Counter-Currents
3,909 words
Part 1 of 4
Overview
The European New Right (ENR), born in 1968 in France, is the only school of thought that offers a comprehensive philosophical alternative to both the Left and the mainstream Right; not a political alternative or a cohesive popular movement, but a body of thought, an interpretative framework with distinctive concepts, major texts and authors pointing to a solid intellectual alternative to the establishment. In our current age of social media, fast reactions, and accessible commentaries about what is wrong with diversity and racial integration, we tend to underestimate the cultivation of slow but substantive scholarly alternatives to the establishment.
The ENR has produced sufficient books, articles, meetings, journals, to be integrated into an academic environment as a full program of thinking and research. Creating an alternative intellectual movement backed by a solid academic foundation can hardly be underestimated. Cultural Marxists were once outside our universities, but they understood the value of developing a counter culture based on solid intellectual pursuits, and however much we may disrespect the current exponents as unoriginal imitators and conformists, the initiators did produce dynamic new interpretations of every field of human endeavour and politics, and then, gradually, book by book, conference by conference, journal by journal, discipline by discipline, PhD by PhD, they took over the entire academic world, to the point that they are now seen as the only legitimate producers of knowledge.
Yet, indispensable as the ENR remains intellectually, the ENR has a very definite and apparent flaw; it is a dated school, saturated with an outlook that grew in reaction to a historical reality that is no longer relevant; and by this I mean that it grew in the context of the Cold War, as a reaction to both the internationalist ideologies of American liberalism and Soviet communism, in defence of European cultural autonomy. The issue of our times, the most important threat ever faced by European peoples, is the existence of a hostile elite in the West promoting mass immigration and race mixing combined with the relentless determination of Africans, Asians, and Mestizos to colonize European lands. The ideas of the ENR were formulated in the absence of this existential threat.
Since the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s, the ENR has diverted all its animosity against American cultural imperialism, which it has erroneously identified with Western civilization as such. The ENR believes, to this day, that the main enemy of humanity is American/Western civilization. The most salient cultural traits of the West, rationalism, individualism, and universalism, have been identified by its proponents as the “real enemy.” This is a major mistake. It betrays a lack of appreciation of what is intrinsically unique to the West, and why the West is currently facing ethnic disintegration. For this reason, I would borrow only certain ideas from the ENR while carefully avoiding its general outlook.
Without its rationalism and liberalism, there is no West, and the only thing left to admire is the traditionalism of other cultures alongside the pre-rational and pre-Christian pagan traditionalism of Europeans, a paganism the ENR has inadequately disconnected from the rest of Western history and which is best categorized as an idealized projection onto the past of New Age motifs by post-WWII affluent Europeans.
Critical as the ENR is of leftist ideas, it has assimilated leftist multiculturalism as an antidote to Western universalism combined with leftist notions of the equal right of all peoples, calling for a pluriversum of independent cultural collectivities, without realizing that this call is universalistic in its own wish to want all peoples to co-exist in state of harmony, a very liberal wish beset by a naive understanding of the inherent flaws of humans and the inherent Faustian impulses of Europeans. The ENR belief that all peoples should have a collective right to national-ethnic self determination can work as a regulative moral principle in favor of white nationalism. But there is no way around the thinking offered by Nietzsche, Schmitt, Pareto, and Spengler (which Sunic says, as we will see later, influenced the ENR greatly) about the inescapable nature of humans to seek more than others, which is now inscribed into the logic of global capitalist accumulation. Calling for a stable equilibrium is to be caught up, yet again, in universal utopian dreams about the unity of mankind in their differences. The West must strive for new ventures otherwise it will be surpassed by other civilizations. China believes in self-determination as it plunders the resources of others in a frenzy to ensure mass consumerism for its 1.4 billion inhabitants.
The ENR is correct in holding the West responsible for the illusion that it can create an egalitarian world. But this illusion is a product of a civilization that promises utopia because it is driven by a personality that is intolerant of a society that is not one of perpetual motion and ceaseless conflict. “Western civilization,” Robert Nisbet observed, “has been the single most war-ridden, war-dominated, and militaristic civilization in all human history.” World War I and II were massive civil wars for the augmentation of power and the joy of struggle. European men needed tranquility and common ground after these two brutal wars. They were right to concentrate on economic innovations and coexistence.
The ENR rejects the idea of progress but the pursuit of progress is inherent to Europeans even though historical cycles are part of this movement. The prosperity brought by the success of Promethean innovations has created softer temperaments incapable of seeing the darker side of humans and the imminent threat that non-white colonization poses for Europeans. Confused by cultural Marxist ideas alien to the West, young European minds have turned against their own heritage, accepting a message of white guilt propagated by a hostile elite in charge of the media and education.
