Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
Weak men create bad times, and
Bad times create strong men.

The Past Is a Future Country. The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution
Edward Dutton & J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles
Societas, 2022

The end is nigh …

* * *

Part I: My Awakening

The world is falling apart: a simple anecdote.

My family lives in a large exurb outside of a major American city. Our town is sizable — it is both economically and demographically diverse. It is also very safe. Across the United States, there are similar towns outside of every major city in that it represents a middle point — somewhere in between rich and hoity-toity towns and towns that are depressed and dangerous. It is firmly a middle-class town albeit with sizable pockets of poverty, the latter phenomenon exacerbated by a large and recent infusion of illegal immigrants. Our children, like most, play youth sports. One of the town fields is located near one of these pockets of poverty that is mostly comprised of government subsidized housing. On a random Sunday afternoon last year, one of our children played in a sports contest on that field — the only people watching were the parents and families of the participants. Close to the field was the thing that is both the bane and salvation of every sports parent: a portable toilet (or “Porta Potti”). On this otherwise unremarkable day, a swarm of fifteen or so minority children — aged between ten to fifteen — emerged from the housing development and began hitting the Porta Potti with an aluminum baseball bat every time an unfortunate parent used it. It was clear that this was a type of dangerous game to these children — something they had done before — as they wildly guffawed with each strike of the bat. I can only imagine what the experience was for the parent inside of the thing. The field was big enough such that there were not enough people around it to dissuade the “gang” — after all, no one wants to watch a sporting event near the Porta Potti. My wife and I looked on in disbelief as we watched this happen from a distance to a few unsuspecting parents. Eventually, I walked over to the Porta Potti and stood a kind of silent guard over it for the duration of the game. The “gang” was most unhappy, and I thought it possible that the next target for the baseball bat might be me. Other than scowling and aggressive glances, however, my presence next to the Porta Potti ended that afternoon’s hijinks.

On the way home from the event, the reality of such behavior dismayed my wife and me. Perchance I am overstating it, but there was a feral and dehumanized aspect to these children in the way that they took glee in terrorizing people in vulnerable positions. This was removed from childish antics by kind, not degree. There was something so unseemly about it that it felt a little like Western civilization had cracked in the manner of something like Clockwork Orange. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have never looked at our town the same way after that experience. Parenthetically, it fits together with a noticeably increasing baser and more imbecilic feature of many of the people of the community in which I live. Without any hyperbole, a walk in our local suburban mall today reveals a seeming degeneracy and indecency, culturally and physically, that has appeared as if one waved an instantaneous dysgenic magic wand.

It is an astounding thing.

Never in my life have I experienced directly “White Flight” — but I have a sense now of what motivated it in urban areas during the 1950s and 60s. I think that may change, and areas once considered immune from that phenomenon in the United States, like middle-class American suburbs, are now changing in a way that might mirror what happened in American urban areas some sixty years ago.

* * * *

One of the ironclad ideological laws that has spanned my entire political life in the United States is that the culture only moves in one direction — leftwards. As a political contrarian and conservative, I have watched American culture descend one depressing rung of debasement after another. Even as my adult life has spanned a full generation, I am amazed and confounded by how quickly and oppressively the culture has sunk into ever greater displays of depravity and lawlessness. Without belaboring it — because if what I am saying is not self-evident, no amount of elaboration will suffice — the culture has fully embraced a self-destructive nihilism and hedonism that is both appalling and unsustainable. Pornography, homosexuality, fornication, infidelity, feminism, abortion, transgenderism, atheism, blasphemy, and every other sort of political and social pathology are not merely tolerated — they are celebrated by a decadent elite who rules the government, media, entertainment, and educational establishments. Add to this an open and revolting attack on the historic stock of the country (i.e., Whites or ethnic Europeans) in which discrimination against them and their children is based solely on their ancestors’ alleged crimes. Alongside the grievance culture, the debased elites intentionally open the borders to Third World illegal immigration to “brown” the country as both a vote-gathering ploy and to punish the historic stock’s alleged colonialism and exploitation of the Third World. And ever more outrageously does it drift — yesterday’s shock (e.g., gay “marriage”) looks anodyne compared to today’s shock (e.g., “sex change” operations for children). Yesterday’s demand for a “color-blind” society has given way to today’s “Woke” demand for open borders, minority reparations, and institutionalized discrimination against White Americans. Yesterday’s plea for tolerance of sexual deviance has become today’s demand for categorical social conformity in favor of the basest forms of degeneracy. What comes next in this diabolical descent is hard to predict other than it will be something even more wicked or racially charged.

If the culture’s deterioration were not enough, the nihilistic guardians of this cultural destruction do everything in their incredible power to ostracize, censor, and destroy that segment of the population resistant to these cultural “innovations” and otherwise refuse to apologize for their continued existence. Simply stated, contrary views to the predominant liberal-left orthodoxy are to be crushed. We are the people famously mocked by then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 as follows: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” We are the people then-candidate Hilary Clinton labeled as the “deplorables.” Our liberal masters deride vital social institutions like traditional marriage and family, stay-at-home mothers, regular church attendance, social homogeneity (and the preference for it), and patriotism as anachronisms of ignorance, oppression, superstition, and violence. We who celebrate our ancestors for the contribution they made as explorers, inventors, philosophers, theologians, artists, scientists, musicians, or warriors are derided as racists who dare to live without the burden of White Guilt that those same elites insist that we wallow in — in what amounts to a demand that we offer a never-ending apology to the automatically righteous “People of Color.” The moorings of Western Civilization — and all that binds it in blood, temperament, and history — are coming undone with shocking speed. As a lifelong political junkie and conservative, I am a firsthand witness to the dreadful collapse in real time.

