What is the Longhouse?

The word ‘longhouse’ is now part of the right-wing lexicon. It was popularized by BAP’s book, Bronze Age Mindset, but has since taken on a life of its own. Today, it’s generally used as a synonym for feminism, but I think that’s an inaccurate way to use the term (I mean, why not just say feminism?). In my first Substack article, I’ll try and clarify what the longhouse really is — or at the very least share my interpretation of it.

Live, Laugh, Longhouse 

Lewis Henry Morgan was an American anthropologist. He studied American Indians, and spent part of his life among the Iroqouis. He observed that Indian families would live in a joint-tenement building, called a longhouse. Five, ten or even twenty Indian families would live in this building (I know it smell crazy in there).

There was no concept of private property or land ownership among them. Property was the possession of the community, rather than the individual or family. To quote him:

Each household practiced communism in living…. Whatever was gained by any member of the household on hunting or fishing expeditions, or was raised by cultivation, was made a common stock. Within the house they lived from common stores.

The longhouse was supervised by a matron, who was responsible for distributing the provisions. To quote Morgan once again:

Every household was organized under a matron who supervised its domestic economy. After the single daily meal was cooked… the matron was summoned, and it was her duty to divide the food, from the kettle, to the several families according to their respective needs.

Morgan describes Indian society as a ‘gynocracy’, because it was matrilineal and matrilocal. In other words, descent was traced through the mother, and men lived with their wife’s family after marriage. 

In 1877, Morgan published his most influential work, titled Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization. In this work, Morgan applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to the study of history. Just as man had evolved from ape, society had evolved through seven stages of development.

Stage One: Lower Savagery
Stage Two: Middle Savagery
Stage Three: Upper Savagery
Stage Four: Lower Barbarism
Stage Five: Middle Barbarism
Stage Six: Upper Barbarism
Stage Seven: Civilisation

Morgan believed that mankind developed in stages, and each stage was an advance on the previous stage. Societies in the early stages of development are polygamous, collectivist, and matriarchal, while later stages are monogamous, individualistic, and patriarchal.

Morgan argues that gynocracy wasn’t unique to the tribes of North America. Instead, he believed it was a stage of societal evolution that all people went through. He believed that gynocratic, primitive communism ‘had a wide prevalence in the tribes of mankind, Asiatic, European, African, American, and Australian. Not until after civilization had begun among the Greeks, …was the influence of this old order of society overthrown.’

Most interestingly for our purposes, Morgan predicts that one day, an eighth stage of development would be reached. This eighth stage would combine the benefits of civilization with some of the ‘virtues’ of savage society, such as gynocracy and communal ownership. This idea had an immense influence on both Marx and Engels, who incorporated it into the socialist view of human history.

Morgan also created a secret fraternal society called The Order of The Iroquois. They would meet in a Masonic lodge, perform a secret rite called inindianation and LARP as Native Americans. But that is a story for another day….

Reject Modernity, Return to The Longhouse!

The term ‘longhouse’ could be viewed as a shorthand for Morgan’s eighth stage of development. In other words, a society that is technologically sophisticated yet retains primitive values—what we might call a neo-traditionalist society, or a gynocracy with modernist characteristics. Hence, BAP writes:

The modern is “nothing new”: it is the return of a very ancient subjection and brokenness under new branding, promoted by new concepts and justifications. If you want to see our future look to Europe as it existed before 1600 BC, or much of the world as it was until recently and still is….the communal life of the longhouse with its young men dominated and broken by the old and sclerotic, by the matriarchs, the blob and yeast mode in human life overtaking and subjecting all higher aspiration.

Nietzsche made the same point in Genealogy of Morality, when he wrote:

Modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that predilection for the ‘commune’, the most primitive form of social structure which is common to all Europe’s socialists, are in essence a huge throw-back.

Socialism, communism, feminism, democracy—all of these so-called modern ideas are, in fact, a throw-back. Far from being ‘progressive,’ they are regressive: a regression to the collectivism and egalitarianism of our tribal past. This regression is disguised by contemporary rhetoric and modern technology. But behind the neologisms and corporate inclusivity programs, there is a reactionary impulse.

