Traditionalist Aesthetics.
Since I was a child, I've always had--though crude at times--an appreciation of the school of Aesthetics. Though I was by no means a good artist and I'm still not proficient in that wonderful labor, art as a whole has always captured my interest, and I recall always loathing on some level the meaningless, smug elitism found in post-modern art for something of a more classic variety--one of my personal favorites being the work of Thomas Cole specifically his two most famous cycles The Voyage of Life and The Course of Empire, I was also fortunate enough to be raised mostly on Studio Ghibli films which similarly gave me an abiding love of Nature that I can say has never left (One of the primary reasons I couldn't stand being a libertarian was the environmental impact of Capitalism and Industrialization).
Yet if I had a love of Aesthetics, it could only have been born by sheer hatred of my surroundings: the place I was born and raised in lacked any kind of truly lasting aesthetic beauty--at least in the sense of a translation of the divine abstract into human forms and concepts, humans can understand the forest and the mountains as divine because it is far more ancient than humans in both cases, and in the mountains in particular their sheer awe inspiring size as well as the difficulty in mastering them. I was raised in a town with no earnest sense of community--we'd get renters which would move out after a couple of years, if you were to take a long walk through it you would see apartments and condominiums on all sides, broken up only by the occasional alley or fast-food restaurant; even in perfectly sunny days, the town was sun washed, which only emphasized the grey of the concrete sidewalks and the oppressive heat of the street and parking lots.
Places which should have been a refuge from the ugliness of the town were instead infested with an ugliness of their own: you would never get a quiet park far from busy and bustling streets, nor a Church that hadn't been utterly desecrated by a postmodern aesthetic design, art museums housed meaningless paint soaked rags that snobs admired not out of any inherent beauty in the painting, but instead because they could take refuge in its absurdity, in the utter fascination they show towards contemptuously worthless and meaningless things, and the ability to sneer at "philistines" for not "getting it" in a despicably elitist fashion.
Perhaps one of the most intrinsic attributes of conservative thought is in an appreciation of the beautiful. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr.--a man I have some disagreements with--the doctrine of Conservatism is that what was beautiful yesterday is beautiful today, and will continue to be beautiful tomorrow.
Aesthetics then, in the traditional sense, are those things of beauty which speak to something deep within the human soul: not merely beauty of sight, of depiction, but beauty of movement and beauty of stillness, beauty of speech and beauty of silence; the bartender who masters his craft and can move with mechanical precision and confidence is just as much a promoter of aesthetics within his own field as Monks praying in silent humility, he's making a communicative statement.
And that's the thing with art, all art, that brings it directly into the realm of politics: it is a form of communication, not just of the values expressed by society but rather the state of humanity, its almost a kind of religious expression that can communicate the deep yearning of mankind in a way that mere words can't, yet the trend among the world today is not just a rejection of beauty, but its total perversion. We're told to recognize the ugliness of the human form upon being bloated by its consumerist habits as "beautiful" or "natural" in what amounts to a callous disrespect of nature, to compare a person so loaded with artificial food and chemicals and sugars that are slowly killing her to the natural landscape. More and more what is beautiful is being torn down to make way for more disgusting housing developments, more land for an insatiable human race, all the while garbage post-modernists support these developments with the rallying cry that what is beautiful strictly isn't, that everything is up to interpretation, and that humanity having any standards at all is oppressive; so gorge yourself on fatty foods and know you're just as beautiful as Venus!
It's only the political Right that is capable of defending Aesthetic beauty, that stands as the line in the sand against the acceptance of ugliness as a good thing, against the adoration of mediocrity, that would leave humanity with an inability to communicate the divine abstract, instead rolling around like some headless animal that cannot get a firm grasp on anything of worth nor communicate perennial truths or even basic definitions because "everything is subjective, anything can mean anything".
The first and most important battle the Traditionalist must face, has to be in the realm of art. If the traditionalist wins in the art world, if he can commit to the fire every last piece of meaningless postmodern shit and reestablish a temple towards appreciation of what is aesthetic, what is beautiful, then the rest of the culture war will come easy.
Posted Mar 18, 2018, 2:46 AM UTC · edited
u/Moprollems
How do a traditionalists deal with ugly historical facts like ancient greeks supporting rampant sexual degenracy and japanese conservatives having no interest in combating extreme pornography?
Offtopic: If leftist support sexual degenracy, does that make Nazis degenerates?
Firstly by acknowledging there's a difference in culture.
In the case of the Greeks on some level their "rampant sexual degeneracy" is partially an exaggeration--far too often I've seen people confuse Greco-Roman attitudes about sex to be "homosexuality" in the modern context. In the Greco-Roman world, sexual politics were more a matter of masculinity than "homo or hetero", if you were a "catcher" rather than a "pitcher" generally you were looked down upon as weak and emasculated, and men were generally expected to settle down and marry a woman regardless of their sexual preference
As for the habit of extreme pornography among the Japanese, I believe Jonathan Bowden described it best that among Japanese culture you have a kind of pressure release valve whereby they exteriorize this kind of extreme, psycho-sexual fantasies; it exists, they're aware of it, and yet they don't let it tear apart the fabric of society.
It's important to note that a great deal of modern sexual ethics comes from Christianity, the flaw of "universal" morality is in assuming that everyone generally came to the same conclusions and that we're all part of this collective moral continuum where we acknowledge the same things as natural or degenerate.
Japan is a pagan society, whilst we've influenced their thought, there's still points where the "cat is out of the bag" as it were and it becomes clear that we're different peoples with wildly different worldviews. For example the traditional Japanese religion, with its emphasis on Animistic spirits coming to reside in places and things can, on some level, lead to them taking better care of their property whilst Westerners--long divorced of such thought--could arguably be considered more wasteful.
Important to note is that Traditionalism is not a mere mimicking of the past. You had Traditionalist thinkers such as Rene Guenon who actually converted to Sufi Islam in spite of being a Frenchman, it's not the vain hope that if we just completely mimic the past we can somehow mantle it and return to it; traditionalism's fundamental principles are eternal and human, whilst they can adapt to new times, they have much the same underlying essence--in much the same way that Pagan societies of old incorporated and adapted new gods and theology without it being seen as an "invention" or "heresy" in the monotheistic sense.
I'm surprised and pleased to see a reactionary critique that's also not supremacist for any one culture.
I would say I'm more of a placid kind of cultural relativist/supremacist, my indecision over what I could be considered is mostly based around most of the Cultural Relativists I've seen being extremely hypocritical and west-hating--for example an art history class I had decried the habit of Catholic priests destroying native tribes' idols to their gods, whilst at the same time trying to teach us about the "complexity" and indeed, beauty of Human Sacrifice practiced among those tribes.
So I wont try and place any cultures above my own, nor do I precisely view them as equal. Yet similarly I dislike the tendency among Cultural Supremacists to seemingly be cultural imperialists or reduce cultures to their most bare components. I have a positive view of Islam overall and I've studied, to a degree, the cultures found in West-African Tribes; for the most part I appreciate them.