Another White Man's Burden?

Salvation through Dissolution

It would be gauche to spend more than a fleeting moment analyzing Kipling’s famous poem, given its trite dimensions and ad hoc nature. And so here is that moment: it is a call to heroic self-sacrificial service. The ideal of the white man (really, the Anglo-Saxon and Teuton) does not relish the fruits of empire, he does not enjoy gain at the expense of his savage thralls. But they are not merely slaves, they are school boys, trained and prepared for a life beyond fetishes and jungles. Alas, they are too savage and will malign the forces that make them sanitary and proper. They will shun and despise their liberating conquerors, who shall die in droves to tilt a single blackened chin up towards the sun. But that was no reason to relent, as the poem was dedicated to President Roosevelt in light of the smashing victory against Spain and the seizure of her last domains. Uncle Sam, as much as John Bull, must put his shoulder to the wheel, even if it is thankless and futile labor. Such is the burden upon the white man.

It seems absurd to compare our current era, with its fairly rank anti-white disposition (which is, according to its advocates, not racist, because you cannot be racist against a force of systematic racial oppression), to the high days of Victoria. But that is, in a very limited selective way, what I intend to do. I am not comparing the empires of yore to today’s globalized hegemony (though the same kind of geopolitics of the Great Game are afoot). I am not comparing the scientism of eugenics and dreams of space exploration to the scientism of gender swaps. I am not comparing the reign of the gold standard to the reign of the dollar (though the latter was a radical derivative of the former).

Rather, I sketch out an odd analogy between two rival, and seemingly unrelated, views of racial uplift. The purpose is to answer the question: why do western whites self-deprecate and support policies that displace themselves?

Putting aside vulgar theories of magical propaganda that takes over the mind (usually ascribed to a particular tribe), there is nothing more common among elite whites than white displacement. It is not simply pandering for votes or the purse of varied minorities, it is more and more a true belief in the need to Include in a way that overcomes all boundaries and markers of Human difference (race yes, but also sex, sexuality, religion, “socio-economic” status, and so on). These improve Diversity, the quantitative aggregate of qualitative different views towards an improved product/end/result. And most importantly, Equality is an intrinsically important virtue, rather Equity, where the three children can watch the baseball game, each receiving a box according to his height. Each life possesses its own sacred, even self-evident, importance that, supposedly, cannot be removed and only be defended so as to be fully self-actualized. Whiteness (rather than white people per se) is an impediment towards these ends, along with other systemic specters like Patriarchy, Capitalism, Imperialism, among many other hobgoblins. Once these are exorcised from global society (cant that’s repeated not only by establishment parties in the West, but also by China and Russia among other multipolarists), then world peace and prosperity will dawn on the people. Progress will win.

What does any of the above have to do with the white man’s burden? How could these values, especially those explicitly oriented against Whiteness, ever be compared to the rugged determinism to carry a basket of brown savages towards the idol of civility?

The purpose of enlightened civilization, whether it was secularized republicanism of France or the utilitarian ethic of Britain, was universal uplift. With or without the ontological Hegelianism that saw European civilization, in its national constitutional monarchies and modern liberty, as the height of Human development, these empires saw a mission to save the savage peoples from themselves. Slavery was not only a means of economic extraction, God sive Nature forbid! For the Liberal Christian (Catholic or Protestant) or the Humanitarian (whether idealist or empiricist), coerced labor was ultimately towards tutelary purposes. When slavery was excessive in its cruelty, it had to be abolished. Even as the Royal Navy cruised the waves in pursuit of flesh traffickers, Britain implemented a pseudo-regime of coerced labor throughout the Caribbean and Africa. This ranged from contractual work to a form of debt peonage, but even as it was oriented against the moral ill of slavery, it replicated the same form of Humanitarian ethos.

In the excitement of Southern secession in the United States, former Senator James Henry Hammond advocated reopening the slave trade for the purpose of saving the darkies from the Savage Continent. In the tender arms of a planter, the African will learn manners and Christianity. Not a few British and French liberals guffawed at the system of African slavery still extant within America, but not a few of their countrymen found the moral hand wringing to be nothing short of hypocrisy. As industrial labor brutalized the bodies and minds of many young Englishmen, concern was lobbied on behalf of the repatriated Africans of Sierra Leone and the semi-free black farmers of Jamaica. With boys choking to death with black lung from the mines and particulant overload from textile mills, Parliament debated whether more should be done to educate Subcontinental peoples. The Abbe Gregoire understood the stark racial differences between whites and blacks, especially in the colony of St. Domingue, but these could be overcome through racial regeneration. Writing to an early president of newly independent Haiti, the monk counseled a semi-coerced labor system to educate, stern but fair, leading towards Haitian regeneration (this project ultimately failed).

