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The European Heritage: The Question of Paganism
On this particular point, I refer to the article “The Religion of Europe”, which appears in the selection of ND texts and summarizes the fundamental lines of Alain de Benoist’s book Comment peut-on être païen? However, to complement these reflections, the following remarks from de Benoist himself are included.
According to the classical process of the development and degradation of cycles, the egalitarian theme has passed in European culture from the mythical stage (equality before God), to the ideological stage (equality among men), and finally to the scientific stage (the assertion of the egalitarian fact)—in short, from Christianity to democracy, from the latter to socialism, and then to Marxism (egalitarianism with scientistic pretensions). The greatest criticism that can be made of Christianity is that it inaugurated the egalitarian cycle, introducing into European thought a revolutionary anthropology of universalist and totalitarian character. [1] In Indo-European polytheism, the diversity and unequal importance of the gods reflected the diversity of the world and the inequality of men. In Judeo-Christian monotheism, men are identical in essence—they are equal before God. Certainly, Christianity does not deny the phenomenal diversity of individuals, but it affirms that such diversity is secondary, for behind the visible world lies true reality: that of the abstract laws of metaphysics, within which men are identical before God. That this secularization of Christian theodicy may seem heretical does not invalidate the thesis, for we are dealing not with authentic antinomies, but with deviations from a single theme—or, in other words, with relative antitheses within the same process.
It is only with Judeo-Christianity that the totalitarian temptation appears in European history, since monotheism implies the exclusivity of one god over all other gods, and of one single truth that rejects all others as absolute errors. Moreover, monotheism justifies the elimination of the “Other,” compounded by the development of an exculpatory good conscience that institutionalizes monotheism.
Furthermore, monotheism introduces into European culture both universalism and individualism. In Christianity, salvation is individual, whereas in paganism the world of the gods was the projection of men, and religiosity guaranteed the permanence of communal bonds, thus merging with patriotism. A universalist and cosmopolitan religion such as Christianity was, for the ancients, desacralizing, for it implied the abandonment of national and communal specificity. By contrast, in paganism the diversity of beliefs and cults was legitimate, as it corresponded to the natural diversity of cultures and peoples. Its tolerance derived exclusively from its unequal perception of the world.
Considerations on Technology
According to Arnold Gehlen, technology responds in man to the void produced by a double organic deficiency: the deprogramming of his instincts and the relative inadequacy of his organs to their environment. Technology exists because man is essentially plurally specialized, and because in him instincts manifest themselves as impulses that must be channeled according to selected responses. [2] For Gehlen, there exists a kind of “resonance,” a physiological bond between man and certain rhythmic properties of his external environment. Technology allows the reproduction of such automatisms with great regularity, enabling man to create zones of stability within his surroundings. Through technology, natural automatisms are extended by mechanical automatism, giving rise to repetitions quite similar to the natural ones. However, for Gehlen, the cause of the “technical malaise” in the contemporary world lies in the disjunction between the progressive invasion of daily life by technical gestures of regulation—which gradually replace lived experiences.
Moreover, today a technicist ideology [3] is spreading gradually. It is based on the idea that we are advancing toward the end of ideologies, since ideology is regarded as a kind of approximate imperfection meant to compensate for the uncertainties we encounter. It is believed that, thanks to the development of technology and science, social aims can be determined objectively. Subtly, it is suggested that the age of decisions is over, and that politics should no longer be a matter of decisionism but of technical expertise. Yet man is a producer of ideology, by the simple fact that his presence in the world is inseparable from a certain vision of the world. Ideology is what gives meaning to our existence.
