Colonize Your Bookshelf, Part I
Everyone please welcome Edward Maxwell III, editor-in-chief of Imperium Press, our fifth additional writer at Zeroth Position.
Please note: where references in this series are from forthcoming Imperium Press editions, page numbers have been given from Cambridge University Press editions.
Decolonization is like wallpaper. It has become such a part of the background of life that we notice it like a fish notices water—we are swimming in an ocean of decolonization. And like the tidal wave it is, it has not only reached your doorstep but threatens to carry your bookshelf (and you) away with it. The powers that be have taken aim squarely at both, so you had better colonize it yourself while you still can.
Liberal elites are not stupid. We have a tendency to underestimate the enemy, but they do not run the show without reason. If they do not want you to read old books (and they do not), then they have good reason for this. Frank Zappa, unlikely friend to the political right, was a lifelong conservative. We should not begrudge him that; we can all admire a man who makes a career of dunking on hippies. In one of his interviews he donned his prophet’s cap and foretold of the end of days, telling of “Death by Nostalgia,” where the gap between “The Event” and “Nostalgia for the Event” would continue to narrow until it were so small that the man in the street could not take a single step without being nostalgic for the previous step, and we would reach a kind of maximal entropy where all possible states would be exhausted—everything stops.
We could tweak Zappa’s end-times scenario to where the gap between “The Event” and “Recollection of the Event” should continue to narrow until we reach a state where one could not remember what happened seconds before, where the man in the street would have the historical horizon of a goldfish—at this point we have entered into the mind of the ideological liberal. Let us call it “Death by Amnesia” in honor of Zappa. Liberalism can be characterized in many ways, but one will not go too far wrong in thinking of it as simply amnesia raised to the power of an ideology. Liberalism does not want you to remember the past because a sufficiently long temporal horizon renders it powerless. Liberals do not want you to read old books because everything they believe, every argument they make, has been refuted in a manner more or less definitive some 340 years ago by a man who spoke six languages (two of them dead), saw more of the world than they have, had read more widely than they ever will, and probably held a rank or a post beyond what they could ever achieve had they been alive for all 340 of those years. The only response to such a thorough spanking is to boldly declare “We…uhh…WE’RE DOING IT ANYWAY!” and then run a rapier through our aristocrat, which is just happens to be the approach one observes both in the streets and in institutes of higher “learning” today.
So one had better colonize one’s own bookshelf while still possible. This is not rhetorical; the days of the internet-as-Wild-West are well and truly over. Peak “open web” was probably about 2013—resources available even last year are quickly disappearing. We at Imperium Press know this firsthand, as we have seen multiple online sources cited in our book Nemesis (Zeroth Position review here) go up in smoke since publication in September 2019 (more on this book later). Hopefully, curious readers got to them while the getting was good! We have your back though: we have scrapped actually, you know… publishing books for the moment to focus on a project of archiving books worth reading while they can still be found on the web (and some of those have disappeared as well since starting this project). You did not think this was going to be an academic exercise, did you? As a companion to this archival project, we have selected a few key texts that can serve as your maiden voyage in colonizing your own bookshelf.
Robert Filmer: Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (1680, posthumous)
Filmer is a good place to start because he a) was brilliant, and b) occupies an important position in the development of liberalism. Most people know Filmer as Locke’s target in the first of his Two Treatises of Government, and most think of him as having been trounced by Locke here. This is because most people have been colonized by liberalism, which is not unlike having been colonized by cordyceps. So let us colonize the terra nullius of the liberal mind; perhaps we can civilize the savages there, or at least give them a few warm blankets for the winter. But first, we must place Filmer in his proper context.
The standard (liberal) account is that it was all “divine right of kings” this and “silk slipper on your neck” that from time immemorial until the stunning and brave Locke stood athwart history and yelled “Stop!” with such force that everyone (or at least everyone who counted) simply could no longer believe that kings should rule, and spontaneously decided to organize society on the basis of human rights, consent of the governed, and rule of law. But of course, the reality is somewhat different. Divine right of kings has never been standard operating procedure, and was in fact something quite new in Filmer’s time. Does this come as a surprise? Good thing you decided to colonize your bookshelf.
Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com
References
- Filmer, Robert (1680). Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 3, §3, p.39.
- Filmer, Ch. 1, §1, p.5.