Last year, I gave a talk at The Event. This has since been collected in a book of presentations from the event that was sold in a limited run. I am publishing this on The Forbidden Texts so that I can refer to it in a subsequent post (that is about to be published).
This paper is about my cast-iron belief that culture is the product of law and not the other way around. The clarion call, which I am sure will echo down the corridors, will be: ‘but surely it is something of both! Surely, culture makes law just as law makes culture’. No, you are wrong; I am going to tell you why. But before that: why this topic for an event called ‘where do we go from here?’ My reasons are threefold: first, because it is important to lose any notion that our systems of liberal democracy are designed for, or respond to, bottom-up movements; second, because I believe that change at the level of law is now going to be next to impossible to achieve within the system; and, third, therefore this means that our only remaining options are total regime overthrow, which is to say capital ‘R’ Revolution, or, that warmer and cosier capital ‘R’ of ‘Ride the Tiger’, which is to say surviving and outlasting the regime long enough that it collapses so that we can rebuild it from the burnt ashes.
I am going to start – to the surprise of almost no one – with some statistics. These pertain to the United States between the years of 1960 and 1990:
GDP +41%
Government spending: +454%
Violent crime: +560%
Illegitimate births: +400%
Parents in single-parent homes: +300%
Divorce rate: +400%
Teenage suicide: +200%
Average SAT scores: 75-point drop.
These numbers are taken from a book by Jim Nelson Black called When Nations Die. Black was writing in 1994 and he could not have dreamed how bad things would be by 2021. Black’s thesis is that the cause of America’s decline is religious. But a few pages later, Black points out that in November 1980, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Ten Commandments could not be posted on the wall of a schoolroom in Kentucky because seeing the words of the Mosaic law on the wall ‘may include children to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and to obey the commandments.’ The case Black is referring to is Stone v. Graham (1980), but it was based on the precedent of an earlier case: Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). In that case the Supreme Court declared that state-sponsored Bible-reading in American schools was unconstitutional, which rested on an earlier case still: Engel v. Vitale (1962), which ruled that it was unconstitutional to compose a prayer in public schools.
Now that is just one legal strand, but when you effectively ban religion and the ten commandments from schools, well – what was it Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida said? – ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows!’ (1.3.109-10). The truth is that the church, unless it is backed by law, has no authority – at least not in this world. As long as little Engel or little Schempp or little Stone can get daddy to run to the court and have the state back them over the religion, it is toothless. Note also that, in America, the Supreme Court is a method of de facto passing new legislation without actually passing new legislation by elected officials. Rather, the court members can decide a case by interpreting the constitution which means, essentially, they can make it up since anyone with verbal dexterity can argue that black says white and white says black. In other words, the Supreme Court is simply a method by which elites can bypass the public. We can use Kerry Bolton’s useful phrase for this: ‘revolution from above’ – in fact, so useful is the term that Bolton wrote a whole book on it.
This graph shows religious belief in America since 1962, Christians such as Jim Nelson Black may wonder why there’s been such a decline. I do not: culture is downstream from law.
Another such Supreme Court case came in October 1962: James Meredith v. University of Mississippi; the latter were effectively forced by the Supreme Court to take their first black student. At the campus, riots from the public attempted to prevent this from happening. This was a year before the so-called bottom-up Civil Rights marches and a year before John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Note that here neither the State authority vested in Mississippi nor the ‘will of the people’ mattered in the slightest: they were federally mandated to take the black student by fiat. No matter your view on this, the fact remains that the supposedly liberal federal state forced an institution to take a student against its will. The logic in so much else we have seen follows on from this.
The Civil Rights Act was passed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before JFK had been assassinated in 1963, the political will did not seem to exist to pass these radical bills officially through Congress, but in the aftermath of his death and in the disarray of national mourning, well – never let a good crisis go to waste as they say. This is how Christopher Caldwell describes the consequences:
Civil rights ideology, especially when it hardened into a body of legislation, became, most unexpectedly, the model for an entire new system of constantly churning political reform. Definitions of what was required in the name of justice and humanity broadened. Racial integration turned into the all-embracing ideology of diversity. Women’s liberation moved on to a reconsideration of what it meant to be a woman (and, eventually, a man). Immigration became grounds for reconsidering whether an American owned his primary allegiance to his country or whether other forms of belonging were more important. Anti-communist military adventures gave way, once communism began to collapse in 1989, to a role for the United States as the keeper of the whole world’s peace … and enforcer of ethical codes for a new international order, which was sometimes called ‘the global economy’.