Furthermore, this technocratic ideology proclaims the neutrality of technology and adopts an instrumental conception of it. According to this ideology, to make technology something excellent, it would suffice to place it at the service of the common good and of humanity. However, this idea is completely false. Technology sets its own logic into motion and profoundly transforms the nature of man. Man is the only being who confers meaning upon the world, for he transforms chaos into an organized cosmos. Technology possesses no symbolic order for the interpretation of the world. It is nothing more than a simple operative instrument, and the language it produces is exclusively functional. It is an all-encompassing medium that creates a new sphere—a technocosmos—which, driven by autonomous processes, constitutes a proliferating fabric that expands not according to the purposes assigned to it, but according to its own unrestrained growth and development. In the technical universe, man knows how to do more and more things, but he does not know in accordance with what project. Yet man is a being who seeks to provide himself with the necessary means of power to carry out his projects and decisions. Every project implies a symbolic space, a choice of values that technology, by neutralizing all meaning, prevents him from attaining.
According to the ND, the most urgent task is to identify the essence of technology. European civilization is not endangered by technological progress, but by the egalitarian utopia that prevails today and that inhibits man’s will to affirm himself as sovereign over what he has created. The end of the domination of the machine does not lie in its destruction, but in man’s will to transform himself in order to remain master of his own productions. [4] Ultimately, it is a matter of man assuming his role as mediator between the symbolic and the real, and thus becoming the agent of his own history.
Considerations on Science
For the ND, science is not neutral, since it is implicated in the world and in the history of peoples. Science was Europe’s choice, and to choose science today is to assume our cultural identity. The essence of European science is struggle, conquest, and appropriation of the world. [5] The first scientific laws discovered by the Greeks arose from necessity—they needed them to transform the world. From its origin, European science was provocation and seizure—that is, knowledge and action. The primordial scientific attitude was a constant exercise of curiosity and imagination. The development of science corresponds to a defined project: scientific inquiry is, in reality, conquest, and every act of research aspires, beyond the knowledge of the world, to its appropriation. For the ND, there is no contradiction between science and the sacred—though these appear opposed within the framework of modern ideology, where science is the pursuit of rationality and the sacred the troubling and unpredictable manifestation of the irrational. The sacred allows man to confront the unknown, and it is present wherever there is acceptance of risk. The acceptance of danger lies at the foundation of the European tragic and heroic spirit since the beginning of its history. Thus, the true essence of European science is the attitude proper to a people, the intellectual practice of a community facing the challenges of nature—in other words, the expression of the will to power and of self-overcoming, which has allowed Europe to enter history. Science is not opposed to myth, for myth is also the will to transform chaos into information and to give meaning to the world. In this sense, mythical thought does not contradict the scientific method—it prolongs it. One must not forget that the founding myth of Greek science is that of Prometheus, who reminds us that science is struggle and challenge—an act of defiance toward the gods and toward nature—and that from this struggle history itself was born.
The prevailing conception of science until now has rested on a series of ideologemes: the unity of the world, its harmony, and its independence from man. The discovery of its laws was considered the objective of science; those laws were the foundation of morality and the guarantee of security before the world. Yet the development of the sciences has rendered these postulates obsolete. The collapse of the notion of unity serves as an example. In geometry, each dimension has its own geometry. Already Nicholas of Cusa had destroyed the religious dogma of a fixed, closed, and motionless universe. By recognizing the impossibility of assigning limits to the cosmos, he relativized the notion of center and the hierarchized perfection of the universe. Moreover, the thermodynamics of reality demonstrates that the world of living beings is not subject to an irreversible, entropic linearity of time. The very theory of relativity insists upon local, non-absolute time.
Reality, too, is not harmonious. It is man who introduces harmony into the results of his observations, when sketching his scientific theories. Reality is not in equilibrium either, for in science equilibrium means death. Nor does reality obey general laws except under certain conditions and within precise limits.
It is also known that order is not the natural state of the world—an intuition stemming from the exploration of the infinitely small (the Brownian motion of particles) and the infinitely large (the expansion of the universe). Order, for any system, is not a single state but multiple, layered through successive strata of differing orders. Order may arise from disorder, but chaos may also arise, by chance, from the superposition of two simple ordered states.
The notion of complementarity in the quantum revolution has called into question the dogma of the objectivity of reality, since, according to this principle, it is impossible to know a particle through a single experimental arrangement; it must instead be described by two concepts called complementary, though mutually exclusive. The notion of non-separability shatters the invariants of our daily intuition—causality, determinism, and space. These concepts of complementarity, non-separability, indeterminism, and relative causality clash with classical mathematical language, which is incapable of formulating statements that are false or paradoxical.
