'I was within and without'

I recently read a fairly innocuous tweet from one of my favourite writers, Neema Parvini, that struck a chord with me.

Parvini, originally a Shakespeare scholar, has written two very important books in recent times, namely The Populist Delusion and Prophets of Doom. He describes his political position as ‘the sensible centre’. However, his disdain for the therapeutic state, for open borders, and foolish liberal internationalism, would mark him as ‘far right’ by the ‘antifa’ standards of our age.

Under the moniker of ‘Roland Rat’, he recently posted a response to the ‘post-feminist’ writer, Mary Harrington, about men who resist ceding authority to other men:

This struck me for two reasons.

First of all, history and lore is filled with stories of these men who are ‘not clubbable’, who deeply want to serve their community, but battle to live within it. Parvini is right. It is not about psychological trauma or pain. It’s something in the soul.

The title of this essay, ‘I was within and without’, is a line from the narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, who fits neither in the fantastical world of Gatsby, nor in the old-money world of the Buchanans. Nonetheless, he reaches a kind of heroic perspective when he comes to the epiphany that Gatsby, despite his fraud and criminality, is worth more than ‘the whole damn bunch together’. Carraway becomes a seer of the lost generation.

The headline image of this piece is a still from one of the most haunting moments in all of cinema: John Wayne standing on the threshold of a frontier home in West Texas in the film, The Searchers.

Wayne plays the role of Ethan Edwards, a Confederate veteran, cast adrift years after the Civil War because he refused to take an oath of allegiance to a new military unit. When his young niece is kidnapped by the Comanche, he spends years searching for her, eventually finding her as one of the ‘wives’ of Scar, the Comanche chief. He brings her home in his arms, and as she is taken in, he pauses at the threshold of the family home, looks in, and then walks away. The film ends.

Within and without. Edwards, in complex fashion, feels fierce loyalty toward his people, his family. But for some reason, he cannot live on the other side of the threshold.

Perhaps this motif is a shadow of something embodied in the lives of certain saintly figures, men like John the Baptist and St Francis of Assisi, who call from the wilderness, from ‘the other side of Jordan’, from the edge.

We have seen this motif enacted during the upheavals of the past few years, of the past few decades.

I think of the doctors, scientists, journalists, everyday people who refused to shut up and be agreeable about the greatest crime of modern times, the covid revolution, who with the venom of John the Baptist told the truth to the lying child-maskers and needle-pushers.

In American politics, for some reason I think of the great Pat Buchanan, who for years warned of the consequences of so-called conservatives yielding to political correctness, to safetyism, to Israeli foreign influence, to secularism and globalisation, only to be pilloried as some kind of fascist. A few years later, a very different type of outsider took up parts of his policy plank, and called it ‘Make America Great Again’…

In the 2024 election, I think of RFK Jr, incurring the wrath of his family, because he sees that Kamala Harris is a censorious lunatic who loves war.

Go back deep into the past and recall Diogenes, the great Cynic philosopher and forerunner of Stoicism, who, while lying in the sun in Corinth, was asked by Alexander the Great what he could do for him. Diogenes asked for nothing but Alexander to move out of his light. Diogenes would wander through midday Athens carrying a lamp, claiming he could find no real man in the city.

Think of Jane Austen. A withdrawn woman who did not marry or leave her family home, yet somehow wrote novels not of an age but for all time, because she pierced to the heart of human nature from her quiet perch.

What of Parvini himself?

He smokes cigars, shares old BBC archive footage of a world that is gone forever, and reminds us of the music of a saner time, of the likes of the Kinks or Oasis. He defends old Britain, before it was sold out by the likes of Churchill, Thatcher, and Blair.

He is not sentimental though, believing that it is elites who always rule, and not the people. What is therefore required is a new set of elites, elites who will clear the old ones out and return us to some kind of lost sanity.

But sanity is, paradoxically, never found in the social convention, or if it is, only fleetingly. Sanity is not, after all, the purely rational. A new set of elites merely from the same old inner circles will never restore anything. You need something renegade in the mix, something not simply within, but also without.