The first lines of the Iliad make this clear: you do have a “soul” of sorts apart from your body… it just isn’t you. It’s a shade. It’s completely homosexual.
This is an extremely 19th-century book. I don’t mean in the style of the prose, although BAP can rarely keep up the caveman-esque mode of speech for long and soon lapses into elegance. Nor do I mean to allude to the fact that it randomly launches into dubiously-informed racist tirades, though it does that as well. (I will, in general, refrain from dwelling on the fact that this is an incredibly racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. book — though it certainly is, that is a boring and, as BAP would say, bugmannish line of criticism.)
Rather, in its philosophical content, it is the foremost heir of 19th-century Romanticism that I have seen in our own age. There is the disdain for reason and intellect and corresponding exaltation of “body and blood”, animal instinct, as the superior source of knowledge. There is the glorification of war, piracy, and banditry as the supreme manifestation of manliness, a view often said to have been discredited historically by the mass mechanized death of the First World War — but in BAP it lives on. There is the love of nature and the belief that nature operates with some super-rational “genius” that men must allow themselves to be guided by, and in connection with this a certain racially-charged environmentalism[7] and even defense of the welfare of “animals, who are our brothers.” (In general, BAP is happy to lower man to the level of animals by emphasizing as essential and virtuous those qualities which man has in common with animals, though he is not entirely consistent on this point and commonly disparages groups by comparing them with animals.) And there is contempt for the bourgeois values of the shopkeeper or industrialist — even more so the values of the farmer — in favor of the values of the warrior aristocrat who does no useful labor nor trades value for value but rather prizes taking the produce of others as a joy in itself.
By no means is BAP a “traditionalist” or “conservative” as that term is generally understood, especially in the context of American politics. Needless to say, he has complete contempt for the American constitution and the liberal values it embodies. But he is also the furthest thing from a “communitarian” or a Vermeuloid believer in the idea that individuals should subordinate themselves to the “common good”. BAP holds that “small communities” (repeatedly using the metaphor of packed longhouses) are naturally ruled by old men and “mammies”, groups for whom he has approximately equal contempt. Several times he advances the notion that such is the default state of human society and that European civilization was in such a state before the arrival of the wild Aryan conquerors of the Bronze Age.
The proper type of person, for BAP, is not an altruist who sacrifices for the common good and certainly not a proponent of “enlightened self-interest” who wants to get rich by inventing some type of useful gadget for the masses. He is a predator who lets his natural instincts run free and goes out to occupy space and demand tribute from the common sort of man. His heroes are Greek tyrants and, in the modern day, mercenaries. He speaks glowingly of tyrants who gathered all the leading men of a city to one location and had them murdered en masse. But even that sort of action is suspicious because it could be construed as in one’s rationally calculated interest (practically verging on homosexuality). The greatest type of brutality is that committed, like the most preposterous alleged depravities of Nero and Caligula — in a turn of phrase he repeatedly uses — “for no reason at all”.
It is completely consistent for BAP to praise brutality committed “for no reason at all”, as that is precisely his attitude toward the choice to live in the first place. “According to any rational calculation, life is not worth living, because pain far outweighs pleasure. Heavily medicated nihilists are likely to deny this — the blessed and happy know it’s true… but also know that reason and rationality are false.” The Buddhists are correct that this life is a living hell, but rationally deciding to attempt escape is the coward’s choice. The man of the Bronze Age Mindset chooses life, chooses suffering, “for no reason at all”. He gives free rein to his animal instincts and lets the spirit of nature within him run wild with no respect for the nonexistent rights of others.
It is always difficult to criticize an explicit rejection of rationality. Any argument presented in favor of rationality is circular in that, in connecting premises to a conclusion, it presumes the validity of reason. All that can be done is to point to the power and results of reason, and to the failure and bankruptcy of attempts to live in a manner contrary to reason. Indeed, I believe a large part of the appeal of BAPism and other forms of irrationalism is the low and disreputable state of universities and other organizations that claim to be bastions of rational thought. The thought is, “If this be reason, to hell with reason!” Above all, the prevalence of skepticism and its partner, dogmatism, encourages an attitude of hopelessness that knowledge and meaning can be found through reason. But since people need these things, they turn to non-rational sources. It must be the project of defenders of reason to present a coherent and systematic view of the world. But to elaborate that is beyond the scope of this review.
One could also seize upon the tensions and contradictions between BAP’s right-wing condemnations of petty and violent criminals (particularly those of non-white races) and his embrace of criminal behavior writ large as the highest mode of life. Or point out in a Randian fashion how the predator who lives off others is ultimately dependent on them and is in fact a pathetic creature with no power of his own. Indeed, BAP recognizes this latter fact in the context of modern totalitarian dictators but seems to believe the situation is different in the case of Greek tyrants and his idealized latter-day mercenary-king.
But perhaps the most fatal criticism of BAP’s whole project is a flaw he shares with many authors of quite different philosophical inclinations: he fails to take into account and to grapple honestly with the transformative impact of future technology on society and the human condition itself. One gets the impression (as, again, one gets from many authors who have nothing in common with BAP’s views), that humanity will trundle along in precisely the same essential state as today, but perhaps with somewhat bigger guns and fancier toys. And yet BAP (correctly) points out that technological stagnation or retrogression is not a way forward, would only lead to the stifling of the human spirit he admires by various forms of collectivism (and gerontocracy/matriarchy, in his view).
But if technological progress is allowed to proceed, there will be no stasis of mankind in his “natural” condition. He will be destroyed, or else he will gain full power over his own physical and cognitive architecture, to create a mode of existence consisting of nothing but pleasure and happiness. Even if it were true in the past (and I do not believe it is) that the choice to live is irrational because suffering outweighs pleasure, this condition would cease to hold. BAP may regard such an existence as contemptible and the culmination of the life of the “bugman”, but the idea that it is going to be stopped by pirate gangs of musclemen is preposterous. Indeed, there is one passage in which BAP alludes to a possible future embodying the Gnostic nightmare of a world of “matter wrongly configured”, in which animalistic impulses are finally and completely repressed in favor of an artificial world of logarithms and intellect.[8] While I differ in my opinion of the desirability of such a world, I do believe that something like it is inevitable if humanity is not destroyed and scientific-technological progress continues. The “bug life” of pleasure, tended to by machines, will be the rational choice and the dominant choice, and though BAP plays the part of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, no one will have the capacity to stand with arms akimbo and send the logarithms to the devil.[9]
Bronze Age Mindset is an erudite and thought-provoking book, even if in the end its irrationalism is senseless and its program of “exhortation” absurd. It does at least push back against the altruist-collectivist mentality of our age, even if the alternative it proposes of the predatory warrior-aristocrat is just as false and destructive. I have also neglected to mention in this review (though one can get a sense from the epigraph above) the sheer number of batshit insane quotes, which are amusing — and surely intentionally so — in their abrupt transitions between serious philosophical examination and declarations on the order of “Saddam Hussein was a transsexual in his soul” or an episode where BAP is beaten up by a bouncer’s “goons” for harranguing people at a nightclub about the Crusades and the Trojan War being the same historical event. I cannot whole-heartedly recommend it, but it is entertaining.