It is our mission to foster open debate among different currents of rightist thought, as they confront the challenges of modernity. We believe that the Truth can only be obtained by an honest and sincere exchange of views, unfettered by the tyranny of thought control. The only toxic ideology of the twenty-first century is the inverted virtue of wilful blindness and enforced ignorance.
The above text is recited by members of a small community of young men and women in the greater Sydney metropolitan region, who would, on occasion, congregate to discuss events of the passing times, reflect on the history of their people, the state of their nation, and ponder its place in the future. It is in this spirit that the Observer & Review is now published, having arisen from this eclectic milieu which this year celeb-rated its eleventh anniversary.
In explaining the need for a new print journal, a brief outline of our worldview may be in order: What matters most cannot be empirically measured. This has become undeniably clear in the wake of the Twentieth Century’s great conflict of ideologies, between the East and West, in which we suffer the consequence of the “Free World’s” overripened triumphalism. In an era defined by the reign of quantity, Soviet irrationality became primarily noticeable in the field of economics; its material bankruptcies drove it through sclerotic stasis to administrative and governmental death. Little effort needed to be exerted to recognise this bankruptcy: even a blind man would notice if the masonry with which his house was built started to collapse around him, or on him. The decline we are witnessing in the West, by contrast, is not as easy to identify in terms that can be recorded with the same level of accounting certainty; and not to the same level of satisfaction demanded by neoliberal apologists for the status quo.
Our decline is primarily a cultural matter: intangible, ephemeral, and one that therefore defies precise mathematical assessments. It is invisible to technocratic eyes. Civilisational self-confidence cannot be measured in financial ledgers or the productive output of five-year plans; any signs there merely evince symptoms of a deeper problem. Notwithstanding demographic and other related trends that can indeed be tabled or graphed, the significance (even existence) of our present decline is therefore much more difficult to convey to the broader populace.
The prevalence of doctrinaire rationalism and an ideology that promotes hyper-individuality may provide an explanation why this is so. Its dominance in the intellectual life has displaced all other non-measurable concerns from the individual conscience and public debate, leading to the cultivation of a thoroughly déclassé populace, which in turn becomes atomised, deracinated and dehumanised; man becomes a generic puzzle-piece of universal application, who belongs anywhere, every-where and therefore nowhere.
In the end, obsessive utilitarianism proves itself to have little utility in the maintenance of those things that one lives for, like beauty, or the memory of one’s forefathers; virtue declines, and is replaced by values, colourless empty vessels into which the rude will of a dominant faction pours its ideology.
This is a consequence of the reduction of all worth to only the materially quantifiable. It has also caused the demise of authority (unless defined in strictly positivist terms), hierarchy (unless secular), identity (unless contrived or socially constructed), and the complete rejection of particularity (in all its organic or essentialist forms). Last century’s struggle against militantly collectivist communism has thus been followed by the death of community and the denial of the Good and True among the ostensible victors. Ironies abound: old foes may have waged war against the “opium of the masses”, but it is our civilisation that has now lost any belief in the transcendent, and through it, lost faith in itself; taste, manners, and mores, once intuitively known and experienced as an unspoken language that bound individual members of a society into a great whole, have become relativised, subjectivised, rendered effectively meaningless; cash nexus obsessions have resulted in inferior built environments and inferior public service; the edifice now decays around us as ‘main street’ is increasingly festooned with the signs and symbols of a state endorsed civic cult based on an anti-culture of self-hate.
Whether it is a matter of distorting our culture, redefining our history, or manipulating human nature itself, we are increasingly living in an age of a Great Lie, one that is being promoted by Power with greater impudence, and enforced by it with increasing levels of legislative, policing and managerial control – just as its mendacity becomes apparent to a broader cross-section of a brow-beaten public. We refuse to genuflect before Power’s idols. It is not an act of charity or kindness to indulge in somebody else’s delusion. To force a person to participate in a falsehood is an act of humiliation, and we refuse to be humiliated.
Advances in technology mask this decline, giving the impression of ‘progress’, while the things that make life liveable and lovable continue to fade into memory. Tears in the fabric are stitched, cracks are filled in with cheap plaster, yet the ship of state maintains its present course. A totalitarian panopticon is built by a globalised corporate elite animated by the spirit of collectivised control, while an enfeebled, cowardly or complicit political class either passively watches-on, or actively facilitates its growth. Is this the “end of history”?
What is needed instead is simply to stop fostering the conditions for the proliferation of hostile and self-destructive pathologies, while reigniting the moral imagination according to the traditions and legacies of those who came before. We cannot expect Power to do either of these things, but we can try, with this infinitesimally small initiative of launching a journal of neo-dissident thought. We believe in the ultimate unity of politics and religion insofar as the mundane should always be subjected to higher concerns and interests, and it is from this position that we will approach the various matters addressed in these pages. Here we recall the words of Russell Kirk, from his 1971 study of T. S. Eliot:
How may a man be born again and a blasted land born anew? Why, screw your courage to the sticking place: dare to ask terrifying questions, and you may be answered.
Hopefully, those committed to the conceits of Whiggery, its fanatical outgrowths and bastard children in the world of politics and culture, will find our work terrifying indeed.
This journal is not a commercial enterprise; its creation is a vocational affair produced by people who wish to fill a gap in the Australian literary and intellectual scene for writing that addresses issues that would ordinarily find no platform for publication. We intend to publish three times a year, subject to writers’ involvement and readers contributions.
The O&R will be published in print only since we have little faith in the transient and easily censored nature of the internet; cyberspace has its uses, but we are interested in those who make the effort to engage in real life. While we have friends and associates and are funded out of the good will of supporters, we have no political party or factional affiliations or memberships – we will spare no efforts to maintain this status.
Substantive contributions and correspondence is welcome, from all; the latter is encouraged even from among those who take issue with what appears in these pages and wish to enter the breach. While we do not believe that Truth is relative, we do believe it can be discovered through bona fide dialogue.
Welcome.
The Editor
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