Howdy.
Many people on the Right are not interested in high culture.
-- Jonathan Bowden
Let us take a look at a man named Jonathan Bowden.
He was a British essayist, speaker, and right-wing guru. He died at 49 in 2012.
I personally haven't read him until now. It took me some time to break down the, shall-we-say, "hype-barrier". Well then, no matter, for now he's a fav of mine. Kinda.
He knew art. He knew literary brilliance. With a radical conservative approach he portrayed the greats of 19th and 20th century. More of this below.
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A fine trait of Bowden's was: he admitted that some spirituality is the basis of reality. Hierarchial elitism is needed to give meaning to existence, he once said. In a lecture on T. S. Eliot.
But he, Bowden, also poses with guns. As we see in the promo pic illustrating this post. Hardly the pose of a perennialist...!
So how do you combine that? Preaching transcendence and at the same time intimating that tough-guy nihilist?
I’d say right, now, he wasn’t all nihilist... But had something of that in him too... He sometimes used post-modernist deconstruction as a way to criticise leftist modernity. A somewhat banal jargong. Like noting that "lefty X is really taking a conservative stanse in ussue y".
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Now, to summarize his creed a bit, the best parts of it:
Bowden was for Western civilization... and some Paganism to that... and aestheticism, literary sophistication, and elitism in art, politics, ethnicity, anywhere.
As for the last item, ethnicity and race, we shall here only say that Bowden had seen into this hot topic too. Like, in Western Civilization Bites Back, 2014, p. 164, he refers to Simone Weil and her enracinement idea: to enroot oneself. -- That was original, a modern right-winger acknowledging Simone Weil, the post-modern theologician. I've written about her myself on this blog. In Swedish.
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As I said Bowden had a tinge of perennial ideas in him. They might have been a mere shadow. But they were there. And this, to me, makes it easier to digest his overall message.
Thus we've introduced the man and his thought and what makes me even tolerate him. Now we'll make room for some diverse aspects of his ideas. Some informal remarks on them. Here goes.
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BBB: Bowden kinda liked Beckett and Bacon... their mere attempt to be different, anti-story, anti-meaning. “The work of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett ... tends in the direction of an anarchistic Right-wing nihilism.” [Source] -- This attitude of Bowden's might seem bold and fresh but I have personally no wish to be such a post-modern recruiter of famous fringe-figures to our cause. It is a predictable partisanship. And it does permeate much of Bowden's thought.
Bowden: knew academic jargon, had some higher studies behind him, but no academic exam. Pretty much self-educated. Mostly mentions thinkers etc. from Nietzsche and on, but he had some knowledge of Renaissance art too. Sometimes he comes thru as a crampy nihilist rigorist of the usual right-wing kind -- but -- he is not wholly a Nietzschan nihilist.
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From the work called Frenzy, (written around 1994) here is Bowden’s creed, already intimated. Inequality, hierarchy, and “sexist and racist”: [Source]
The reason why I support the Right against the Left is that the Right supports structures that already exist and that give life meaning. The Right, in other words, supports those structures that exist at the present and that communicate value and identity to the citizen. Of course, everything the Left says about the Right is true, and this is why the Right needs to be supported against the Left. The Left declares quite correctly that the Right is racist, sexist, and elitist—all of which is correct because you cannot have a civilization that is not hierarchical and elitist. If you like, the Right preserves difference, inequality, between groups, and it gives meaning to life because it orders things hierarchically. If things are to be defined, if they are to be named, then they have to be placed on different levels—a definition that is based on equality, an absence of distinction, is null and void.
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Bowden appreciated Eliot’s foundation in spiritual esotericism – above and beyond, this dimension we need; like Eliot Bowden stood for this. And in his speech on Lewis, Bowden said that the spirit of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis was “the classicism of the Old World coming back to the Old World via the New World”. [Source]
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To top this presentation off, hereby a transcript of Bowden’s lecture on Wyndham Lewis. Of Canadian extraction Lewis was a modernist painter of great skill, also sometimes a fine author. He had an interesting life and Bowden aptly shows it.
Here it is. A fine piece, Bowden at his best -- I'd say, it's as good as anything Lytton Strachey might have written.
Related
A site dedicated to Bowden's writings
Good reads by me, November 2025
In Swedish by LS: Simone Weils credo
