In Defence of Intellectuals and Scholars

There has always been a portion of the right who have no time for intellectuals or scholars. On any given day, one can see someone or other lamenting the ‘uselessness’ of what amounts to academic activity. In this post I want to defend the role of intellectual activity and scholarship and outline the service it provides in vanguard formation.

Without genuinely intellectual activity – by which I mean reading and analysing books, discussing and evaluating ideas, summarising and disseminating those ideas worth keeping – the ‘right’ amounts to little more than people reacting to things and giving their ‘takes’ on whatever is going on. In other words, the stock-in-trade of Tim Pool. I do not begrudge such people or their ability to milk the news cycle for clicks and dollars, but they will never be able to organise effectively because they have no considered or coherent positions. Simply put, they are Reaction Monkeys helping to turn the organ grinder of the news cycle. Many of these criticisms come from people who, when held up to the sunlight, are little more than Low Rent Tim Pools themselves – which is to say, when the rest of us spent the last six years studying, they are still sitting there mocking Guardian articles with tired 2016 takes to dwindling audiences. They frequently claim the Dissident Right™ is ‘irrelevant’ but given the amount of time they spend bitching about it, they must know deep down that that is where all the action, dynamism and energy is. And, let’s face it, that must hurt because there’s nothing more irrelevant than a Low Rent Tim Pool.

In any case, an intellectual’s role is something else. To begin with, an intellectual must step back from the cut and thrust of whatever is going on right now to think about how we got here, why people think what they do, whether what they think is worth thinking, and if not, then why not? A pure intellectual – let us say someone with the arrogance and confidence of Vox Day – might seek to come up with his own assessment a priori. A poet and genius like Morgoth may just divine it from his soul. A scholar, meanwhile, will want to look around, survey all available assessments, and then begin to zero in on those that cut to the essence of the problem.

Back in 2017, before knowing any better, one might have turned to books on the popular market. For example:

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2017).

Goodhart is a start, his distinction between the ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’ is a start, but he doesn’t go far enough. Goodhart is a boomer with boomer assumptions. He’s politically correct. He’s liberal. He’s a democrat. There are real limitations to his analysis. His half-baked ideas were also put into practice by the disastrous Theresa May (see ‘The British Dream’). Thus, the search for something more penetrating and substantial begins in earnest, from Peter Hitchens to Giambattista Vico and very far beyond. You cannot defeat Boomer Truth with yet more Boomer Truth. In fact, you cannot even identify Boomer Truth if you never venture outside it. Even if you took effective action (X to doubt), you will end up back where you started because the problem is not this or that policy but a set of fundamental beliefs about the world. This will also (sadly) be the case with Ron DeSantis in Florida. While he’s making the right moves purely from a tactical point of view, all his values are boomercon values which will solve nothing in the long run. Take a look at the small print on those Bills he’s passing, and you can quickly see the weakness of the sauce. Those critics of intellectuals and scholars on the right tend also not to understand this basic point (i.e., about Boomer Truth), because their high-time preference towards action grants them the shallowest possible diagnosis of the issue in the first place. I have less than no time for these people. My entire body of work to date is a rebuttal to these people. I believe that the fundamental correctness of my position is why more people listen to me than to them, even if in the overall scheme of things beyond the Dissident Right™ more people listen to Tim Pool and other such merchants of sensationalism.

Canon Formation

In the ceaseless search for ‘the correct answer’, one may scour many books, many of which will be diverting but ultimately discarded, while others become worthy of championing, disseminating, teaching to others. This process is called canon formation.

The Dissident Right™ is in the process of refining its canon. You see the basic issue is that The Dissident Right™ is not the post-war New Right led by William F. Buckley or its British Thatcherite counterpart. The Dissident Right™ is also not the Old Right eulogised by the late Justin Raimondo. The Dissident Right™ is also not the French New Right as embodied by Alain de Benoist. The Dissident Right™ is also not the post-war neo-Nazi right of William Luther Pierce. The Dissident Right™ is also not the Neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment, the so-called NRx. The Dissident Right™ is also not the old reactionary right of Maistre et al. The Dissident Right™ is also not the Catholic Literary Revival of Chesterton and Belloc. The Dissident Right™ is also not the libertarian right as represented by the Mises Institute. The Dissident Right™ is also not the old Alt Right v1.0 who were prominent between 2015 and 2018. And yet, The Dissident Right™ will include people from each of these backgrounds and more, and its reading lists will include texts from all these traditionally separate spheres. In other words, The Dissident Right™ has become an heir to all these movements and with it has become a repository and destination for intellectually curious right-wingers who have somehow ended up here. Almost everyone who would self-identify as Dissident Right™ would also recognise one of the former movements in their own past.

Therefore, since the Dissident Right™ consists of many people from many backgrounds, a formidable task in the scholarly process, which has been ongoing, is to delineate and refine a canon. The process of canon formation mainly asks, ‘who is in and who is out?’, ‘who is worth reading and who is not?’ Whether or not anyone realises it, this has been taking place.

William F. Buckley, for example, is out. Almost no one reads him or has anything good to say about him. Buckley has been seen as a CIA installation, a containment mechanism, a betrayer of the right on all counts, a gatekeeper, and so on. Meanwhile, his good friend, James Burnham – a man who also had CIA connections – is in. Burnham is read by almost everyone now. It’s not just because of my efforts, this has just happened naturally. Everyone from Erik Striker to Bronze Age Pervert to Carl Benjamin might reference Burnham on any given week. This wasn’t an accident. It happened because Burnham’s analysis is incredibly prescient to the current moment. It also happened because Burnham – unlike Buckley or most other National Review alumni – was always thoroughly illiberal in his thinking and analysis. Thus, in the canonization process we can see that, as things stand, Buckley is out and Burnham is in. Both Buckley and Burnham were in the canon of the New Right, but only Burnham makes it to the canon of the Dissident Right.

