The Old School

Across generations, races, cultures, sexes...

Those of you who follow Stoic Observations know I have little patience for the pet dimensions of today’s politically populist and Woke contingencies. I myself make jokes about Millennials but that’s because I’m a dad. I’m self-deprecating about my inability to teach them to drive a stick, because I respect them as people and their choices. It’s not as if driving an automatic is anti-social. Nevertheless, I don’t like the idea that our consumer society can make such superficial generational distinctions into divisive, self-fulfilling buckets.

Yet I have engaged, somewhat, in the Culture Wars. I have a compelling need to critique the divisive nature of our niche marketing to the various cultures and sub-cultures and factions in society. My very Stoicism rescues me from having too much care from these debilitating conflicts, many of which are artificially instigated by social media bots in the never ending game for fame, popularity and the power of influence. (The demand for influencers increases as individual capacity for critical thought & responsibility diminishes.) I dropped my political partisanship and looked to ancient wisdom in order to re-engage the public with a kind of disinterest. It has remade me in the third way since my 40s, when I was obese, partisan and careerist to my current eyes.

Where I’m stepping over yet another line in purifying my inner self takes a lot of explaining. It is a philosophical clarification of how, when and why I use race with the aim of never using it again. I am already convinced that this is the ethical way forward, like the redesign of the approaches to a hospital’s emergency room in order for it to be more functional. The very idea of race and our accommodation of all its theories and enablers has placed bollards and barriers in all the wrong places for both ingress and egress to the soul. What is not racial that I have placed at the feet of race which I must now snatch away and rechristen? Certain fractions of mislaid culture. At length I will cover this from many angles. Today my aim is to rescue and refine my concept of the Old School.

I am going to frame my Old School around the virtues of Christendom and see how that works. It will be inclusive of certain ethnic traditions that I have inherited from my family. I am also going to attempt once again to indulge, on the cosmopolitain edge, some respect for that which I consider Neo-Victorian. Progressives call this area ‘organic’ it is the essential distinction between those people who would much rather have tilled their own gardens and ridden their own horses rather than agitated for wind farms and electric motorcycles. It is the preference for leather over Alcantara, of wood over carbon fiber, of that which is crafted by masters over that which is manufactured for the masses. If what I come up with drifts into some bizarre idiosyncrasies, well that’s what I get for not being an AI. Serves me right.

Christendom
I have three words to say about Christendom for all of you who tremble at the very notion. James. Clerk. Maxwell. I made an accidental pilgrimage to his laboratory in Cambridge this year. It has always been quite enough for me to understand that he was a Presbyterian for the purposes of my simple explanation that I see no fundamental conflict between faith and reason. They are separate methods of discovering what it is we human animals seek to know. Looking an inch closer, I see that this great scientist was also anti-positivist. We’ll see what those implications are later. In the meantime, I think the context of Paul Kingsnorth best illustrates the reasons why I like the term Christendom in context. Take a moment.

He brings up an argument I have heard before which is the downside of the atomicity of individualism. This may very well be the subtext of the television drama Severance. Clearly the fake families of corporate life are destructive of humanity. Here in my twelfth year of working from home, I am certainly more sane than I would have otherwise been. I get it. I also see immediately how much he resembles those I would consider the friends of decentralization and village life. But it is the fact of Kingsnorth’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity that intrigues me most.

Community vs Community
I recently attended the funeral of a co-worker. He was of some roughly Middle Eastern extract, the details of which are purposefully suppressed by me in the light of the Woke mind virus pandemic. I know he did a lot of work in some small European country, which I also forget. I represented our team since I am here on the West Coast and most of us are not. His church was Orthodox, its liturgy was mysterious, its chants and songs foreign to my ears. Its message and morality was not. I was reminded of an old correspondent of mine from Kansas City who told me how physically vigorous the Orthodox liturgy is. I’m certain I stood at attention in my hard shoes for 15 and 20 minute stretches.

The prayers and songs were displayed on suspended panels in two languages. The request came to not dress in black. His daughters and wife were resplendent in white. I kept reflecting during the liturgy what I am doing or not doing to properly present myself as a colleague coming to this event to represent the respectful sentiments of the company and of his peers there. In the end, I couldn’t do so without a cracking voice and tears, but I think that I acquitted myself well enough with his brother as I exited the sanctuary.

This is an organic community borne by and maintained in the religious discipline of an Orthodox establishment. It was open enough to admit me for that moment and closed off enough for me to consider it opaque. I raise this in contrast to our political propaganda which convinces so many of us that we know all we need to know about the XYZ community as it’s ‘interests’ are reported and celebrated. At some point I must intuit my respectability without regard to political definitions of ‘community’ and ‘pride’.

