My proposal solution is to bring a closer unity through focusing in the greeks. The central question is "if the Greeks where here today, and had access to our technology, what would they build? how would they solve our problems?"
1) Convince the ethno-nationalists to put Ancient Greeks above their local petty nationalistic appreciation – to believe that the best civilization to aspire to is the Greeks, and that their own particular nationalism (that be, Anglo, Spanish, Nordic, American, Argentinian, Australia, etc etc) comes second.
2) Convince the Christians that the foundations that made their religion possible is the Greeks, and they are to be admired.
3) Convince the techbros that there are critical insights for tech development in the Greeks - Odysseus crafting his own boat in Odyssey 5, Pelops sabotaging Oenomaus' chariot in the Olympia origin myth, Icarus and Daedalus is not about "technology bad" but "technology good, as long as you don't try to be god", and so on.
I think there's something to explore here. Specially as a current that can build bridges between these three groups + build something that the normies can look up to, and something that is sexy enough that the shitlibs can't help themselves but want to join.
However, I don't think it's ever a good plan to "Convince faction X of thing Y they don't believe." A much better plan is "Promote Y as best you can, and as one part of that, show how it's also relevant to X."
>>5199 I'm not saying direct worship of apollo, maybe only secular reinstatement of him. At a Catholic highschool I teach at, the head Priest has tons of posters in school of all the greek gods - he tells children "isn't this so cool!" while he tell them how Perseus saved Andromeda.
On the broader public, there's no Hellenic pagan base of normies, like there is with Christians. But there are a few very smart people online who are non-Christians Hellenics who I would like on my side, so I think smart Christians should find ways to build bridges with these small group of pagans.
on the christian angle, I'm interested in this word "πραΰς"
from Matthew 5:5 "μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν." - the common read is "blessed be the meek"
But Aristotle describes "πραΰς" as in between two extremes:
>>5200 "The praos person gets angry at the right things, toward the right people, to the right degree, at the right time, and for the right duration. They are neither irascible nor spineless about it."
I like it on a level but I worry this wouldn't really unify or accomplish much. What's the end goal? What Greek things specifically would you like to see come out of any of these three groups? Not to be overly pessimistic but the best likely scenario I see would be at best forming a Greco-Dark-Enlightenment subcommunity that doesn't really adhere to any of the other three, which isn't a disaster per se but doesn't accomplish much either. I'm a Christian myself and I like a lot that I hear from my Pagan friends (mostly Norse though, I don't know any Greek Pagans personally). But I don't know if there's enough real overlap between Pagans (a small group, though growing) and Christians willing to meaningfully dialogue with Pagans, to build anything on. What would you see as a good first few steps there? The world could always use a few more healthy, levelheaded exchanges between differing worldviews but it's hard to pull off. >>5201 As for praos there's something to be said for that reading. Christ Himself is recorded exercising righteous anger on several occasions. But (and there's a perfect quote for this that I can't find right now) I'd say it's pretty important to be aware that humans will almost always err on the side of excessive anger, with the excuse that they're being "righteous" than being excessively peaceful when action is required.
I like the idea. The plan needs work. For example:
> Convince the techbros that there are critical insights for tech development in the Greeks - Odysseus crafting his own boat in Odyssey
This is the youth pastor voice. “But you know who else was into technology? Or as they called it, Techne? That’s right…”
This doesn’t work.
We have to be honest about the why.
The deep fascination with the Greek city state and the Roman republic is not utilitarian-they invented things we find useful-but rather aesthetic, moral, and spiritual.
These were men who lived free and beautiful lives, life as art, who built cities that are to this day the pinnacle of human architecture. Who sought to “throw the spear of man beyond man”.
If you want to speak to the ethnonationalists, teach them the Greek obsession with citizen quality. (Their definition of quality was ofc more sophisticated than that of the modern ethnoid.)
If you want to reach the Christians, teach them the history of the church and the aesthetic heritage of its greatest works. The Pantheon was built by Romans, the Hagia Sofia by Greeks who called themselves Roman, and St Peter’s Basilica by men deeply enamored by the above and working to redeem at a distance of a thousand years the void of their loss.
If you want the technologists… maybe that’s a good subject for this thread
> These were men who lived free and beautiful lives, life as art, who built cities that are to this day the pinnacle of human architecture. Who sought to “throw the spear of man beyond man”.
Right. The level at which the Greeks were good and worthy of emulation is not some set of object-level features, such as details of pagan cults. It's the meta-level striving for the height of human flourishing. That's what in need of recovery. The applications to the axes of the trichotomy will fall out naturally or not at all.
"I still remember when i asked Hitler which is our homeland. I had the impression he would answer "Europe." Do you know what he replied? "Greece, Our homeland is Greece!" Another time, I asked him: "Fuhrer, what are you?" and he clearly answered: "I am a Greek!" – Leon Degrelle
This is an excellent idea, but the framing feels incorrect to me.
First, the original NRx trichotomy that we see in Spandrell and Land is a 2010s taxonomy that is less relevant today, as neoreaction, in the original blogosphere sense, isn't a particularly active or significant part of the right anymore. If you're interested in whether the trike is a kind of structural universal for rightist politics or human life, and how the Greeks can help to mediate those tensions, I'm totally with you. But that's a very different proposition from convincing three 2013-vintage factions!
Beyond that framing point, I think this idea suffers from a lack of specificity, maybe a lack of depth as well. For context, much of Western civilization, from the American founding fathers to the German NSDAP, has taken explicit inspiration from the Greeks and Romans, and until the establishment of the German-style research university in America and the UK, classical education *was* education. It's impossible to overstate the degree to which the Western elite were steeped in classical history and classical ideals. So, advocating for Hellenism is, prima facie, merely advocating for a return to form in Western elite formation.
But of course, there's an ENORMOUS range of ideas that can be associated with the "Greeks." You can have a Christian Hellenism, a liberal-democratic Hellenism, a purely aesthetic Hellenism, even a bodybuilding antinomian archaeofascist Hellenism. When talking about a culture that is five centuries distant and utterly alien, your exegesis of what "the Greeks" meant is the essential point of the project. Most of these projects, frankly, use the Greeks as a kind of totem onto which are projected particular modern ideals. So yeah, you can't just throw around Hellenism and expect that a coherent set of ideals will magically fall out. When advancing a Hellenist project, you need to have *your* Hellenism.
As I obliquely mentioned above, that kind of neo-Hellenist project is being tried, right now, by Bronze Age Pervert. Looking at BAP's work is important if you want to understand just what a Hellenist revival on the right can look like. BAP is imposing his own reading — a biologist, antinomian, vitalist reading — on the surviving Greek texts, informed by enormous study of Greek culture and philosophy. What comes out of that isn't so much a particular program for right-wing politics, but rather a lens through which one can view life and politics as such. This mixed political-metapolitical angle is a really nice way to go about it, and I think that's one of the reasons that he's had such success (the other primary reason being his own deep spiritual engagement with the primary texts).