In many leftist accounts of this era, whether orthodox Marxism or third-world anticolonialism, these worries and obsessions were simply superstructures to justify exploitation. Sure, Senator Hammond may claim he loves his black children, but he still made a lot of money off of them. This explicitly racist system only ever exploited, while justifying itself (“why?” would be a good question) that it was doing so in the name of God and Mankind. The same age that produced Social Darwinism (as vulgarly understood; Herbert Spencer is a much maligned and misunderstood figure) also produced the men who laid down their lives for “lesser races” in the civilizing mission. It was all about Empire or Power or the Late Stage of Capitalism. Proof, in many of these accounts, is found in the turn against the civilizing mission just when it seemed to be working. The evolue of Africa were spurned as administrators by French colonial offices. The process of uplift was endless, or seemingly endless, and therefore must have been callously used to cover over grave sins.

But what sparked the turn against liberal civilizing? The first major shift came to Britain through the 1870s, when the crisis of manufacturing dawned upon a political class (especially those Manchesterian liberals) unprepared for competition. The “free trade” empire of Britain basked in the sun of its native superiority, with policies of low/no tariffs and open seas. But the age had closed with the rise of America and Germany (and, not far behind, Japan). Nineteenth-century France was already always behind, lagging behind its sweetest foe Perfidious Albion. The old arrangement was unsustainable, with a flagging economy that only intensified domestic agitation. The haute bourgeois philistines faced not only the revolt of the proles, but frustration from the ruins of the Ancien Regime that wanted to reassert tradition. The imperatorship of Louis Napoleon and the premiership of Disraeli saw a break with the easy optimism. Instead, Africa and Asia were foreboding in their haunted darkness and maddening whispers. New orders, that preserved traditional elites in tributary vassalage, came about. The insurgent candidacy of Joseph Chamberlain, an old Liberal and now revanchist Tory, drew from the many laboring Britons who would benefit from an economic union. A White Dominion would throw up the walls against a united Germany and its zollverein as well as America’s GOP protectionism, but also abandon the global ideal. These efforts marked a change epoch.

What changed the civilizing mission? Was it simply the cleverness of culturally conformed subalterns making their white administrators nervous? Was that why France embraced negrophilia, with a fixation for African erotica, interracial flings, and American Jazz? It is naive, but common, to buy into the Marxian framework that all ideas are simply covers for the base motives of economic exploitation. Add in a Freudian twist and these become psychodramas about male inferiority and/or impotence. Even today, the conspiracy theorist who shouts about legions of Gates Foundation employees sterilizing black Africa can never explain why the birth rate continues to rise. Can’t the neo-Malthusians stop the fertility of Africans?

The truth is that the Gates Foundation cares, as much as civilizing liberals cared, to uplift the races, to save them from the plight of Blind Nature. Contrary to dimwitted yet well-meaning Conservatives, Darwin (and many of Darwin’s students) were not proponents of ethnic cleansing eugenics. To the contrary, the plight of dysgenic environments and breeding led to a desire to help and protect and uplift. Modernist Christians, in conjuncture with Rockefeller’s charity efforts, believed the world could be saved through free trade, access to medicine, good agricultural practices, and sanitation. Was this really just a plot to sell more barrels of oil by Woke Capital?

Today’s “White Man’s Burden” asks for something different than sending your sons to the corners of the Earth (though, with the many who join the Peace Corp or work for an international relief NGO, that may be part of it). It asks for dissolution. In its more perverse forms, it asks for vasectomies and abortions and the “good work” of racial intermixture. But usually, in its more staid and socially stable forms, it asks for white people (not only men) to put in the Work of taking down the Systemic Forces of Oppression. It means being willing to listen to marginalized voices, putting your own needs (blinded by privilege) aside for the greater good. Programs like Affirmative Action had a nearly unlimited mandate; racial disparities were simply the white/racist coding of systems that had to be rebuilt from the ground-up. Intelligence Quotient tests, standardizing testing, equal (but not equitable) schooling, these were all still tainted with White Supremacy and must be rigorously purged.

While race is considered entirely a social construct (and therefore, in the ever fleeting End of Progress, all Human beings are simply Human), it must be incessantly brought to the fore to expose the earlier foundations of racialization built into Western societies (including Western societies that had little to no contact with non-European peoples). The inequities must be corrected, simultaneously by and not by white people (who must be critical allies, leading the way but also taking a seat). And yet, no matter what is done, the critic (especially of a BIPOC variety) will denounce these efforts as simple pandering. Every major corporation advocating for Black Lives Matter is simply a front. Contrary to Conservative critics, policies like ESG are not only socially progressive but profitable. And so the Democratic Socialist will tap they/them toe: see? it’s a plot to undermine true liberatory politics (despite increases for minorities in governance and ownership)! It is still blame from those they better and hate from them they guard.

