monsters, mammals, now in rut far down in the sea–

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes, as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in these watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while sucking will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at a time; and while yet drawing moral nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence, even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of gulf-weed in their newborn sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.–Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternation and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight–

There is something really overwhelming in these whalehunts, almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life, more terrific than human activity. The same with the chapter on ambergris: it is so curious, so real, yet so unearthly. And again in the chapter called The Cassock--surely the oldest piece of phallicism in all the world’s literature.

After this comes the amazing account of the Try-works, when the ship is turned into the sooty, oily factory in mid- ocean, and the oil is extracted from the blubber. In the night of the red furnace burning on deck, at sea, Melville has his startling experience of reversion. He is at the helm, but has turned to watch the fire: when suddenly he feels the ship rushing backward from him, in mystic reversion–

Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern. A stark bewildering feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! What is the matter with me, I thought!

This dream-experience is a real soul-experience. He ends with an injunction to all men, not to gaze on the red fire when its redness makes all things look ghastly. It seems to him that his gazing on fire has evoked this horror of reversion, undoing.

Perhaps it had. He was water-born.

After some unhealthy work on the ship, Queequeg caught a fever and was like to die.

How he wasted and wasted in those few, long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they took on a strangeness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the circles of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage–

But Queequeg did not die–and the Pequod emerges from the Eastern Straits, into the full Pacific. ‘To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world–’

In this Pacific the fights go on:

It was far down the afternoon, and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done, and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then such a sweetness and such a plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manila isles, the Spanish land-breeze had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle, observable in all sperm whales dying–the turning of the head sunwards, and so expiring–that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed wondrousness unknown before. ‘He turns and turns him to it; how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage- rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire . . .’

So Ahab soliloquizes: and so the warm-blooded whale turns for the last time to the sun, which begot him in the waters.

But as we see in the next chapter, it is the Thunder-fire which Ahab really worships: that living sundering fire of which he bears the brand, from head to foot; it is storm, the electric storm of the Pequod, when the corposants burn in high, tapering flames of supernatural pallor upon the masthead, and when the compass is reversed. After this all is fatality. Life itself seems mystically reversed. In these hunters of Moby Dick there is nothing but madness and possession. The captain, Ahab, moves hand in hand with the poor imbecile negro boy, Pip, who has been so cruelly demented, left swimming alone in the vast sea. It is the imbecile child of the sun hand in hand with the northern monomaniac, captain and master.

The voyage surges on. They meet one ship, then another. It is all ordinary day-routine, and yet all is a tension of pure madness and horror, the approaching horror of the last fight.

Hither and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small unspecked birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish and sharks, and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea–

On this day Ahab confesses his weariness, the weariness of his burden. ‘But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck ? I feel deadly faint, and bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise–’ It is the Gethsemane of Ahab, before the last fight: the Gethsenane of the human soul seeking the last self-conquest, the last attainment of extended consciousness–infinite consciousness.

At last they sight the whale. Ahab sees him from his hoisted perch at the masthead– ‘From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high, sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air.’

The boats are lowered, to draw near the white whale.

At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspectful prey that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head, beyond. Before it, far out on the soft, Turkish rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either side bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flagstaff rising from the pointed hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the clouds of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro shimmering like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail-feathers streaming like pennons.

A gentle joyousness–a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale

The fight with the whale is too wonderful and too awful,  to be quoted apart from the book. It lasted three days. The fearful sight, on the third day, of the torn body of the Parsee harpooner, lost on the previous day, now seen lashed on to the flanks of the white whale by the tangle of harpoon lines, has a mystic dream-horror. The awful and infuriated whale turns upon the ship, symbol of this civilized world of ours. He smites her with a fearful shock. And a few mitnutes later, from the last of the fighting whale-boats comes the cry:

‘The ship! Great God, where is the ship?’ Soon they, through dim bewildering mediums, saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of the water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight–

The bird of heaven, the eagle, St John’s bird, the Red Indian bird, the American, goes down with the ship, nailed by Tashtego’s hammer, the hammer of the American Indian. The eagle of the spirit. Sunk!

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness.

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

The reversion. ‘Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.’

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood–self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?

She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.

Now what next?

Who knows? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.

The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and  Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business-like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.

Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est! But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?

Post-mortem effects, presumably.

Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.