And this same process is happening across every respective inherited canon from every prior movement. There’s an old established Neo-Nazi canon, for example. Oswald Spengler and Francis Parker Yockey are in that canon, and they are both figures who are widely read and cited by people in the Dissident Right™, but they seem to have much less use for – say – the works of David Duke. Again, there’s a reason for that. It’s not just that Duke has ‘bad optics’, it is because someone like Yockey has penetrating insights into what went wrong in Europe. It would also be true that fewer people read Yockey than read Spengler or Burnham. And so, he is ‘less canonised’ than either.

It would be a whole other post to analyse each old canon to see who currently makes it into the new canon and who does not. Canons are also subject to change in real time. Once almost everyone would cite Hans Hermann Hoppe, for example, but now the status of this work is much more ambiguous as libertarianism in general has come to be seen, for right or wrong, as deeply uncool. Hoppe was a major figure for Alt Right v1.0, but there has yet to be a sustained ‘reassessment’ by the Dissident Right™. No one consciously controls this process, even though it is controlled by intellectuals and scholars, it ‘just happens’. In academia, scholars often devote themselves to ensuring this or that writer maintains a place in the canon. Once the Dissident Right™ becomes big enough and established enough, this too will start to happen.

The Uses of an Established Canon

Years ago, my friend The Distributist made a video in which he talked about how valuable it was for the left to have a bunch of thinkers they had all read. For a start, the leftist is not discussing their own thought but rather assessing Marx or Foucault or Marcuse or whomever else. There is great utility in this for the leftist because it gives them scope to consider ideas without owning them – there’s a level of safety and distance there, he does not have to commit. In the years since he made that video, the Dissident Right™ has made good on what he had hoped for: an equivalent on the right. No matter what you make of Curtis Yarvin, you have heard of him, and even if you have not read him, you know the sort of stuff he says. And thus, we can use ‘Yarvin’ as a way in to discuss a given problem, including what he does and does not get right. Or better yet, we can talk about Mosca, Pareto, Carlyle, Maistre, Evola, whoever, and this is a way of developing thought, entertaining ideas without owning them.

Yarvin himself, as much as anyone, has helped to shape the canon. For example, it was he who told everyone to read Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse …’; we did. A discussion over whether we agree with slavery is scarcely worth entertaining, while a sustained analysis of Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse’ opens a deep reservoir to dredge in a way that is simultaneously distanced from us but also teeming with spice. Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse’ can demolish liberal assumptions in a way that a generic discussion about slavery never could. This is not a ‘waste of time’ – it is very important to understand the core of what we stand for and what we do not. The people who do not take the time to do such things can and will be left behind. They are, in effect, glorified normies, Low Rent Tim Pools, who can react to things as much as they want, but in the end, they will be led, and they will not lead. Certain computer programmer types disparage ‘The Great Read’ believing that – in what must be the height of total stupidity – old books have nothing to say to our present moment. But these are also people delusional enough to believe that they will overcome the CIA, MI6, Google, and the United States military with, wait for it, network analysis. Let me offer a reality check: that is not happening; least of all when you spend the rest of your time repeating tired Boomerisms no one wants to hear while trying to ‘deradicalize’ the youth. Let me make it simple to anyone reading this: that person is not your friend and is nothing more than a timewaster.

Anyway, this process of assessing and re-reading a canon over time, with familiarity, with repetition, with saturation, builds up a whole way of speaking and thinking that is almost second nature – one might call it a culture. This has not been the work of any one person but has happened organically and naturally over time, fostered by those people engaged in intellectual and scholarly work. Those people who do not read, who do not watch streams, who do not read substacks, who believe they already have all the answers, are also people who have not been part of this process in any meaningful respect. They are on the outside looking in. Since they did not take part in the process, they have – to be blunt – absolutely nothing to offer it. If you assume the position that you already know better than hundreds of books written by people far more learned than you or me, such that you deem these books a waste of time a priori, one must ask why you are not already running the world. In truth such a stance can only ever be a post-hoc rationalisation. I have no time or respect for anyone who has no time or respect for the canon – why should such people be afforded respect? They show themselves to be puffed up with hubris, no better than Satan in Paradise Lost. He crashed and burned and so will they.

In any case, the fact is – and I have seen it countless times – those people invariably end up repeating ideas taken from those books second or third hand after an intellectual and scholar has helped to rehabilitate and popularise them. This is how discourse works. And whether anyone likes it, the role of intellectuals and scholars is to disseminate, martial and gatekeep that knowledge. Perhaps no one in history has recognised this more than Antonio Gramsci sitting in a prison in Mussolini’s Italy – that is perhaps why we now live in his world. It has taken the right decades to catch up, even though rightists at the time, such as T.S. Eliot, recognised much the same thing (see Notes Toward a Definition of Culture). The men of action, when they come, come on ground manured, husbanded and tilled by such intellectuals, even if they do not know it. Of course, many of them did know it, some even slept with a copy of Carlyle next to their bedsides. You can pretend it were otherwise, but this is to ignore the facts.