Caldwell’s thesis is that the raft of changes brought under LBJ in 1964 and 1965 in every area of life amounted to a ‘new constitution’, and culture has been catching up to it ever since.
However, once again the revolution came from above and earlier than the formal legislation of 1964, a whole decade earlier. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) was the Supreme Court’s unanimous verdict that ordered the desegregation of all but one of America’s schools. As Caldwell notes, the verdict was curt and devoid of footnotes, ‘less a judicial argument than a judicial order.’ Of course, what they had really done was to abolish freedom of association, a First Amendment right, from this moment on, and therefore to rewrite the constitution significantly. Caldwell also outlines how almost all the events children are taught in Black History Month were Astroturfed by the NAACP. He says, ‘the NAACP not only staged events, it scripted them. The plaintiffs it hand-picked to carry them out were chosen for their sympathy and skill.’ He then outlines how Rosa Parks was a trained social agitator from the Congress of Industrial Organizations and a leader of the Montgomery NAACP chapter. This is the equivalent of someone like a BLM activist today. The death of freedom of association in America is a principle so illiberal that even Julius Evola was moved to criticise it on liberal grounds, labelling it ‘truly a coercive system’. But can anyone wonder why Americans have become so shrill, so eager to play the victim, so demanding of others for their rights today? I do not: culture is downstream from law.
We can pick just about any topic and find a similar story. How about Johnson’s The Omnibus Crime Bill passed in 1968? Even that had its origin in the Supreme Court when Chief Justice Bazelon said in 1960 that we ‘desperately need all the help we can get from modern behavioural scientists.’ Then came the cases. Mapp v. Ohio (1961), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Escobido v. Illinois (1964), Miranda v. Arizona (1966) – each one expanded the rights of criminals, forced states to find legal defendants even if guilt was not in doubt. And even if defence lawyers were provided, if judges found their strategies to be ‘inadequate’ their convictions could be overturned! Here a liberal government decided arbitrarily that methods of justice and punishment that had always worked perfectly well were now outmoded and that new hitherto untested methods involving such nonsense as compassion for criminals, the idea that society is chiefly to blame for crime and so on, must be brought in.
Here is one of my favourite graphs, though I derive no real pleasure from seeing it. Culture is downstream from law.
Shall we pick another one? This is fun. What about feminism? In October 1971, a survey of American women was carried out by the Phillip Morris tobacco company asking them about various aspects of life. This was surely a move that would have made Edward Bernays proud, the slogan was ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’ – it made Fatboy Slim a lot of money down the line too! In any case, in one question the women were asked to respond to the statement ‘being a woman has prevented me from doing some of the things I hoped to do in life’, here were the results:
Frequently: 7%
Occasionally: 12%
Hardly Ever: 79%
Those damn women, they never listen to feminists even in 1971! Well something was going to have to change and you couldn’t leave it up to the stupid public to do, they are just going to vote for Nazis like Richard Nixon again in any case, so yet again: Enter the Supreme Court. If you had not worked it out by now, I am talking about Roe v. Wade, verdict decided in 1973 and my gosh ‘hark what discord followed’. But finally, there was a wedge issue that the elites could drive into the heart of the American family, between husband and wife, between sister and sister. Let’s take a look at US domestic birth replacement rates before and after 1973.
Does it surprise you? It doesn’t surprise me: culture is downstream from law.
Now, a short digression: I have lingered on this period from the 1960s to the mid-90s in America, but the same changes happened here. First legally, then culturally. Of course, the same changes happened here, we are a vassal state to the USA, save perhaps the City of London. This happens to be the topic of The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens, who chose the period from 1965 to 1997 – he dates it from the death of Winston Churchill to the death of Princess Diana. It was in this period in which the last vestiges of the old Britain were well and truly destroyed to ready the way for what he calls ‘the ground zero’ for the Blair creature to build his monstrosities. I do not have the time to go into detail on what was happening here, but in virtually every case parallel laws were made in this country whether through precedent or legislation – and anything that was forgotten was passed speedily, without debate, in the Blair years, to the extent where he even setup a totally alien US-style Supreme Court in this country, which, if you recall, even had the audacity to try to scupper Brexit.