In this context, in a situation now in which multiple Western cities and towns have been colonized by non-Europeans, the call by the ENR for “biocultural diversity,” for “harmony of man, city and cosmos,” for “submission of Promethean power,” for “repudiation of hubris,” is a call to extinguish the very spirit that created the West and that can get us out of this situation. We need struggle, computer programming warriors, identitarian groups, hate and hubris, to get out us out of the invading hordes of Africans and the mounting Pakistani rape gangs.
The following is an engagement with the ENR by way of Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, originally published in 1990 but still the best sympathetic presentation of the ENR in English. A second edition of this book was released in 2004, and a third edition by Arktos in 2011. The central figure in Sunic’s book is Alain de Benoist, seen as the foremost theoretician of this school. This third edition, the one I am using, contains an opening essay by de Benoist, “The New Right: Forty Years Later,” which praises Sunic’s book without offering any objections. This book by Sunic is based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Santa Barbara. The third edition also contains an “Editor’s Foreword” by John Morgan, a “Preface to the Third Edition” by Sunic, an “Introduction and Acknowledgements to the Second Edition” by Sunic, a “Preface to the Second Edition” by David Stennett, a “Preface to the First Edition” by Paul Gottfried, and lastly, as an Appendix, de Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s Manifesto for a European Renaissance, an essay originally published in French in 1999.
This assessment will consist of commentaries to passages cited from this book. I will identify the above authors alongside each passage, though in the case of Sunic I will be commenting on passages from him as if they were expressions of the ENR generally. Sunic does an excellent job in bringing to light ENR ideas, which was his objective, with only minimal expressions of his thoughts. His book is essentially an appreciation of the ENR, and de Benoist in particular.
Pinker and Race Realists
John Morgan writes:
It [ENR] opened up a whole new world for me, a world in which the ideas of the ‘true Right,’ as Julius Evola called it, were still being passionately defended and discussed at a high intellectual and cultural level. I was simultaneously overjoyed that such a thing existed, and disappointed since I knew that there was nothing like it in America. More than a decade later, while the situation is more hopeful, there is still no ‘American New Right,’ thought at least some efforts are being made in that direction, notably through Greg Johnson’s Counter-Currents, as well as Sunic’s own endeavours with The Occidental Observer and with his friend Kevin MacDonald (p. 7).
Students today inhabit an academic world where conservative ideas are dismissed without barely any required attention to the classic writings of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, or Oswald Spengler. You can be sure that none of them, and none of the academics teaching, are aware of the ENR, and few have heard of Carl Schmitt, Pareto, or Spengler, not to bring up the fact that most academics are specialists utterly ignorant of the intellectual history of the West. Feminists are the worst-educated shallow heads you will ever meet. Students do read Nietzsche, but only through the filters of post-modernists and liberals. They learn about the antecedents of Marx, about Hegel in particular, but in the lectures Hegel-the-defender-of-Prussia never stands a chance compared to Hegel the proponent of “negative dialectics” as developed later by Marcuse and Adorno.
One could say the academic left has successfully integrated many Western thinkers except fascists within a “Liberal Arts” education that is taught as if it were the background leading up to current critical race theorists, feminists, and deconstructionists.
The only alternative one hears about in academic is the school of sociobiology, though by the 1990s even this seemingly threatening school was assimilated within mainstream psychology and evolutionary theory, notwithstanding the hyperventilated opposition of feminists. Debates between the “nature” and “nurture” sides soon became no more threatening than debates between structuralist, analytical, and Hegelian Marxists, or between functionalist, conflict, and symbolic sociologists.
Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2011) is testimony to this integration, a book that endorses the universal values of the Enlightenment, for nurturing the “better angels of our nature,” through “tolerance,” “science,” and “civic equality” — in opposition to all forms of European ethno-nationalism. Pinker tells us there is a good side to our human nature, which has finally been allowed to blossom in current liberal societies, a side that welcomes mass immigration and diversity. This argument is fundamentally the same as that forwarded a few decades ago by Pinker’s ethnic compatriot, Norman Geras, in Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (1983). This book claims that historical materialism did not entail a denial of human biology as much as an affirmation of the way socialist relations (rather than Enlightenment values) would bring out the best side of human nature, against the bad side celebrated by conservatives.
