1.1 Introducing Thomas Carlyle

The Thomas Carlyle Club for Young Reactionaries (Students Against a Democratic Society) is pleased to present the inaugural issue of our free newsletter, Radish.

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Contents

1. Who was Thomas Carlyle?
2. Carlyle on democracy: An excerpt from Shooting Niagara, his last great reactionary pamphlet. Plus:
   1. A rebuttal (of sorts) by Walt Whitman
   2. A last word from James Anthony Froude, Carlyle’s biographer
3. Letter to Walt Whitman: Whitman and Carlyle quarreled over popular government. Whose predictions came true? At Whitman’s request, we checked up on five U.S. states to see how well democracy and republicanism are working out for America these days:
   1. Kansas
   2. Missouri
   3. “To gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum”
   4. Illinois
   5. Tennessee
   6. “Training people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves”
   7. Louisiana
4. ‘The Present Time’: An excerpt from the first of Carlyle’s brilliant Latter-Day Pamphlets. What is democracy? How does it ‘govern,’ exactly? And shouldn’t we have answered all these questions properly 150 years ago?
5. Liberty, Equality — and Swarmery: An extended excerpt from a pamphlet generally considered ‘extreme’ — in 1867.
6. Recommended reading: Learn more about the topics covered in this issue with our extensive reading list.
7. Happy New Year from Radish!

Who was Thomas Carlyle?

Since I refuse to tell you anything about Thomas Carlyle, besides his name and occupation (writer/historian), this will be a very short introduction. In fact, you may stop reading it now, as long as you promise not to read anyone else’s introduction to Carlyle either.

Thomas Carlyle

Do yourself a great favor: instead of reading about Carlyle, read the man himself. Carlyle’s work is readily available, free of charge, at the Open Library and Google Books.

If you need a place to start, try this reading list:

1. Chartism (1840),
2. Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850),
3. Shooting Niagara (1867), and finally
4. the Occasional Discourse (1849).

For those who insist on a proper introduction, I provide this excerpt from an 1881 obituary:

The way to test how much he [Carlyle] has left his country were to consider, or try to consider, for a moment, the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery.

That was written by American poet Walt Whitman, Carlyle’s staunch political opponent. Whitman also wrote:

under no circumstances, and no matter how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpass’d conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect.

Whitman, you see, was a progressive; Carlyle, a reactionary. As the great pseudonymous Carlylean reactionary Mencius Moldbug explains in ‘Why Carlyle Matters’ (Unqualified Reservations, 2009):

A reactionary is not a Republican, a Democrat, or even a libertarian. It is not even a communist, a fascist, or a monarchist. It is something much older, stranger, and more powerful. But if you can describe it as anything, you can describe it as the pure opposite of progressivism. True reaction is long since extinct in the wild, but it lives in Carlyle…

As for those “lurid” predictions, how completely have time and events disproved them? We resolve the Carlyle-Whitman quarrel in our letter to Walt Whitman.

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Carlyle on democracy

From Carlyle’s last great pamphlet, Shooting Niagara:

All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of the Devil for a thousand years,” — laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the preliminary.

You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite direction:

a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for the most part, but now fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you, — with loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another strap is gone!”

— this, I think, has mainly been the sublime legislative industry of Parliament since it became “Reform Parliament;” victoriously successful, and thought sublime and beneficent by some.

So that now hardly any limb of the Devil has a thrum, or tatter of rope or leather left upon it: — there needs almost superhuman heroism in you to “whip” a garotter; no Fenian taken with the reddest hand is to be meddled with, under penalties; hardly a murderer, never so detestable and hideous, but you find him “insane,” and board him at the public expense, a very peculiar British Prytaneum of these days!

And in fact, the Devil (he, verily, if you will consider the sense of words) is likewise become an Emancipated Gentleman; lithe of limb, as in Adam and Eve’s time, and scarcely a toe or finger of him tied any more.

And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium, such as never was before, — hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.

Suffice it to say, Carlyle takes a dim view of democracy! You can read this passage in context below. For now, we turn to Mr. Whitman’s rebuttal.