Back to America. One of the many acts passed by Lyndon B. Johnson was The Immigration and Nationality Act 1965. This overturned the long-standing Immigration Act 1924, which had set racial quotas to ensure that the nation would remain majority European: effectively this act said that America was first and foremost for Europeans and only available to other people according to strictly defined minorities. The 1965 Act abolished this and gave out the opposite message: America was a nation of immigrants of any race from all over the world. And thus at the stroke of a pen the nature and character of the nation was changed forever. The combination of the 1924 Act and the Great Depression reduced legal immigration to around 40,000 people a year in the late 1930s. After the 1965 Act, in the 1970s it was around 450,000 a year; in the 1980s, 733,000 a year and in the 1990s, over 900,000 a year – almost all non-white and from the third-world – for illegal immigration you can double that. When I say ‘culture is downstream from law’ let us consider this scene from 1950. This is street in San Francisco. Everyone is white, of course they are, the law was literally keeping other people out.
Now let’s look at San Francisco today.
Okay, let’s try to be more charitable. I searched for ‘San Francisco’s Happiest Street’ to see what would come up. It was this.
Okay, let’s split the difference. Here’s one I found from Politico under the headline: ‘San Francisco is putting its pedestrians first!’.
I don’t need to say much else other than the law says anyone is allowed to come. The law in fact does not even demand people speak English, schools are happy to teach in Spanish presumably so long as they do not start praying. Of course, there are many other aspects of these picture that are downstream from law. Drugs are not only virtually decriminalised in San Francisco, but openly pushed and promoted at taxpayer’s expense by the government.
One thing I have not done in this paper is to discuss the vested interests and pressure groups behind so many of these changes. The big money that funded the activism. The specific personalities and groups involved. I mean, I do not know if it is even legal to discuss that out loud, but these things are extremely well documented. However, in some respects, it is not important for the purposes of this talk other than to say these forces are always in a tiny minority, organised, and extremely well connected. The charge I have most frequently faced in advancing my idea that culture is downstream from law is by the reflexive counter-charge that the people making these laws must have a culture. This is not necessarily so. If culture is downstream from law, law is downstream from interests. All you need for laws to be made are the vested interests of some portion of the elite minority. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that talk of ‘black rights’ are in the interests of black people as a group – I have a library of Thomas Sowell books that could easily kill a small deer should they fall on one – to show you that is far from the case. How many real women has feminism actually helped beyond the careers of feminists? Do you think the 79% of women who said they were not being held back because they are women in 1971 are more happy or less happy now in 2021 when they spend the majority of their fertile years stuck behind a corporate desk being told over and over again that they are being held back? Fighting at once the likely confusing biological urge to have babies while at the same time believing they can never sit on the board. The interests served by laws are seldom, if ever, in the interests of ‘the people’.
Thus, I say that we need to stop thinking in terms of ‘the people’ and more in terms of what will benefit us – not ‘us, the people’, but just us. Who is ‘us’? Productive people who want to live a moral life free from parasites as Andrew Ryan once said, and our families. We are living in a time and a place in which this is being made impossible by the elites and overthrowing them is almost certainly beyond us. And so, I return to my idea of the Network of 10s – we can build things for ourselves. We can build our own Rapture, or if you prefer our own Trumpton – maybe virtually at first, then physically, in time even with laws – but this is the best we can hope for. In time, I believe virtually everyone on the right will come to see that this is the path, especially as they come to see that the system is not designed for any of us. In fact, the system repeatedly tells us that we are not wanted. Let it sink in the mire of bioleninism for all I care, because in the end, whatever we call Western Civilization is up here. It lives in us, through us, in the things we read, remember, preserve, maintain. We cannot trust the institutions to do this for us. We must pass it down. We must ensure it lives on. We will see all of history erased or rewritten before our eyes in the official record, in our lifetimes, it is happening. We will endure. Because after all, what was Europe and what was America but a Network of 10s?
I agree that culture is downstream from law, but with the caveat that this is valid during the down slope of a culture. I am not sure it applies to the up slope. (In fact you almost say as much in the introduction)
That it applies during the down slope can be explained by the observation that 'when people are in it for themselves' they will seek the edges of the written law to increase their share of the commons. When 'people are in it for themselves' you are almost by definition on the downside slope of a culture.
I was a huge fan of Andrew Breitbart, so this topic is hard. I would describe the truth of it in a push and a pull. Push: How gay marriage went from entirely outside the overton window to entirely inside in about 5 years. Pull: The Princton study that showed that writing laws bears no correlation to how well they express the values of the people.