Bronze Age Pervert and the Undending Struggle against Aristocracy

Life, most people would agree, is unfair. Some people are rich, powerful, glamorous, and admired; others are poor, oppressed, uncool, and despised. And, it seems like the ones who get the top slots in this hierarchy are often not the most deserving, but the lucky, the ruthless, the beautiful and the conniving. Virtue, everyone says, is not really rewarded, whereas wickedness often is.

There are a variety of responses one can make to this. One is to insist that none of it really matters, because it is the poor and downtrodden who are truly blessed by god. This has been over the centuries a very powerful response, helping millions to lead satisfying lives and inspiring a few to achieve ecstasies of renunciation.

Another is to fight, politically, for a more just world; we'll come back to this one at the end. 

A third is to try, somehow, to set up a system in which the "best" really do occupy the top slots. Plato's political dialogues are focused on exactly this point, and from him the idea has stumbled through the western tradition down to our own time. Nobody agrees on what Machiavelli was really trying to say in his books, but one view is that he wanted to teach elite young men how to reach the top while serving their cities or kingdoms.

The notion that the top slots should go to the "best" is not confined to politics. There is an old and strong tradition holding that the really top people are the intellectuals, whose worth is measured by the boldness and power of their ideas and works. Nietzsche, one of the key thinkers in this discourse, wrote that a civilization is the universe's way of producing a few truly great minds. This emphasis shifts the problem from "how do the best achieve power" to "how do the best attain the freedom they need to think and create, and the wherewithal to spread their wisdom."

In the modern world of mass media and mass democracy this kind of thinking has taken on a different tone. While in ancient Greece the "problem" was that the truly good were oppressed the powerful few, be they tyrants or oligarchs, in the modern world they are oppressed by the masses. Modern intellectuals may have the freedom to publish their ideas in small magazines, or on their blogs, but this does not matter because nobody reads their work or recognizes their greatness. Real excellence remains scorned.

All that was by way of introducing a very strange contemporary best-seller, titled Bronze Age Mindset, by an author who signed himself Bronze Age Pervert. I have not read BAM, and will not, but I have spent a few hours this evening reading reviews and responses; here is a fairly sympathetic summary if you want to read more. On its surface the book is not very impressive:

BAM appears at first glance to be a simplified pastiche of Friedrich Nietzsche written by an ESL-middle-school-message-board troll. Words are often misspelled or dropped, verbs misconjugated, punctuation rules ignored. For example, a prototypical BAP sentence reads “Wat means?”

And so far as I can tell, BAM is basically another version of the young Nietzschean screed, urging young men to get tough, get smart, storm the heights of power and influence, conquer hot women, etc. On his twitter feed, BAP is obsessed with weight lifting, and many of his posts are just pictures of buff men and toned women. He has something of an obsession with beauty, and one of his main attacks on the irritating masses is that they are motivated mainly by jealousy:

The bugman pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful [and seeks to] bury beauty under a morass of ubiquitous ugliness and garbage.

One of his attacks on modern civilization is the ugliness of our art, which he thinks is designed to destroy our natural love for the beautiful in the name of equality, which really means mass mediocrity.

But of course the main grievance is that the truly excellent are held back by the grinding banalites of liberal piety, which insists that everyone be polite even to the pathetic, everyone try to fit in, everyone pretend that the mediocre is just as valuable as the extraordinary. There is no greatness because we shame anyone who puts himself forward as great. There are no alpha wolves/gorillas/lions/men, because the betas stomp us down. In opposition to all of this BAP offers the mindset of the Bronze Age Hero, which is a passionate desire “to be worshiped as a god!”

There are two interesting points here. One is that BAP has now been identified, and he turns out to be Costin Vlad Alamariu, a Yale University political science PhD. According to Blake Smith, Alamariu's dissertation attacked the tradition that runs from Nietzsche through Leo Strauss to Alan Bloom, which emphasized that the truly "free spirits" should scorn the masses and write only for each other, if necessary by concealing their true meaning behind a facade of acceptable rhetoric. Alamariu argued that modern conservative thought was failing either to inspire to young or to halt the continuing decay of society, and that what was needed was a more radical and youth-friendly kind of politics. BAP, it seems, is just Alamariu carrying out the program laid out in that dissertation. BAP does warn his followers that they might need to keep their actual thoughts secret, in order to survive in our miserably fallen age, but he at least is through with trying to speak in code. He gleefully describes the violence of his vision:

The BAMs will “wipe away this corrupt civilization,” and justice will become the will of the stronger. Alamariu writes that his vision of justice is for predatory zoo animals to be “unleashed by the dozens, hundreds… the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns.”

Those who have bothered to attack BAM have called it fascist, but I don't think that is quite right. Obviously fascism shares some of BAM's themes and rhetoric: the call for a violent cleansing of society, the contempt for weakness, the celebration of inequality. But actual fascist leaders have had very little in common with Bronze Age heroes. They tend to be short, ordinary-looking, and unbuff, with a history of failure before they entered politics. But the main difference is that BAM has nothing to say about either nation or race. One assumes that most of BAM's readers despise blacks and Jews, and Alamariu may as well, but the main animus is against ordinary people of every race. If you look at the contemporary fascism of, say, Russia, you see very little about individual heroes, but instead an endless insistence on the wonders of the Russian People. It is the whole people who are despised by outsiders and must fight for their rightful place in the world. BAP is having none of that; to him the few truly great beings are oppressed everywhere, and their only loyalty should be to themselves.

One of my thoughts about all of this is that until very recently, most human civilizations were dominated by a hereditary aristocracy; there are few things more universal. The longing of people like BAP to be and be seen as part of an elite tells me that the aristocratic impulse is deep and ancient. The thought that I am better than you, and therefore deserve to be richer, more powerful, and more respected than you, is surely among the most ancient human thoughts, probably shared with other social mammals. One can imagine evolutionary reasons why this is so widespread, and why it appears even in people raised in societies with a strongly egalitarian ideology.

I would call the political philosphy of BAM aristocratic. BAP says nothing about a hereditary elite, of course, so what it envisages must be something like Jefferson's "natural" aristocrats, the people who deserve to lead because of their excellence. 

And (finally) the reason I am writing about this, is that BAM's exhortation represents the exact opposite of my own political views.

I can find things I admire and agree with in the writings of fascists and communists, but BAM inspires in me nothing but loathing. I agree, as I have said, that there is something "natural" about aristocracy; so far as I know, there has never been a civilization without a leadership class that believed in its own special status and special fitness to rule. That just means we must always be on our guard against aristocratic rhetoric and thinking. The whole point of my politics is to fight those aristocratic tendencies, to insist that everyone matters, and work for a world in which a few do not hoard most of the wealth and power for themselves.