I’m a literary critic. I can’t like a book if it’s not well-written. There’s no consideration of political usefulness or ideological affinity that can vanquish my desire to read beautiful texts. This is why I am happy to report that in Edward McLaren’s novel Bothelford’s Gone I finally found a right-wing text with artistic value.
Bothelford’s Gone is not a political manifesto or a propaganda screed. It’s a work of art that is as complicated as the world it describes. It’s a Bildungsroman whose teenage protagonist tries to grow up in a world that ditched the idea of growth in favor of mindless, aggressively pursued change for its own sake.
McLaren’s diagnosis of Britain’s (and, by extension, the West’s) ills is neither shallow nor simplistic. The writer correctly intuits that what the Right urgently needs is a philosophy of the times. We need to explain the degradation of our reality, from the devastation of the natural world to the fraying of social bonds, in ways that eschew both convoluted conspiratorialism and superficial sloganeering. The novel is promoted as the first literary portrayal of Muslim rape gangs in Britain, and it is absolutely that. It is also much more.
Bothelford’s Gone portrays Britain as being profoundly spiritually unwell. Families fall apart, culture disintegrates, and meaningless licentiousness overpowers people who are glued to their screens in search of pornified titillation. Before Jack and Agatha, the novel’s teenage protagonists, were brutalized by foreigners, they were betrayed by their own self-indulgent and careless parents.
The novel leaves you wanting to think deeply and obsessively about the reality it portrays. This is how real art works. It becomes part of you. You go into the world, carrying it inside you and touching others with the traces of the art that transformed you. The concept of shared culture has disintegrated into volitional content with everybody consuming—and what a word this is!—their own, highly idiosyncratic list of cultural products. We don’t vibrate in sync because we don’t hear the same music of words, images, and rhythms. Whoever manages to overcome the isolating tendency of our times will win the future. Culture is only that if it is shared. We need to come together over real art.
Bothelford’s Gone is a good place to start.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is why I love the horror movie genre. It is inherently right-wing. The premise of every story is a tacit acknowledgment that there’s something deeply spiritually unwell about the state of things. That evil is inherent and eternal, not a temporary problem that can be solved by technology and social progress, as progressives like to believe. True horror requires the reactionary belief that evil is a permanent, cyclical part of human nature that we can’t just reform away.
For all the left’s dominance in arts and culture, horror just seems like the one genre they can’t quite get a grip on.
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“the left’s dominance … horror just seems like the one genre they can’t quite get a grip on”
Horror depends on norms, and leftists are inherently suspicious of any and all norms, so it’s harder for them to create unease based on deviations from the natural. The inherent leftist sympathy for criminals also gets in the way…
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This is very insightful. The left’s Dr Frankensteins are doing the most outrageous surgeries to manufacture vaginas out of penises, yet there’s no understanding of the horror of it on the left. If people want it, it’s got to be good. Choice is like holy water. It transforms everything into acceptable.
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“leftists… norms”
This is one thing that confuses me *terribly*.
I’m in the broken-social-compliance-mechanism club (current culture likes to call it ‘autistic’ but I’m not sure that label means anything anymore). Social policing and norms enforcement are something I constantly run afoul of. Not always the enemy, but a relentless stumbling-block.
I’m religious for reasons that have nothing to do with “fitting in” so I’d be part of my church regardless, but one thing I appreciate, deeply, about the parish community is that when, inevitably, I transgress some mysterious rule I didn’t know about, the impetus of norms-enforcement is to bring the transgressor back in, seek and establish forgiveness, etc. There’s a well-marked path for putting things right, and a powerful motive for doing so. Social norms are, mostly, there to ensure the long-haul health and good functioning of the community.
One thing that is absolutely terrifying about the modern left, that I’ve watched evolve with no small alarm, is their mania for social norms enforcement. Yeah, their social norms change constantly, and they are not traditional social norms in the sense that they lead to stable community life. But boy, do they ever have social norms! They have demented, labyrinthine, kaleidoscopic, self-destructive norms, that they enforce with the zeal of battery hens tearing open a cellmate with an open sore.
The only way for us Dead-Mechanism people to be part of the New Left Social Order is to become their eunuchs.
That’s not a lack of norms. That’s the malignant metastasization of norms.
-ethyl
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They enforce this myriad of social norms because they have abandoned the big, important ones. They are consumed by the chaos of their own making and try to find their way through it by establishing these meaningless little boundaries. Because they’ve abandoned the big ones. Their social norms are a parody of what big, serious norms are. In a world without God, they make little idols out of words and worship them.
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“That’s not a lack of norms”
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think of these as norms at all, they’re parlor games. They’re not meant to maintain anything but rather to catch people out so that some can feel temporarily better than those that erred in whatever ridiculous counter-intuitive thing they’ve decided is canon.
When I say norms I mean the big things like ‘don’t steal’, ‘don’t randomly attack people’ and ‘don’t kill people’ all of which are under constant attack by leftists as they roll out every possible excuse for those that break them which is why they’re not good at horror.
In between you have an area of everyday social norms designed to help people navigate social interactions (and let the less imaginative know what to do or say in most daily situations).
These get broken all the time, even by the most normie normies and most people don’t care that much as long as it’s not a perennial habit (a lot of humor is about people in situations where whatever they do they’re breaking some norm or other or they have to choose between a social norm and something else that they want). I’ve broken many social norms in Poland and people mostly don’t get bent out of shape since I do follow most of them when I know about them.
But modern leftists can’t help but try to retell villain’s stories (see Wicked) by recasting them as following some greater good (revolution!) or just being misunderstood.
The idea of choosing evil is incomprehensible to them because choice is always good so what seems bad is really good…
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Yesterday at a faculty meeting, a professor suggested removing the words “liberal arts” from our mission statement because it scares away people who don’t want their children to be exposed to liberal thinking. It’s all about words to them. Word play is their god.
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Maybe?
I think I grok what you’re saying here, and mostly agree with the heart of the thing. It’s a wee bit of a cop-out to say that social norms are only norms if they are serving the function of healthy culture and stable community life, and anything else isn’t a social norm.
The left does have social norms. They’re just *bad* social norms. They’re social norms in the same way that Satanism is a religion: they define themselves by what they’re against, and would collapse if they had nothing stable to oppose. Sucks as a way of life because it is opposed to stability itself. That is a principle. Not a good one, but a principle.
Perhaps a devotion to instability amounts to the same thing as lack of principle: social norms policing isn’t aimed at any greater good, only the opportunistic shredding of the next-highest ape for one’s own gain? Is it like the difference between a well-run county sheriff’s office, deploying resources strategically to address the biggest concerns of residents (protect and serve!) and a Stasi unit?
-ethyl
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