We should not be surprised by the presence of a concept of human nature among leftists who claim that humans are social constructs, or the ease with which Pinker reformulated his “politically incorrect” ideas about human nature in a pro-diversity direction, since every politics supposes a concept of human nature and one can always argue that human nature is flexible enough to allow for the accentuation of varying types of behavior. Georges Sorel was more profound than Pinker when he observed that humans are by nature inclined to be barbaric under conditions of scarcity and decadent under conditions of affluence, and that only immense effort and discipline can bring out the best in humans. “Our nature,” Sorel wrote, “is invincibly borne toward what the philosophers of history consider as bad, whether it be barbarism or whether it be decadence.” The “better angels” Pinker has in mind are decadent whites who accept their own demise while looking out for personal entertainment in a civil atmosphere.
What about those writers who have written about racial differences, J. Philippe Rushton, Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, and others? These writers have been marginalized out of the universities. But don’t they constitute a body of thought that stands as an alternative to the establishment? They constitute a particular school on a crucially important issue, race, which hits at the core of egalitarianism; however, they do not, in my estimation, constitute an outlook that can offer an alternative vision to the establishment; they have destroyed, in theory, a major pillar of the establishment, but they don’t offer an overall vision that can galvanize the masses against the establishment and inspire a cultural revival that is European rather than about IQ scores and pro-Asian in its celebration of IQ scores in abstraction from any sense of people-hood.
Therefore, I agree with John Morgan. Encountering the ENR in Counter-Currents was very exciting to me, for, as critical as I have now become, this school taught me that narrow arguments about human nature, about racial hierarchies, participation in mainstream politics, are bound to be co-opted and marginalized, unless we develop an alternative culture, a network of counter-cultural spaces, media, conferences, organizations, blogs, webzines, hundreds of books, programs of education — against the entire establishment. IQ scholars, and sociobiologists generally, operate under the supposition that research about IQ differences will eventually win the acceptance of the academic establishment purely through rational persuasion and the truth of the evidence. The ENR has a more profound understanding of the way politics is also driven by vested interests, institutional arrangements, symbols, myths, feelings, and morals.
We cannot underestimate the incredible power our hostile elites have over Western intellectual life. However pathological they may seem to us, the left has produced thousands of highly researched books, hundreds of refereed journals, academic associations, think tanks, entire departments and programs across thousands of universities, hundreds of yearly PhDs, almost all the publishing houses, not to mention control of popular culture. We have so little. A few blogs, a succession of quick articles, slogans, thousands of “unique visitors” will never be enough to bring a new intellectual culture. The ENR has to be given a lot of credit for starting this intellectual change.
Schmitt, the Liberal West
In “The New Right: Forty Years Later” (2009), Alain de Benoist writes:
The ENR makes a great effort to identify its real enemy. The main enemy is, on the economic level, capitalism and the market society; on the philosophical level, individualism; on the political front, universalism; on the social front, the bourgeoisie; and on the geopolitical front, America (p. 28).
The word “enemy” recurs often in ENR writings, borrowed from Carl Schmitt. For the ENR, the enemy is Western civilization, the creator of capitalism, individualism, and universalism, all of which culminate in the aggressive American geopolitical imposition of its culture upon the world. A short hand for identifying the enemy is “liberal universalism.” It may seem odd that the ENR sees liberal universalism as the enemy in light of Schmitt’s observation that liberal societies are different from all other cultures in denying the friend-enemy distinction. The ideology that denies this distinction is, apparently, the real enemy of all the other cultures that do not deny it. How is this so?
Liberal societies believe that enemies are a thing of the past. Liberalism offers a solution to the bellicosity of the friend-enemy distinction by teaching its citizens that differences can be resolved or handled through a politics of consensus and pursuit of individual interests susceptible to compromises; a politics in which humans agree that they are all members of the same species with an overriding common interest in their prosperity through free markets and peaceful coexistence, no longer trapped by intolerant attitudes against those who come from different cultures and religions, for there are no “strangers” or outsiders, since cultural beliefs are private affairs enjoyable by all individuals. Everyone wants peace and comfort if given a proper liberal setting in which to actualize these human aspirations. Schmitt designates this effort to abolish the friend-enemy distinction as an effort to abolish politics. Politics is fundamentally about the friend-enemy distinction, and in his view this distinction is inherent to human nature and can never be abolished. Instead of abolishing this distinction, liberals have in fact categorized anyone who disagrees with their liberalism into an enemy that must be ostracized, excluded, suppressed.
