Times of adjustment
Progressive history: 'the past was generally worse'
Cyclical history: 'certain points in the past were worse for certain things'
These include 'times of adjustment' e.g. when we were beginning to solve some of the problems inherent to living in cities, or problems associated with industrialisation, etc. Life was 'better' after these problems were solved, but was also better before any of them emerged.
Each big change necessitates a period of adjustment and problem solving.
It can be argued that Britain in the Industrial Revolution was encountering the problems of "take-off"; heavy long-term investment - canals, mills, railways, foundries, mines, utilities - was at the expense of current consumption; the generations of workers between 1790 and 1840 sacrificed some, or all, of their prospects of increased consumption to the future.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.223
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Little Masters & Big Masters
Global - Local
"When the spinning of cotton was in its infancy, and before those terrible machines for superseding the necessity of human labour, called steam engines, came into use, there were a great number of what were then called little masters; men who with a small capital, could procure a few machines, and employ a few hands, men and boys (say to twenty or thirty), the produce of whose labour was all taken to Manchester central mart, and put into the hands of brokers …The brokers sold it to the merchants, by which means the master spinner was enabled to stay at home and work and attend to his workmen.
The cotton was then always given out in its raw state from the bale to the wives of the spinners at home, when they heat and cleansed it ready for the spinners in the factory. By this they could earn eight, ten, or twelve shillings a week, and cook and attend to their families.
But none are thus employed now; for all the cotton is broke up by a machine, turned by the steam engine, called a devil: so that the spinners wives have no employment, except they go to work in the factory all day at what can be done by children for a few shillings, four or five per week.
If a man then could not agree with his master, he left him, and could get employed elsewhere. A few years, however, changed the face of things. Steam engines came into use, to purchase which, and to erect buildings sufficient to contain them and six or seven hundred hands, required a great capital. The engine power produced a more marketable (though not a better) article than the little master could at the same price.
The consequence was their ruin in a short time; and the overgrown capitalists triumphed in their fall; for they were the only obstacle that stood between them and the complete control of the workmen.”
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.220-1
Universal / Particular
Universal - Particular
Global - Local
All folkish thought is particularistic—different strokes for different folks.
Such a thing cannot be maintained under a propositional framework. Propositions are inherently universalist—what’s true for me is true for you too. As such, propositional (AKA ideological) notions of “The Good” always and invariably collapse into moral equality, as they have done under Christianity when it brought in imago dei. “There are different goods for different agents” becomes “all agents are beholden to the same good expressed differently” becomes “all agents are beholden to the same good” becomes “all agents are the same”.
Folkishness cuts across all that because it is pre-propositional, meaning pre-ideological.
Folkishness traffics in imperatives, and imperatives are naturally agent-specific. The commands for the husband and the commands for the wife cannot be reduced to a common standard. As such, moral particularism can be set on a secure footing, and indeed, becomes the foundation of all morality since morality is foundationally imperative.
The Odinic is the founding god, and the Tyrrhic is the folk whose duty is to carry out the god’s will. Under folkishness, the god’s will is sovereign, even over ideology. The god’s will cannot be beholden to a principle, a justification, or a proposition. Because folkishness properly bases ethics on command rather than proposition, ethics is agent-specific just as commands are. This maintains the boundaries between classes, and between insider and outsider.
Under the alternatives to folkishness, which we can broadly class as Axiality, ideology is sovereign.
The juridical interpreter of commands becomes sovereign over the king, the issuer of commands. It becomes “interpretation all the way down”, and as Schmitt has shown, sovereign decision is deferred indefinitely. Sovereignty then devolves on to each man to command himself—an impossibility.
Folkishness posits an originary will, embodied in the command of the sovereign. That will cannot be carried out by any other people (folk); no people can alter the will of the founder (elite). The two are bound together irrevocably, just as the father needs the son, and the son needs the father.
[Imperium Press]
‘Who’s the Boss — Folk or Elite?’, Imperium Press, Substack
Revelation
For Strauss as for Nietzsche, the truth of mimesis and of the founding murder is so shocking that most people, in all times and places, simply will not believe it.
The world of the Enlightenment may have been based on certain misconceptions about the nature of humanity, but the full knowledge of these misconceptions can remain the province of a philosophical elite. The successful popularization of such knowledge would be the only thing to fear and it was in this context that the Straussian, Pierre Manent, launched a ferocious attack on Girard’s theory: “If human ‘culture’ is essentially founded on violence, then [Girard] can bring nothing other than the destruction of humanity in the fallacious guise of non-violence.”
Girard, in turn, would counter that salvation is no longer to be found in philosophical reticence, because there will come a day when there is no esoteric knowledge left:
I do think it is necessary for us to engage in the discourse we have been pursuing here. But if we had chosen otherwise, others would have taken up this discourse. And there will be others, in any case, who will repeat what we are in the process of saying and who will advance matters beyond what we have been able to do.
Yet books themselves will have no more than minor importance; the events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write and will establish truths we have difficulty describing and describe poorly, even in simple and banal instances. They are already very simple, indeed too simple to interest our current Byzantium, but these truths will become simpler still; they will soon be accessible to anyone.
For Girard, the knowledge of the founding murder is driven by the historical working of the Judeo-Western revelation. The revelation may be slow (because it contains a message that humans do not wish to hear), but it is not reversible. For this reason, the decisive difference between Girard and Strauss (or Nietzsche) centers on the question of historicism.
[Peter Thiel]
‘The Straussian Moment’
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