A NOTE ON NEW OCCIDENT
- Editorial Board
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
Sir Walter Scott, writing about the founding of The Quarterly Review, said that “The real reason for instituting the new publication is the disgusting and deleterious doctrines with which the most popular of our Reviews disgraces its pages.” We feel much the same. New Occident exists because what now passes for serious opinion, left and right, has become intolerable to anyone still attached to the civilization of the West and the standards that once governed its life of the mind.
We write at a moment when almost every tendency that earlier critics lamented has matured into something coarser and more entrenched. The old complaints about the world order seem almost quaint. The nominal Right has not escaped this decay. In many respects it has hastened it. Institutions that once claimed to defend the West, or at least some remnant of its moral and cultural order, now offer a soft echo of liberal premises, or, equally often, scream of the same. On campuses, even the ostensibly conservative machinery has proved remarkably eager to trade away loyalties for a place at the table, training clever young men and women to manage the decline of a civilization they are no longer permitted to love. Elsewhere, a great deal of what passes for right-wing commentary is an unstable mixture of marketing, ressentiment, and posturing, offering little more than either empty slogans or white papers carefully trimmed to treat symptoms but rarely the underlying disease.
New Occident begins from the conviction that this will simply not do. If the decline of America has been driven, in no small part, by an unspoken and unanswerable aristocracy formed in a handful of universities, then any serious attempt at renewal must speak to that fact. It is not enough to denounce elites in general. The old universities exist. They continue to shape the people who will govern and administer, for good or ill. They are also, even now, among the last places where long arguments might be read and remembered. We do not believe that the way out can bypass them altogether. We believe that, in some measure, it must come from within the same place but from those who still understand that privilege binds before it entitles.
Hence the character of this review. New Occident is written and edited chiefly by students, scholars, and alumni of the old institutions of higher education, above all in the United States. Many of our contributors write under assumed names, in the older Anglo-American habit of political argument in inhospitable times, not as an affectation, but as a practical concession to environments that punish such devoted candor. They are, for the moment, some of the last vestiges of an American elite still willing to ask what is best for the country for which there is no substitute, and for the wider West of which it remains a part.
What do we mean to defend? The list, at least in outline, is simple. We wish to defend high culture against the flattening pressures of the globalist will. We wish to defend the civilizational West as such, and in particular the Christian inheritance that gave it form. We wish to defend inherited hierarchy and authority against both the sentimental utopianism that denies their necessity and the cynicism that treats them as mere instruments of will-to-power. We wish to defend the classical and Christian moral order against the dissolution of sex, family, and law. We wish to defend concrete loyalties to nations and peoples against both deracinated cosmopolitan abstraction and tribal frenzy. None of this is fashionable, even among much of the so-called right-wing. That is precisely the point.
We are not under the illusion that all of these tasks are novel. The worst intellectual and cultural shifts of the past half century, be it the suicidal importation of semites, the disintegration of the family, the privatization and then pathologization of religious belief, or the rise of a state all but hellbent on the destruction of its own people, have been noticed before. What seems newer is the degree to which even their critics have learned to speak about them in the prevailing dialect. New Occident will often sound more old-fashioned than that, and through that, paradoxically, more in tune with what must be done.
Our manner will be, as far as we can manage it, academic without being merely academic. We have no desire to shriek shrilly down from the ivory tower. The quarterly issue is about proper rhythm. It forces a patience that the news cycle despises. Between issues, the magazine’s web pages will carry additional essays, letters, and notes, but even there we will resist the pressure to become yet another outlet of instant reaction. There is no shortage of commentary in our time. There is a shortage of judgment.
We are not a mass magazine. New Occident is addressed first to a current and future elite, whether or not it yet understands itself as such: to those whose education, position, or vocation gives them real responsibilities for institutions or souls. We mean, in time, to supply something like an intellectual backbone for that emerging Right—a body of arguments, standards, and remembered examples on which resolve can lean when fashion and fear press in. Our pages are written to form instincts as well as opinions, to give younger leaders some sense of what must not be surrendered and why. But it is not addressed to them alone. Our readers already come from a wide variety of occupations and situations. What they share is less a social type than a disposition. In a society, nothing of consequence can be rebuilt without the allegiance and sacrifice of citizens at every level. If there is to be any renewal of serious public life, it will require both those who govern and those who consent to be governed to recover a mode for speaking about the good.
We do not promise comfort. New Occident will sometimes praise what is unfashionable and criticize what enjoys universal applause. We will sometimes reach back to authors, episodes, and doctrines that contemporary pedagogy has politely buried. We will do our best to tell the truth as we see it and to admit when we have been wrong.
This is, in the end, a modest undertaking. A quarterly cannot repair the university or the family, dismantle the administrative state, or restore a lost confidence in the civilization of the Latin West. What it can do is keep certain questions open in a time eager to close them, preserve a fugitive seriousness that might otherwise disappear, and offer, to those who labor behind the wire, the knowledge that they are not alone. If we can do that, then New Occident will have justified its existence.
For now, we make only this claim: that the situation is grave enough to warrant another attempt. The West has not yet exhausted its resources, nor has America. Whether those resources will be wasted, forgotten, or saved depends, in part, on what is thought and written in years that feel, to many, like an interlude to our downfall. We propose to use our pages to think as clearly and as candidly as we can about that.
— The Editors
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