Third Worlds

An Essay in Sustained Reorientation

But you are a great sinner, that's true, he added almost solemnly.
And your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky—

Note: The purpose of posting this is to get my writing juices flowing again. I also want to set-up some of the content changes here as my interests are leading me more into rediscovering the ancient and catholic faith¹, as well as traditional understandings of culture and society, as opposed to vacuous comments on news headline-type content.

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As I’ve mentioned to several friends (both online and off) over the last week, I am stepping back a bit from the world of daily content creation (on Twitter and Telegram, etc) to see some other larger projects through to fruition. This includes many essays that remain incomplete.

The present piece will combine a sense of reflective personal orientation toward the world, together with an introduction to certain themes relating to our cultural betrayal. It is increasingly being recognized that the Western world as we have been raised to understand it is presently under intense strain, to the point, perhaps, of dissolution. Understanding the dynamics of this transformation, when the very social bedrock that frames our own understanding of ourselves is called into question, necessarily involves aspects of inward reflection.

Who are we, as individuals, when we can no longer relate ourselves to the world in which we live? Increasingly, we find ourselves as wanderers in a time when the very concept of home, of place, is under siege. To interpret the world causes moments of self-interpretation.

The more time I spend seeking to understand our age, the more time I spend in the dark forests of history. They are dark indeed, for as Jonathan Clark has explained, what especially characterizes our time is a profound refusal to integrate the development of the past to understand the present. There is a general spirit, everywhere we look—from academia to “church” to the arts—to treat the past as something that modern man has conquered and therefore rendered irrelevant, inconsequential to our own world. But to shut off our world from its own history is to shut ourselves, as individuals, from the deeper elements that sustain our subconsciouses. It is no coincidence that the world of artificial intelligence and hysterical technological innovation would also seek the destruction of our heroes— it’s one and the same Weltgeist underlying both.

To be post-historical is to be post-human.

It is for this reason, I think, that I’ve been surprisingly unable to write very much this year; whereas in prior years I could pull off 3-4 essays a week. While I actually have more time to expend writing and reading than at any other time since college, I’ve surprised myself in how much more I need to read in order to productively write. I am hopeful, though, that I have reached the point of ability to reflect on my readings.

The present “West” (not to be confused with Western Civilization, which was the pre-twentieth century world of Christendom, and which was conquered and replaced by the American Civilization) suffers from two types of Third Worldism. One of these types has directly to do with what most people think of when they hear “Third World.” This is a problem that first stemmed from indiscriminate immigration, and now stems from a type of discriminate immigration which favors those ethno-cultural groups whose presence necessarily entails the separation of our society from our traditions and customs.

The immigration problem exposes the deep lie about American life that few are willing to talk about: groups of individuals are not blank slates that can be swapped at random with any other groups of individuals around the world and not change the culture that hosts said groups. That is to say, man is both the creator and the product of culture and the social order. The individual mind is a product of socio-cultural characteristics that precede his own life. Everywhere we look today we notice, little by little and in subtle steps, the realities of the great replacement (I link to Wikipedia, because by now we all know how to read around the goofy scare phrases like “conspiracy theory” and “white nationalist”); the slow yet sure nature of the disappearance of European majorities throughout major European and American economic-political centers of influence.

This type of Third Worldism, which facilitates the increasing meaninglessness of actually having, in real graspable ways, a distinct and historically-rooted civilization, is itself a spark that causes self-reflection: who are we, and who am I, and how do I relate to the we? In a time where the non-European Third World bands together by fierce tribal instincts to overcome the ways of life of Europeans and European-derived Americans, Whites are told not only that it is immoral to defensively think tribally, but also that it is impossible on the basis that it is meaningless: there is no “White” culture, we are told. I am more interested in the rhetorical politics than I am in addressing the claim head-on: what purpose does uplifting the interests of “blacks” or “latinos” and denying the legitimacy of “Whites” as a category serve? We all know the answer.

Denying to Heritage Americans and native Europeans our own past is incidentally driving a sort of historical reawakening: we European-derived Americans actually do have a historical context, and we are becoming more aware of it. The more we discover who we are, or were, the more we agitate against the culture revolution that is built upon the repudiation and tearing down of our history.

What they call extremism on the right is merely the instinct to rediscover, reassert, and defend our own past; for without the past, we cease to exist in the present. Which of course is the objective of the cultural revolutionaries.

The second type of Third Worldism is more metaphysical and stems from the insights of the brilliant—though painstaking to read— sociologist Philip Rieff. Rieff observed three different organizing principles that have come about over the course of world history. The first sustained the great civilizations of antiquity (though the organizing principle is not necessarily time-bound) and were characterized by polytheism, myths, and the non-personal fates. The second sustained the medieval world (and Judaism) and are characterized by a personal God that stood above history and communicated with man via revelation. Third Worlds are characterized by the abandonment of transcendence, the core aspect of the first two World types. This is the World of materialism, economics, man as animal and man as ultimate shaper of his own destiny. Man does not participate in something higher than himself, but rather participates merely horizontally: with man and the world.