Exploring the Metapolitical Utility of the Word 'Longhouse’

If you were to ask a normgroid what makes someone right wing, they would likely say a desire to return to the past. This is because the debate between left and right is framed as a conflict between progress and tradition, the future and the past. Many on the online right buy into this framing, and therefore spend their time critiquing modernity, secularism, Lockean Individualism, etc. Some even convert to Catholicism, move to the Midwest, and spend more time debating Prots on Xwitter than attending Mass.

But it is a strategic mistake to accept your opponent’s framework.

Why should modernity and technological advancement be associated with leftism, feminism and collectivism? Hasn’t the overwhelming trend of human history shown the opposite to be true? Morgan himself observed that as society evolves, it becomes more patriarchal, individualistic, and hierarchical. In fact, it could be argued that the advancement of civilization (i.e., progress) is synonymous with the intensification of hierarchy.

The concept of the longhouse is useful because it reframes the debate between left and right. Leftism is not a progressive ideology. It is a yearning for our tribal past.

Leftism is a Psychological Response to the Trauma of Modernisation

In his book, The Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cuddihy argues that modernisation is synonymous with differentiation:

Differentiation is the cutting edge of the modernization process, sundering cruelly what tradition had joined. It splits ownership from control; it separates church from state, ethnicity from religion; it produces the "separated"or liberal state, a limited state that knows its "place," differentiated from society. Differentiation slices through ancient primordial ties and identities…. Differentiation divorces ends from means, nuclear from extended families.

In other words, modernity divides and distinguishes. It creates boundaries between people and things. Upper class and lower class, government and religion, family and community, labour and leisure (think Sicilian fisherman) all get separated by modernity. This leads to a more efficient, but also more fragmented society.

Cuddihy argues that members of the Protestant core culture are uniquely adapted to modernity. He thinks that modernity is essentially ‘a secularization of Protestant Christianity’ and offers the following description of the WASP:

They, in a sense, are "ego-syntonic" to modernity. They alone were “present at the creation.”

This ego-syntonicity can be explained by the fact that Prots built the modern world, and have had the longest time to adapt to it. By contrast, other groups have been thrust into modernity with almost no adjustment time. The most dramatic example of this is the Australian Aboriginals. They didn’t know how to boil water and were suddenly thrust into the industrial civilisation of the British Empire. They experienced modernization at a neck-breaking pace. This process was traumatizing for them. But it was also traumatizing for other groups outside of the protestant core-culture, such as Jews.

In the late nineteenth century, Jews began entering the West from the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe. The shtetl was a Gemeinschaft, which is a pretentious way of saying tight-knit community. ShtetlSTEIN, who had grown up in this tight-knit community, suddenly found himself in the highly differentiated West, with its clear division between public and private, individual and community. These divisions were totally alien to him. In the shtetl, ‘privacy is neither known nor desired,’ and life was characterised by ‘tribal wholeness’. By contrast, the West was atomized and fragmented. As a result, the Jewish newcomer experienced ‘wholeness-hunger’, a desire to return to his premodern Gemeinschaft.

This desire is a defining feature of the Jewish intelligentsia, who are overwhelmingly left-wing. Their leftism can be understood as an adaptive response to the psychological trauma of modernity. To demonstrate this point, I’ll lay Karl Marx on the chaise longue, and explain how this trauma shaped his worldview.

Karl Marx & Shtetl-ler Colonialism

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx denounces the ‘the idiocy of rural life’, but he doth protest too much.

It is clear that Marx harbours a deep nostalgia for the premodern past. This nostalgia is not expressed explicitly, but implicitly. He loudly celebrates the industrial revolution and advanced technology, but has a latent desire to return to the simplicity of premodern life. Occasionally, this latent desire bubbles to the surface, as can be seen in his following scREEEEEd from The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie has put an end to all feudal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour in the icy water of egotistical calculation…..The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

This passage could just as easily have been written by Joseph de Maistre. It oozes with reactionary sentiment and nostalgia for the feudal past. Marx is clearly suffering from ‘wholeness hunger’. He mourns that social bonds have been ‘torn asunder’ and expresses palpable anxiety about the dynamism of industrial civilization. Some may disagree with my interpretation of this passage (Erm....actually 🤓☝️Marx detested feudalism), and they might be correct. However, my point is not about Marx's attitude toward feudalism - it’s about his attitude towards modernity. Marx was opposed to modernity, because he was opposed to differentiation. To quote Cuddhiy again:

Demodernization, from Marx to Mao, is dedifferentiation.