Consequently, the ND criticizes scientistic rationalism [6]—that is, blind faith in the infinite possibilities and results of science, rather than in the practice of science itself. For this optimistic theory of progress, science is a neutral tool for attaining human comfort and happiness. Scientism rests on the belief in a unifying principle of world and thought. It is a faith in universal laws that express truth and in infinite confidence in reason as an instrument for exploring a passive world. Moreover, within this scientistic vision, scientific practice is based on a certain number of postulates that contemporary science has rejected. The first is the belief in the correspondence between the laws of thought and the laws of nature. The second is the belief in reality as an eternal, transparent, and objective datum, independent of the observer. Popper criticized the belief that we could begin from pure observations, for it is theories that determine the collection of experimental data, and nature responds according to our experimental choices. Likewise, Kuhn maintained that science progresses through unpredictable leaps or readjustments, not through the accumulation of certain laws. This progress is based on the idea of the scientific revolution. [7] Every new theory refutes rather than completes its predecessor. In non-revolutionary scientific periods, researchers accept existing paradigms as true. These paradigms provide the conceptual and experimental tools and thus condition the results. It follows that science does not describe the given objectively, but interprets it through subjective and revisable paradigms that guide research and select experiences. A revolutionary scientific period is characterized by a global change of paradigms, and thus by a displacement of the criteria and solutions proposed.
As we can see, the spirit animating the false scientific debate is based on two implicit requirements: naturalism and historicism (the desire for finality). Naturalist thought, stemming from Platonic essentialism, presupposes something that does not change and remains identical to itself beyond the becoming of the world. Historicism, on the other hand, considers that advancement in time gives meaning to what, viewed in the instant, appears unjustifiable, factual, and random. On the one hand, nature cannot be dissociated from the reality of its transformation by man; on the other, contemporary sciences find within it only complexity, mystery, and paradox.
To affirm chance, or to accept the obscure or the ineffable, is to enter the realm of the mythical, the aesthetic, and the poetic—for these arts, like science, sink their roots into the common questions of all human knowledge: What is the meaning of life? What is man’s role in the cosmic process? It is the tragic acceptance of randomness, the affirmation of antagonisms and contradictions observed in physical reality, which manifests itself to the investigator as both variant and invariant, continuous and discontinuous, rational and irrational. It is a multiform “yes,” an optimistic response to the challenges of history that, since the Greeks, has been faced and accepted with the same poetic spirit: it is the quest that matters, not the goal of the quest.
This third scientific position stands opposed both to rationalism and to the mysticism of a great cosmic unity. Both reject the tragic dimension and share the same clichés: the illusion of a linear history leading to an end, and the belief in a nature or immutable essences preexisting the chaotic and troubling appearances of reality.
Finally, it must be said that the sciences are something more than the sum of exportable technologies and abstract knowledge translatable into a universal language. What is exportable and universal are the materials or the technological jargon (language-sign), but not the language-concept, which allows a people to endow the surrounding world with meaning and to structure its collective thought.
The Biological Conception of the Nouvelle Droite
Biology has come to contradict many of the axioms of the Christian Western worldview. Conversely, it has confirmed many of the intuitive ideas about life that animated Indo-European cosmologies—the vision of tragic vitalism. [8] Life is conflictual, since inter- or intra-specific selection constitutes the becoming of species. Life is hierarchical, tending toward complexity and possessing a negentropic character. Life evolves according to a non-linear scheme; its phenomena are marked by randomness, by the challenge/response pattern, and by the polarity of inheritance/mutation, which corresponds to the duality of tradition/innovation—that is, the selective conservation of information and the risky attempt to introduce new information.