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Whitman responds

From Whitman’s Carlyle from American Points of View:

Carlyle’s grim fate was cast to live and dwell in, and largely embody, the parturition agony and qualms of the old order, amid crowded accumulations of ghastly morbidity, giving birth to the new.

But conceive of him (or his parents before him) coming to America, recuperated by the cheering realities and activity of our people and our country — growing up and delving face-to-face resolutely among us here, especially at the West — inhaling and exhaling our limitless air and eligibilities — devoting his mind to the theories and developments of this Republic amid its practical facts as exemplified in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana.

I say facts, and face-to-face confrontings — so different from books, and all those quiddities and mere reports in the libraries, upon which the man… almost wholly fed, and which even his sturdy and vital mind but reflected at best. …

All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were distasteful to him from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and contemptible.

For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as his, the bearings he persistently ignored were marvellous.

For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so much of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the only effectual method for surely, however slowly, training people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the ultimate aim of political and all other development) — to gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs and their doings to the telescopes and microscopes of committees and parties… seem never to have enter’d Carlyle’s thought.

It was splendid how he refus’d any compromise to the last.

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A last word from Froude

From the preface to James Anthony Froude’s biography Thomas Carlyle (Whitman considered Froude to be Carlyle’s “fullest best biographer”):

He [Carlyle] was a teacher and a prophet in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled.

Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen.

He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution.

If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teachings are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works.

If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers, and he will shine on, another fixed star in the intellectual sky.

Time only can show how this will be.

Was Carlyle right after all? Have the facts authenticated his teachings? To find out, we took the Walt Whitman Republicanism & Democracy Tour: America’s Cheering Realities, from Wichita to Jena!

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Letter to Walt Whitman

Dear Mr. Whitman,

I hope this letter, which I have sent back in time from the year 2013 at great expense in postage stamps, finds you well, and also does not somehow kill my great-grandparents.

Recently, I read with interest your Carlyle from American Points of View (see above), in which you suggest that if Mr. Carlyle had only witnessed first-hand the “practical facts” of America “as exemplified in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana,” he surely would have learned to love “all that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy” as much as you or I or any other decent human being.

And if the practical facts of Kansas, Missouri, etc., in the late 19th century would have shaken the skepticism, with regard to popular government, of such “an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty” as Carlyle’s, surely the “cheering realities” of those same states today will shatter it completely!

Luckily for all three of us, the U.S. Postal Service recently introduced same-day past-century delivery. So I have taken the liberty of compiling for you a few anecdotes of life in those five American states in 2012, which I present below, along with my commentary.

I’m sure these cheering realities will only reinforce your (already sturdy) faith in popular government.

Sincerely,

The Carlyle Club

Kansas

In April, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) declared a four-year-old girl a “high security threat,” accused her of smuggling handguns, and threatened to shut down the Wichita airport after they observed the child hugging her grandmother.

Remarkably, although everyone not actually employed by the TSA agrees that everything it does is either useless or evil, no one has any idea how to stop it. Perhaps we should all vote on something.

In November, 50 young Mesoamerican colonizers gathered in Topeka to protest Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s “tough immigration laws,” which are so tough that 50 foreign invaders can safely protest the Secretary of State in front of his workplace.

“I just don’t see why he’s so troubled with” colonization, said Luis Sosa, a Mesoamerican colonizer attending a U.S. community college who had no problem giving reporters his full name.

In May, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback felt the need to sign a bill prohibiting state courts and agencies from using non-U.S. law. Many Americans opposed the measure, citing a variety of reasons:

• it will ridicule and demonize Muslims, somehow;
• it is unconstitutional and un-American, somehow;
• it is unnecessary, because U.S. law always prevails, and even when Islamic law prevails, that decision eventually gets overturned, and these 49 other documented cases do not count, so ignore them;
• Muslims should be protected by U.S. law (?); and
• people may feel that Kansas is unwelcoming.

In December, acting on “the promise, nay certainty of the democratic principle… to gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum,” the Wellington City Council ruled that a household may have no more than four adult cats and one litter of kittens.

