1,906 words
Guillaume Faye
Sex and Deviance
London: Arktos, 2014
Recent events have underlined once again that Islam is dangerously incompatible with what many refer to as Western values. The murder of several employees of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo is a violent reminder of this fact.
But it is interesting that some commentators (myself included) are starting to notice that the “Western values” represented by the likes of Charlie Hebdo are actually completely at odds with anything that could be considered authentically European. Arktos Media’s new translation of Guillaume Faye’s Sex and Deviance is a welcome and timely contribution to this ongoing discussion. Faye is clear that Islam’s anachronistic attitudes towards sex and sexuality are explosively at odds with Western sexual mores, and furthermore that the West’s current sexual mores are themselves a deviation from traditional Western values. His insistence that the individualism of Christianity is at the root of the West’s present sexual ennui is likely to make this book as controversial with social conservatives as it will be with the Islamophiliac left.
Faye’s central concern is the decline of the family and the consequent reduction in the European birth rate. This is the touchstone to which all of his judgments return. If something is judged to be harmful to the birth rate then it is harmful per se. But this focus leads to some surprising conclusions, particularly his relaxed attitude to homosexuality, a subject of some division on the outer reaches of the right. Faye says that his judgement is guided by the Aristotelian mean and this allows him to seek a balanced and healthy path between, on the one hand sexual moralism, and on the other sexual incontinence.
Faye places the family at the center of his discussion because it is the necessary and best developed means of continuing the lineage. The irresistible trend of recent decades has been to undermine the stability of the family in favor of individualistic pleasure seeking. This has resulted in fewer marriages and fewer births as individuals rotate amongst a series of sterile sexual relationships. The properly conjugal element in sexual relationships has largely disappeared and this is something that fatally disrupts the social primacy that should be accorded to reproduction. For Faye, “The couple is not an isolated romantic duo but the central pillar in the architectural structure of a family” (26).
But in order to strengthen this structure he does not advocate a return to conservative family values as such. Or rather, he does and he doesn’t. What he wants is a candid recognition that there are several different types of love (sexual, familial, romantic, etc.) and that they have become confused and conflated in detrimental ways. He regards the bourgeois family as the model of a balanced and secure framework within which to rear children. But crucially, he is alive to the necessary hypocrisies that exist within that model and that allow it to function. In this sense, he argues for a distinction between conjugal love and sexual love, the latter (in the form of adultery or prostitution) being necessary for the former to function well. Not surprisingly, he thinks that such an outlet for sex outside of marriage is more necessary to men than women, although he allows for the latter case.
To some this will smack of a deft form of doublethink, allowing for conjugal fidelity to be maintained by excluding sexual infidelity from the reckoning. A smart excuse for priapic intellectuals. But it must be admitted that there is a strong element of pragmatic sexual Realpolitik to it. What made it possible in centuries past was the strong taboo against discussing sexual matters openly. This is why (as Faye correctly notes) divorce was always much more scandalous than adultery; it was socially unacceptable, whereas infidelity remained outside the purview of society. In the present context where no one can ever shut up about their own sexual concerns for more than five minutes at a stretch, it is difficult to see how such a form of necessary hypocrisy could endure. What is essential for its operation is a certain discretion concerning sexual matters, so that they do not emerge into explicit discourse. And this is surely why so many taboos are enforced so strictly. Once an explicit argument is made for such a system then its hidden aspects are brought to the fore, destroying the division between private and public. None of which means that adultery is any less prevalent now, simply that its effects are experienced as devastating rather than being kept out of mind.
In his discussion of homosexuality Faye carefully distinguishes between the practice itself and the promotion of homosexuality as an ideological norm that is being used to undermine the family. Although he sees male (though interestingly, not female) homosexuality as a pathology, it is not in itself a particularly harmful one. By contrast, the ideological exploitation of homosexuality, and issues such as gay marriage, are pernicious dogmas that actively undermine and devalue the importance of the family: “Homosexual unions will always remain a marginal phenomenon with few demographic effects, practically none of which will have any influence on the biological composition of Europeans. Moreover, as is the case with everything that is against nature, the homosexual couple does not last. Gay marriage only poses a problem because it is part of an ideological (not biological) dissolution of the natural order” (60).
