I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family.  Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like.  (I am tempted to say that it would be impossible to run Pennsylvania any worse than it is being run.)

Is the family perfect?  Yes: It is perfect in the same way that the Catholic Church is perfect, which is to say that it is perfectly suitable for achieving the end for which it was created.  That does not mean, however, that it can fulfill functions not appropriate to it.  The family is not the same as the state, just as the family is not the same as the individual or the ethnic group.  We are all familiar with what happens when ethnic groups take control of governments in such places as Africa or Detroit.  We are probably also familiar with families who defend the criminal behavior of their own members, no matter how heinous.  (You can admire them for their family loyalty, if not for their moral probity.)  What these have in common is that each assigns to a natural institution tasks or characteristics that are completely inappropriate to it.

On the last day of the tenth annual Mut Zur Ethik conference in Feldkirch, Austria, Col. Robert Hickson of the Special Forces University in Florida; Eva-Marie Foellmer, a leading figure in Mut Zur Ethik; Tomasz Kazmierski, a Polish physicist now living in England; and I were climbing the Rothorn, a mountain in Switzerland, atop which (at its almost 3,000-meter-high peak), in typically Swiss fashion, stands a restaurant.  I had spoken during the conference on the use of television as a weapon in the global culture wars, but most of my talk had focused on the United States’ impending war with Iraq and whether the Swiss model of direct democracy might help us avoid such wars.

As we climbed, Colonel Hickson began to berate the Swiss for taking thousands of gun emplacements out of operation in the mountains.  His point was not that the gun emplacements themselves were so important but that their absence indicated (in his mind, at least) a withdrawal from the idea of communal self-defense and a citizen militia as the backbone of armed Swiss neutrality.  He wondered aloud whether the Swiss were still in a position to defend themselves.

I replied that artillery is useless in a culture war.  If the Swiss were hoping that artillery would save them from the dangers of globalization, they were as deluded as the American conservatives of the 60’s who stood with their eyes fixed on the Fulda Gap, waiting for the Soviet invasion that never came, while American culture was subverted by people acting behind their backs.

During one of the breaks at the conference in Feldkirk, I was invited to lunch by two men, one of whom told the story of how the 200th-anniversary celebration at Switzerland’s oldest gymnasium had been marred by African drug dealers selling narcotics to the students.  Peter Schaller, one of my hosts during my stay in Switzerland, teaches at the gymnasium, and he confirmed the accuracy of his colleague’s account.  Drugs are still illegal in Switzerland, but the police will not enforce the laws if the drug in question is hashish.

So what are the Swiss to do?  What would Wilhelm Tell do (WWWTD)?  Would he organize discussions about the dangers of drugs?  Having heard so much over the past few days about the Swiss idea of direct democracy, I suggested that an appropriate application of those principles would be for the faculty and parents to go out into the schoolyard and tell the drug dealers to leave, and, if persuasion did not succeed, to remove them physically from the premises.  (Actually, I said that the faculty should tell the dealers to “get the f–k out of here.”)

You can take the boy out of Philadelphia, but you can’t take Philadelphia out of the boy.  There I was in the mountains of Switzerland, having a Philadelphia moment.  Maybe it was the thin air, or maybe I found myself momentarily swept away by the idea of actually doing something to stop the all-but-universal subversion of social order.  (Maybe that explains my unfortunate choice of vocabulary.)  I cannot, for the life of me, imagine engaging in a debate with some Swiss leftie wearing tiny glasses and an Arab scarf about the dangers of drugs.  I could sooner see myself taking drugs, squatting on the abandoned tracks of the Letten Bahnhof, veins bulging in my forearm, ready to shoot up.  At that moment, however, I thought that Swiss direct democracy did have something to offer, because I could imagine myself standing in a schoolyard, like those where I used to hang out in Philadelphia, telling someone to “get the f–k out of here,” and being willing to use force to make that stick.  Maybe it was the intoxication of seeing myself as a latter-day Wilhelm Tell, but I felt encouraged by the example I had raised.  Eva-Marie, however, was not amused.

“You’re raising your voice,” she said.

Eva-Marie’s response struck me as a particularly schoolmarmish thing to say.  It was like telling me that my zipper was down.  It may have been true, but I did not understand how it was relevant to what I was saying.  We were talking about two completely different orders of being.  Needless to say, I was annoyed.  For all I know, lack of oxygen was causing me to raise my voice.  I suspect, though, that it was anger—anger at seeing one more bastion of ethnic culture destroyed from within, the casualties smiling as they died.  The issue, as far as I was concerned, was whether the Swiss idea of direct democracy had any relevance to drug dealers at that country’s oldest gymnasium, and the fact that I was raising my voice—if, in fact, I was raising my voice—was irrelevant.  What about the principles?  Did my application flow from them or not?  We will never know, because Eva-Marie’s response effectively ended the discussion.  I strode ahead by myself—lest I raise my voice again—and concentrated on the cows with bells around their necks.