The desire to live in a classless society, free from the divisions that are part and parcel of modern life (class differences, division of labour, etc), is at its core a yearning for premodern wholeness.  This is why Cuddihy says that Marxism had a ‘covert neo traditionalist appeal’ to East European Jews. It promised to restore the communal solidarity that they had lost after leaving the shtetl.

Marxism didn’t only appeal to East European Jews. It had widespread appeal among people outside the Protestant core-culture, who encountered modernity relatively late and have faced significant challenges in adapting to it.

TLDR: Behind the revolutionary facade of Marxism, there is a yearning for the shtetl. Worldwide communist revolution is Shtetl-ler colonialism.

Marxism’s Modernist Mask

Marx was covertly neotraditionalist, but he wore a modernist mask. He claimed to be a champion of reason. He argued that socialism and communism were scientific. And he worshipped advanced technology and modern industry. Marx’s modernism was echoed in the Soviet Union, where they bragged about their tractors, sputnik program and nuclear power plants. They even adopted a futurist aesthetic that centred around industrial and technological motifs.

But with the new left, the modernist mask of Marxism dropped. An antediluvian face with a prognathous jaw and sloping forehead was revealed.

The old left wanted to seize the coal-fired power plants and place them under the control of the proletariat. The new left wants to destroy them. The old left believed that industrialisation was essential for progress. The new left exhorts people to give up their automobiles, air travel and air conditioners. The old left denounced ‘the idiocy of rural life’ and worshipped advanced technology. The new left venerates indigenous culture and celebrates Noongar bush medicine.

In short, the covert desire for the premodern became overt with the new left. And yet, the new left continued to think of themselves as a modernist avant-garde. When talking about left-wing intellectuals, Cuddihy says:

With perhaps unpardonable oversimplification, I should like to name the essential thrust of what they were opposing: they were opposing modernity. Hereby hangs a paradox: most of them were very "modern" men supposedly engaged in attacking the status quo, and the fact that their "traditional" opponents also considered them to be a dangerously modernist avant-garde only confirmed them in this, their cherished illusion.

In short, the left are anti-modern modernists.

From the Longhouse to Bauhaus

This anti-modern modernism is perhaps best symbolized by bauhaus architecture and its corollary movements.

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school in 1919. According to Tom Wolfe, it was not just a school for architects, but a commune.  The young architects who studied at the Bauhaus were expected to adopt a diet consisting entirely of vegetable slop. Gropius would lecture them on the need to ‘start from zero’, a phrase that makes one think about Pol Pot.

Starting from zero in the realm of architecture meant rejecting all things bourgeois. For Gropius, ‘bourgeois’ was a catch-all epithet for anything he disliked. Cornices and pitched roofs? Bourgeois.  ‘Luxurious’ materials like granite, marble and limestone? Bourgeois. Bright colours? Bourgeois. The individualistic obsession with privacy? Oh, how utterly bourgeois!

The architecture of the future would not be created for the bourgeoisie. It would be created for the worker. Luckily for Gropius, the socialist governments of Germany and Holland were looking for anti-bourgeois architects. They commissioned him and his students to design housing projects for workers. 

He built an apartment block in Berlin for the workers of the Siemens factory. This apartment block had an open floor plan that blurred the boundaries between private and public space. It did this because Gropius saw privacy as a negative aspect of bourgeois life, and wanted to build in a way that promoted communal living. Does this sound familiar?

This was just one of many worker housing projects that were completed in Europe in the aftermath of WW1. All of these projects rejected bourgeois privacy and aimed to create functional, communal living spaces.

Worker housing has become the reigning architectural style of modernity. Now called the ‘international style,’ it is indistinguishable from the aesthetics of austerity that defined post-war Europe. Gropius, the founding father of this aesthetic, stood at the forefront of the modernist avant-garde. He built with industrial materials like concrete, steel, and glass. And yet, in his open planning and contempt for privacy, one can discern a return to the communal ethos of the longhouse. Bauhaus is the longhouse—reimagined in steel and glass.

Conclusion

Let’s return to the question we began with: what is the longhouse?

The Longhouse refers to the return of an egalitarian, pre-modern social structure. This return is obscured by neologisms, contemporary rhetoric and even modern building materials. But beneath the glass, concrete and 'isms,' there is a desire to return to the 'tribal wholeness' of our distant past.