It is clear to me that the very notion of Christendom would be described today as some set of deluded cranks in search of conflict. But as I decline further engagement in American culture wars, I believe I can resurrect the term in ways that are interpreted as arcane and quaint. Yet I think Kingsnorth understands, as must more of us, that there is something already well-evolved in Western civilization which surpasses and transcends such schismatic mind virus attacks as we have suffered. America may be new and its flowers may be wilted or shorn, but its roots are in the right place. I expect that I will not have to live underground.

Looking Backwards
For me the unreconstructed traditional Old School is centered around that ontological description of that kind of Duke Ellington three-piece suit dignity of the Negro. He listened to Gospel and the Blues. Not Little Richard but Lester Young. She ate burned steaks with Worcestershire sauce, green beans and mashed potatoes. She was moderate and he thought before she spoke. He buttoned up his shirt, even during the Depression. When I formed the Conservative Brotherhood I said what we were for. It bears repeating that this was a matter of cultural values rather than political talking points. There was a time before populism when such things were done:

Pride
We are African Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities. We are proud of our heritage, and respect the lives, triumphs and tribulations of our forebears in this country and beyond. We aim to represent their greatest hopes for us and honor their memory.

Patriotism
The United States of America is our home, not simply by default but by choice. We take our duty to our home seriously and we defend it. We seek to improve it by our work and values and leave it better than we found it.

Family
We are extended families and we put family first. It is the primary organization to which our lives are dedicated. We fight for the proper upbringing of our children. We demand respect and consideration of our elders. We love and support our brothers and sisters.

Industry
We work twice as hard and sometimes get half as far, but we work with dignity and we expect and enjoy our rewards. We are not materialistic but we know the value of a dollar. We seek self-improvement through creativity, dedication and effort in our jobs, businesses and partnerships.

Piety
We have abiding faith in God and the principles of righteousness. We strive to be true to transcendent values and take the long view of our purpose on Earth. We conduct ourselves as vessels of spirit and we guard our own souls and the souls of others from corruption.

Liberty
We believe in the rule of law and rights of people to be free and to determine their own fate. We fight tyranny and oppression of all kinds keeping in mind the battles of those who struggled and died that we might be free.

Pluralism
We believe in a tolerant and open society, and we welcome all people to enjoy its benefits and responsibilities.

Looking Forwards
These days I am happy to ditch the pride and emphasize the patriotism. I always did feel a strong affinity for anyone who walked on the sunny side of the street, but what racial identity has become in America since 2005 is a travesty. It doesn’t properly reflect anything like the notion of pride I alluded to. What I meant was a complete, unapologetic lack of shame which is nothing like today’s passive-aggressive pronoun declarations. I have to give some silent props to those Asians and immigrants who carry on the simple patriotism I’m talking about. Without getting into ‘true American’ debates I must say, especially after this Memorial Day, that a praxis of humble respect in patriotism satisfies most everything I ever meant about ‘pride’. Yet I eschew pride that I may escape the fall.

I also don’t want to get into fighting tyranny and oppression of all kinds. I’m giving up that Sheepdog aspect. I don’t pretend that my guns and ammo are for anything but my personal safety, my skill development and my recreational enjoyment. I don’t fear at all for my personal safety and am not inclined to desire CCW. If I need to pickup a stick or run away, I can handle that without Mr. Smith or Mr. Wesson.

Other than that the Old School declaration of values stand and I don’t aim to be evangelical about them, except when people ask me about culture.

I recently wrote:

The alleviation of pain is not the purpose of civilization. The purpose of civilization is to standardize and communicate how to deal with the inevitability of pain and suffering. In other words the purpose of civilization is to sustain culture. A culture needs the backbone of civilizational infrastructure, so that the praxis of a culture survives multiple generations - a culture that adjusts to the change of society’s circumstances - a culture whose dynamism openly edifies and inspires human creativity.

So I want to say right now that I accept Science and Religion as frameworks appropriate to the humble edge of Discovery, with only a marginal amount of respect for humble self-discovery in Gnostic frameworks. I can’t say I absolutely prefer self-deprecating humor over calm, Zen self-possession. Get back to me on that one. But I say this in distinction from frameworks of Technology and Magic, which are ascendant, especially in matters of AI and wishful thinking.

Conserve What?
Well lets make some of that easy and lighthearted - starting with nostalgia.