It cannot go on like this much longer — and it will not.

* * *

Words are difficult for me to summon to convey adequately the revulsion I hold for what my country and the broader West has become — I have become a stranger in a bizarre land. As the culture has hurtled downward into more disturbing displays of anti-social behavior, stupidity, and vice, my views have become more hardened as a result. I have evolved, as it were, into something more retrograde. It is a far place from where I started: my first political inklings were conventionally conservative and communitarian. At its heart, as a naïve young man, I wished to live in a country where law-abiding people got along, venerated the traditions of family and nation, and were inculcated with the virtues of thrift, hard work, and respect. These were the values my parents taught me. I anchored these communitarian hopes to a belief in the “American Way,” which was implicitly an endorsement of the classical liberal antecedents of Americanism itself. Thus, when I was young, I saw the American flag as embodying all these hopes. To put a bow on it: all of it can be summed up in my admiration for everything that President Ronald Reagan represented at the time. He was the personification of my convictions and my hope for the U.S. as a young man.

As the country has changed, so have I. My conventional conservatism gave way to something different as I grew older. The belief in classical liberalism as part of my patriotic fervor has waned; hence, my belief in Americanism as an ideology has all but vanished. I am more Catholic, more European, and more ancient in my political thinking now. Blood, soil, and faith animate my political thought much more than the promise of constitutional government; ergo, it is the people and their values and virtues — and not the system — that matters. Call me a “paleo-conservative,” “alt-right,” or the “dissident right,” but whatever pejorative I am called, it means that my communitarian impulses found a home in a recognition that I belong to a people (broadly European) with a long and storied shared culture and civilization — and a predicate for any successful society depends, at least in part, on the broad homogeneity and shared culture of that society. To put it more crudely, race, for the lack of a better word, became real to me as a part of my political thought. That, of course, makes me liable for the current political heresy of “racism” — especially when one considers that my view of race, broadly speaking, now includes a preference for political existence that is racially homogeneous as opposed to heterogeneous. Not only do I not think that “diversity is our strength,” I dare to think that diversity and pluralism, which are exponentially expanding under the rule of our present elites, are invitations to social chaos and declining levels of social trust and cohesion. To be sure, race is not an idol for me or a mechanism for supremacist thinking — nor could it ever be. Rather, I accept the notion that relative racial homogeneity is necessary for a functioning society. The collapse of American society is driven, at least in significant part, by increasing diversity and the dilution of America’s European stock. In present terms, there are few statements that are more retrograde than this one.

The crucible for my political evolution has been two-fold — first, I became a traditional Catholic years ago, which, by its nature, carries with it a thoroughgoing critique of Americanism as an extension and instantiation of Enlightenment thought. Second, I lived through — and am living through — the fever pitch of anti-White insanity right now. The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the general lawlessness that has continued since radicalized me on the question of race in a way that I neither sought nor invited. It is amazing what the concentrated hate of a people — White people — does to a constituent of those same people. It makes them inevitably come to terms with their corporate identity. Even if it had been something that I consciously refused to countenance for the entirety of my prior life, the issue found me. No, I am hated because I am White and so are others because they are White. I am bombarded with messages, subtle and not-so-subtle, that I belong to an especially odious category of human beings on account of my Whiteness. Setting aside that such an accusation is false and malicious, it has a boomerang effect. The net impact of all this hate that has rained down upon my kind — Whites — and how that hate has been mainstreamed over the last decade has forced a moral reckoning in my soul. It is as if I screamed in frustration that I am not ashamed of myself or my heritage — I am proud to be of European blood and, when pushed, I am proud of the immense accomplishments of my people. If I am “racist” because of these thoughts — if I am odious and retrograde for these opinions — my creation as such has only the haters to blame. Quite simply, without the vitriol against me or my kind, I would have never reached this point. I surmise that if I feel this way — even in the face of internal pressures of my mind to ignore it — others have been similarly changed by it as well. Our elites are creating a backlash White identity movement by their racism.