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Missouri

In January, March (twice), April, May, August (twice), October, and December, we read in the papers that lawless bands of black teenagers are ambushing white and Asian people at random and beating them unconscious, sometimes fatally, as part of a “knockout game” popular in St. Louis.

We find these stories disturbing, because by not censoring the ancestral origin of the attackers and victims, they may perpetuate hurtful stereotypes.

In March, two black teens in Kansas City allegedly followed a 13-year-old white child home, doused him in gasoline and set him on fire, stating: “You get what you deserve, white boy.” White parents and students report a pattern of harassment by black students and teachers at the victim’s school.

This is normal, and no cause for alarm. However, the same story with the clines reversed would be a national crisis and proof of the inherent wickedness of all white people everywhere, so we are always on the lookout for such a despicable crime to agitate over.

In September, a crowd of 150 gathered in St. Louis to support Reginald Clemons, one of four black men who raped a pair of white sisters and forced them off a bridge to their deaths in 1991. Clemons has been awaiting execution for his crimes since 1993, which is considered normal. One of his accomplices is already free on parole, which is also considered normal.

The protesters are participating in social justice, a new and more democratic form of justice based largely on historical revisionism and xenophilia.

In August, two black serial robbers shot and killed former college volleyball star Megan Boken for no reason, as she sat in her car in front of an apartment building on a Saturday afternoon in St. Louis.

This, too, is normal — an accepted part of urban living. In fact, I’m not even sure why I brought it up.

Now what was it Whitman said?

“To gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum”

The “promise, nay certainty” of democracy, according to Walt Whitman.

(Above: Jess Bachman’s ‘Death & Taxes’ (2010), which depicts the U.S. President’s budget request.)

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Illinois

On one August weekend in Chicago, 21 people were shot, presumably by black people. The next weekend, 30 were shot, seven fatally. The following Thursday, 19 more were shot — 13 over one half-hour period.

Fortunately, Chicago has strict laws against carrying a gun, in accordance with certain unelected officials’ evolving interpretations of the Constitution.

In December, a black man boarded a Chicago train and, without saying a word, struck a 21-year-old (presumably white) woman in the face with a sock filled with his feces. The woman, a college student, described it as “the biggest degradation” she had ever experienced, and wished that “he had just hit” her.

I am not sure if this is considered normal yet. In any case, it was an isolated incident, obviously not indicative of any sort of breakdown of social order. That would be crazy. American society is clearly more orderly than ever — just look at all our laws regulating cat ownership!

In March, one year after Illinois became the 16th state to abolish the death penalty, a remorseless 24-year-old black man smiled as he was sentenced to 50 years in prison for raping a 90-year-old woman.

We consider capital punishment uncivilized.

In September, the Chicago Teachers Union ended an eight-day strike in exchange for an 18% raise and other benefits. Chicago has the shortest school year of all ten largest metro areas, and was already paying its teachers more than any other city, yet 39% of its teachers send their own kids to private schools.

Well, what’s another $74 million a year, when your state is already going bankrupt? (States do that now.)

In December, a Mesoamerican colonizer named Jorge Mariscal received a free kidney transplant in Chicago, an option not generally available to U.S. citizens. Two other Chicago hospitals hope to offer free liver transplants to a pair of colonizing brothers.

“Why can’t we be treated the same?” Jorge asked, without apparent irony, as he worried if fellow colonizers might not get their own free treatment.

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Tennessee

On a Friday night in March, four black immigrants, including a 15-year-old, abducted two young (presumably white) men in Antioch. They beat and stabbed the men for at least an hour, and forced them at knifepoint to perform sex acts on each other.

On another day in March, 29 Somalian immigrants were charged with sex slavery in Nashville for abducting girls as young as 12 from Minnesota and smuggling them to Tennessee, among other states, to have sex with up to 10 men a day.

We, as a diverse and tolerant society, refuse to let these unfortunate incidents call into question the merits — whatever they may be — of importing large numbers of Africans. Especially since we do not believe in the existence of human clines.