Liberals were deluding themselves, or so Schmitt argued, in believing they could abolish politics or reduce politics to disagreements about the pursuit of economic interests; humans are inherently flawed. Born in original sin, humans cannot avoid conflict, power struggles. Whereas in traditional cultures an enemy was simply an external power that threatened one’s sovereignty, in liberal cultures an enemy is anyone who opposes the peace-loving liberal states, or the values of liberalism. Liberal states have actually come to designate their illiberal opponents as being outside their norms of “humanity” and thus as opponents of “humanity” and thus as rightfully in need of eradication and banishment. Whereas wars in the past were between sovereign states, each of which understood that the pursuit of state interests and power was a normal aspect of human nature, and therefore wars were fought for limited objectives dealing with standard political matters about increasing or defending one’s sovereignty, with the onset of liberal states, wars took on an ideological dimension between “good liberals” and “evil fascists.”
The ENR has thus designated liberalism as the enemy, the very ideology that claims to have abolished the enemy-friend distinction. Liberal universalism is the enemy of all the particular cultures of the world wishing to maintain their cultural sovereignty against American liberal imperialism.
There are a number of problems with this identification of the enemy, which I will outline below and will have the opportunity to elaborate upon as I comment on new passages later on.
The key problem is this: if our main enemy is capitalism, individualism, universalism, and American geopolitics, and if these traits are equated with Western civilization, as the ENR equates them, with the Christian West, and thus deeply embedded in Western culture, then it follows that our enemy is us, the West, and that our friends is them, the traditional-non-Western cultures of the world wishing to retain their non-liberal customs against Western culture. This is clearly an endorsement of Marxist multiculturalism.
Now, the ENR does draw a distinction between America and Europe, identifying the former with the West, while viewing Europe as a constellation of particular cultures struggling against the universalism of what Sunic calls Homo Americanus. There is an ambivalence here in that sometimes Europe at large is classified as Christian, universal, and liberal, and sometimes the blame is directed essentially at America. But if we were to separate Europe from the West, keep it relatively apart, as a federation of nations wishing to retain their historic identities, how can we attribute to liberalism the destructive universal imperative the ENR attributes to it (and Christianity) considering that European nations are liberal and that the French nation, as the ENR knows, endorsed the Declaration of the Rights of Man?
The ENR takes for granted a crucial distinction: the inherently traditionalist nature of non-Western cultures (until they were modernized by the West) versus the inherently liberal nature of the West. The ENR’s equation of liberalism with everything this school dislikes is flawed. Liberal modes of being can be traced back to the willingness of warriors in prehistoric Indo-European societies to fight to the death for pure prestige as aristocratic individuals committed to the principle of “first among equals” (primus inter pares). Only Indo-Europeans created a form of rule where leaders were accorded respect as the first men of the group but everyone within the aristocratic elite expected equal respect as a men of virtue capable of performing great deeds The idea of progress implicit in Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus was liberal in portraying a god that instead of expecting blind obedience brought man fire, the arts of domesticating animals, building with bricks, digging up minerals, making ships, writing, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, in order to push men out of savagery into civilization, while insisting on justice by rational standards. A similar liberal confidence in the capacity of man is present in Antigone by Sophocles in a famous chorus:
Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none
More wonderful than man . . .
O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!
The aristocratic defiance exhibited by Socrates in his dialogical questioning of conventional norms, religious piety, and his relentless effort to offer explanations for the way things are and the best form of government was liberal. The travels of Herodotus over the non-Greek world “for the sake of learning, for the sake of inquiry” were liberal, and so was his sympathetic account of the customs of other people and his realization that there were multiple ways of living in the world. The Hellenistic revolution in science, the greatest age of natural discoveries before the seventeenth century, was liberal in the many individuals who offered novel explanations and methods of discovery of natural phenomena; the science of mechanics by Archimedes, the science of physiology by Erasistratus and Galen, the heliocentric hypothesis of Aristarchus, the measurement of the circumference of the Earth by Eratosthenes. The Roman development of a unique class of jurists that rationalized and systematized their laws, making a science of jurisprudence, governed by equity and based on the premise that men were capable of being responsible for their actions and able to enter on their own volition into contractual relations with reciprocal rights and duties, was liberal. The seven liberal arts studied in the universities invented by medieval Catholics drew from a Greek and Roman tradition which considered it essential for a free person to be educated in the artes liberales. The Bill of Rights of 1689 were liberal in their establishment of the supremacy of the law and of parliament over the monarch and the announcement that all Englishmen had basic rights.
The ENR defence of European paganism against the history of Europe is a dead end, and does not teach us how this paganism is different, uniquely European and how it may have already been pointing in an “individualist” direction through its validation of individuality in the performance of heroic deeds, rather than just another variant of your typical superstitious despotic religions of the Orient. The modern liberal way of life is found in European states having a set of institutions that guarantee individual rights but at the same time integrate individuals into the whole nation as an ethno-political collective within which individuals rights are validated and sustained.