To be sure, traditional Catholicism is silent on the question of race or racial homogeneity. “Liberal Catholicism” spouts that pluralism and diversity are religious commandments, and liberal churchmen opine that support for “open borders” is not merely a political good but a moral command. Setting aside the theological discussion of Christianity’s position on the question of ethnos or race, suffice it to say from my perspective, the only affirmative obligation that Christianity imposes is the belief that God created all men in His image and likeness and all men share an equal dignity before Him and His Church. But that view, which is one to which I readily accede, does not command, as an article of faith, that the tribes and nations of the earth must meld into a single amorphous coffee-colored people, or, more pointedly, that the conscious preservation of a particular tribe or nation is, in and of itself, a sin. Not only do I not scruple over my preference for racial homogeneity as a predicate for social and political cohesion or even the comfort I feel with my own, but I also find the liberal supposition of my “sin” in preferring it to be laughable. Put more bluntly, I reject the moralizing on this topic from the same people who say I must celebrate sodomy or feminism. My views on race — as well as my views on about everything else — are the same as how intelligent Westerners believed a century ago; ergo, I worship like them, think like them, raise my family like them, and hope like them. Their way of life was self-evidently better than our way of life today even if we have more technological “bells and whistles.” If I am going to follow an example of life, better theirs than the degenerate leaders and culture of today.

Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel as if I have voluntarily made myself into a dinosaur. Not only have I rebelled against every liberalizing trend, but I have also rebelled against them with greater intensity as I have aged. While I am no genius, I am an educated and successful professional in the United States. Being a milquetoast liberal would have made my life “easier,” as it were, because I would have simply followed the current that everyone in my professional class appears to have done. I would have dutifully put pronouns in my LinkedIn profile like everyone else; I would have stopped having children at the conformist number of two and sent my erstwhile employable spouse back to work; I would have enjoyed the creature comforts that come with two professional incomes at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the developed world. And more to the point, I would not have had to continuously bite my tongue when liberal after liberal in my professional circles out-virtue-signaled each other with one notion more ridiculous than the other. I could have leaned into the smugness that comes with guilt-free first-class air travel because I assiduously recycle and hate Donald Trump. Yes, life would have been easier as a beta male and simp. Perhaps I would have had to become a vegetarian, but the quinoa salad is delicious.

But alas I could not stomach it. Now, this is not to say I am heroic — far from it. I do not advertise my culturally seditious thought — I am mostly silent in professional settings with respect to what I think. Indeed, my colleagues would be positively horrified if they knew the full depth of my opinions about them and the world. I have chosen a middle path of resistance: I work silently in their world and offer resistance where and when I can without overtly betraying just how subversive my thought really is. In the confines of my home — and in the confines of the pew before God — I am freer to be myself without the charade. With my friends of similar thinking, and there are many in my life, I am free to unload on what I think. And, of course, there is the outlet of writing, which is the apogee of my ability to disentangle my thoughts about the dystopic world I inherited from my parents.

All of this is said to underscore the point that notwithstanding the ease of accommodation — the allure of just getting along with the world in obedience to its dictates — I just cannot do it because I am a natural contrarian. I did not ask to be one, but I take comfort in it all the same. To put it in very trite terms, being on the winning team is less important to me than being on the right team. And, for whatever reason, God gave me the gumption to say the magic word of ‘no’ even if — and especially if — pressure is applied to me to force a ‘yes’. This obviously does not make me a saint, but it is the only way that I know to live.

The contrarian’s lot is a lonely one; whether he is culpable for it or not, there he is, by himself, against the world. While I have come to accept the social sentence of intellectual and moral isolation and disempowerment that comes from being a contrarian against today’s inexorable liberal tide, I do not relish it. That said, I have recently read something that promised relief from my isolation even if that relief would come during social chaos and political breakdown.

Part 2: Review of The Past Is a Future Country

The Past Is a Future Country is a fascinating book. I was introduced to Dutton as an author in my later years. He is a youngish Ph. D who has reinvented himself as an evolutionary biologist of sorts — in the vein of J. Phillipe Rushton and Kevin MacDonald. In the beginning of my foray into banned books, I read and reviewed Dutton’s book, Make Sense of Race, which makes the case that race is real. Parenthetically, I read any number of books about the science of race that were effectively banned merely because they take a heterodox position compared with the prevailing liberal view that race is nothing more than a social construct. This book is different; it touches on race to be sure (and assumes for brevity’s sake the reality of race), but this is a book about genetics, fertility, demography, culture, and politics — and the implications for the future. It is a limited account of the history and future of Western man, at least in selected ways, from a Darwinian perspective. That alone will turn off some readers, and it is discussed a bit more below. However, this evolutionary reasoning is “within-species” human evolution, not speciation; as such, it should not be objectionable to Catholics. But it is much more than that, it is a detailed model of what may come based upon who has children and what this means for the future.

The idea that the religious will inherit the world has special currency in my life as a traditional Catholic. These types of Catholics typically have exceptionally large families by conventional standards because they, among other things, take seriously the Church’s teaching prohibiting birth control. If most Catholics in the West use contraception in much the same way as their secular or non-Catholic neighbors despite the Church’s teaching that contraception usage is sinful, traditional Catholics are uniform in their complete rejection of contraception and their general acceptance of patriarchy. It is common for such families to have six, seven, or more children, and it is further likely that the seriousness and devotion of traditional Catholics means that their children likely will similarly be believing Catholics in future generations. It does not take a demographer to see that the implications for traditional Catholicism are very bright and the likelihood of it eventually eclipsing conventional (i.e., liberal) Catholicism is likewise high — and sooner than people think. Ironically, the phenomenon that the authors tease out in the future of Western societies is at work on a much smaller scale in the Catholic Church. Ergo, she is divided between conservatives and liberals; the liberals have the seats of power, and the conservatives have the faith. Just like the broader society in the West, the Church shifted dramatically in a liberal fashion during the 1960s (Vatican II and its aftermath). Just like the broader society, the anti-social forces of liberalism inside the Church are sterile (producing no children or vocations, and only apostasy) while the faithful and conservative are fecund. We now have hit “peak” liberal Catholicism in the current pontificate, which, like the broader society, is pushing more outrageously in anti-social ways. Thus, what is happening in the Catholic Church fits precisely with what the authors contend is happening (or about to happen) in the broader Western world. Parenthetically, that is why the liberal Catholic hierarchy is trying in vain to crush it. I assume that similar trends exist for other religious groups (like Mormons, Amish, and certain Evangelical branches). Indeed, the liberal mainstream Protestant denominations are in a death spiral by comparison.

