It has been difficult to keep up with Henry Dampier recently, on feminist predictions, discount slaves, incoherent elites, brittanus americanus, globalization and war … and more, and more, and more (plus some genuinely useful advice). This blog is not among those immediately assuming the explanation lies in methamphetamine. Category theorizing. Yuray is digging up some authoritative support for the restoration of Latin. Meta-fragmentation. Hawk politics. No enemies to the left. Greetings! Unity (I don’t get it) — this seems to be related. The basic dissymmetry. Reliable nets.

Paleao-reaction goes mainstream.

Casual Marxism. Curricular Satanism. General Gruberism.

Malthusian mechanics (in pre-industrial England). Escaping the Malthusian trap. Evolution of culture, chain-letters, dark nets, and the (ancient) Egyptian state. Predation games. Killer apes. Genetic ontology. Shrinking brains. Social media hooks. Hmmmm.

Amerika on The Peripheral. Troll points. Auto-cannibalization watch (1, 2, 3). Sound convictions.

British decay in context. East Asia does it better, Japan notably excepted. Hold the fix. Peak delusions. McCloskey on Piketty.

Uses of racism. Race in your face. Villains of Ferguson. Last gasps. Amnesty and disillusionment.

Weekly golden oldies.

Among these rumblings, the most indefinite, tentative, and unresolved tend to the aesthetic. Without settled criteria of evaluation, there is little obvious basis for productive collision. Instead, there are idiosyncratic statements of appreciation, expressed as such, or adamant judgments of affirmation or negation, surging forth, draped in the heraldic finery of the absolute, before collapsing back into the hollowness of their unsustainable pretensions. As things stand, when somebody posts a picture of some architectural treasure, or classical painting, remarking (or more commonly merely insinuating) “You should all esteem this,” there is no truly appropriate response but laughter. If there were not a profound problem exactly in this regard, NRx would not exist. Criteria are broken, strewn, and dispossessed, authoritative tradition is smashed, infected, or reduced to self-parody, the Muses raped and butchered. That’s where we are in the land of the dying sun.

An associated, insistent murmur concerns communicative lucidity. This is not solely a question of aesthetics, but in its quavering groundlessness, it behaves as one. It arises most typically as the assertion — initially unsupported and subsequently undeveloped — that clearly, ‘unnecessary obscurity’ should be condemned.

The culpability of this blog as a vortex of euphoric obscurantism can scarcely be doubted, so addressing the challenge approaches a duty. Setting aside, for the moment, the social and cryptographic aspects of the topic, as well as the specific critique of human cognition for its intolerance of real obscurity (comparatively articulate from my perspective, if obscure from others), this post will directly pursue the question of language.

This question is first of all about trust. Even in this, initial regard, it is already difficult. As a complex tool, there are things it can do, and things it cannot do. Speaking approximately, and uncertainly, if it is directed towards those undertakings which have, over eons, exercised selective pressure upon it — meeting the social necessities of paleolithic human groups — then an assumption of its inherent trustworthiness is at least plausible. To extend such an assumption further is sheer recklessness. Nothing in linguistics supports the wild hypothesis that this code, developed piecemeal for primate social coordination, is necessarily adequate to modern cognitive challenges. Grammar is not sound epistemology. Mathematicians have abandoned ‘natural language’ entirely. To presume that language allows us to think is a leap of faith. Radical distrust is the more rigorous default.

To promote ‘clarity’ as an obvious ideal, needing no further justification, is a demand that language — as such — can be trusted, that it is competent for all reasonable communicative tasks, and ‘reason’ can be defined in a way that makes this assertion tautological (such a definition is eminently traditional). “I give you my word” language is not predisposed to deception — no thoughtful investigator has ever found themselves in concurrence with such a claim. Vocabularies are retardation, and grammar, when it is more than a game, is a lie. Language is good only for language games, and among these trust games are the most irredeemably stupid.

There is no general obligation to write in order to attack language, but that is what Xenosystems does, and will continue to do. Language in not a neutral conveyor of infinite communicative possibility, but an intelligence box. It is to be counted among the traps to be escaped. It is an Exit target — and exit is difficult.

Once it slips the collar, ‘must’ reverts to its status as the most preposterous word in the English language, an instrument of sheer obfuscation. Watch it go:

The United States must review its policies across the Middle East. … It must take a stand against Riyadh’s promotion of exclusionary Wahhabism. […] … Likewise, pressure must be placed on Egypt to abandon its witch hunt of the Muslim Brotherhood. In undertaking an effective counter terrorism strategy, the United States must partner with the Arab states to undertake political reforms that ultimately lead to underwriting a social contract in which every group of the population are represented and protected. […] … If the United States and Iraqi government want to defeat ISIS, they must now ensure the inclusion and protection of Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds and Yazidis, along with the majority Shi’ites [this one is minimally OK]. […] … Eventually, a process of reconciliation must be initiated between Shi’ites and Sunnis. This centuries-old dispute is played out today in a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which has produced a monster that threatens the national security of not only Middle Eastern nations, but also the United States. It must come to an end. […] … The Obama Administration must pursue a policy of severe sanctions against any and all countries that finance jihadist — even if they are our own allies. … What will ultimately turn the tide in the Middle East are groups that actively advocate for a democratic culture and its values around the Arab world. A campaign to promote these ideas on every level must begin, as part of the counterterrorism initiative launched by Kerry. [Emphases added.]

Must they, really? Will they? Can they?

It’s irritating to see moral fanaticism — betrayed by its distinctive combination of groundless certainty and communicative fervor — masquerading as realistic analysis. The disguise is only necessary because the prescription so exorbitantly exceeds the diagnosis, tripping eagerly into glassy-eyed deontological intellectual abandonment.

“The Middle East must stop being the Middle East, and America must help to make this happen.” It can’t, and it won’t, on both counts. The musty smell is simply annoying.

Evola represents a significant thread of early 20th century reactionary thinking, rooted in the discoveries of historical linguistics, and the intellectual formation of an ‘Indo-European’ people corresponding to its deep cultural cladistics. The core phenomenon that supports the mystical-reactionary interpretation of history is the unambiguous process of crudification that afflicts the Indo-European languages, evident through the line of grammatical degeneration from Sanskrit, through Attic Greek, to Latin, and then into the vulgar — even structurally collapsed — tongues of the modern European vernacular. Reactionary, hierarchical, and racially-inflected ideas comparable to Evola’s are easily identified in the writings of Martin Heidegger, among many others. Historical linguistics appears to apprehend a large-scale ethnic totality undergoing prolonged cultural deterioration at the fundamental (grammatical) level. Once this is noted, progressivism appears as pure irony — and as a comic confirmation of decline.

Outside in, comparatively comfortable with chewed-up techno-commercial jargons and stripped-down communication protocols, is only minimally attentive to this particular ‘problem of tradition’ (which it registers from a position of detachment). Insofar as ‘tradition’ is invoked, however, it seems to be a highly significant reference — and its tendency to relapse the problem back to a Sanskritic (Vedic) origin is surely worthy of disciplined commentary. Kali Yuga makes a lot of sense.