We will see in later comments that the ENR rejects liberal equality but is unable to reject the principle of equal rights, but instead of defending this principle it presumes that traditional cultures have a concept of freedom and individualism of which the European version is just one variation. The ENR wants to have it both ways, reject liberal equality but accept liberal rights by redefining this term in traditional terms but without admitting that all traditional cultures suppress individuals under a collective, whereas only Western cultures generated the idea of a collective based on reason-grounding individuals. The traditionalism that the ENR idealizes stands against this liberal collective. The enemy of the West are those social groups that have exploited this liberal disposition to advance their own non-Western ethnic ends in ways that are destroying the ethnic European collective that is integral to this disposition.
Source: http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2015/10/thoughts-on-european-new-right-part1.html
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18 comments
“but they don’t offer an overall vision that can galvanize the masses against the establishment and inspire a cultural revival that is European rather than about IQ scores and pro-Asian in its celebration of IQ scores in abstraction from any sense of people-hood.”
Excellent. Thank you,
Ironically, what built Western Civilization is ultimately it’s Achilles heel. It has destroyed the fabric of European traditionalist customs and left us morally defenseless to Marxism and is in the process that of destroying the very people that gave birth to it. Liberalism can only survive on perpetual hypocrisy and subversion, because without it, its principles will cause it to self-destruct in the end.
I agree with you perfectly, Kane. I don’t know what your national background is, but it seems to me that the only group of people that are obsessed with defending concepts like liberalism and individualism are Anglos – people in places like England, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. There are a small number of some such people in Continental Europe maybe the most are in France), but in general when I look at the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Poles, the Eastern European countries I don’t see too many people that are attached to liberalism. Only Anglo people have this pathetic love affair with liberalism. I fear that they will be doomed to die because of it, because as you aptly pointed out liberalism is damaging and self-destructive by its very nature.
You say that Italians, Germans, and Spanish do not accept liberalism, and yet they do accept mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
On the other hand, you say that Anglos accept liberalism, and yet Alabama vehemently rejects mass immigration.
Doesn’t this suggest that liberalism isn’t the problem?
I am not saying that Italians, Germans, and Spanish do not accept liberalism, as they obviously currently live under liberal governments, so it is impossible to say they do not have liberalism there. I am speaking about general tendencies among the people, I am saying that Italians, Germans, Spanish, etc are not mentally or philosophically attached to liberalism in the way Anglos are.
Also, there is no need to reference modern Alabama for your argument, you could have easily referenced America, Australia, South Africa or the British Empire in earlier time periods with their racial policies (all of these places were liberal for the past couple centuries). But either way your point is wrong for three reasons:
– First, I am not saying that liberalism is the sole and only problem we have.
– Second, liberalism causes many more problems other than immigration or race issues.
– Third, I could easily argue that whatever racialist policies or tendencies we see in the liberal Anglo world are actually a paradox. In other words, they are in contradiction with liberal principles, but they occur because the people there are not willing to practice liberalism to a full extent.
I should also say that I think there are a lot of people out there (Anglos included) who merely think they like liberalism, but would actually prefer something else if they only explored all of the alternatives out there. There are a lot of White Nationalists that I have have met who seem to think they prefer liberalism, but I believe that if they were to fully study and grasp the ideas of the European New Right, they would realize that they really prefer the ENR to liberalism. I am hoping people will realize that eventually
Anyway, I don’t think me having endless exchanges with people here is going to help. What really needs to happen is that people need to study and contemplate the philosophy of the ENR on their own. They need to self-reflect and consider new ideas in order to realize what they truly want.
Some of this essay was good and positive, and it seems like Americans and other non-EU whites are at least learning a few things from the European New Right. However, there are some issues that I simply can’t ignore in this article, and I truly hope that Mr. John Law does see and consider some of my comments here.
To begin with a quote from the author:
Quote: “The issue of our times, the most important threat ever faced by European peoples, is the existence of a hostile elite in the West promoting mass immigration and race mixing combined with the relentless determination of Africans, Asians, and Mestizos to colonize European lands. The ideas of the ENR were formulated in the absence of this existential threat.”
Large-scale non-white immigration to Europe began in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and the ENR was in fact a reaction to it and to the leftists who were justifying it. These issues are covered extensively in ENR works. The ENR spends a lot of time criticizing Cultural Marxists and leftists which even you yourself find worthy criticizing in this very essay
Now to address your arguments about the ENR’s position on America and the “West”, I will use just two quotes which I believe embody your argument in the article:
Quote: “The key problem is this: if our main enemy is capitalism, individualism, universalism, and American geopolitics, and if these traits are equated with Western civilization, as the ENR equates them, with the Christian West, and thus deeply embedded in Western culture, then it follows that our enemy is us, the West, and that our friends is them, the traditional-non-Western cultures of the world wishing to retain their non-liberal customs against Western culture. This is clearly an endorsement of Marxist multiculturalism.”