Compared with conservative and religious people, the modern misanthropic liberal ideology coupled with feminism produces next to no children. I have seen this up close as well: as someone in a profession overwhelmingly dominated by secularly inclined people, feminist and careerist professional women have surrounded me. Just by anecdote, their fertility is appalling low. Even for liberal “do-gooders,” like committed social justice warriors and “community activists,” socialists, and environmentalists, their brand of liberalism is just as fatal to fertility as is the liberalism of careerist women and effete beta men. I have always suspected that this dynamic would eventually mean that religious people would swamp liberal people in sheer numbers. In fact, as an example of this in microcosm, Israel, a formerly liberal state, is transitioning to an authoritarian and illiberal state based on demographics and fertility. The religious have many; the seculars do not. While Israel and Jews may not the best type for comparison (they are congenitally ethnocentric even as liberals), the experience shows the power of who has children and who does not, which has shown up in Israel already because of its small sample size. In fact, this is what The Past is a Future Country is about, and it is a ride filled with fascinating insights and predictions. Indeed, I cannot recall a more gripping book — perhaps because it reads like a plot-twisting prophecy albeit twinged with the science of demography and genetics.

The Past is a Future Country as a prediction for the future world needs to be qualified. Any social science analyses and modeling that make predictions of future human events are likely to be susceptible to attacks from a variety of angles, including bad assumptions, faulty predicates, or missed phenomenon. Even with the inherent problems with social science predictions, we should not assume that they are worthless. If the assumptions are largely correct and if the phenomena are reasonably predictable, then social science predictions about the future should be able to tell us something — not in the exactitude of a mathematical equation but something more akin to an artist’s sketch. The point here is not that things will unfold exactly as the authors predict — it is rather that the authors sought to model what is a known phenomenon: religious and traditionally conservative people outbreed irreligious and liberal people. Similarly, the very stupid and impulsive likewise outbreed irreligious and liberal people. Eventually there must be a political and social reckoning for these facts. This is a book that does what it can to tease all that it can from that reality while filling in the details of why societies and civilizations move as they do.

And this is what they promise in brief:

This book will be a story of exile and abandonment in that context, not triumph and rejuvenation. There will be a ‘Great Escape’, whereby intelligent, conservative people flee apocalyptic chaos to establish refuges of civilization in which they weather the storm of the Dark Age. Those exiled will be conservative, middle class, and white (defined very broadly), set against ‘post-liberal’ areas of mixed ethnic minorities, with some white admixture. Today, the Woke will continue to induce guilt in the white or otherwise ‘privileged’ middle-class population, but tomorrow the underclass will be the frightening majority of the Western population, and too vast in size, and offensive in character, to sustain further sympathy. Lower IQ whites, reluctant or unable to move due to the associations between low IQ and conservatism and between high IQ and migration, will simply merge into the majority non-white populations; dissolving away into extinction like the Neanderthals.

If we are on the cusp of a fundamental reorientation of the Western world in a conservative and religious way, it must seem like the world’s best kept secret. Indeed, from the perspective of the lived experience of someone in the Western world, it seems like an inexorable and unstoppable march to the left. And all the media and conventional news outlets parrot the same thing — we are moving, forever, in a progressive fashion. Those who complain about it are dinosaurs. Western Civilization has undoubtedly been moving in a direction that is irreligious and socially liberal for a long time now and this movement followed history in the West that was not liberal by any standard. Setting aside the historical antecedents for liberalism in the West, the question is why the West shifted from conservative and religious people to an ideology that abhors religion and conservative values. In the first instance, The Past Is a Future Country is an attempt to distill why this happened.

The authors posit that everyone — Westerners included — was once (and always) religious, ethnocentric, and conservative. I am not sure that I agree with that but more on that later. From the author’s perspective, these attributes were adaptive in the Darwinian sense — they made survival and propagation more likely than in their absence. We tend not to think of virtue in Darwinian terms, but virtue — in a man or in a community — is self-evidently adaptive. Delaying gratification, general intelligence, impulse control, respect for authority, sexual ethics (including monogamous marriage), and communitarian sensibilities contribute to a tribe or nation that grows, while the lack of any one of these things, or, catastrophically, all of them, contributes to a tribe’s or nation’s destruction. Piety and a belief in divine justice likewise contribute to a sense of belonging and a rationale for virtue. It does not take a genius to understand that it is easier to do hard things if there is a supernatural or communitarian reason for doing them.