As evidence for the pathological nature of homosexuality, Faye notes the narcissism of the various “pride” marches held around the world: “Why be ‘proud’ of being homosexual or bisexual?” he asks, noting that such displays betray a “deep infantilism. One can be proud of what one has become, of what one does, of one’s capacities, but to declare oneself proud of one’s sexual orientation is to set the bar for pride pretty low” (51). Despite this, Faye is entirely tolerant of any sort of homosexual or bisexual practice carried out in private. His concern is only with the ideological use to which such tendencies are being put. Regardless of whatever views one might have on the subject, Faye’s arguments are consistent, honest and balanced. It is telling, and very depressing, that his discussion of homosexuality is prefaced with the following remark: “In saying these things, of course, I am conscious of contravening the laws which limit freedom of expression in France” (46).
When Faye describes homosexuality as “against nature” he does so from a biological, rather than a moral perspective. But Christianity is quite different. It sees homosexuality as morally wrong because the individual is deviating from nature. And here Faye identifies the fundamental problem with Christianity, and the root cause of our present sexual confusion. Faye points out that Christianity condemns individual lapses such as homosexuality but is perfectly content with collective lapses such as racial blending. In fact, Christianity has nothing to say about the racial mixing of different peoples and Faye contrasts this with his own preferred Aristotelian view which tolerates individual predilections such as homosexuality, but forbids collective aberrations such as relations between distinct peoples. The problem with the Christian viewpoint is that it sees man as superior and distinct from the rest of nature. Faye terms this “anthropological irrealism” (263). Rather than existing within a wider contextualizing spectrum of natural evolution, man is seen as a special case. It is an error that, in its secular form, has led to the present obsession with equality. All people are sacred and therefore all people are equal. In that case, then, communal concerns become irrelevant when considering who to marry; instead, one should just follow one’s heart and marry whomever one becomes infatuated with, regardless of any wider considerations.
The other religion that Faye pays close attention to is Islam. For the purpose of his discussion, the important distinction between the two is that Christianity is an insidious corrosive that rots from within, whereas Islam is a wholly alien faith that can only cause explosive conflict. Faye is clear that the reason for Islam’s radically alien character is racial rather than spiritual. Religion emerges from a particular people and embodies their existing characteristics. What shouldn’t be surprising is that the importation of large numbers of Muslims who have very, very different notions of gender relations into post-feminist, sexually-liberationist European countries will be a disaster. That political leaders of all stripes are unable (or unwilling) to see this is to their eternal shame.
No doubt, if Faye had written his book a couple of years later he would have made some reference to the Rotherham scandal. Over a period of 16 years at least 1400 (a conservative estimate) white girls were sexually abused (including being drugged and raped, and trafficked) by Pakistani men whilst the authorities did their best to cover up the crimes. The reason for the cover up essentially boils down to a fear of being called racist. Some social workers insisted that the rapists were actually the girls’ boyfriends (despite the fact that the girls were children and the men were clearly several years older), whilst a Home Office researcher who did make reference to the rapists’ ethnicity was warned never to do so again and was sent on a diversity course as penance. The whole sordid affair illustrates Faye’s assertion that, “the media only emphasize ‘sex monsters’ of Gallic origin. The goal is to provide aid and comfort to the propaganda which says that sex crimes (and other crimes) ‘come from all milieus’” (206). Post-Rotherham we can confidently add that politicians and police will actively assist the media in covering up such crimes. The attested reality of Rotherham suggests that Faye is not overestimating the scale of the problem.
Despite some of Faye’s controversial views it is obvious that his concern is largely for protecting such victims from unnecessary predation. He writes, “we should consider the daily unhappiness of these young girls and adolescent boys . . . who get up every morning to go to school and who have to confront the barbarians, sensing that they are not protected by the authorities of their own country (marshmallows who have abdicated all responsibility) and without the young men of their own nation – unmanly, fearful, unworthy of their ancestors – daring to defend them” (164). He also makes the valuable observation that, “the life of a woman, especially a young woman, counts for more than that of a man . . . simply because she is a mother, in charge of reproduction and the upbringing of offspring” (119).
Such observations reveal Faye to be in total opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that will do nothing to protect our women and children, and that will, in an outrageous inversion, identify you as a hateful extremist if you speak in favor of such protection.
This is a radical book in many respects. Even its insistence on a division between private and public is radically at odds with a social norm that has outsourced domestic life to various media, social networks and other technologies. Above all, Faye has written a book that seeks to redress the imbalance of modern sexual mores and to install the family once more at the heart of such considerations. It also seeks to reinstate the virtue of communal considerations above purely individual ones. These aspirations transcend any ideology, whether of the left or the right, because they are attuned with biology and nature. Such wisdom is surprisingly hard to come by nowadays; Sex and Deviance should be read by anyone who seeks it.