Not quite, because as you yourself admit, the ENR distinguishes between Europeans and the West. However you don’t seem to understand the full implications of this division and its depth, so allow me to explain:
The concept of the “Western Civilization” presented by the ENR is as the modern, liberal “West”, which is opposed to true European culture; i.e., everything that came before and everything that is non-liberal, holistic, spiritual culture, even in modern times, is considered “non-Western” (and this especially includes the very Christian cultures of Spain, Germany, Poland, the Celts, etc.). This is posed as “the West vs. Europe” (i.e. the modern Western Zivilisation versus genuine European culture), but it can also be posed as “the negative West” versus “the positive West” (although the “positive West” is only a portion of the larger, positive, Indo-European culture as a broad whole).
So no, we are not stuck with nothing but “the traditionalism of other cultures alongside the pre-rational and pre-Christian pagan traditionalism of Europeans” without the West. When we look at just how much the European New Right differentiates from “the West”, we see that there is so much more than “the West” in our own cultures – from ancient times to modern day – that we can admire and draw from.
The Western “rationalism and liberalism” are not our defining traits as Europeans. Concerning the ENR’s critique of rationalism and universalism, these are not seen as characteristics of true Europe, of the “positive West” (if you want to look at it that way), but of the “negative West”. The New Rightists are not condemning “Faustian character” per se, they are only condemning excesses and perversions of this character. For example, the critique of rationalism does not equal to a rejection of science and reason; the critique of progress ideology does not equal a rejection of progress; the critique of uncontrolled technological expansion does not equal a rejection of technological and scientific advancements (Benoist has written that he firmly rejects both “technophilia” and “technophobia”, accepting a more moderate position that is actually common even in mainstream sociology); a critique of universalism and modern liberal imperialism does not mean a critique of expansion per se; a critique of “homo economicus” is not a rejection of economic progress, but a rejection of the economic reductionism behind that absurd concept, etc., etc.
To quote you again: “The ENR defence of European paganism against the history of Europe is a dead end, and does not teach us how this paganism is different, uniquely European and how it may have already been pointing in an “individualist” direction through its validation of individuality in the performance of heroic deeds, rather than just another variant of your typical superstitious despotic religions of the Orient. The modern liberal way of life is found in European states having a set of institutions that guarantee individual rights but at the same time integrate individuals into the whole nation as an ethno-political collective within which individuals rights are validated and sustained.”
I think you are failing to realize that individuality and individual rights are not synonymous with individualism, just as freedom is not necessarily a liberal idea. Individualism as defined by the ENR is essentially the notion that the individual is more important than the community. Hence individualism stands in contrast to holistic and community-conscious society and to the common good. When a people are individualistic they are essentially either egocentric or disconnected, atomized; individualism goes beyond just simply having individual rights.
There is nothing European about individualism in this sense, because it creates atomization, alienation, and destroys collective identities; since, as according to individualist ideology, if people are just disconnected individual atoms, collective groups like race or ethnicity are meaningless. This individualist view cannot be found in traditional European culture or thought, it originates with Western civilization. One cannot observe any real individualistic tendencies in European culture in this sense. True European culture is thus non-individualist, community-oriented, and holistic; in fact, we could say that all human culture is fundamentally holistic and that individualism is a perversion wherever it appears, both among Europeans and non-Europeans.
To conclude, I do not mean to insult the author with any of these comments. I hope the author sees my comments and reflects on them before he writes the next piece.
I agree with you on many points, especially regarding Anglican culpability, but I should like to observe the following about The Continent.
Where there is Christianity, there is a species of individualism. The Christian’s first relationship is with Jesus, and enters into relationships with others who share this relationship (they ‘get along’ because they all have ‘a mutual friend’). Sorry if this is too Protestant, but I believe this individualist streak always exists in Christianity. I fully concede that this is not modern ‘atomism’, but it is a religion that was born of ‘Hellenistic atomism’ .
Where there is monarchy or empire, there is a slackening of duty and virtue. Now certainly, a powerful ruler can extract duties and sacrifice from citizens ‘at gunpoint’, and modern surveillance can keep people on their best behaviour, but the point is that the qualifications for citizenship are lowered in more massive societies. This is why such societies usually contain exclusive ‘societies within societies’ (courts, secret societies, political/religious factions, fortified townships) – if they really were homogeneous, the social bonds would be of an unspeakably low quality. Again, this is not Anglican liberalism, but it is something like Lowest Common Denominator politics and risks sharing the same vices.