The chasm between the Second and Third Worlds is far more profound and far-reaching than the chasm between the First and Second Worlds. This is why Christianity was able to build on and organically transform the great works of Greek/Roman philosophy, wisdom, and literature: they both presupposed a type of heavenly transcendence which was to be reflected on earth.

CS Lewis too perceived such a grand chasm between the Second and Third Worlds that was so intense and world-transforming that all other suggested historical epochal divides cannot compare. In his wonderful Cambridge address De Descriptione Temporum, Lewis challenged alternative views to epochal divides which point to events like the fall of Rome, Christianization of Europe, the Renaissance, or Reformation. In Lewis’ mind all of these have elements of civilizational continuity; they all exist on a continuum, one moment leading to another in a steady rhythm that marks the ebbs and flows of historical dialectic. All these shifts pale in comparison to the specifically decivilizing impact of European dechristianization.

Sheldon Vanauken notes:

“Dechristianization,” says John Paul II, “weighs heavily upon entire peoples and communities once rich in faith and Christian life…” It is still incomplete, of course, just as there were lingering pockets of Paganism in the disintegrating Roman world. But one often hears today of “post-Christian.” […] Paganism like Christianity was a devout belief in divinity—something beyond and above man.

Thus, the shift from Paganism to God Incarnate, great as it was, was a lesser shift than this: from God Incarnate to Man himself.

This great shift, for Lewis, takes place in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and manifests itself in revolutions, quests for equality, moral individualism, denial of ancient political authority, and a frightening obsession with innovation, technique, and materialism. Vanauken writes that

Somewhere between us and Jane Austen’s Persuasion in 1816 runs the chasm between Old Western Man and New Western Man—the Great Divide. Old Western Man feared and worshiped his gods, accepted axiomatically what Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls the Tao or Natural Law, and, if Christian, believed in the Revelation of God Incarnate. Almost a definition of Old Western Man. […] This much, though, is I think certain: Seneca and Dr. Johnson, though separated by 18 centuries, have more in common that Dr. Johnson and Freud, less than a century later.

On this side of the Great Chasm, characterized by Rieff as a Third World, man is the measure of all things. It is his desires and glorification that structure political movements, are employed to manufacture mass consent, and are prioritized above all else in the values of our trans-national social order. It is obvious that for modern man, submission to the mysterious ordering of God is ridiculous; but it must also be said that modern man refuses to be chastised and regulated by history, historical customs, and supra-generational cultural boundaries. Man lives in constant revolt against Nature and History in a way unique to our time.

We therefore explicitly do not live in a culture but in an anti-culture.

Modernism confuses the consumptive artifacts of our economic system with an actual culture. A culture is an organized way of life based on commonality of traditions and conditioned by environment (Christopher Dawson). A culture begins with the cult, the joining together in worship of the sacred, and permeates through the empirical expression of that worship over generations.

It involves identity with ancestors and a shared memory that unites a community with itself, giving it forward-looking purpose based on an historically-derived lens. Ethnic solidarity therefore is part of a culture's meaning; without commonality of past, without the ingrained sentiment of cultural inheritance that joins the living with the dead, there is no culture.

A culture exists prior to the arts, the products, the styles, the behavioral norms of a society. All these things are products of the culture, or the social soil. Paul Krause once noted that "culture is something to tend and till, the real root of the culture war is the issue of consciousness and memory rooted in history, identity, and symbol."

American society (as it came into being following the 1960s) is one of the pre-eminent examples of an anti-culture. What is labelled American culture is actually a sustained assault on the very idea of culture. Propositional nationhood--the idea of a socio-political community built only on ideas, not shared memory or historical experience-- is an anti-cultural project. It is no wonder that degradation, hideousness, and aesthetic chaos are key features of the dying society around us.

In this way, the Third Worldification of the first meaning flows from the Third Worldism of the second meaning. When there is nothing transcending the individual for which to fight and to which to conform our behavior, there is also no reason to consider nations as realities transcending any of the constituent individuals. Here’s where I must be controversial. The rejection of our European past is itself the rejection of the dynamics of our faith, as that faith expressed itself in the course of history. The collapse of Europe is concomitant with the dechristianization of our world; they flow from the same overall spirit. We Westerners are losing ourselves because we have lost our metaphysical vision of the triune God as the source of all things.

Thus the Dostoevsky quote at the beginning. In pursuit of man’s greatness; man as the measure of all things; man not as steward of a created world, but as god, as ultimate reality, we find Western Man swimming in a sea of loss. We sought to gain the world, and ended up losing it. We have laid siege to every aspect of our civilization and our humanity, we went all chips in on our great betrayal, yet it was all for naught. One increasingly gets the sense that we have bargained everything we had—”destroying and betraying ourselves"—and now stand as witnesses to the ultimate cost.

The challenge of course is to determine our answer to the question: what is to be done? Whatever the ultimate answer, it is without question that fighting to re-absorb our own historical awareness is vital. It is for this reason that I turn the content of my Substack to questions of history, catholicity, meta-culture.

For we are nothing without our roots. It is these that we must atone for betraying.

1. (though reformed and suspicious of certain Puritan developments— will elaborate later)