13 Comments
In terms of religion, ancient Greeks and Romans were indifferent to race-mixing as well… no?
I believe it was Revilo Oliver who said that was because their biology was too primitive. Of course, then, that’s true of everything else, such as their concept of what is or isn’t “natural.” Unfortunately, too many on the Right like modern medicine and genetics EXCEPT when it come to certain subjects….
There’s much to agree with in Faye’s book, it would seem, and yet… the basis of his ideas seems so wrong-headed.
I must say, there does seem to be something essentially Gallic in the notion of vive l’ hypocrisy!
Why does Faye believe we should look to Aristotle for biological ideas? When he’s sick, does he ask his doctor to balance his humours? Does he believe that two objects of different masses fall at the same rate, because they are equally happy to be returning to their “natural” place?
There’s something to this, though. The real “European Tradition” is the hypocritical one, but that one isn’t “Christian.” Or rather, the bizarre sexual doctrine of the Church (based on Philo’s misunderstanding of the Stoics, which Faye apparently takes over, having apparently learned his Greek from the Rabbis) was never able to impose itself on the people until the Church completed its takeover of the administrative structure. Whatever the Church “taught” the people continued their pagan, mostly Germanic mores, which included divorce, polygamy, and concubinage, along with the non-(but not anti-)-family values-oriented Mannerbund.
The only state that was so weak as to rule only with the Church’s support was Visigothic Spain. As a result, there and there alone was the Church’s Judaic family values morality imposed. “The resulting oppressive atmosphere estranged the subjects from the rulers, and ultimately was a contributing factor to the ease with which the Moors conquered Spain.” (Vern Bullough).
Indeed, the “hypocritical” system Faye proposes WAS the Arab way of life, the same sane and happy modus vivendi, until Christian imperialists imposed their Victorian/Judaic ideas on the Arab states, creating, in turn, the fundamentalist Islam backlash.
So, traditional European morality isn’t Christian, Faye’s “anti-Islam” moral system IS traditional Islamic morality, and Christian morality won’t save us from the Moors. Other than that, I’m sure it’s a fine book.
, the “hypocritical” system Faye proposes WAS the Arab way of life, the same sane and happy modus vivendi, until Christian imperialists imposed their Victorian/Judaic ideas on the Arab states, creating, in turn, the fundamentalist Islam backlash.”
Where does Islamic polygamy appear in this?
Per my comment elsewhere before this review appeared, I knew it was James O’Meara who should review this book.
Does Faye mention Hollywood or media Jewry at all? How can you talk about the sexual deviant movement without lots of citing of Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud, etc?
Even Joe Biden is ahead of Faye on this one: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/349155/joe-biden-attributes-social-liberalism-jewish-control-hollywood-%E2%80%98social-media%E2%80%99-patrick
No point in reading the work of people who deal in half-truths, thanks to their own personal cowardice.
You ask the question but do not wait for the answer.
I’m familiar with Faye’s other stuff, although admittedly not this book so I could be rushing to judgement. From what I understand, he blames Christians and Muslims for policies and social trends Jews are almost solely responsible for. The Supreme Court judges who vote as a tribe for gay marriage are not Muslims or Christians. The people making the laws forcing Christians to bake cakes for gay marriages or close their businesses aren’t Muslim or Christian.
Faye is a typical reactionary, he makes a name for himself by bending the laws of political correctness, but never breaks them. He should be writing columns for World Net Daily, not pretending to be establish a philosophy for European nationalism.
There are laws against such things in France. Don’t be so quick to judge–you betray your ignorance.
“Faye says that his judgement is guided by the Aristotelian mean and this allows him to seek a balanced and healthy path between, on the one hand sexual moralism, and on the other sexual incontinence.”
True Realpolitik would be Faye’s consistent application of Faye’s own rule: Don’t speak openly about sex! Support the sexual prudes! I think it was Greg Johnson who truthfully pointed out on a round table talk about Charlie Hebdo that southern baptists are great consumers of pornography. Yet the key difference between them and any other kind of degenerate is that they also have a healthy amount of children.
Tacticus’s “Germania” may have been more of a critique of Rome than an accurate anthropology of the German people, but his description of German sexual practice is telling. He purports that the Germans viewed semen as a power, energy, or life force. Men were prohibited from intercourse until after age 21, according to Tacticus, in order to preserve their virility. Whether or not this is true, Tacticus saw something valuable in this doctrine of sexual puritanism. In the east, the doctrine of sperm withholding is known as Tantra.
