PREMIUM: Metaphor vs Antimetaphor

Introduction

In late June, Just Stop Oil attacked Stonehenge as a part of their long-running campaign of publicity stunts to “raise awareness about climate change”.  Two activists sprayed Stonehenge with orange pigment. 

Now, that they are pushing at an open door on this issue is not interesting here, nor is their general disregard for the inherited goods of our civilisation, either. 

One of them was an old Indian man, and the other a zoomer, after all. 

I found it interesting that everyone reacted with horror to this. A genuine, deep, old-world anger at the temerity of these two. 

Afterwards, a fellow Just Stop Oil activist was debating the merits of this on LBC and defended their actions by saying: 

“It's just a bit of orange dust on a rock.”

We were discussing this in the office. It was Rory, the editor of Islander, who looked over at me and said “the left really is just metaphor vs antimetaphor, aren’t they?” and this clicked something in my head. 

I think this distinction really does provide insight into the two kinds of worldview that are in conflict, and helps us better understand ourselves and our enemy. 

Part 1: Metaphor

A metaphor is a sentence which directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It is a figure of speech which is representative or symbolic of something else.

Metaphors are concepts with layers of meaning. The bottom layer is the literal thing in itself, a spoken word or an object on this material plane that is the anchor for the reference. 

Built upon that, are layers of meaning, in which the discerning mind is being appealed to through the non-literal reference to something else; the higher, transcendent layers which are present and make themselves felt through our act and response to the literal. 

The thing referenced is a direct reference to other, greater metaphysical things. 

When one stands before stonehenge, one stands before 10,000 years of contiguous history. 

Not only is Stonehenge itself about 5,000 years old, but we, the descendents of the people who made it, are still here and have been since the retreat of the ice sheet. 

In 1903, a nearly complete skeleton of a neolithic man was discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge. Radiocarbon dating put him at around 10,000 years old, and DNA testing revealed that he was related to a Mr Adrian Targett, a retired history teacher living half a mile from the cave in which Cheddar Man was discovered. 

Quoting from a Guardian article from 2018, entitled “Cheddar Man changes the way we think about our ancestors”, they said: 

“Thus the DNA of Cheddar Man shows there is a 10,000-year-old unbroken genetic lineage from people who inhabited Britain long before agriculture reached our shores to British men and women of today.”

And:

“the average person in Britain today carries around 10% of the genes of these ancient hunter-gatherers.”

We are in part the same people who built Stonehenge. It belongs to us because it is a monument our civilisation constructed and still stands to this day.  

Stonehenge is, therefore, a metaphor for our civilisation. When one refers to Stonehenge, one refers to this lineage.

 All monuments are metaphors for the civilisations which build them, and they stir the hearts of men. 

As Evola might put it, the monument instantiates an immanent transcendence of the metaphysical qualities it possesses that imbues it with an ontological rank which marks it out as above other mere objects. It is unique, precious, mystical, and untouchable. 

No-one visits Stonehenge or the Pyramids of Egypt because they want to see a pile of stones. 

They visit these ancient monuments to take part in the metaphorical continuum of a great civilisation. 

They wish to, even if only for a moment, be touched by the transcendence of what these things represent, as a human experience of a higher plane of existence. 

Stonehenge is also representative in the way that it makes present something otherwise absent, or at least not immediately felt. In telling the story of Stonehenge, we refer to that great chain of being; we refer directly to one thing by mentioning the other. 

And it is in the story of stonehenge that we find that representation of reality which provides the rhetorical argument for not only ourselves, but future generations: our ancestors made this monument, and preserved it through the ages. 

This places a moral burden upon us to do likewise, so that our descendants can likewise touch the metaphysical inheritance and experience the transcendence we ourselves enjoy. We are obligated to keep the flame of this long history burning. 

So, to summarise, Stonehenge as a monument is a metaphor for a non-rational metaphysical hierarchy, the wyrd of a people that moves from the past to the present and into the future, that they carry with them wherever they go. 

This is the enchantment of the world that Adorno and Horkheimer were referring to in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The “far right” are the people caught up in the enchanting metaphor of their own civilisation. 

They are believers in the wyrd, the destiny, that is an expression of the vast web of deep magic, as Peter Hitchens calls it, that lies under every mountain hill, vale, river, field, pasture, hamlet, town and city of this country.  

The deep magic is given its power by its fundamental and abiding metaphysical and moral truth.  The spiritual accumulation of millennia from the good will of untold generations in the same lineage. 