In May, four armed black men forced their way into a Memphis home, where they proceeded to bind three (presumably white) men and rape them for almost nine hours with a baseball bat and broom handle. They left without stealing anything.

Also in May, we learned that Tennessee has imprisoned a 33-year-old black man from Knoxville who cannot support his 24 children by 11 different mothers. Five years in prison will surely teach him to be a responsible adult and not rely on the state to provide for him and his offspring. Which it does.

In January, the white principal of Germantown High was forced to apologize for breaking down the school’s standardized test scores by cline in an assembly, thereby revealing that in Germantown, like everywhere else in the U.S. (and the world), black students tend to score lower than white students.

Today, the state continues to throw millions of dollars at the biological fact of clinal differences in intelligence, to no effect.

Now how did Whitman put it, again?

“Training people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves”

Democracy is “the only effectual method” for achieving this “ultimate aim”?

(Above: Heritage Foundation graph of total U.S. welfare spending, 1950–2010, adjusted for inflation.)

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Louisiana

Ah, Louisiana. Democracy at work.

In March, an elementary school teacher in Tallulah was fired after failing to notice two third-graders performing oral sex under their desks.

In February, five black men invaded a Gonzales home, where they proceeded to slit the throats of all three whites inside, husband, wife, and son, before stealing a rare coin collection worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. All five were promptly caught by police; one, in fact, was already in jail for an unrelated shooting he committed days later.

In August, Louisiana deployed the National Guard to prevent looting by the (predominantly black) citizens of New Orleans during Tropical Storm Isaac. Widespread looting nevertheless ensued, and in the following week, police made 42 arrests.

“Nearly everyone we found looting… had already been arrested multiple times,” said the police superintendent. This is, of course, considered normal.

In June, three black teens invaded a Mansfield home, where they proceeded to beat and rape a 76-year-old (presumably white) woman. Nearby, majority-black Shreveport has a predictably elevated crime rate. And Mansfield’s is not the only recent case of a black man invading a woman’s home to beat and rape her. It is not even the only recent case of a black teen invading an elderly woman’s home to beat and rape her. Nevertheless, when another home-invading rapist is loose in Shreveport, the media will not report his obvious physical features, such as epidermal pigmentation.

Last, but not least: in December, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) hired Theo Shaw as a “community advocate” in New Orleans. Shaw was one of six black teens convicted of ambushing a white student at Jena High School in 2007. Witnesses testified that the gang “stomped him badly,” “stepped on his face,” and “slammed his head on [a] concrete beam.”

The SPLC describes itself as “a nonprofit civil rights organization” (with an endowment of over $200 million) “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry.”

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‘The Present Time’

From the first of Carlyle’s brilliant Latter-Day Pamphlets:

What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible!

The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European populations, which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue permanent, may be.

Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that now the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come.

Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty — O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same.

Government as a house

The front wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:

— but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind?

My dear household, cease singing and psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your work-implements, if you have any; for I can say with confidence the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails, worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry, are not the best basis for a household! —

In the lanes of Irish cities, I have heard say, the wretched people are sometimes found living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends; but I did not hear that they sang very much in celebration of such lodging. No, they slid gently about, sat near the back wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for most part! —

Our rulers, the “Sham-Kings”

High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of speech and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar of Democracy in 1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it presents seems rather to be one of boundless misery and sorrow.

What can be more miserable than this universal hunting out of the high dignitaries, solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and reverend signiors of the world; this stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against those who pretended to be speaking for them and guiding them? These guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane; — and what were the people withal that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man’s real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices, — a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes, — a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long.

A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther: — fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present! A more scandalous phenomenon, wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in all high places: odious to look upon, as the carnage of a battle-field on the morrow morning; — a massacre not of the innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impostures into the street!

Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow, — like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us.

Imposture, be it known then, — known it must and shall be, — is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one.

What is the harm in a sham?

Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here, — for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange!

Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial, — what you in your iconoclast humor call shams, — all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them.

Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honorable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue salable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis?

“The greatest sham, I have always thought, is he that would destroy shams.”