Evolution, or phylogenesis, designates the complex metamorphosis of species and the emergence of new ones, produced by the double pressure of genetic mutations and adaptive selection. Evolution is neither linear nor teleonomic. It can be compared to a sphere expanding in all directions, according to the contingencies and accidents of genetic patrimonies and environments. It seems to obey a cooperation of Dionysian principles (the sudden illumination of mutations and the birth of new forms) and Apollonian principles (the selection and organization of those forms). [9]
Life develops through fulguration. When an organism evolves, the mutation and selection that govern this qualitative leap entail a risk of failure. The cognitive processes of the human mind obey this same risky illumination. [10] Man creates new cultural forms equivalent, in phylogenetic evolution, to the appearance of new species. In both cases, there is no final determinism—only creative hypotheses, games that exist solely to respond to an external challenge of unpredictable nature. There is no other project than the preservation of life itself.
Moreover, biology can be associated with sociology, history, political science, and economics, since the functioning of societies follows metabiological (organic) processes. Consequently, the ND seeks to integrate biology into its holistic (global) perception of social and political analysis—biopolitics. This vision leads the ND to criticize liberal mercantilist society, denouncing it as a pathology of biological domestication, and Western civilization as a pathology of biological homogenization. For the Nouvelle Droite—following Konrad Lorenz in this respect—any learning of new behavior accompanied by reward leads the organism to adapt to painful situations that would otherwise be intolerable, except for the willingness to pay a high price (suffering) for what one desires to obtain. In contemporary society, however, there has been a shift in the pleasure–displeasure equilibrium toward an increasing hypersensitivity to every painful situation. This hypersensitivity to pain and suffering renders man inaccessible to joy and atrophies his capacity for enjoyment. It drives him to seek ever-new and ever-stronger sensations beyond all norms: we see this reflected in today’s pathologies of drug use and sexual perversions. Intolerance toward suffering transforms the natural ups and downs of human life into an artificially levelled flatness. And this tendency generates a mortal weariness. [11]
Ethology also announces itself as one of the cornerstones of a new conception of the world. Man ceases to be regarded as a creature external to the world of living beings: he is part of nature and the spearhead of the animal phylum. Likewise, ethology renders obsolete the Judeo-Christian anthropological angelism and confirms the divorce between current social and political ideologies—based on a mechanistic, environmentalist, and egalitarian vision—and the life sciences (especially ethology and genetics), which reveal a man radically different from the teachings of the old humanism.
Ethology [12] demonstrates experimentally the biological and phylogenetic foundations of human behavior. The human species is an animal species that possesses not only the characteristics of other animals but also synthesizes the past of reptiles, mammals, and primates; and beyond this, it adds to its genetic programming its openness to the world and its cultural “training.”
Man is valued as the heir of all phylogenesis, of the full depth of biological complexity and of life on Earth. The greatness of man lies neither in his animality nor in an abstract and indefinable humanity, but in his superanimality. We are at once the oldest species—because we have inherited almost all the genetic information of the species that preceded us—and the youngest, because we are the most recent. The human species possesses the deepest biological memory and therefore the greatest potential for the future.
This immense past of pre-human inheritance corresponds to man’s biological dimension. However, human reality unfolds across four levels [13]: the microphysical level (energy), the macrophysical level (matter), the biological level (life), and finally, a specifically human level characterized by culture and historical consciousness. For Lorenz, hominization occurs when the following three conditions are realized: the central representation of space, developed through the prehensile use of the hand; a permanent behavior of curiosity and active exploration; and, third, a cultural aptitude for self-domestication, creating new degrees of freedom in action.
Man shares his belonging to the first three levels with other parts and components of the universe, but the last level belongs solely to him. Man is not devoid of instincts; rather, he possesses all instincts, which he can master and to which he can give an almost infinite number of concrete expressions. His neocortex can impose its will upon the impulses and emotions of the paleocortex. Rational consciousness domesticates feeling.