It is strange to think of religiosity as a positive evolutionary trait but that is the argument. In fact, upon reflection, it makes perfect sense. The West became great because it was all of these — it was composed of pious, virtuous, and intelligent people who were tribally conscious. Without thinking of it in Darwinian terms, they were people who venerated the past (their ancestors) and made provision for the future (their children) — and the only people they did not think of were themselves. Today, it is all inverted: our age mocks the past, makes no provision for the future (because they have no children), and thinks only of themselves (as the narcissistic people that they are). In a few words, we are irreverent presentists.

The Past Is a Future Country is a proffer of how we got here — considering that liberalism is a destructive force, the authors spend time discussing how it came to predominate our Western societies. The leftward drift that we see all around us was driven by rising prosperity, education, and the collapse of infant mortality in the First World. The authors fix the beginning of this cycle as the Industrial Revolution, when constant environmental pressures began to wane, and an explosion of population began. Controversially, they also argue that maladaptive people — those who never would have survived or been allowed to breed under the harsher conditions of our ancestors — survived and reproduced in this population expansion. They essentially argue that the dystopia we have inherited in the present time is because of an excess of maladapted people propagating maladaptive ideas because life has become safer and easier. They liken us today to degenerate trust-fund babies living off the excess of our industrious parents with the caveat that we have all but exhausted the corpus of the trust sustaining our decadent lifestyle. In a sense, we have all become Paris Hilton. In that way, they treat extreme liberalism (which today is contemporary liberalism), atheism, and the host of social attitudes that accompany them as, in effect, a product of degenerative mental illness. Stated differently, the stupendous advances of the nineteenth century, which the religious and conservative version of Western Civilization created, ironically enough, allowed for an explosion of anti-social and individual extremist personality types to flourish in the aftermath.

Definitions matter: what is key here is how the authors define conservative and religious views versus liberal ones. They even admit that the new virulent multiculturalism and “Woke” views operate like a hyper-puritanical religion unto itself — with assorted dogmas, orthodoxies, heresies, saints, and sinners. For example, the modern concept of “hate speech” resembles blasphemy laws in past generations. From the outside, most of the left today are completely immune to reason or argument precisely because their moralistic views operate like a belief system as opposed to a reasoned ideology. To question them is to question their faith, not their ideas. Even if the religious are moralistic and intolerant (in the positive sense) — and even in favor of authoritarianism in some guise — the authors do not define the religious/conservative groups with respect to those values; as such, the “church” of multiculturism notwithstanding, our liberals today are not grouped with conservativism/religiosity by the authors on account of their shared (albeit vastly different) moralism or intolerance. Instead, the authors break down the differences between the two groups with respect to how they view five aspects of moral philosophy and action that themselves are grouped into two broader categories: binding moral foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) and individualizing moral foundations (care and fairness). In this approach, the authors rely upon the scholarship of Jonathan Haidt. Throughout the competition is between “binders” and “individualizers.” What is interesting is that today’s conservatives rate all five aspects about equally, according to the authors, while liberals tend to only value the individualizing traits. It is why the authors suppose that conservatives can empathize with liberals, but liberals cannot reciprocate, which is another invisible reason that the culture drifts leftwards.

It makes complete sense to me — setting aside the evolutionary language — why “binding” moral foundations are necessary for functioning societies. Individualizers could only predominate in a society that had been built with “binding” capital because their ideas only deconstruct and withdraw from that capital. In a sense, liberalism is parasitical and could never build a civilization itself. Assuming that it is maladaptive on the human evolutionary scale makes sense because it is obviously maladaptive on the civilizational scale. My own acceptance of an interest in “my people” — a tribal instinct, for the lack of a better phrase — fits squarely here. As I became more self-aware and revolted by liberal excesses in my own lifetime, the idea of tribe — or race or ethnicity or whatever you want to call it — has taken hold. Once the scales fell from my eyes, I thought about my family and children in a context that was tribal or racial. I do not want them accosted for being White and I came to terms with the particular gifts of my people, who are Whites or Europeans. Now, every time I hear anything suggesting antipathy towards Whites, I become that much more ethnocentric in favor of them. I am evidently not alone in this reaction; they note:

Consistent with the interpretation that there are fundamental differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, it has been found that when conservatives feel cheated of a reward, they feel that they deserve, then this elevates their feelings of hostility to other ethnic groups. They are group-oriented, so cheating them is cheating their group and that is what they care about. When liberals feel cheated in the same way, it elevates their feelings of hostility to members of their own group. Liberals are ‘individualists’ who are in constant competition with other members of their own ethnic group; conservatives are ‘tribalists’ who are in constant competition with other ethnic groups.

In the view of the authors, I am then an archetype of a “binding” conservative who sees unfairness to my kind as a reason to love and build up my kind. Thus, this book, which can seem like a recitation of social science data can be deeply personal and explanatory of why we react to what we react to.