I think Tantra is that kind of hypocritical “ying-yang” balance that Faye advocates, foreign to the West, in that it seeks to derive sexual pleasure while preserving sexual energy. The West seeks to take things to their extremities and their roots, in movement and not balance. True Realpolitik understands the logos of the West and speaks in those terms to achieve reasonable goals. While Faye’s plea that we have less flings, more families, and more affairs seems “realistic,” if it cannot attract the Western mind, it will be ineffective.
The Western sex drive is like a spring. Time weighs on it, and the drive becomes stronger. A weak sexual drive does not come from lack of sex, but from too much. This may be how we get the raping celibate priest. At the same time, feminists expect that they should be able to walk around naked without being touched or stared at. This expectation has been formed by interaction with gay or heterosexual white knights who are so overstimulated by flings and internet pornography that they no longer behave sexually aggressively. Perhaps even the bare-breasted culture of Africans was an organic mechanism of managing the naturally higher sex drives of those people.
There are exceptions, but the general rule is: more sex means higher expectations, and less sex means lower expectations. If we seek a world with maximum binary paring between the genders, where every man can find a woman and every woman can find a man, we cannot all have the expectations that the Hollywood porn industry feeds us. One way to lower these expectations, and make people happier with less, is through sexual starvation.
This is of course an ideal, and I’m not suggesting that adulterers be stoned to death. But the best ideals are meant to be just out of reach. Sometimes what is most effective as a goal is what reaches just above the grasp of society. Faye likes counter-intuitive thinking, but what he fails to grasp is that his post-modern endorsement of affairs and prostitution as “inevitable” is both true and completely counter-productive. We should accept the fallen state of man, but we shouldn’t settle for it as some kind of “Aristotelian mean.” A better balance comes from the tension between our ideals and our natural inclinations. Lower the ideals, and the natural inclinations will become quite unbalanced.
As regards homosexuality, laws are but one way that society asserts its preferences. Many people have a bisexual tendency, but can choose not to express it if given the social or legal incentive. Keeping people out of this hedonistic behavior forces them into more creative heterosexual relationships. Again, I don’t advocate stoning homosexuals, but I am in favor of making people feel uncomfortable and pay a penalty for infringing against heterosexual norms. The society of the 1920s in which homosexuality was present, yet illegal, was closer to the one we have today than the medieval society in which it was not present at all. What I mean by presence is not private incidence, but public knowledge. So long as homosexuality is legal, it will always be public, and present a hedonistic challenge to traditional marriage. What must also be avoided is the situation of the 1920s in which homosexuality was illegal and yet also tolerated as a presence, especially in theater and hollywood.
Faye’s criticism of Christianity, that it attacks individual and not societal transgressions, seems to be more observational than historical. We can find passages in the Bible where believers are encouraged to live righteous individual lives, and cooperate with a polytheistic, idolatrous collective government. And of course, racial suicide has happened under the watchful eye of a Christian majority. This would seem to back Faye’s criticism.
Yet historically, Christianity has been extremely concerned with the collective. Charlemagne’s Papal support was not content to allow the Saxons to practice their own collective tradition, but saw the religious unity of Europe as paramount. This outward looking, collective tradition (as opposed to the inward looking ascetic tradition) continued in the Middle Eastern Crusades and the Teutonic Crusades, and in the religious nature of the Holy Alliance against the Turkish threat, and in the evangelization and conversion of the European colonies. It is only after with modernism, asking ourselves “What right do we have to force Christianity on the world?,” that Christianity became an inward looking and suicidal ideology. Otherwise, it has been historically extremely concerned with the religiosity of collective government and of collective society. It has been more concerned with converting and controlling great swaths of Earth rather than to focus myopically on the individual.
Christianity has nothing to say explicitly about racial mixing because there were no Africans or Asians in 1st century Palestine. It saw itself as entirely compatible with scientific racialism until the 20th century. But while Faye criticizes Christianity as a race-neutral religion, he does not explain how his own “Aristotelian ideology” is derived from Aristotle’s personal views on race-blending. And if silence is deadly, he should equally criticize the Poetic Edda for not explicitly prohibiting race mixing.