Later, Eva-Marie suggested that I share my idea with Peter Schaller.  Schaller, to my surprise, agreed that my suggestion was perfectly consistent with Swiss traditions.  Eva-Marie could not see this, in his opinion, because she was a German.  Schaller mentioned that the drug dealers were probably armed, to which I responded that every Swiss man has a military-issue weapon, which he could carry with him into the schoolyard to make sure that the drug dealers understood the seriousness of his intentions.  Schaller replied that the problem is not the application of Swiss principles; the problem is that the faculty at the gymnasium are divided on the drug issue.  Many of his colleagues take drugs; even more are willing to defend drug use as culturally appropriate for some.  In other words, the problem is that large segments of the faculty have been inculcated with the ideas of the 60’s, and, as a result, there is no consensus among them.  If Schaller, in Swiss fashion, were to show up at school with his Swiss army-issue weapon, he—not the drug dealers—would end up in jail.  Is action possible without consensus?  And is consensus possible among a faculty that includes drug users, drug justifiers, and two flaming homosexuals?  Not even Wilhelm Tell could make Eidgenossen (“oath comrades”) out of that motley crew.

This is why the globalists promote moral disorder.  If there is no moral consensus, action is impossible; if action is impossible, then, a fortiori, resistance is impossible.  That the Swiss Germans named their organization “Mut Zur Ethik” (“courage to be moral”) is a tacit recognition of that fact.  Ultimately, the issue is not whether direct democracy is a model for the rest of the world.  We may have reached the point where even the Swiss cannot apply it to the greatest problems threatening Switzerland.  In the absence of a moral consensus, Swiss direct democracy is no more effective in a culture war than the silent artillery batteries in the mountains above Sargans.

It is time to stop mistaking the part for the whole.  It is time to embrace a coherent, genuine conservatism (as opposed to neoconservatism, 19th-century liberalism, free-marketism, libertarianism, and all of the other forms of the English ideology that are now being imposed on the rest of the world by globalist fiat) that can meet globalism head-on and provide some protection from its most virulent forms.  What we need, in other words, is a philosophical lingua franca for antiglobalism.  In order to be both universal and particular enough to be effective, antiglobalism will have to be based on nature, not on ideology.  Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.  (If grace builds on nature, then we will have to build on it as well, if we hope to be effective.)

The goal of globalization is isolation through the manipulation of passion, because isolation is the necessary condition for exploitation, whether financial or sexual or cultural.  This violates the social nature of man, because, as Aristotle writes, “Man is a being made for social life.”  In other words, the exploiters have to work against nature to succeed.  That is why the homosexual has become the globalist model of the ideal citizen.  His life is lived in defiance of nature, and, as a result, he is completely isolated and easily controlled.  In order to evade the snares of globalism, the clever individual must be unhomosexual in his dealings with his fellow man—which is to say, not a sexual predator (or addict), not grandiose, not narcissistic, not in rebellion against nature, and, ultimately, in control of his passions.

In order to protect himself from exploitation, the individual must create walls of defense, and the first wall is the moral order.  As Saint Augustine writes, “a man has as many masters as he has vices.”  Man is a rational animal who can seek the good through exercising reason and free will.  Man achieves the good first by acting according to the moral law, by implementing practical reason as an individual.  He then achieves the good in association with a spouse by founding an oikos or household.  He then achieves it as a member of an ethnos or nation; and, finally, he achieves that perfection as a member of a polis or state.  Thus, the full scale of how man achieves the good follows an ascending order: ethos, oikos, ethnos, polis.  Any truly antiglobalist conservatism must be based on this hierarchy.  That would mean promoting morals, family, and ethnicity at home and among others and not trying to impose on every other ethnicity of the world some sort of utopian magic formula like the “free market” or “democracy” of the Swiss, Wilsonian, or any other sort.

The hierarchy of ethos, oikos, and ethnos corresponds roughly to the stages of human development.  Ethos helps to form character; it is the main issue for a man from childhood into his teenage years.  If reason does not take control of passion at this point in his life, his character simply will not form.  If his character does not form, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for him to link his efforts with other men.  The result is the ghetto mentality we find in housing projects.  Large segments of that population become sexually active before will and reason have formed the habits of character.  As a result, the will is permanently stunted, and the self is not disciplined or ordered enough to carry out anything but the most rudimentary tasks in life.  Such a person can go to the store and buy a gallon of milk, but he cannot get a GED or commercial drivers’ license.  Like the homosexual, the ghetto dweller is, in many ways, the ideal citizen of a consumer culture.  In one respect, he is completely docile, but, in another, completely out of control.  He can consume, but he cannot produce, and so he has to be given money in order to be of use to the culture.  The ideal consumer is not the ideal employee, and social engineers have been unable to square that circle.  