And we see it referenced all the time. 

Nelson says “England expects every man to do his duty”, this is to what he refers, and we feel that burden of obligation upon us. 

When Russell Crowe in Master and Commander says “this ship is England”, it's a ready and comprehensible part of our language and we understand what he means. 

Part 2: Antimetaphor

Antimetaphor is a positivist attack on the hierarchy of metaphor by appealing to the material component of the metaphor in isolation in space and time.

As we saw with the Just Stop Oil protester, it’s just orange dust on a pile of stones.  A reduction to the trivial that is an untrue rendering of what is actually being referenced.

Antimetaphor uses positivism’s ruthless attack on metaphysics to sever the connection that the literal has to the metaphor, attempting to detach it from the greater meaning it possesses. 

To do this, they attempt to step outside the subjective universe of human experience and into the objective universe of valueless rationality as they expect that the universe itself might display. 

Metaphysical things are not objectively quantifiable, the objective perspective is blind to metaphysics. 

The positivist attack can be successfully made on corporeal grounds if the interlocutor consents to agree to an objective frame. 

They must admit that, from this perspective, incorporeal things do not manifest in the material world, and therefore they do not exist. 

Since we are now unable to reference a greater and particular whole using a metaphor, we are forced to use rational abstract categories to denote physical characteristics of the universe, which in turn can be quantified, duplicated, or exchanged in turn. 

What this amounts to is a conceptual reduction in our perspectives from a rich, dense, and particular mythology of a people, which treats each place, person and event as crucial to the whole, to the thin, abstract, and fungible categories of positivism. 

This is how the closed universe of machine minded men is philosophically established and how antimetaphor becomes the reign of category and quantity. 

It also allows things to be grouped together which are otherwise not related; when everything is merely its base material components isolated in the here and now, things can be abstracted and associated that otherwise have no association at all. 

Antimetaphor is therefore the attack on the narrative reference of the human perspective of life.

It is the dominant paradigm of the 21st and latter half of the 20th century, it has a long pedigree.

It is the force CS Lewis is objecting to in the Abolition of Man with regards to the new educational standards of Gaius and Titus.

It is the disenchanted world of Adorno and Horkheimer and the one-dimensional world of Herbert Marcuse. 

It's not that metaphorical things can't be enjoyed, either, but they are superfluous and reduced to mere fancies. 

We can trace its debunking pedigree all the way back to Heraclitus, who said “no man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

And we see it everywhere around us now, particularly in the attempt to unbake the cake of English identity and liberate us of our obligations to the past and future.  

A great example of the war of antimetaphor against metaphor is is John Cleese and the entire Monty Python crew, whose entire careers were built upon lampooning our civilisation to make us feel embarrassed about it. 

Cleese and his fellow Pythons attacked the stuffy old sentimental forces of metaphor by mocking them through the callous and rational lens of antimetaphor. And they certainly won those arguments.

But now he is an old man, he looks around and laments that somehow “London isn't an English city any more”.  

Another example of this was from the recent Southport riots, where one rioter, David Spring, 61, was making threatening and hostile gestures towards police, calling officers "c*nts" and chanting "you're not English any more".

Our police, just like our cities, are being shorn of their ethnic character. They are no longer metaphors for English civilisation. 

And Mr Spring is right; they are the universal men of the extropic liberal state.  To call them English is to refer to a long continuum of civilisation that these people don’t even reject, they simply don’t recognise. These people and places are being shorn of their English metaphysical character and becoming something else. 

Part 3: The Extropic State

Antimetaphor has no other goal but to create the Extropic State. 

Extropianism is an "evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving the human condition".

In essence, the philosophy of extropy is the self-conscious articulation of the subconscious Whig interpretation of history, in which science, technology, and liberal morality would bring mankind into a new materialistic golden age. 

Extropianism seeks to bring about a positivist, antimetaphorical, anti-metaphysical, universal state which has outgrown the old world of metaphor, metaphysics, and human particularities. 

There was even a relatively short-lived Extropy Institute, which shuttered itself in 2006 because the institute deemed its “mission as essentially completed”.

As far as the Extropy Institute was concerned, we were in that paradigm, and they had won.  

Extropic state is determined to bring about Karl Popper’s antimetaphorical “abstract society”, in which each citizen is rationally imbued with a set of rights designed to protect their material person. 