I believe that modern liberalism is a very flawed response to these older problems, but not necessarily the cause of them.
Regarding your point on Christianity, no it’s not individualist. Again, acknowledging the individual or allowing people some level of individuality is not synonymous with individualism. People are in fact as much individuals as they are groups, so they will naturally operate on an individual level to some extent. Individualism is rather placing the individual above the group or only seeing the individual as important and not the group. You are right to think that your interpretation is too Protestant by the way, because more traditional forms of Christianity have acknowledged the relationship between god and collective entities like nations (simultaneously with the individual).
As for your discussion on politics, when we closely observe liberal societies we see that liberalism does no better (actually even worse) at preventing the slackening of duty and virtue that you claim occurs under monarchy or empire. Liberalism only pretends to solve these problems but really only makes them worse. Now of course such problems exist within monarchies and empires as well, but that is because the sources of such problems are not purely political by their roots but also cultural and moral, which leads me to mention that liberalism is actually, on top of being politically bad, is also bad for culture and morality. I don’t feel the need to argue why extensively here, because I think it is at least partly obvious why. Also, btw, I am not arguing for monarchy or empire to replace liberalism. The ENR actually advocates an alternative (organic) form of democracy to replace liberalism, the ENR does not advocate autocratic systems.
I agree that Christianity has rarely been so individualistic and admits of local authorities and customs, has been ‘morally conservative’ on certain points etc.
But I believe that this is a rather inevitable concession to the human nature that it promises to transcend. These kind of concessions, it is possible, play a part in the Christian tradition, maybe even a greater part than monasticism. But I stand on the point that the Christians priority is the relationship with Jesus. I do not think that more worldly relationships, such as erotic relationships or friendships, receive very great endorsement in Christianity, and one must look to Greece and Rome to understand these things.
Actually, Christianity is not as simple as you make it out to be, it is rather complex and sophisticated in that it deals with nearly every issue imaginable (including various types of relationships such as worldly relationships). The average person, like yourself, merely likes to simplify Christianity in their minds into basic ideas. However while such simplifications sometimes make it easier for the average Christian to practice the religion’s teachings on a daily basis, this is hardly what should be used to analyze the quality of the religion or its philosophy. The fact is that, like almost any belief system out there, Christianity offers people an ideal to strive towards, and people don’t necessarily achieve that ideal. In other words, I’m trying to say that it is rather hard to reach perfection, no matter in what terms you define it. Yet that does not mean that the ideal or the belief system that espouses it is bad or not worth practicing. You would really have to analyze what the goal of the philosophy is in order to see whether it is bad or good, so essentially I don’t think one can adequately criticize Christianity unless one were to examine whether its ultimate goals are bad or not.
In any case, despite my long apparent defense of Christianity here, yes I agree with you that it is worth looking to older pagan ideas to supplement understanding.
The philosophy of Social Credit was based on Christianity which C.H.Douglas continually referred to. Unfortunately, as Douglas was prone to say, “What you see is what you get,” and that refers to Christianity too. The Christianity which he referred to was slightly different from today’s Christianity. The forces set in motion by the Reformation/Enlightenment seem to be speeding up since WW2. Individual behavior is important as C noticed but Jesus emphasized national repentance for without that individual repentance is more difficult (repentance is a biblical word for smarten up, don’t do that and behave yourself). As LT wrote it gets a bit complex and if I can unravel Douglas’s Christian references I’ll have my next paper on Social credit and rhondda can straighten out those old church ladies……..
Sandy & LT:
I would be interested to learn more about nation and individual in Christianity.
I have recently become aware of Herder, but his position seems more modern and reactionary than traditional.
C, I’m working on it. Just for your information salvation was mentioned 45 times in the new Testament whereas kingdom was mentioned 205 times. A kingdom is, of course, a form of government so the emphasis is on governing the nations. The principle nations being the 12 tribes of Israel each of which is descended from a single individual; Manasseh, Reuben, Zebulon, Gad and so on. Genesis Ch 49 has Jacob telling his sons how they (their national descendants) will be in the last days and Deuteronomy Ch 31 has the end of all Israel with a song – a lamentation.
Our good editor is probably rolling his eyes now but briefly the individual emphasis came in during the reformation but it is always about kingdoms. No man shall stand alone and kingdom shall rise against kingdom.
LT thank you for your excellent rejoinder to John Law’s piece, although I prefer the form it takes here to the version at Eurocanadian.ca.
Anglos are beginning to move away from liberalism, although I hope that many will avoid the more obtuse and myopic strains of ideologies such as neo-reaction.
