After
an initial foray into the similarities between China and the South (https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/china-and-dixie-approaching-friendship-between-two-tellurocracies), Prof Alexander Dugin
has opened fresh ground for us to plow with regard to this subject. We will now put our hand to the plow and see
what further ties we can find between the two peoples and their cultures.
The
Middle Logos
Prof
Dugin writes of China,
The
Chinese Logos unfolds exclusively and absolutely in the middle sphere, in the
intermediary world which is conceived as the main and only one. Neither Heaven
and Yang nor Water and Yin, that is to say neither the Apollonian heights nor
the Cybelean depths acquire autonomous ontologies or a particular Logos. There
are no extremes, there is only the center between, which constitutes them over
the course of a subtle dialectical game. The gods, people, the elements, Empires,
rites, animals, luminaries, cycles, and lands all represent the unfolding of
the middle Logos and are but traces of the dynamic, rhythmic pulsation of the
Center always situated equally in the middle between two poles which are void
of autonomous being and which intersect one another by virtue of great harmony.
--‘The Noology of the
Ancient Chinese Tradition’, https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/noology-ancient-chinese-tradition
One
sees this same emphasis on The Middle in Southern thought and life. The late Prof Thomas Landess of Georgia
spells it out in his essay on Southern religious life, in which he notes that
it is neither the Father nor the Holy Ghost Who is most important in Southern
Christianity but the incarnate Son of God, Who lived with us in the world as
one of us. This results in
characteristics that distinguish the South from the other cultural regions
surrounding her in the (unnecessary) American union. He says:
Southerners have a sense
of place in a way that sets them apart from other Americans. New Englanders, Easterners, even
Midwesterners have always believed in abstract America, the land of the free
and the home of the brave, with liberty and justice for all. Southerners have been more inclined to love
its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills, and more accurately, certain
rocks and woods, the ones they see and move among and know are real. Abstractions, however pretty, are to most Southerners
no more than vague and inaccurate rumors of the truth, a questionable report on
the nature of God the Father.
. . .
. . . It is God the Son who represents the
family in the councils of the land. God
the Father remains at home, brooding over the headlines in His newspaper, which
tell of the perennial failures of mankind.
He knows in His infinite wisdom that almost nothing can be done, but He
sends the Son anyway, as a testimony to His good will and His agreeable nature.
The Son goes to the town
council, or the state legislature, or the United States Senate knowing that he
will be crucified. He is particularly
well versed on crucifixions as the result of the War [the War of Northern
Aggression-W.G.], which He knows was no Armageddon but one of the many just
causes in history that are defeated by superior forces and confused logic.
. . . Southerners have been relatively immune
to the tyranny of ideas in an age characterized by the emergence of one
ideology after another. . . .
In some measure this
reluctance to join the larger movements of the age results from the fact that
Southerners do not believe they have to join anything in order to have a sense
of belonging, to derive some personal satisfaction from an emotional
identification with a larger group of their own kind. They belong, after all, to the family, which
has the advantage over “the Folk,” or “the Proletariat,” or “the Party” in that
the family is composed of flesh-and-blood people, whom you know well and who
know you and who, because they are so complicated, defy ideological
classification.
. . .
Of course, such a recognition
is not always pleasant and heart-warming, it can be a warning and an
anathema. . . . In being members of the same tribe or clan we
share with one another the secret of our own depravity, our certain knowledge
of what it was that the Son died to save us from.
. . . In one sense the power of Southern
fiction lies in the very fact that it is not about the South but merely takes
place there. Thus it has a fine
particularity that gives flesh and bone to its universal soul. In that respect it is analogous to the
created order itself. We delight in its
accidental variety and are spiritually moved by its substantial revelation of
the Divine. As it is with great literature,
so it is with people. . . .
To boil the matter down to
an essential proposition, the best of Southern literature is characterized by
its ontological orthodoxy. For the most
part Southern writers believe somehow, some way, in the Incarnation and in all
that such a miraculous event implies.
The flesh—the concrete particulars of time and place—are therefore
important, good, and hence sacred. . . .
--‘A Note on the Origin of
Southern Ways’, Why the South Will Survive, Univ. of Georgia Press,
1981, pgs. 162-6
Since
everything does unfurl within the Middle in the South and China, a great deal
of importance is placed on external behavior (rather than inner holiness) and
the gentleman and the lady (rather than the saint) become the ideals that men
and women strive towards. Prof Landess
explains about the Southern attitude:
Preachers speak of Him
[the Lord Jesus Christ-W.G.] as if He were a close friend, someone known to
every member of the congregation as the incarnation of the way they all should
behave and never quite do.
Because of this familiar
Presence (at times too easily familiar), Southerners have always paid some
corporate attention to ethics, exemplary behavior as a mode of serving and
worshipping God. Perhaps the best
example of such an attitude is to be found in Robert E. Lee’s famous statement,
“Duty is the sublimest word in the English language.” . . .
His sentiments are echoed in the letters of countless ordinary citizens
as well as in those of public figures and are by no mean narrowly sectarian.
Thus, a “good Christian”
is someone who behaves well, and the phrase is still more likely to be used in
the South than elsewhere in the nation.
Indeed the attention to personal conduct that characterizes the South
has considerably strengthened communal feeling over the years, though in ways
that make many people uncomfortable.
Typically, one is always under scrutiny in Southern towns and
cities. Virtue is measured in terms of
objective behavior as well as in properly orthodox sentiment, and vice is noted
as well, though not in the same way that it was noted in seventeenth-century
Salem [a town in Puritan New England-W.G.].
God the Son, after all, does not persecute witches.
--Ibid, p. 162
Prof
Richard Weaver adds,
To take over his task
[i.e., the philosophic doctor of the Middle Ages-W.G.], the dawning modernism
chose the gentleman. There was logic in
this choice, for the gentleman is a secularized expression of the same thing. Rulers any group must have; and, after
repudiating the sanction of religion, the age turned to the product of a
training which would approximate religion in breadth and depth. . . .
. . . The American South not only cherished
the ideal [of the gentleman-W.G.] but had given it an infusion of fresh
strength, partly through its social organization but largely through its
education in rhetoric and law.
--Ideas Have
Consequences, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013 [1948], pgs. 50, 51
Confucius
gives us the Chinese equivalents to these thoughts:
The Master said: ‘The noble man takes the Right as his
foundation principle, reduces it to practice with all courtesy, carries it out
with modesty, and renders it perfect with sincerity. Such is the noble man.’
--The Analects,
Thomas Crofts edr., Dover Publications, 1995, Book XV, Ch. XVII, p. 94
Tzŭ Chang asked Confucius
the meaning of virtue, to which Confucius replied: ‘To be able everywhere one goes to carry five
things into practice constitutes Virtue.’
On begging to know what they were, he was told: ‘They are courtesy, magnanimity, sincerity,
earnestness, and kindness. With courtesy
you will avoid insult, with magnanimity you will win all, with sincerity men
will trust you, with earnestness you will have success, and with kindness you
will be well fitted to command others.’
--Ibid., Book XVII, Ch.
VI, p. 106
Herbert
Fingarette, commenting on Confucius’s teachings, writes,
. . .
The
rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/china-dixie-and-life-middle .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
No comments:
Post a Comment