EXCLUSIVE: Harrison Pitt on Europe’s Crisis and Christian Identity
A wide-ranging interview on moral universalism, cultural decline, and the political future of the West
In early March, I was fortunate enough to hear Martin Sellner and Harrison Pitt – two political operatives of towering intellect on the European right – talk at a Viennese venue where they discussed issues such as “remigration,” the “Great Replacement,” and the Christian faith’s relatedness to them.
With looming in the background a continent wrestling to salvage any identity at all – be it ancestral, religious, cultural or otherwise – as it undergoes waves of migration which radically transform its social and political order, their considered reflections and analysis felt necessary.
Both men wield significant organisational and ideational influence in European politics and address rapidly growing audiences. They also happen to profess Christian belief.
Already familiar with their work, as I benefitted from the chance to examine them more closely and then pose questions to them, I quickly realised here was a form of political Christian of greater sincerity and depth than we have been accustomed to until now. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Nicolás Gómez Dávila, from metaphysics to anthropology and history, the ideational exchange taking place in this emerging political faction is refreshingly serious.
The virtuous Catholic seeks to uphold in a political community justice and truth. Seeing injustice and falsehoods put upon their nation, Sellner and Pitt advocate action to avert a civilisational suicide which would see beautiful cities and cultural artefacts destroyed, while innocent targets – many of whom are already Christians – are victimised by hostile new arrivals.
Do Catholics, therefore, have a natural ally in this blossoming movement? How might the Weltanschauung, thinking, and aims of its leaders converge or diverge from a true and patriotic Catholic understanding?
Fortunately, I was given a keen window into their minds, swiftly finding my answer. Both Sellner and Pitt courteously agreed to speak to Pelican+ candidly.
Over the course of the talk they gave, a consensus was reached that white “self-hatred” was a leading cause of Western malaise. However, I asked the speakers, since it “is something so inherently contrary to nature,” whether they had any thoughts on whether it was something learned rather than organically occurring.
The media landscape has long promoted materials antithetical to a Christian conception of virtue or the good life. Anti-family themes of hedonism and self-discovery have abounded; something particularly disturbing for Christians who instinctively understand the power of stories and mimetic archetypes in shaping human behaviour, for better or worse. So I asked whether they believed the sometimes pernicious influence of the entertainment industry (often used as a means of propaganda) and the like may have something to do with its emergence.
More directly, I posed the question of whether right-wing policy would make much difference if, for example, Hungarian youth are still shaped by poison such as American Netflix shows?
Part 1 Interview with Martin Sellner
The following are the responses of Mr. Harrison Pitt
Harrison Pitt: Self-hatred is no doubt a peculiar emotion for a species said to have survived in large part by natural selection to indulge. But Western civilisation is itself peculiar in all sorts of ways, both for good and for ill. Christianity teaches us that many of the most counter-intuitive ideas imaginable are to be praised as virtues. Both St. Paul and Friedrich Nietzsche are agreed that the Christian faith is nothing if not a strange religion.
Continue Reading at Pelican Plus.
To the extent that it has shaped the West, it therefore does so in strange ways, up to and including driving many to mistake self-hatred for self-sacrifice.
As for the peoples of Europe themselves, Professor Joseph Henrich has argued at considerable length, not only that the West’s inherited faith is peculiar, but that Westerners themselves inhabit a peculiar psychological world: more individualistic, more drawn to universal schemes, more taken in by abstractions that go well beyond the immediate or long-run needs of the tribe than tends to be the case among the peoples of, say, Nigeria or Pakistan.
As such, morality for the European is so much more than a matter of group survival. This is the source of much of our greatness as a civilisation, but when activated and exploited in the more sinister ways you mention, it is no wonder that it also makes us prone to pondering suicidal daydreams where others would simply reject them without pause.
Policy, as you say, can only achieve so much. Culture, history, philosophy – these matter, too.
Pelican+: In the talk, you suggested that the West’s “moral universalism” might have something to do with a Western excess of self-flagellation and reluctance to acknowledge differences between peoples or confront dangers in open border policies. But what we are talking about, excluding perhaps prefiguring precursor moments in the French Revolution and Spanish Civil War, (at least as a mass attitude) is a postwar phenomenon. It coincides with the sexual revolution and a loss of faith. You hinted at why in the talk, but must we not consider why, for some 18 centuries, Europe held to an objective, and universal creed without cannibalising itself?
Harrison Pitt: In short, the nightmarish experience of Nazism afforded ample opportunity after the Second World War for all of the above to be exploited in ways never before imagined.
It is not an accident that right-leaning Zoomers, living at a distance from the horrors of mid-century Europe and exposed to more irreverent forms of digital media, are less taken in by the implicit message of post-war morality: the West must die a gradual, decent, maximally painless death for Auschwitz to be made impossible.
Pelican+: I found it highly significant that, during the talk, your co-speaker philosopher Renaud Camus suggested that though he was historically Catholic, he found it harder and harder to identify with Catholicism as it abandons its traditions and beauty. This phenomenon will be of little surprise to Pelican readers. Camus also complained about the weakness of the churches by plastering trite inscriptions exhorting visitors that they must “be good” to people – particularly to outsiders.