This is in opposition to the metaphorical “closed society” of irrational tribes, peoples, and histories; this is the way the cycles of history are to be broken, and history will be put to an end. 

Man is to be understood only in the category of citizen, a corporeal, rights-bearing individual: the man is irrelevant, only the abstract nature of his material reality is represented by his status as a political entity within the extropic state. 

The extropic state can therefore only consider the material well being of its charges. It cannot speak to their dignity.  

You have likely seen videos of disrespectful immigrant behaviour; the extropic state has no concept of the metaphor being attacked by such insulting behaviour, and therefore it can’t process your objections.

As it processes all humans are fundamentally the same, it believes the differences between the natives and the immigrants are brought to the conversation by the natives themselves, and therefore blames them for not accepting the “correct” antimetaphorical paradigm with their “far right” metaphorical framing. 

The Extropic State must also be therapeutic: it must brainwash people who rightfully object to its unnatural and bizarre circumstances to accept the state of affairs that is causing them to go mad. 

Aesthetics themselves also fall away because they are metaphorical, particular and non-utilitarian; some people might not enjoy them and they aren’t technically useful. 

Function is universal and necessary, which is why everything looks samey, dystopian, and interchangeable. It’s why McDonalds buildings look like prison blocks and telephone boxes look like gibbets.

It’s also why the left has the keys to the kingdom. Liberals/leftists manning the institutions recognise the forces of antimetaphor in certain governments and not others, and cooperate accordingly.

It’s why the system accepted Starmer but rejected Corbyn, despite there being almost no difference in their politics. 

Starmer would never have uttered the metaphorical statement “Zionists don’t understand English irony.” 

They are all working to build the extropic state and they all recognize each other by their dead positivist language, their hollow signage, and constant demands for material privileges dressed up as rights.  No conspiracy necessary, they mix like sugar and water. 

It’s also why they can’t stand the Conservative Party. Despite it being the most left-wing party in the country, it is also a metaphorical party.  

Nationalism is also a product of antimetaphor. It renders us as a fungible class of human capital which makes possible the levee en mass; it reduces unique people to abstract citizens to be used as cannon fodder. 

And once you agree that people are merely instances of abstract categories, you can agree to more; if you can be a nationalist, you open the door to being an internationalist; all they are doing is expanding the frame that you can no longer root into something unique and particular. 

I think this is why the liberal elite hate the working class with such venom. The working class are the metaphorical people  of English civilisation, they embody it completely.

They remind the liberal elite that the metaphysical slime of Englishness still clings to them and they have failed to fully become antimetaphorical global citizens. 

It's the source of their xenophilia, as well. They are trained to love other cultures more than their own to remove themselves from the stink of cultural parochialism. 

So what is the alternative? 

The Metaphorical State and The Future of the Right

I have often wondered what the essence of the traditional right actually is. What is its true source of power, from whence it derives genuine authority? 

The justification of any order lies in its ability to instantiate a just order. This goes as much for the extropic state as much as it would a metaphorical state. 

Only they have a much easier task than we do. Returning to the undifferentiated sludge of humanity is easy, actually. Setting the rules which will build something apart from it is the hard bit.

Britain used to be a metaphorical state, in the sense I have outlined here. It was the kind of society and state that Britain used to have before a certain dark lord took the reins of power and began turning us into an extropic state.

And I genuinely mean that Britain actually meant something, that was made present when the British were a metaphorical people.  

We were synonymous with honest governance, decent manners, calm demeanour, fair dealing, and common sense. 

This was built on a great people and history stretching back into the primordial past. 

All of the virtues required to bring into being a good and just order were present, virtues that people would die in their hundreds of thousands to defend, which is what the Tommies thought they were doing in world war 1 and 2.   

And it seems there is no particular limit to a metaphorical state, either, if the British Empire is anything to go by.  It gave ethnically non-British people something to buy-into whilst retaining focus on the subject of the metaphor. 

I think the Queen’s funeral showed us that the deep magic of our metaphorical country still abides, it just needs to be summoned up. It is still in the hearts of the British people, but it is at the moment dormant and suppressed. 

I’m not sure how this is done, at least not yet. 

I suspect it has something to do with establishing the frame such that it captures the forces of antimetaphor within a metaphor, so that for them to even express themselves, it pins them to the metaphor they are attempting to escape. 

But as I said, I don’t have the answers yet, and I think I’ve spoken for long enough, so I just hope this analysis has been of some use to you. Good luck and godspeed.