Religious-conservative people also rate highly on “caring” and “fairness”; this makes sense too because Western Civilization has always given space, to a much greater extent than elsewhere, to the individual and his unique dignity and value. This fits squarely with Kevin MacDonald’s book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, which posits the qualitative difference of European people with regard to their capacity for high trust and empathetic societies. One way to look at the maladaptation of liberalism is that it is a gross distortion of the original good of empathy and humanity of European peoples in much the same way that feminism is gross distortion of the original good with respect to how European peoples treated their women generously compared with other peoples. This is also why I resisted — for as long as I did — the very notion of tribalism because not only was I indoctrinated by the predominant liberalism of extreme individualism, but I also empathized with it.

The authors argue that when an ideology reaches twenty percent of the population, a tipping point is reached, and the ideology picks up increasing power in that opportunists join it as something akin to a bandwagon effect. This is why the switch seems so abrupt and startling. We all know that people like winners and the tipping point is an indication of winning. As one might imagine, they identify the 1960s as the period in which we reached our liberal tipping point. Cumulatively over several generations, dysgenic people — people who would have been effectively banished from earlier religious and conservative societies that valued the communal necessity of socially appropriate behavior or would have died because of a high mutational genetic load — thrived without the need for piety, virtue, or tribalism (i.e., ethnocentrism). Eventually the maladapted people took over and the culmination of the maladaptation is what we know of as contemporary liberal society.

Similar to the idea of a “winning team” and the momentum of a new ideology, the authors introduce the so-called “cultural mediation hypothesis,” which is the idea that the smartest people in each society embrace a new ideology (like liberalism or the Reformation) because they are opportunists and first to recognize the change and advantage to themselves first. The new ideology gathers momentum, and the momentum of opportunism takes on a social life itself. Another anecdote to make this opportunism point: I work with a talented White professional man who is in a leadership position in my organization. In one of our mandatory diversity seminars, he continually and obnoxiously virtue-signaled how bad White people were to the glee of the diversity commissariat. What was lost on him is that he, a White man, was dominating the discussion on the topic. He took over a diversity seminar from the putative minority facilitators. The irony of his frequent reminders to the mostly White audience to “listen” to minorities was that he was, in that very moment, not doing what he counseled. He could not help but be a leader even if he led in an obvious anti-social, self-defeating, and misanthropic, self-hating fashion. According to the authors, this man was someone who would have embraced and virtue-signaled his religious or ethnocentric “convictions” if the prevailing cultural ballast had been religious and conservative. As it was, he simply said what he was expected to say (even if with more enthusiasm and relish than was necessary). It is also a reminder that we conservatives will not need anything approaching a majority to win, as it were; there will always be intelligent opportunists waiting to join us once we hit a critical mass.

Virtue signaling is something that the authors harp on several times as a reason why this societal momentum picks up speed in one direction or another — to do it effectively, social climbers have to one-up each other with the signal of greater virtue that is more directionally extreme than the one previously stated — “competitive virtue signaling.” This is why it moves one step inexorably at a time. Parenthetically, I see this among my fellow paleo-conservative friends — in our conversations, at least at times, the dynamic is one in which we are a little more conservative after the conversation because the only thing that moves our discussion is something just a little more conservative than what was said before. In a sense, we all virtue-signal; the only difference is whose opinion we value and thus who we aim our virtue signaling towards. It will be incredible to see this dynamic reversed in the broader culture — that is, virtue signaling moving further rightwards, but that is our destiny after liberalism’s coming implosion.

Religious conservatives fit squarely with the people who built Christendom and Western Civilization in the first place; today’s liberals are a vampiric force that can only destroy it (and are destroying it). As natural destroyers and parasites who are mostly concerned with their own sense of autonomy, it further makes sense that they are anti-natalist while religious conservatives are pro-natalist. Thus, even without parsing the rhetoric and expressions of anti-natalism, we can see why religious conservatives, as normal people who care about piety, family, community, and a sometimes inchoate group loyalty, would have a fertility advantage: the latter embrace family, and liberals as the equivalent of maladapted narcissists do not. Indeed, the authors suggest that narcissism and Machiavellianism are typical “liberal” traits in present-day Western societies which corresponds with elevated rates of their psychopathology and low self-esteem. The idea that liberalism comes from a surplus of genetically maladapted people is compelling and intuitive. Simply put, it fits.

The point here is that our political and religious views are flavored, at least in part, by a genetic predisposition — and our views, such as they are, are heritable to some extent. So conservative and religious people transmit those dispositions genetically — as well as environmentally — to their offspring. The same can be said of anti-social liberals who likewise transmit their maladaptive traits to their offspring — to the extent they have them. But the issue here is that intelligence and educational attainment currently have a negative correlation with fertility — except for religious conservatives. Liberals, who have ruled intelligence and educational attainment for a long time are self-selecting themselves out of existence in the same way as the Shakers did in the nineteenth century; or, in the pithier words of the authors, “devout liberals are going the way of the dodo.” Ergo, conservatives and religious people have more children than atheists and liberals and so do the stupid and impulsive. Both realities underpin the entire analyses by the authors such that they end up predicting both a rise of a huge — and imbecilic — underclass and an eventual takeover of the elites by the fundamentally conservative and religious. But the only people breeding — the religious-conservatives and the very stupid — are doing so for vastly distinct reasons. One breeds intentionally to express a religious commandment and communal values; the other unintentionally because they cannot practice self-control, evaluate the consequences of their actions, or competently manipulate contraceptive devices. Both realities co-exist with each other. The anecdote that started this essay is germane: religious conservatives will be surrounded by a large group of stupid, impulsive, and morally challenged.