Man is both distinct from and intertwined with nature, and Christianity is not alone in making that claim. Those who do not see man as a special creation devolve into animal rights nonsense, where cute puppies receive donations but starving children are ignored. Morally and spiritually, man does have some distinction from nature. But Christianity also preaches that the world is fallen, and with the world, so man must be fallen. Christianity says nothing about evolution, but neither does the authentic tradition of European paganism, or Aristotle. It’s easy to reject a faith as imperfect, and indeed, the cause of all wrongs, when one feels no obligation to provide an alternative spiritual worldview for the masses of people.
The distinction of man does not necessitate a belief in the cult of equality. Hierarchy and Christianity coexisted for thousands of years. The origins of the cult of equality are more complex than Christianity, and in fact, much more deep.
Christianity may have appealed to that existing urge, and only now that we rest on the supremacy of our civilization can we express it in suicidal terms that would otherwise result in immediate invasion or collapse. The belief that people are sacred does not necessitate a belief that equality is sacred, as all sorts of cultures and religions around the world have maintained the former belief without the latter. Even the Chinese Communists, whose only religion is purportedly egalitarian materialism, embrace the hierarchy of the state! The difference between European Christians and Chinese Communists with respect to the cult of equality may be more genetic than ideological.
The idea that communal considerations are irrelevant in traditional Christian societies is preposterous. Consider the case of Edgar Allen Poe, who fudged the age of his bride on the marriage certificate from 13 to 21. He did so because he was unable to get permission from her father (who may have been dead at the time, I don’t recall), not because it was illegal to marry a 13 year old. 21 was the age at which women no longer needed their father’s permission, but even this was a modern development. Previously, there was no such thing Christian marriage without parental approval. I’m not defending a poet’s pedophilia, but using an example to suggest that the ages of consent in a strongly Christian society developed around communal and family based considerations rather than individualistic free love.
In addition, this is entirely off-topic, but Faye’s point about pride doesn’t go far enough. I agree that “to declare oneself proud of one’s sexual orientation is to set the bar for pride pretty low.” However, I disagree that “one can be proud of what one has become, of what one does, of one’s capacities.” Humility, despite what you may think of Christ, predates Christianity as a Western value, and was shown by Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the model of Roman civic virtue. The Roman Triumph sought to honor and reward a military commander, but was not supposed to be awarded by the commander to himself in a display of pride. The proper response to such a honor was thankfulness and humility.
It is good to hold one’s self in subservience to a higher ideal. Pride is a force of stagnation, and encourages jealousy and envy, which are anathema to the cooperative spirit of Western society. We should have reverence for race to which we belong, and thankfulness that we belong to it, and all sorts of other good feelings, but we should not have White pride or any other kind of pride. (least of all gay pride!) The arrogant, prideful White may have a better chance of survival than the self-hating, masochistic White, but we don’t have to choose one or the other. We can in fact choose to be humble and Stoic in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius, in which service and duty reign supreme over pride. Praise the excellence itself, not the mortal body in which it temporarily resides!
Thank you, there’s real dignity in your thoughts!
“Asia and Europe: tiny corners of the Cosmos. Every sea: a mere drop. Mount Athos: a lump of dirt. The present moment is the smallest point in all eternity. All is microscopic, changeable, disappearing. All things come from that faraway place, either originating directly from that governing part which is common to all, or else following from it as consequences. So even the gaping jaws of the lion, deadly poison, and all harmful things like thorns or an oozing bog are products of that awesome and noble source. Do not imagine these things to be alien to that which you revere, but turn your Reason to the source of all things.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/17212.Marcus_Aurelius
A good quote. And if anyone is interested, I tried to source my references, but failed to use html correctly.
The podcast with Richard Spencer and Kevin McDonald is here:
https://soundcloud.com/radixjournal/the-insider-as-outsider
And the podcast about Charlie Hebdo with Greg Johnson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v79cKyOcEqQ
Pride may be the wrong word – since it is a pejorative to the Christian mind. As you know, English is profoundly deficient in words about Consciousness. In any case, it is a sign of health to like being who you are. Neither pride nor self esteem quite hit the mark. Perhaps we need to invent a new word.
The proud young man destined to become Swami Vivekananda complained to his father about his upbringing and their circumstances, “What have you given me?” His father replied, “Look in the mirror” – and silenced him. Tantric Pride is just this ability to admire oneself while giving the credit to God. If one can do it for sunsets, forests, beautiful faces, bodies, and characters – it would be the greatest egotism to deny God this last and most intimate object just because it is also a subject.