What Jonathan Bowden Got Wrong

The Impotence of the Right without God

Frustrated by the failings of mainstream politics, a group of intelligent young men sit, awed, around a gifted orator. Contemporary politics, he explains, merely offers them ‘one party with two wings and a fulcrum’¹ and that they must renew the radical Right ‘by making it exciting, by making it the oppositional force within the culture’. The Conservatives ‘won’t touch’ their ideas: ‘they’re deeply frightened’. Nor will mainstream media. But ‘the internet will gradually eat all those structures.’ The Right will rise.

This orator was Jonathan Bowden — a cult figure. He died from a heart attack at the age of 49, soon after being released from the psychiatric ward he was admitted to following a mental breakdown.

‘I’m a Nietzschean’, Bowden said, ‘and my views are philosophical.’ Nietzsche, too, went mad. His big idea was perspectivism: ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’. Without truth, the world is merely a contest of conflicting narratives vying with each other for pure power. But is THAT a fact? Is it TRUE? Nietzsche never managed to extricate himself from that logical contradiction.  Nor could he have done. His followers haven’t either. It’s impossible, and self-contradiction is the touchstone of error.

Despite this self-referential incoherence at the heart of his thought, however, exploring Bowden’s ideas is instructive. They reveal how the Right goes wrong without Christianity. As Don Colacho said, ‘the simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.’

One of the Left’s strengths is that it has a clear unifying value: equality. The Right, by contrast, is unified only by its opposition to equality. To the Left, the Right is Hydra. The mainstream media has never defined ‘far-right’. Nor has anybody else. But what Warby described as ‘the labelling game’ persists regardless:

‘All ‘Right’ means is ‘not of the Left and has strong political opinions’. It is divided most obviously between the partisans of liberty, of authority and of fraternity, often in an uneasy alliance against a common Left opponent.’

Thus when Bowden asserts that ‘human inequality is the basis of life’, Christianity agrees with him. God made men as leaders of women. Different people also have different gifts. And even in Heaven there is hierarchy. But it also disagrees because all humans are equally made in the image of God. Without this transcendence, Bowden — like everyone else on the Right who abandons political liberalism but not philosophical naturalism — is left with only tribalism.

For Bowden, ‘race is a primary identity out of which culture comes, and without which you can’t sustain a civilisation.’ But race can’t sustain culture after its religious roots have been severed. Rome, for example, fell while remaining racially pure. So did countless other cultures, as Julius Evola noted.

They become what Spengler described as Fellaheen — spiritually exhausted, walking dead. According to The Cambridge Ancient History, Babylonian culture, for example, was in its final stages ‘spinning itself out only because there was no neighbour with enough force to cut even so thin a thread’.

Bowden is right to note ‘there is a physical basis to life’. IQ differences in the races, for example, do seem at least partly genetic, as Rushton showed. But it was Catholicism, not being Caucasian, that enabled European cultural achievements. Orientals have higher IQs but achieved less. Man cannot be reduced to the physical.

High IQ combined with secular liberalism results in bluetooth dildos.

It also results in what Bowden calls ‘total and utter atomisation’. Autonomy is the core of liberalism, and this weakens the sense of duty and community. Bowden says that ‘people are traumatised by liberal values and feel that they can’t stand against them.’ But prioritising materialism and small families, as most people in the West now do, is standing for liberalism. The idea of making sacrifices for parenthood as a civic duty is alien to them.

Bowden is right that unassimilated mass immigration is potentially explosive. ‘Many of the people flooding into the West are less liberal than the people who are here already.’  And ‘many of them don’t like quite a bit of what they see in the West and it’s not that they feel sorry for us. They feel that we’re a bit weak and hopeless and will be pushed aside.’

Given that a below-replacement fertility rate is, historically, the main symptom of cultural decline, they’re right. And they see the liberal West lacks a spiritual tradition demanding their allegiance. Nations exist in the state of nature with regard to each other — ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Tennyson put it. Weakness invites attack.

But because Bowden sees ‘Western civilisation as primarily, but not exclusively, Greco-Roman’, his ideas about how to reinvigorate it are confused. Western civilisation is primarily Christian.  According to one of the early Church fathers, Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165), the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers were ‘Christians before Christ.’ Plato, he believed, had laid the foundation for Christianity: God was outside the universe, timeless, and immutable. Because Greek philosophy recognised man’s divine gift of reason, it also recognised the reality of free will, and Justin saw Christ as the personification of ‘right reason’.