In man there is also a close relationship between neoteny and the enduring character of curiosity and imagination. Human thought is essentially imaginative and constructed through simple curiosity. Human knowledge is nourished not only by experience but also by analysis, intuition, and deduction. Behaviors that in animals are purely instinctive and predetermined appear in man as reflected and historicized. Man is the only being conscious of being conscious. He is also the only being capable of capitalizing on ancestral inheritance, constantly reactivating it, enriching it, and renewing it. His potential capacities are innate, but they are either hindered or developed by the environment, and are continuously reoriented through cultural learning and inheritance. The latter determines the system of human understanding of the world, consisting of classifications, divisions, and analyses that allow man to comprehend his environment and formulate norms and rules of action for survival within it.
The foundation of the ethological method lies in comparing the motor behaviors of each species and between species. This means that higher animals share a maximum of innate behaviors with previous species, yet in each new racial differentiation or speciation new innate behaviors emerge. Scientifically grounding the idea that each human race possesses an innate behavioral repertoire provides an important argument against racial assimilationism and ethnocentrism. [14]
Western humanism is based on ignorance of this phylogenetic nature and on the Cartesian illusion of an a-zoological rationality of man. The dogma of the entire environmentalist school is the claim that human behavior results solely from learning and environmental influence—that every man is like virgin wax, endowed with the same faculties and virtual reason as his peers. With ethology, this belief has been shattered.
Human behavioral patterns are a biological inheritance of the species. These patterns, differing among groups and individuals, depend upon the genetic program, which reflects the ancient imperatives of species survival. Nevertheless, cultures—resting on the phylogenetic specificities of the populations that have created them—retroactively influence the biology of the species, adding themselves to natural evolution within the limits of innate aptitudes (a phenomenon of coevolution). Our species rests upon an immense stratified reservoir of behaviors conserved in the genome, enriched with every mutation or racial differentiation. Far from being a simple behavior, an instinct does not obey the monocausality of a single drive: hundreds of genetically programmed drives act behind every behavior, which manifests itself as testimony to the entire history of the species. Thus, culture acts upon innate impulses, recombining them according to an infinity of possible purposes.
Ethology has also invalidated another of the central postulates of the liberal and economistic worldview: the idea that man is calculating and rationally maximizes his satisfactions. Ethology shows instead that calculating behavior is typical of lower, specialized animals. Man, by contrast, is characterized by a behavior of curiosity, divided between play and exploration. Curiosity is an autonomous behavioral pattern, independent of any instinctual necessity and without immediate satisfaction value. Exploratory behavior, too, is independent of the pragmatic pressures of the environment. Lorenz also saw in play one of the roots of artistic behavior. Art would thus be founded upon a very ancient biological schema that programmed us as playful animals in search of pure joys without ends.
Ethology likewise demonstrates that the universe admits no final determination and lacks teleological meaning. Organic becoming is unpredictable and, above all, improvised. Evolutionary development frequently loses its way, for it ignores any predetermined project. The river of life [15] continues to flow because it constantly improvises the most dangerous and audacious innovations. Evolution is far from describing a gradual progression toward perfect adaptation or higher forms of life: it often carries along many inadequate organs from generation to generation. In reality, evolution takes place according to the circumstances of different environments—sometimes blindly, to the detriment of the species concerned—hence the shifts in direction, the dead ends, the maladaptations, and the multiple pathways. One example of this is the human brain, which is “ill” because it has evolved excessively in relation to our general physiology, creating a lag between our perceptual apparatus and our cognitive and intellectual faculties. This difference in evolutionary speed between genetic and cultural evolution is the cause of many disturbing processes. Today, man can no longer keep pace in his adaptation with the accelerating evolution of civilization.
Creative evolution [16] depends upon interactions among different types of organisms. Evolution halts when the competitive confrontation among similar forms ceases. The absence of struggle and effort leads to biological stagnation and the blockage of evolution. What drives progress is not an external providential force, planner and organizer of matter, but active organisms subjected to the demands created by new environmental conditions that must be overcome in order to survive. One may say that the objective of evolution is the continuation of the river of life, and that the preservation of species is not always the highest goal. Nature is not conservative: to perpetuate itself and to survive implacable competition, species metamorphose—even at the cost of their own disappearance.