The difficult task of casting out shams

Even so. To such depth have I, the poor knowing person of this epoch, got; almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood! For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man believe generally in his heart that lies were the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length other than hindrance and destruction for him. O Heavyside*, my solid friend, this is the sorrow of sorrows: what on earth can become of us till this accursed enchantment, the general summary and consecration of delusions, be cast forth from the heart and life of one and all!

*Heavyside: One of Carlyle’s imaginary friends. A solid Englishman.

Cast forth it will be; it must, or we are tending, at all moments, whitherward I do not like to name. Alas, and the casting of it out, to what heights and what depths will it lead us, in the sad universe mostly of lies and shams and hollow phantasms (grown very ghastly now), in which, as in a safe home, we have lived this century or two! To heights and depths of social and individual divorce from delusions, — of ‘reform’ in right sacred earnest, of indispensable amendment, and stern sorrowful abrogation and order to depart, — such as cannot well be spoken at present; as dare scarcely be thought at present; which nevertheless are very inevitable, and perhaps rather imminent several of them!

Truly we have a heavy task of work before us; and there is a pressing call that we should seriously begin upon it, before it tumble into an inextricable mass, in which there will be no working, but only suffering and hopelessly perishing! —

Will democracy manage it?

Or perhaps Democracy, which we announce as now come, will itself manage it? Democracy, once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by?

To the great mass of men, I am aware, the matter presents itself quite on this hopeful side. Democracy they consider to be a kind of ‘Government.’ The old model, formed long since, and brought to perfection in England now two hundred years ago, has proclaimed itself to all Nations as the new healing for every woe: “Set up a Parliament,” the Nations everywhere say, when the old King is detected to be a Sham-King, and hunted out or not; “set up a Parliament; let us have suffrages, universal suffrages; and all either at once or by due degrees will be right, and a real Millennium come!” Such is their way of construing the matter.

Such, alas, is by no means my way of construing the matter; if it were, I should have had the happiness of remaining silent, and been without call to speak here. It is because the contrary of all this is deeply manifest to me, and appears to be forgotten by multitudes of my contemporaries, that I have had to undertake addressing a word to them. The contrary of all this; — and the farther I look into the roots of all this, the more hateful, ruinous and dismal does the state of mind all this could have originated in appear to me.

Recipes for governing

To examine this recipe of a Parliament, how fit it is for governing Nations, nay how fit it may now be, in these new times, for governing England itself where we are used to it so long: this, too, is an alarming inquiry, to which all thinking men, and good citizens of their country, who have an ear for the small still voices and eternal intimations, across the temporary clamours and loud blaring proclamations, are now solemnly invited. Invited by the rigorous fact itself; which will one day, and that perhaps soon, demand practical decision or redecision of it from us, — with enormous penalty if we decide it wrong! I think we shall all have to consider this question, one day; better perhaps now than later, when the leisure may be less.

If a Parliament, with suffrages and universal or any conceivable kind of suffrages, is the method, then certainly let us set about discovering the kind of suffrages, and rest no moment till we have got them. But it is possible a Parliament may not be the method! Possible the inveterate notions of the English People may have settled it as the method, and the Everlasting Laws of Nature may have settled it as not the method! Not the whole method; nor the method at all, if taken as the whole? If a Parliament with never such suffrages is not the method settled by this latter authority, then it will urgently behoove us to become aware of that fact, and to quit such method; — we may depend upon it, however unanimous we be, every step taken in that direction will, by the Eternal Law of things, be a step from improvement, not towards it.

Government as a ship

Not towards it, I say, if so! Unanimity of voting, — that will do nothing for us if so. Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote.

If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with the most chaotic ‘admonition;’ you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all!

Unanimity on board ship; — yes indeed, the ship’s crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the time being, will be very comfortable to the ship’s crew, and to their Phantasm Captain if they have one: but if the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them much! — Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities, — since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws, — could be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of Nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous votings: this is considered to be all the law and all the prophets, at present.

The nature of the universe

If a man could shake out of his mind the universal noise of political doctors in this generation and in the last generation or two, and consider the matter face to face, with his own sincere intelligence looking at it, I venture to say he would find this a very extraordinary method of navigating, whether in the Straits of Magellan or the undiscovered Sea of Time. To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these.