If liberty and rationality was the Greek heritage, the Roman heritage was law. In the Aeneid, for example, Anchises’s shade, speaking to his son Aeneas, tells him that, although others will exceed the Romans in the arts, the Romans will “impose their rule on the peoples (these will be your arts) and add settled custom to peace, to spare the conquered and cast down the proud” (Aeneid 6.851–53). And after Rome became Christian, Christianity became, according to Rodney Stark, ‘a highly centralized bureaucracy modeled on the Roman state. Ironically, this new ecclesiastical structure was destined to long outlive the empire and to play a pivotal role in the rise of the West.’

Pace Bowden, then, Western Civilisation is primarily, but not exclusively, Christ and the Catholic Church. Any schoolchild could tell you that from the fact that the calendar says BC/AD. Christ is the pivot point. The heritage of Greece and Rome culminate in Christianity. Thus modern decline starts at the moment when Christianity begins to weaken and splinter: the Reformation, liberalism in religious form.

Because of this decline, ‘the West is very weak but incredibly highly armed’. Over the last few decades, however, practically every time Western troops have been sent to fight in the “developing” world, they have lost. What does a culture have to fight for when its divine fire goes out? ‘Enthusiasm’ comes from the Greek entheos meaning "divinely inspired, possessed by a god," from en “in" + theos “god”. When the fires go out in the temples, a culture is burnt out.

As Bowden himself recognises, ‘the decline is inside, the decline is mental’. He gives Mel Gibson as an example of someone who faced up to the assault of liberal cancel culture and ultimately ‘faced it down’. But Gibson, tellingly, is Catholic. He has the enthusiasm to resist. ‘We certainly are in a philosophically vapid phase because we’ve privatised our belief systems’

Many people ‘just want a quiet life, but their vanguards that given them the identity in the first place will inevitably tend into conflict’. No subject is more neglected by the liberal regime that military history. And human history is largely war punctuated by brief periods of peace. Thus the timebomb at the foundations of liberalism is that ‘many liberal humanists don’t really like the people that they protest to adore because they all want them to become Westerners’.

For now, however, ‘economy is all that matters to people because they’ve been told that it is.’ Pseudo-conservatives are willing to sacrifice anything on the altar of the market. Unfettered capitalism is economic liberalism. ‘I would prefer,’ Bowden says, ‘if people change their ideas, but people won’t, and therefore they need the pressure of material circumstances to do that, and that takes an economic form.’ As the Bible recognises, ‘all things obey money’.

For Bowden, the ultimate problem is that Christianity is ‘deep down a “Left-wing” religion of humanism, love, and tolerance.” Given that the essence of the Left is equality, however, this is odd: Christianity is hierarchical. The Devil was cast out of Heaven for trying to equal God. Man is not equal to the angels. And the Psalmist has ‘hated and abhorred iniquity’ (119:163).

So what does Bowden mean? Remember he’s a Nietzschean. For Bowden, ‘paganism is natural law oriented’. And what he means by this is not what Aquinas means by it — "nothing else than the rational creature's participation in the eternal law" ( ST I-II.91.2). No, he means Hobbes’s state of nature where man is wolf to man. It’s in this sense, he claims, that Christianity is weak.

This is Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment. Note this is not the same thing as resentment. A weak man might resent being weak. Ressentiment would be an inverted system of values whereby he tries to revenge himself upon the strong man by denigrating his strength. Weakness, he claims, is superior.

That’s the problem Bowden, like Nietzsche, sees with Christianity. ‘I don’t agree with Christian ethics. Deep down, they’ve ruined the West, and we’re in the state that we are because of them.’ Nietzsche believed that, under Christianity, the slaves rose up against their masters, tricking them into praising forgiveness and compassion. For Bowden, this isn’t the way of nature. Nietzsche’s Blond Beast, happy and noble in his strength, is the ideal.

But what does this actually mean?

‘Become stronger. Move towards the sun. Become more coherent. Become more articulate. Cast more of a shadow….you’re doing it for yourself. IT comes from inside’.