Among the lessons drawn from ethology, we find the affirmation that man is a predatory primate, endowed with an aggressive drive, a territorial sense, and hierarchical specialization. Like all higher primates, man is a social animal who lives in groups. These inherited innate drives serve for the formation and survival of the group. Lorenz demonstrates that aggression is an essential part of the organization of instincts for the protection of life and the condition for the survival of societies—man asserts himself at the expense of the environment he confronts.
In man, the suppression of aggression would lead to the disappearance of his spirit of initiative, competition, risk, and even personal honor. To attack this drive would be to strip man of his desire to live and to struggle. Rather than imposing a moral veto upon aggression, it should be redirected toward forms of activity that allow for cathartic discharge [17], such as sports or scientific competition, to name two examples.
According to Professor Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the existence of hierarchies in human societies plays an important role in the inhibition of aggressive impulses. Hierarchization appears to be a mechanism designed to neutralize aggression within a group, and it can therefore be concluded that egalitarianism implies greater intraspecific violence, and that its application would transform social competition into a merciless struggle. [18]
With regard to the dialectic of order and disorder, ethology teaches that the absence of change entails a loss of adaptive power, while the absence of structure leads to the failure of genetic inheritance to sediment. Too much order ossifies; too much disorder destroys. Every new generation must recreate a balance between tradition and the rupture with the past. Without order, the vulnerable individual perishes; without a certain disorder that fosters the full development of diversity among its members, society disintegrates through the competitive dynamics of group selection.
Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.
Notes
[1] Benoist, Alain de: “La question religieuse,” in: Pierre Vial: Pour une renaissance culturelle (Le GRECE prend la parole), Copernic, París, 1979, pp. 196-225. Comment peut-on être paien?, Albin Michel, Paris, 1981.
[2] Benoist, Alain de: “Technique et societé,” in: Vu de Droite (Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines), Copernic, París, 1979, pp. 314-318.
[3] Benoist, Alain de: “Ideologie: c’est la lutte finale,” in: Actes du XVIII colloque national du GRECE (La fin d’un monde, crise ou déclin), Le Labyrinthe, París, 1985, pp. 55-67.
[4] Benoist, Alain de: “Technique et societé,” in: Vu de Droite, loc. cit., pp. 314-318.
[5] Jobert, Anne: “De la science au sacré,” in: Etudes et Recherches no. 1 (spring 1983), pp. 11-38.
[6] Jobert, Anne: “La Tierce Voie en Sciences,” in: La Troisième Voie, op. cit., pp. 5-15.
[7] Jobert, Anne: “Science et progres,” in: Etudes et Rechercher pour la culture europeenne, no. 3, pp. 29-34., Cf. likewise, for this entire interpretation of science, the book by Anne Jobert: Le retour d’hermes—de la science au sacré—, Le Labyrinthe, Paris, 1984, pp. 9-78.
[8] Vouloir no. 3 (february 1984), p. 2.
[9] Vouloir no. 6 (may 1984). p. 3.
[10] Faye, Guillaume: “Dans le fleuve du vivant,” in: Eléments no. 41 (march-april 1982), pp. 67-70.
[11] Benoist, Alain de: “Konrad Lorenz moraliste,” in: Vu de Droite, op. cit., pp. 155-160.
[12] Faye, Guillaume: “Les fondements de l’éthologie,” in: Eléments no. 50 (spring-summer 1984), pp. 59-63.
[13] Benoist, Alain de: “L’homme n’est-il q’un animal?,” in: Vu de Droite, op. cit., pp. 167-174.
[14] Faye, Guillaume: Eléments no. 50, loc. cit., pp. 59-63.
[15] Faye, Guillaume: Eléments no. 41, loc.cit., pp.67-70.
[16] Review in the journal Nouvelle École of K. Lorenz’s book Der Abbau des Menschlichen, Nouvelle Ecole no. 41, pp. 128-133.
[17] Benoist, Alain de: “Konrad Lorenz moraliste,” in: Vu de Droite, loc. cit., pp. 155-160.
[18] Benoist, Alain de: “L’inné et l’acquis,” in: Vu de Droite, op. cit., pp. 146-153.