Love Really Is the Answer

Don’t cringe!

“Terror, the most abject terror, is in the atmosphere about us — a consuming passion, like that of jealousy — a haunting, exhausting specter, which sits like a blight upon life. Such a settled state of terror is one of the most awful of human phenomena. The air holds ghosts, all joy is dead; the sun is black, the mouth parched, the mind rent and in tatters.”

– H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia, Travels and Studies (1901)

Recently, my friend Dave Green and a friend of ours John Carter penned pieces identifying fear as the driving condition of our age. They accurately describe the pall that drapes the West and her sons and from where it springs. For the True Believers, it is the prospect that their worldview is wrong. For the moderates, it is the idea that the liberal project cannot be salvaged. For the New Secular Right (condescendingly self-named the “Elite Human Capital Right”), it is the fear that they may say something unfashionable. For the conservatives, it is the suggestion that everything they’ve “fought” for was lost lifetimes ago. For us, it is the fear that the regime will destroy our posterity in a literal sense. There is no shortage of fear to go around, and we are all drunk on it. These fears are ineradicable as they reach back into us from the inky depths of the opaque future. The only option for us is to overcome.

What is the overcoming of fear? To act in spite of it, daring it to become realized, to act as though the outcome were preordained in our favor. In short: courage. The greater the fear, the more glorious the courage. From whence springeth courage? John Carter said in his piece that fear is overcome by love. He followed it up with the observation that this is a tired cliché, which it is. It is a cliché because it is routinely used by pansies and women to suggest that love is passivity and acquiescence to the will of another. This is the feminine version of love, the submissive love that may give in to fear, but never overcome it. The type of love we need is an active love. I may have touched another cliché here, forgive me. Common parlance has accepted the sensation or demonstration of affection as love. This is its inert, hollowed-out form, dubiously appropriate in lazy, peaceful periods. Its fully realized form is the wellspring of courage. More specifically, it is the love of what you are fighting for being more powerful than the fear of the consequences should you lose. This thing we call love is entirely personal and is required on the individual level first before its effects can ripple outward into real change. Courage is the victory of love.

The spectrum of fears listed above can be boiled down to a single common origin: discomfort. For our fears to be realized would be for us to come face to face with uncomfortable change as it is forced upon us. It is something most do not undergo unless they absolutely must. So, Anon, since you want to act in the face of this fear, what do you love more than your own comfort? What do you love enough to make you act in the face of grim futures should you fail? Liberty?Truth? Justice? No, Anon, you do not. Abstractions cannot be loved because they are not real; they cannot love you back. A love that is sufficient to move you to action in the face of this great fear must be embodied. At best you can feel a romantic attachment to abstractions. God? I should hope so, Anon, but in this age, faith of that caliber is a tall order. I suspect that if you truly loved God and truly felt His love in return, you would fear no evil. Do not despair; I suspect this is a failing most of us share despite our pious efforts. The fathers reading this probably have the easiest answer: their children. Woe to anyone who threatens the safety of a true man’s child in his presence. Fatherhood, however, tends to shift one’s focus to other things. One’s desire to spend his courage on looming societal threats rather than those directed at his children erodes as he accepts responsibility for the provision of shelter and security. There is no fault in his eschewing real risk for the sake of his family.

When speaking of his writings from time spent in Communist Prague, Christopher Hitchens wrote:

The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.)

– Hitch-22, p. 338

What Hitchens meant by this is that no matter how total the regime, its control only lasts so long as the people fear its enforcers. This seems obvious: open rebellion against unjust enforcers has a tendency to give the lie to state power. However, what isn’t obvious is why certain historical moments allow for this fire to flourish in the hearts of men. In our own age, the people fighting the “powers that be” are, paradoxically, supported by those very same powers. We all know the story. When people choose to fight and risk it all, what are they fighting for, and how can we take a portion of what drives them?

Courage was something easier for men in the past. I’m not speaking here of the fact that men of earlier ages were made of sterner stuff — this doesn’t need saying. I am speaking, instead, of the societal structures those men could take for granted which fostered great love. Love of family, love of friends, love of kin, love of a larger community. These were all things worth fighting for, things larger than the individual that loved the individual back. All those things have been intentionally wiped away or made as difficult as possible to attain. We know the reasons why. We know that these things give men a reason to fight, that they give them the courage to act in the face of defeat. We have been robbed of these things, individually and as a people. It is time to start again.

We at the Old Glory Club are not building a network of activists, or politicians, or academics, or tradesman, or anything that is built upon an already extant foundation. We at the Old Glory Club are building that foundation: brotherhood. We are cultivating love, that love between men that the Greeks knew as philia. The love that has driven every soldier to fight on despite the pain and the odds. The love that binds in the face of terrors the modern mind can only dream of in romantic hues. This is the base from which we can build something new (and old), from which all other civilizational acts become possible. Call it the Männerbund, or the network of sensitive young men, or a fraternity, or whatever satiates your aesthetic inclinations; the love of brother transcends all others. Anyone who has listened to me speak knows that I am extremely fond of the aphorism “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” Are you worthy of sharing in this, Anon?

Finding love in this world is more difficult than it ever has been. Even the agape that most families took for granted for generations past is a rare thing these days. The love you seek is an active thing: it must be cultivated and nurtured, it must be realized by action and sacrifice, it is something that can never be taken for granted because it is never given freely. This isn’t a one-off. This isn’t something you sign up for and get the newsletter that reassures you that you are loved. This requires a sacrifice of your time, your efforts, your money, and your ego. As Athenian Stranger said in a slightly different context: “Like any and every other excellence in life worth pursuing, you have to make time for it because you won’t ever simply have time for it.” Come join your fellow man, earn your keep, display your quality, and build the bonds of brotherhood with us. The foundation of courage starts here.