If you think this sounds like Jordan Peterson’s blend, you’re right. Like him, Bowden blends Nietzsche and esotericism. And ‘doing it for yourself’ is ultimately a gnostic belief — salvation by knowledge — hence the similarity to Jung. For Bowden, religion is ‘really just based on ideas.’ So ‘you only have to change what’s in people’s mind. It’s very difficult though.’

But whereas Bowden struggles to explain this difficulty, for Christianity it’s because religion isn’t ‘just based on ideas’. Christianity is primarily about the will and the heart, not simply ideas. Religion ‘on its subjective side is the disposition to acknowledge our dependence on God, and on the objective side it is the voluntary acknowledgement of that dependence through acts of homage.’ In fact, strictly speaking, philosophy isn’t sufficient for salvation nor even necessary. ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’ Christianity also recognises, as Pascal said, that men hate religion are ‘afraid it may be true.’

By contrast, Bowden, baffled by why he can’t convert the masses, thinks it must just be because ‘Nietzsche is too strong enough meat for most people’. The idea that Nietzsche’s core ideas are nonsensical doesn’t cross his mind. Ressentiment makes no more sense that perspectivism. For Nietzsche, there is no truth. And that means no standards of true morality either. So what exactly could in principle be wrong with the weak inverting values? Don’t they thereby prove themselves stronger? If Christians really did defeat the heroic culture of the Blonde Beasts, they can’t have been very strong. According to Nietzsche’s view of the world, where only power matters, the Blonde Beasts deserved death. And then there’s the fact that Bowden’s — ultimately Nietzsche’s — view of nature is also wrong. It’s not relentless brutality. Animals work together for mutual survival.

Bowden wants to say ‘there are metaphysically objective standards outside life’. Since there is no way to get value from a Godless view of reality, however, Bowden — like Nietzsche — is ultimately reduced to idolatry. As Bowden explains, ‘the dilemma always in the West is what to choose. Back to Christianity or on to paganism?’ Nietzsche worshipped the Superman, and Bowden says he prefers ‘tribally based religions.’

Without transcendence, tribalism.

Those who forget the Lord ‘walk after strange gods’. With his rune pendant and talk of growing towards the sun, Bowden sounds little different from a hippy, yet he claims that ’the ‘60s revolution is a cultural revolution, not really an economic one, but a cultural and social revolution and it needs to be reversed or changed.’ How he proposes to do this is unclear. ‘The energy can be taken and changed and moved in a new direction, you see? Everything’s about energy. Master it, control it, and you can control the world.’ And this vision of man as master — man in control of the world — isn’t so different from the liberal dream of autonomy after all.

The fact that he doesn’t understand the 1960s revolution was mainly sexual shows his superficiality. As Wilhelm Reich understood, ‘the sexual process is the core of the cultural process.’ Nietzsche, too, wrote almost nothing about sex. Does the Superman have a family? If not, does he fornicate? If so, does he use contraception? Like Nietzsche, Bowden was a physically unimposing man, and their fantasies of strength are a weak man’s idea of what being a strong man is like.

Bowden complains that the Christian view that ‘love is the basis of all life…is a feminine view of civilisation which will lead to its collapse in masculine terms,’ but he doesn’t understand that love, as Aquinas put it, is ‘the choice to will the good of the other’. Love isn’t mere feeling; it’s a willing. That is why the wedding vow is ‘I will’, reflecting a commitment to the good of the beloved.

For Christianity, man is fallen, and ‘life is a warfare’. The good must be fought for incessantly. Masculine language is used about God because we are dependent on Him in a way similar to a family’s dependence on a father. He also has authority over us similar to a father’s over his family. And just as a father’s love can be tough — willing the good of your child, for example, means exposing him to struggle and fear sometimes so he can develop fortitude — Christian love can be as well.

To love is to will order and the protection of the family, the nation and religion as the basis of culture. As the young King Arthur says, bowing his head over the sword he has pulled from the stone, ‘I hereby pledge myself to the service of God and of my people, to the righting of wrongs, to the driving-out of evil, to the bringing of peace and plenty to my land.’

This is masculine love — what the Bible calls ‘the fulfilling of the law’ — and in this respect the King, called Sire because he is the father of the extended family of the nation, shows the duties of every man because manhood is the potential for fatherhood.

1. All quotations are from Bowden’s Why I Am Not A Liberal (Imperium Press, 2020)