More importantly, many Whites in Anglo countries are completely opposed to these tendencies among the Anglos (who, once we look away from their rightist cohorts, are often given to extreme forms of champagne socialism that would make Jews blush).
Yes, Canadians are very attached to liberalism. Unfortunately the conservative side died a long time ago. Harper was a libertarian if you look at who were his professors at univerisity. He played one group off another and that is what pissed Canadians off. But Trudeau one and now Trudeau two are very charismatic and speak to values that Canadians have held since ww2. We have never had the problems that America has had and we use ostricization and church ladies to control the narrative. For it is the churches which are the main perveyors of the sentimentality of immigration. Do unto others is practically wriiten in the constitution or on the brains of everyone. No one where I live want them, but the church ladies are bullying us, usually former immigrants tugging at the heart. I just hope that the Native Indians realize the threat to their well being and then Canadians who feel so guilty about them will rally against immigration in order to protect our native Indians. I can dream can’t I?
Good article. We need a clear look on the ENR, which is probably easier now that it is expressed by people such as Alexander Dugin, who are more “external” to us than the ENR of before.
Also, as the ENR has started before the millenial generation was born – the generation which finds itself deprived of a meaningful future and constitutes, especially, the core of the Manosphere –, it is good to see its ideas and debates on a synthetic form.
Now, there is two points on which I would more or less disagree with your viewpoint.
Firstly, the pluriversum ideal has a use. It has a role to play. Rejecting all ideologies and ideals is a typical conservative trope, something that can appear “pragmatic” but ultimately makes us weak and unproductive. Leftist idealism gives Leftists motivation and creativity. Besides, ideologies like old Marxism or new globalism are vehicles for higher ends. Jews know that they can use those ideologies to mess with other peoples’ cultures and get them closer to a state of “global unification”, i.e. controlled chaos where their people would reign supreme above others and have diluted us into misgenation and oblivion. Jews do not talk too much about their project but really push it.
The pluriversum must be thought of as an alternative to globalism. It is an ideal, something pragmatically far away but important for orientating our public discourse. As such, it can be publically waved against globalism and used as a stance to denounce it. Our deeper enemy lies among globalists, not to say anti-White Jews. From the pluriversum perspective, we can defend “humanity”, cultures and get people from all over the world on our side against the irreductible enemy – the dissolving nomads who have tirelessly worked against Europe and Tradition for century.
Of course, an ideal is exoteric and also allows for something deeper. We can last for more than White safe spaces. We can last for, say, the lion’s share of the world, because Aryans were behind most Tradition on Earth and parce qu’on le vaut bien. Yet we do not and cannot say it with everyone. We have to be multipolarists exoterically and perhaps more esoterically.
For getting allies and ordering the struggle so that we can corner the deeper enemy, as well as for having a “respectable” point of view in public, the pluriversum has an important role to play.
Secondly, our identity should not lie in the West. You should read René Guénon’s essay East and West on the matter. White people are much older than “the West” and way deeper than materialism and technology. Perhaps many discoveries were a kind of modern saga, yet they do not lead to anything spiritual or anything able to order our lives and societies.
For my part, I think it is time to part from “the West” and find our identity back in the deeper roots we know: Indo-Europeanity, not to say Aryanity. A people made not only of warriors, but also of priests, a people endowed with a sacred knowledge that have been gradually set aside from the end of Middle Ages but that we can find anew today.
Why should we put our identity in a restless quest for more technology, more movement, more agitation? Aryans have lasted for thousands of years as brahmins and ksatriyas in India. They did not need technology or a licencious ideal to have their society together. We need to renew the contact with Primordial Tradition and Aryanity. Faustanism is tragic and ultimately leads nowhere. I want to hope for Aryan priestly kings of a new Golden Age, not explorers cucking for Jewish bankers.
You make an interesting point about the spirit of exploration in science. Is it not also possible that the the mathematical sciences represents something vaguely hierarchical, even aristocratic?
The pursuit of knowledge in the modern era has really insisted upon a very restricted approach, so that even the ‘social sciences’ eventually modelled themselves after the physical sciences. From Descartes until the last century, this was ascribed to the absolute reliability of the ‘method’ and the absolute unreliability of tradition, of commonsense, of speech, of the physical senses, etc. But can it not also be seen as a sort of marshalling of diverse forces under one banner, in the name of enormous vertical progress, rather than a lot of private, horizontal, often fruitless talk and experimentation?
I agree that its fate is Faustian and tragic. If medieval philosophy could call herself the ‘handmaiden of theology’, into what kind of sordid employment has modern Scientism fallen?
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