Today’s Reactionary is an Apostate

I recently wrote that “rejection of equality is at the heart of all reactionary thought,” and commenters have since agreed and disagreed.  I stand by the proposition and will here add some remarks on rejection.  To reject is properly to refuse something that is offered, as when a diner rejects a bowl of soup in which he sees floating the body of a drowned fly. Thus a reactionary of the eighteenth century properly rejected the doctrine of equality when, having read one of Rousseau’s works, he threw the nasty book across the room with a cry of execration.

“Rubbish!” he may have cried, or possibly “Rot!”

A reactionary of the twenty-first century more properly ejects the doctrine of equality because he imbibed the spirit of Rousseau with his mother’s milk.  It enthused his teachers when he went to school; it enthused his preachers if he went to church; it beamed from his television, blasted from his radio, and lurked like Satan in the Garden in his books.  A reactionary of the twenty-first century is not a man who has turn up his nose at a bowl of soup that bears on its breast a buoyant fly.   He is rather a man who after polishing off the bowl spits it out.

To become a reactionary in the twenty-first century is to vomit.

A twenty-first-century reactionary is therefore like the Prodigal Son, whereas the eighteenth-century reactionary was like the Prudent Son, his brother   The Prudent Son was older, and we may suppose he was once or twice tempted to demand his portion and run away to a life of riotous living among harlots.  But he prudently rejected this notion and stayed down on the farm with his Pa.

The Prudent Son is like the prudent English of the eighteenth century, speaking for whom Burke wrote,

“Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree . . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each upon his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”*

The Prodigal Son, on the other hand, is like the imprudent eighteenth-century French, who did not, upon finishing one of Rousseau’s books, throw it across the room with a cry of execration, but rather kindled with a wild enthusiasm that drove them mad.  As another great student of the Revolution said,

“I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part.  One thing at least is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often leads to success.”**

Those genuine madmen are the fly in the soup and the prodigal sons of revolutionary times see that fly as an appetizing garnish.  Then having swallowed the fly, some of those prodigal sons begin to feel queasy.  Queasy, then positively ill, and then out comes the vomit.

To vomit the doctrine of equality is, for a twenty-first century reactionary, to apostatize from the religion he received as a child.  To apostatize is literally to move away from what has been set up or established (apo = “away from” + stanai “to set up or cause to stand’).  Thus the difference between an eighteenth- and twenty-first-century reactionary is that the former refused to believe in equality and the latter is an apostate.

Edward Gibbon give us the character of an apostate in a speech by Romanus, a Christian apostate and traitor of the seventh century.  Romanus was governor of the Roman province of Arabia, which lay east of the Jordan River in what is today southern Syria and Jordan, and its principal city, Bosra (Busra al-Sham), lay on the road between Mecca and Damascus.  Bosra was therefore the first Christian city to be attacked when Islam exploded into the world.

Gibbon tells us that the name Bosra means “strong tower of defense,” and that, when the desert fanatics laid siege to this Christian stronghold, “the ramparts of Bosra . . . were crowded with holy crosses and consecrated banners.”  But the governor, Romanus, was disposed to submission, and “in a nocturnal interview, he informed the enemy of a subterranean passage from his house under the wall of the city.”

And so it was, with the aid of a traitor in high office, that the Muslim invasion of Christendom began.

After the Muslim commander had reduced Bosra to dhimmitude, Romanus rose in a public assembly and declared the apostasy that accompanied, perhaps inspired, his treason.  Gibbon reproduces the words of Romanus.

“‘I renounce your society,’ said Romanus, ‘both in this world and the world to come.  And I deny him that was crucified, and whomever worships him.  And I choose God for my Lord, Islam for my faith, Mecca for my temple, the Moslems for my brethren, and Mahomet for my prophet . . .”

We do not, of course, admire Romanus, and no more desire his company than he would desire ours.  But we can see in his abdication what it means for us to apostatize.  It is to renounce the society and creeds of the establishment to which we were once joined, and to place our loyalties elsewhere.

To the faithful, an apostate is naturally more loathsome than an infidel.  The crime of infidelity is always mitigated, and may in some cases be excused, by the plea of ignorance.  But  an apostate is not ignorant of the establishment he has walked away from.  What is more, like the apostate Romanus, he knows the secret weaknesses of that establishment—the subterranean passages by which an enemy force can creep within its seemingly sturdy walls.

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*) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Hugh Gaine, 1791), p. 129.
**) Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Macmillan, 1896), p. 169.
***) Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 51.