While acknowledging legitimacy in his distaste for trite platitudes and suicidally empathetic browbeating, I ask if, sed contra, this commitment to objective morality (which of course can be partially explained in natural rather than divine law terms) was not a source, if not the source, of Europe’s strength. Namely, that Westerners were able to trust and aid one another with a remarkable ability to cooperate. I pried to see whether the speakers thought we ought to heed how third world nations are anarchistically different. After all, does every man seeking to be an amoral Nietzschean übermensch lead to an irresolvable clash of wills and hell on earth?
Is it not also possible that far from moral considerations hindering us, a lack thereof are a source of our demise, as our decline may be partially explained by the proliferation of the number of self-interested turncoats and sell-swords for the great institutional and financial privileges Big Brother can bestow?
Harrison Pitt: Yes, I agree. Monsieur Camus’s point, I think, was that morality by a process of mass commodification has become banal, synthetic, cheapened.
To say as much, of course, is not a rejection of objective morality. Indeed, his call for “decolonisation” implies it. And in no shortage of cases, reversing mass migration will require that many accept the need to subordinate their own individual self-interest to the greater good.
Pelican+: You identified a masochism among European whites behind their desire to give up their wealth and inheritance to outsiders as penance for supposed historical crimes. But is it possible we are being a bit masochistic by blaming whites?
The general public have been against mass migration in most nations in virtually all polls conducted on the matter in almost every Western nation. Conceptually, if the mainstream media (cliché term, I know) was candid about migrant crime, or was honest about the trajectory of demographic replacement and everything that is almost certain to bring, and Hollywood and entertainment culture didn’t constantly fetishise the other, and condemn in group preferences as evil, or our laws didn’t punish white resistance so harshly, is it possible this attitude wouldn’t pervade?
Harrison Pitt: The peculiar masochism of Europeans is a necessary but insufficient part of the story. I do believe that, on balance, our plight has more to do with what others are doing to us than what we are doing to ourselves. But that said, the plot against the host peoples of the West would never have enjoyed such success if we were not first unique in being psychologically vulnerable to the sinister messaging you describe.
Try as the mainstream media and the entertainment industry might, I doubt that Hollywood or the New York Times would ever have much luck brainwashing tribal Pakistanis into giving up everything for nothing in the space of a single lifetime.
Pelican+: Camus says “colonisation is very wrong”. I’m not sure what I think about this yet. I half agree. On the one hand I oppose British Empire nationalism. I think it’s partially true half of the imperial nations’ problems are that they unnecessarily embroiled themselves in the far corners of the earth, culturally caused cultural obliteration among certain peoples – creating resentment, and are now being reverse colonised by their former subjects. Colonialism moreover almost universalises the nation, as has largely happened to British customs and traditions.
But can this condemnation be absolutised? Spain and France would not be what they were without Roman imperialism. France and Spain would likely be weaker. Then there is the question of the New World nations. Are all good and legitimate cultural developments endogenous? Complicated issue, but are we prepared for these inevitable ripostes and if so what is our answer?
Harrison Pitt: My answer is simple.
First, there is a difference between administrative colonisation and demographic colonisation. To govern a people as a well-organised alien minority is quite different from replacing those people forever. Europe’s great colonial endeavours tended more often to be administrative than demographic.
But second, where Europeans did engage in demographic colonisation, as in the United States and Australia, I would never deny that the native peoples of these territories -- though routinely at each other’s throats, of course -- have suffered a profound loss that cannot simply be offset by the enriching first-world conditions that Europeans brought with them. American Indians and Aboriginal Australians can no more live on bread alone than we do. However, where Europeans have settled in large numbers, we have since made a remarkable qualitative difference to the kind of places that the United States and Australia are today. These countries strike everyone, including third-worlders themselves, as enviable destinations not by virtue of the peoples who inhabited them first, but thanks to the peoples who built what they have become now.
Apart from anything else, though, there is no going back at this point in history. Nor will there be any going back if we lose everything ourselves. In the meantime, we have every right to resist.
Pelican+: Mr. Camus opposes the vulgarity of mass production culture and its tendency to equalise. I agree. But is the preservation of nations not a uniquely Christian heritage? Whereas the mass production mentality, the tendency to equalise and erase and make identical, is far stronger outside of Christendom.
Is Latin, the emergent distinction between sacrality and vernacular – that Anglo Saxons and Basques and Poles would attend the same Mass in a dead language but translate devotional materials into their own languages – and the concept of unity in difference in the Trinity (relating to the problem of the one and they many), the very reason we didn’t dissolve into one like the often barely distinguishable nations of the Arab and Eurasian worlds?
Catholics would say this is explained by the fact, according to Augustinian and Thomistic theology, grace builds upon nature rather than erasing it.
Harrison Pitt: I agree. In my view, by far the most Christian sentiment expressed all evening was when Monsieur Camus condemned replacement as a form of sacrilege, because for a man, or a woman, or indeed a people to be dignified, they must be irreplaceable.