Oikos is obviously the concern of people who have just married and are forming their families.  Once the social engineers triumphed over the ethnic group in the 60’s, they turned their attention to the family and, in some instances, succeeded in bringing large segments of America’s families under political control.  As in most of the Enlightenment’s projects, the operation was a success, but the patient died.  The campaign to turn housing projects into birth-control clinics failed to lower black fertility, but it largely destroyed the black family.  Feminism, as the implementer of abortion and birth control, had a similarly devastating effect on the middle-class family during the 70’s.  But, unlike ethnic America, oikos proved too resilient to destroy completely.  Families, withdrawing from the culture through such movements as homeschooling, proved too diffuse to control, and the nuclear bond between husband and wife proved much tougher to crack than the ethnic bond among recent European immigrants.  Like the atomic nucleus, the nuclear family released so much destructive energy when it was split that even the social engineers began to have second thoughts.  Inner-city devastation was largely the result of social engineers splitting the black nuclear family to try to control the “threat” posed by black demographics.  This social tinkering created incredible devastation, because the chain reaction that followed rapidly got out of control.  Because the social engineers failed to take control of the family, the biggest issue became the unresolved conflict between oikos and polis, since polis had effectively abolished ethnos in the United States during the 50’s and 60’s.

Ethnos is the Kulturtraeger, the bearer of culture.  It, not oikos, determines language, clothing, food, etc.  The problem in America is that, after the abolition of ethnos, oikos became defenseless and unable to determine its own identity.  Instead, we are forever naively importing pseudoethnicities into the oikos.  Clothing is especially important in this regard.  Notre Dame sweatshirts, Harley Davidson jackets, Britney Spears pants, Michael Jordan shoes—all of these are pseudoethnicities, which carry with them covert forms of cultural control.

If we compare Europe and America, we find different variations and different weakness and strengths that correspond to some part of this scheme.  Oikos is strong in America, but ethnos is weak or nonexistent because of the shallowness of America’s cultural roots and the ruthlessness with which government-sponsored social engineering has attacked them.  As a result, we have homeschooling families hiding out in the woods (or, worse, the suburbs), trying to piece together a cultural lifeboat out of some Great Books program.  These families should be praised for their willingness to resist the globalist culture, but they are handicapped by their isolation from any lived ethnic Kulturtraeger that could support them.

In Europe, on the other hand, ethnos is strong, but oikos is weak, because ethos is weak.  (One result may be the neopagan revival in Europe that is seen as a reaction to globalism.)  This is manifested most clearly in Europe’s dismal birthrate.  Unlike the American homeschooling Robinson Crusoes, the situation in Europe is typified by the Bavarian Catholic girl who lives in the midst of still-vibrant ethnic symbols, clothing, Volksmusik, and humanely planned cities, yet invites her boyfriend to spend the night with her under the approving eyes of her parents.  Or, better still, by the naked hermaphrodites dozing in the sun in the English Garden in Munich.  The largest problem in both America and Europe is the disconnect between ethos, oikos, and ethnos, and the fallacy of mistaking the part for the whole—a fallacy that flows from this disconnect.  That is why we need a coherent antiglobalist lingua franca, which would allow collaboration by letting nature take its course.

A good place to start would be a concerted effort to get people in both America and Europe not only to turn off their televisions but to get rid of them completely.  The average European or American does not understand that television functions as the prime instrument of political control in the globalist New World Order.  In a recent article on immigration, Stephen Steinlight (senior fellow at the American Jewish Committee), after describing television as “the Jewish industry par excellence,” explained the role that MTV is to play in the globalist system.  “MTV, for better or for worse,” he asserts, “will prove more powerful with young Muslim immigrants than the mullahs.”  He forgot to add that it will also prove more powerful among young Bavarians than the Catholic priests, and more powerful among young Alabamians than Southern Baptist preachers.  He forgot to add that MTV is a form of cultural colonization.  His point, however, remains clear: Television atomizes and demoralizes as a prelude to control and exploitation.

People who do not watch TV spend more time with their families.  Families who do not watch TV spend more time doing things with other families who do not watch TV.  That means a resurgence of ethnic identity.  That means more Bavarians wearing Lederhosen and Dirndlkleider and fewer dressing like Britney Spears.  And that means more cultural independence and more local resistance to the rising globalist Antichrist.