Again, the most interesting question is simply: why? Why are there so many true believers? Call a white person a racist, and he backpedals and blushes. Why? Does he simply fear the arm of the law and the courts? But why do these rulings have such power, not only in juridical force but in social pressure? Why do white people fantasize about the dissolution of their own collective race, ranging from George Carlin awaiting the war canoes to reclaim stolen wealth to Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry musing on a brave new world of only milk-chocolate colored people? Why do they deplore their own cultural achievements as nothing more than mayonnaise and Wonder Bread?

While it may be claimed, as not a few historical anthropologists, that the brown peoples of the world invented modern values (including everything from matriarchy to gay rights to democracy), these claims are not so different than earlier authors who ventriloquized subject peoples as more honest, civilized, and Christian than their captors. Ridley Scott’s portrayal of the serene and tolerant Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven (against the bloodthirsty deranged Crusaders) did not come from Karl Marx but Walter Scott. Self-criticism has metastatized into self-annihilation. It was the xenophobia and racism of world powers that, per textbook histories, caused the Great Depression. Free trade was a policy that dovetailed with the United Nations project, a maximally civilizing force, breaking up old empires and seating new nations in a supranational parliament. Now the time has come, and thus the West must fulfill its promise role in self-transformation. It is not Britain handing its Security Council seat over to India, but rather that Britain’s government belongs to ethnic Indians. The propositional nationhood that makes all who love freedom American or all those who love tolerance British rings of the same universal capacity for malleable regeneration. The West fulfills itself when it ceases to be the West, but simply the Globe.

The point so far is not an idiotic gotcha (“actually the liberals are the real racists!”) but the archaeology of a spirit. The belief, common among educated whites in North America and Western Europe, that true civilization means the dissolution of whiteness is truly held. It was not simply a cynical ploy that led to the Liberalism of Richard Cobden to become the Liberalism of J.A. Hobson, of free trade moving into welfare (a move Herbert Spencer made over his long life). It was the development of new policies as old ones failed in a changing world. Commitment to one set of values led to the transformation of ideas, intensified through polemic and use. American Cold War anticolonialism accelerated in its ideological conflict with the Soviet Union. The earlier limits on non-white citizenship gave way, in a matter of decades, to Affirmative Action. There was nothing necessary in these changes, but it is important to trace the logic. If the role of the “Free West” is to uplift and save the many peoples of the world, what better way (some may reason) than to fuse into them? Western reason meets oriental mystique; white rigidity meets BIPOC rhythm. The dialetik is complete. The world can now enter the phantasmagorical telos of Star Trek globalism.

If this comparison is apt, then the converse may be also be on the horizon. Great expectations of transformation and evangelization gave way to dark clouds of savagery. It was not simply that more money should be spent to civilize India, but rather the subcontinent devoured men’s souls. The supernal stories of Algernon Blackwood or H.P. Lovecraft can be understood as allegories for the failure of the civilization project. It is not men who uplift the lower races, but the lower races (as thralls of forces beyond Human ken) devour their benefactors. It is more common today (perhaps more than anytime in decades) to hear open cries to shut the borders. Repatriation is not a fever dream among anonymous dissidents, but an adumbrated policy among major political parties. It may be respectable, one day soon, to believe such things.

But that does not mean the true believers will give up against the so called bigots and fascists. The Global project has a universal scope and must be defended at all costs, whether against the multipolar nations abroad or from critics within. Already some former progressives have drifted into the same kind of torpor (without the stiff upper lip) of Kipling; nothing is ever good enough, there is too much chaos, can we just stop when things were good (1990s, 2000s)? But these naysayers (such as the “Nazi” Glenn Greenwald with his deceased brown husband and brown adopted children) are becoming enemies of progress and must be overcome. Equity must advance, lest the barbarians at the gate (the many Trumps of the world) hijack civilization. Pope Francis has already counseled that the refusal of immigrants, overwhelmingly from the non-white world, is a grave sin. The global forces of Progress are against enemies who seek to undo the moral compass of the world.

To conclude, one must admire the scope and ambition of Global Progress, the so called purpose of self-abnegated Western civilization. It is a project, predicated on the End of History, to save the world. If there is an alternative, it will be an equally universal idea that leaves no stitch of reality unclaimed. Whether it is to be theorized before its arrival, or (more likely) is theorized after the fact, only a total concept can have the same scope to reject such sweeping ends.