These will lead him to victory; whoever it may be that sets him the way of these, — were it Russian Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of Canterbury, M’Croudy the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political Economy, — sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this Universe, and is his friend of friends. And again, whoever does the contrary is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies. This may be taken as fixed.

And now by what method ascertain the monition of the gods in regard to our affairs? How decipher, with best fidelity, the eternal regulation of the Universe; and read, from amid such confused embroilments of human clamor and folly, what the real Divine Message to us is? A divine message, or eternal regulation of the Universe, there verily is, in regard to every conceivable procedure and affair of man: faithfully following this, said procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole Universe to second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions, towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking this, disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every affair. How find it? All the world answers me, “Count heads; ask Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell.” Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well, — I perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed. Within the last half-century or so, either the Universe or else the heads of men must have altered very much.

Half a century ago, and down from Father Adam’s time till then, the Universe, wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was not the majority in my time!

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Liberty, Equality — and Swarmery

From Shooting Niagara, Carlyle’s last great reactionary pamphlet.

That England would have to take the Niagara leap of completed Democracy one day, was also a plain prophecy, though uncertain as to time.

The prophecy, truly, was plain enough this long while: — “For who can change the opinion of these people!” as the sage Antoninus notes. It is indeed strange how prepossessions and delusions seize upon whole communities of men; no basis in the notion they have formed, yet everybody adopting it, everybody finding the whole world agree with him in it, and accept it as an axiom of Euclid; and, in the universal repetition and reverberation, taking all contradiction of it as insult, and a sign of malicious insanity, hardly to be borne with patience. “For who can change the opinion of these people?” as our Divus Imperator says. No wisest of mortals.

This people cannot be convinced out of its “axiom of Euclid” by any reasoning whatsoever; on the contrary, all the world assenting, and continually repeating and reverberating, there soon comes that singular phenomenon, which the Germans call Schwärmerey…, which simply means ‘Swarmery,’ or the ‘Gathering of Men in Swarms,’ and what prodigies they are in the habit of doing and believing, when thrown into that miraculous condition.

Some big Queen Bee is in the centre of the swarm; but any commonplace stupidest bee…, any bee whatever, if he can happen, by noise or otherwise, to be chosen for the function, will straightway get fatted and inflated into bulk, which of itself means complete capacity; no difficulty about your Queen Bee: and the swarm once formed, finds itself impelled to action, as with one heart and one mind.

Singular, in the case of human swarms, with what perfection of unanimity and quasi-religious conviction the stupidest absurdities can be received as axioms of Euclid, nay as articles of faith, which you are not only to believe, unless malignantly insane, but are (if you have any honour or morality) to push into practice, and without delay see done, if your soul would live! …

Our accepted axioms about “Liberty,” “Constitutional Government,” “Reform,” and the like objects, are of truly wonderful texture: venerable by antiquity, many of them, and written in all manner of Canonical Books; or else, the newer part of them, celestially clear as perfect unanimity of all tongues, and Vox populi vox Dei, can make them: axioms confessed, or even inspirations and gospel verities, to the general mind of man.

To the mind of here and there a man, it begins to be suspected that perhaps they are only conditionally true; that taken unconditionally, or under changed conditions, they are not true, but false and even disastrously and fatally so.

Ask yourself about “Liberty,” for example; what you do really mean by it, what in any just and rational soul is that Divine quality of liberty? That a good man be “free,” as we call it, be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness, is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable; — to him and to those about him.

But that a bad man be “free,” — permitted to unfold himself in his particular way, is contrariwise, the fatallest curse you could inflict on him; curse and nothing else, to him and all his neighbours.

Him the very Heavens call upon you to persuade, to urge, induce, compel, into something of well-doing; if you absolutely cannot, if he will continue in ill-doing, — then for him (I can assure you, though you will be shocked to hear it), the one “blessing” left is the speediest gallows you can lead him to. Speediest, that at least his ill-doing may cease quàm primùm.