What is happening to us, however, is not without precedent — only the scale of the looming collapse is. In the cyclicality and seasonality of empires and civilization, we see birth, youth, middle age, senescence, and death. We see vitality that creates surplus followed by mediocrity that feeds off that surplus, and crisis and death when that mediocrity is forced to fend for itself. From time immemorial elites have had fewer children as they became more prosperous and self-centered in the autumns of their respective civilizations. Our cycle, however, has lasted longer because of the sheer extent of the material advancement bequeathed to us by the Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors bequeathed a material paradise of technology in every conceivable way, but, as any Christian knows, fallen or postlapsarian man will ruin a paradise as soon as he enters it. Paradoxically, it was great height of our civilization, which itself was animated by the intensely felt conservative and religious attitudes, which enabled the advances of the West in the first instance, and which has led to the West to where it is today, the most depraved civilization in history. This material excess forestalled nature’s correction that destroyed societies like late-stage Rome or Athens that experienced similar sterility and decadence. The difference between us and them is that our largess was so bountiful that our descent into “maladaptation” was delayed even if it was inevitable.

The authors also argue that more people with psychopathy and other misanthropic pathologies survive and breed in this twilight period following the generations after the Industrial Revolution and this explains why so many people today seem bizarre, unhappy, or both. It is because they are all those things; perhaps we are hitting peak mutational load. Speaking of dysgenics, this collective mutational load operates alongside of an easier environment and has resulted in a decreasing overall level of intelligence that is bound to decrease further given current realities. To be clear, this is not simply an appraisal of the coming underclass — it is an indictment too of the relatively intelligent. All of us, bar none, are getting dumber with each passing generation. The explanation of how we got here, even if offered in starkly Darwinian terms, seems more than plausible:

The collapse in child mortality, and relaxation of selection pressures generally speaking, permitted even greater genetic diversity to arise, something that further exacerbated declining trust. Declining religiousness also led to the rise in influence of females, and thus a greater emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance’ over systematizing and truth, a coddling moral psychology that goes far in justifying restrictions on free speech in the name of protection from hurt feelings and grim realities. The entire situation led to an increasing evolutionary mismatch, higher levels of mental illness, greater paranoia, and thus, further overall declining trust, feeding into desires to restrict free speech in order to promote ‘safe-spaces’. Declining intelligence itself meant decreasing belief in democracy, declining trust, and increased dogmatism. Genetic diversity also permitted more and more depressed and individualistic people, who would be low on trust, and black-and-white in their thinking; pushing society away from beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy. With no group-selection pressure to keep society united, and with traditional religiousness being weak, these people could hijack the culture — due to the way in which group-oriented people sympathize with individualists — pushing it in an ever-more extreme individualistic direction, and so challenging democracy and freedom of speech, because individualistic values would need to be placed ahead of even truth.

If you think everyone seems to be getting stupider, these authors agree. And I double-checked this point on my own: mainstream research now acknowledges that there is in fact a “reverse Flynn effect,” in which IQs have been declining dramatically for the last three decades. When coupled with a degenerate culture that plays openly to man’s basest instincts, we are well on our way to Mike Judge’s comedic dystopia, Idiocracy. Because the only remaining intelligent left who breed are religious-conservative (even if they are on a cognitive decline), there must be a transformation of elite class in a conservative-religious direction. But alongside of the ascendant religious-conservative elite will be a staggering underclass who will exhaust the modern Western welfare state within several decades from now. The implications for the West filled with an abundance of stupid and impulsive people is that we cannot possibly maintain the standard of living we have grown accustomed to — the accumulated capital from the advances of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath will be fully depleted. The authors argue that we will not be intelligent enough to maintain the technology — let alone invent new ones — that will allow us to continue as we are. While the authors do not predict the precise consequences of this social breakdown (whether it takes the form of the West becoming a Third World country or simply breaking apart), they nonetheless project that things as they are cannot continue. The Western world will see a rise in religiousness and conservatism while it nonetheless deteriorates materially over the next few generations. It leads somewhere dramatically different although where that will be is not clear.

As an aside, I have a super-bright friend who said something almost verbatim regarding our future as it relates to technology. While I said I was worried about nuclear war as a final and dystopic conflagration (apropos to the Russian-Ukraine-NATO conflict), he countered that he did not think it would end that way. Going further, he said that we will eventually become so stupid that we will not even be able to maintain the existing nuclear weapon stockpile we have accumulated and the threat from nuclear war will abate from our own incompetence. He thought that after this dumbing down and loss of technical knowledge and competence, we would end up in a civilization much like the one before the Enlightenment — religious, conservative, and tribal. He — and the authors — are on to something. The future will be less technologically based because we will be too stupid to live with it — and when we become smarter again in the far-off future, another Industrial Revolution will be impossible to accomplish because we will have exhausted all the easily available resources that made the initial one possible in the first place.

The Past Is a Future Country is most interesting in its modeling and projections for the immediate future. Even if it seems that liberalism is at its most potent now, the authors contend that we have reached, in essence, “peak liberalism.” The excesses of liberalism today that should be obvious to anyone are actually signs of disintegration — like the anti-communist crusades of the 1950s were a sign of weakness before the great liberal tide. It is like what financial analysts call a “dead cat bounce,” which is an ephemerally positive market during an otherwise steep decline. It is a last gasp, in other words. What will happen — and is happening already — is that the demographic reality of rising conservatism is already taking hold. So, there will be a shift — one that will be dramatic and sudden — when the ballast permanently shifts to a religious and conservative future, which matches the way in which human beings, including in the West, previously related to each other and the world. This shift should not be confused with a superficial conservative backlash like Margeret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minster of the U.K in 1979 or Ronald Reagan’s election as President in 1980 — what they are suggesting is a world in which pre-modern and perhaps pre-Enlightenment values predominate again. Unlike those conservative cycles within a broader liberal cycle, the authors suggest, however, that Donald Trump’s election and the Brexit vote, both in 2016, were harbingers of a more fundamental shift.

I found the death of liberalism to be fascinating from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective. Again, religious conservatives are suspicious of Darwinian thought and liberal atheists love it — would the grandest irony of all be that Darwinian thought vindicates conservative religiosity and condemns liberal atheism? From the authors:

The ability to resist leftist-induced dysphoria is the new crucible of evolution. Where once the crucible of evolution was child mortality it is now Woke morality. Where evolution was formerly selecting for resistance to genetically-based diseases, the emphasis has now switched to ‘memetically’ based diseases; ideological mind viruses that induce infertility in their nonimmune hosts. Those who resist leftist ideology, and its direct and indirect inducements not to procreate, are those who survive. In significant part, this will be those who are, for mainly genetic reasons, religious and conservative.

This coming world will be profoundly religious and much more ethnocentric. The fact that we who are religious cringe at the association of Christianity and ethnocentrism is because we ourselves are so tainted by invisible liberal pretensions. But in the future, as in the past, the preservation of our tribe will be self-evidently worthwhile, and that we should have to apologize for it will seem insane, which, of course, it is. I see this now with greater clarity — and if I see it, someone who has already achieved success as a professional in a liberal, secular world, others must be seeing it too.

While this newly ascendant religious and conservative intellectual class will be indeed swamped by a massive underclass, the authors predict that something they call the new Byzantiums will emerge. These will be havens of civilization and will be necessary given the risk of overall increasing stupidity, the collapse of the welfare state (and the stupid who rely upon it), and the impoverishment of First-World conditions. They put this in stark dysgenic terms: we will be awash in rising psychopathy, criminality and violence and need to escape it. This collapse, they contend, will not be like the fall of the Roman Empire but something weightier — something like the Late Bronze Age collapse. The new Byzantiums will be places where mostly Whites and “White-adjacent” minorities will bind together with religion and conservativism predominating in something like a wasteland straight of The Walking Dead (sans the zombies).

Conclusion: Is The Past Is a Future Country Compatible with Trad Catholic Religious Belief?

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a fan of dystopic fiction. Setting aside why I like that genre, The Past Is a Future Country is something akin to dystopic fiction in the guise of political and demographic predictions. It is a future-oriented world in which this one — our post-Enlightenment liberal world — has finally hurtled out of control and is destroyed from within. I read it quickly, like I would read a gripping story. I concede that the destruction of liberalism seems too good to be true — I just cannot imagine it happening even if these authors have laid out a plausible path to that future. As a reactionary conservative dinosaur and a religious man living as a foreigner in my own civilization, I welcome its coming destruction. I may not live long enough to see it but knowing it is coming gladdens my heart.

While I cannot deny that a burgeoning underclass, the collapse of governments and technology, and advent of wanton violence and disorder will make life extremely difficult for my descendants, I choose a world of new Byzantiums even in that context over the insanity of late-stage liberalism. Stated most plainly, we cannot create a new Western Civilization — built on the ashes of the old one — without first destroying the liberal monstrosity we call our own. More to the point, I want to live in a Godly community in which sin and vice are condemned by that community even if lawlessness and vice surround it. In a sense, my home and church are already the functional equivalents of the very new Byzantiums predicted by the authors. The only thing we do not yet have is cooperation on economic matters in a corporate fashion. That said, it is not a stretch that we will cooperate if we have too because the community is already in place. Put differently, I already live within a nascent new Byzantium. It has not reached full maturity yet because the social circumstances have not yet demanded that it become that.

So, I clearly liked the book — it provided enormous grist for the mind to consider. The authors are very thoughtful and provide a cogent statement of where we were, are, and are going. That said, there is something off-putting about it that it took me time to puzzle over. Eventually, I found something personally galling about the tenor of the book — call that something like a personal affront. Second, I found something historically did not ring true about it — while the general trend of liberal sterility and religious/conservative fecundity is true, there was a seemingly missing theme of liberalism before the Industrial Revolution that the authors ignored or glossed over.

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