Oh, my friends, whither are you buzzing and swarming, in this extremely absurd manner? Expecting a Millennium from “extension of the suffrage,” laterally, vertically, or in whatever way?

All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of the Devil for a thousand years,” — laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the preliminary.

You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite direction:

a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for the most part, but now fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you, — with loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another strap is gone!”

— this, I think, has mainly been the sublime legislative industry of Parliament since it became “Reform Parliament;” victoriously successful, and thought sublime and beneficent by some.

So that now hardly any limb of the Devil has a thrum, or tatter of rope or leather left upon it: — there needs almost superhuman heroism in you to “whip” a garotter; no Fenian taken with the reddest hand is to be meddled with, under penalties; hardly a murderer, never so detestable and hideous, but you find him “insane,” and board him at the public expense, a very peculiar British Prytaneum of these days!

And in fact, the Devil (he, verily, if you will consider the sense of words) is likewise become an Emancipated Gentleman; lithe of limb, as in Adam and Eve’s time, and scarcely a toe or finger of him tied any more.

And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium, such as never was before, — hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.

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Recommended reading

Want to learn more about the topics covered in this issue of Radish? We highly recommend the following books and articles. (We do not, however, necessarily endorse all opinions expressed in them: some are not nearly extreme enough.)

Original Carlyle

• Chartism (1840)
• Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
• Shooting Niagara (1867)
• Occasional Discourse (1849)

Plus:

• Past and Present (1843)
• The French Revolution (1837)

Mencius Moldbug on Thomas Carlyle

• ‘Why Carlyle Matters’
• ‘Carlyle in the 20th Century’
• ‘From Mises to Carlyle’

Moldbug on democracy

• ‘The Case Against Democracy’
• ‘Popularchy’
• ‘Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction’
• ‘Against Political Freedom’
• ‘Divine-Right Monarchy for the Modern Secular Intellectual’

Extended Moldbuggery

• ‘How Dawkins Got Pwned’
• ‘Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives’
• ‘Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations’

Essential reading! Each of the articles above is the first in a series. You’ll find the rest at Moldbuggery.

Nick Land

• ‘The Dark Enlightenment (Part 1)’

Read the complete series at Urban Future (mirrored here).

Those Who Can See

• ‘Five-Year Plan in Four Years’
• ‘Bring Low the Enemy of Multiculturalism’
• ‘Heretics, Kulaks, and Witches’

An excellent source of clinal realism.

Anti-democracy agitation

• The Problem of Democracy (2011)
• Beyond Democracy (2012)

Libertarians against democracy

• ‘The Education of a Libertarian’
• ‘Beyond Folk Activism’
• ‘Majority Fools?’

Carlyle, by the way, might have called libertarianism “anarchy plus a street-constable.”

This would not have been a positive assessment.

2012 U.S. presidential election

• ‘Romney! He Sucks!’
• ‘Election Rhetoric’
• ‘A Joke Called Democracy’

Assorted, tangential & miscellaneous

• ‘The Hangman Resurgent’
• ‘America’s Ruling Class’
• ‘Rivers of Blood’
• ‘This Isn’t the Britain We Fought For’
• Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886)
• The Revolt Against Civilization (1922)

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Happy New Year from Radish!

Thank you for reading the very first issue of Radish! We at the Carlyle Club hope you enjoyed it. Please consider sharing it with friends and family (not to mention mortal enemies, complete strangers, literate chimps, stray dogs, etc.). I’m sure they’ll thank you — eventually.

We close with this, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘As Breathing and Consciousness Return’:

Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. …

The most important part of our freedom, inner freedom, is always subject to our will. If we surrender it to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human.

But let us note that if the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced on us, then it requires no physical, revolutionary, social, organizational measures, no meetings, strikes, trade unions — things fearful for us even to contemplate and from which we quite naturally allow circumstances to dissuade us.

No! It requires from each individual a moral step within his power — no more than that. And no one who voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood, or props it up, will ever be able to justify himself to the living, or to posterity, or to his friends, or to his children.

From everyone at Radish: Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2013.

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