3,650 words

Guillaume Faye

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The West as Decadence

Western ideology [1] was born from the secularization of the Christian religious archetypes. This secularization unfolded in successive layers: the Puritanism of the seventeenth century; Anglo-Saxon liberalism and hedonism; the doctrine of the social contract; the Enlightenment ideologies; the socialist and Marxist doctrines, heirs to Hegelianism; and finally, the revised Marxism of the Frankfurt School, from which all radical reformism of the “Second Left” proceeds—the latest stratum of Western ideology.

Three founding postulates define the Western triad: the individual, a transposition of religious, extramundane individualism; happiness, a concept inherited from the Christian enterprise of individual salvation—which, having lost its spiritual and soteriological character, has been transformed into a material and moral gratification of an economic nature; and, finally, Reason, the third key concept, as the means to achieve that happiness. For Christianity, the world was rational—divine will oriented it toward a predetermined end. Western ideologies applied this rationalism to human history. It thus became the task of the State to manage society rationally through “laws” (dialectical materialism, free trade) to realize economic happiness. The final postulate of this ideology is the achievement of the socio-economic happiness of the individual through a (technical) organization and rational normalization of society. Contemporary Western societies converge upon the same social model: a harmonious consumer society under the management of a providential state.

The Western ideological system has known three major periods. The first was that of theodicy, when religious mitemes did not directly shape social morality. From the seventeenth century begins the second phase, which constructs social and political ideology in layers that appear opposed yet are intellectually coherent in their progression. From the twentieth century onward, we enter the third age of Western ideology—its sociogenesis—in which it becomes interiorized as a worldview and unifies its intellectual discourse in a new humanitarian-egalitarian corpus (the American version of the philosophy of human rights, whose function is to legitimize the present techno-economic civilization).

Insofar as Western ideology is the secularization of Christianity, one can compare the normative logic of the West with that of ancient Christendom. Belonging to Christendom was regarded as the natural outcome toward which every cultural or religious group should tend, its specificity to be abandoned in favor of the unity of the true religion—just as happens today with the “true” civilization, Western civilization. Cultural normalization is achieved through economic normalization, by means of the ideology of progress (a transposition of Christian eschatology) and the myth of development. This normalization of the human fact derives from Christian anthropology, which postulated a generic man beyond observable differences. Today, this figure is no longer metaphysical but takes the form of the abstract Western consumer.

The entire project of liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism is the construction of a planetary civilization based on rational, egalitarian, and pacific economics. This “secular Christendom” seeks to establish in society—through rationality—the reign of non-conflictive harmony that the great religions once reserved for the afterlife as a counterpoint to the world of conflict, politics, and states.

The doctrinal and political innovation of egalitarianism was dynamic so long as it was sustained by religious precepts as a mythical spring. Today, Christianity—transformed into secular conscience—is incapable of regenerating values. According to the ND, the regeneration of the ideologies of the twenty-first century and of social and historical ideals will occur only through a reactivation of new religious values. Two great religions seem destined to confront one another: a renewed biblical discourse (neo-monotheism, hyper-morality, and universalism) and a new Faustian paganism.

The forces that truly govern Western societies escape the political class. They are endogenous—that is, the result of the multifaceted tensions produced by the current technical and economic system and by the mass media. Institutional politics is no longer the center of major national decisions. The ideologies of political parties no longer serve to think politically, since they are merely electoral, commercial, and advertising ideas. Both the Left and the Right secretly despise politics (power, struggle, historical project), for all these arise from a Faustian psyche and an adventurous mythology incompatible with the Western project of unifying the Earth and humanity—the end of politics. Politics presupposes a differential organization of the world and the exaltation of national wills. Humanism and progressivism are apolitical philosophies.

The latest transformations that have affected Western societies have not even been invented by politicians. They have merely included a posteriori in their programs ideas imposed by cultural pressure groups or economic structures. They have also lost the monopoly over the occupation of the State, which has been taken from them by the technostructure, transnational mechanisms, and the neo-feudal powers of unions and economic lobbies. At the same time, the political class has become a hostage of the media. Between the two exists a complex game of mutual services: politicians need the mass media to stage their roles, and the media need politicians to produce the spectacle they sell to public opinion. The media, in turn, fabricate a simulacrum-population that satisfies the expectations of politicians. The political class becomes increasingly imbricated in the star system and the social sphere of celebrities, confirmed as spectacle by the media. These, acting as filters between the population and the political class, organize the spectacles of the former and serve as the impresarios of the latter.

Another characteristic feature of Western society is the end of the political legitimacy of the State. State legitimacy ceases to be political and becomes a-legal, economic, and technical, insofar as it guarantees consumption and a certain level of economic and technical well-being. All this means that politics is about to change its place within Western society. The centers of decision-making and the focal points of social influence—true territories of politics—have abandoned their traditional loci. Consequently, those who wish to exercise political influence and bear historical weight must abandon the legal structures of elective and established systems, of parties and of the political class itself.

If one admits that politics conceals what polarizes opposing groups around ideas that express models of culture, then the emergence of new fields of ideological conflict constitutes a decisive social fact. The new tendencies expressed metapolitically—through think tanks, theoretical journals, and cultural organizations—are more political and mobilizing than political parties or trade unions. For the Nouvelle Droite, the future will belong to those who invent new forms of action and mobilization, without yielding to the lure of electoral or media success, who do not renounce politics, and who affirm their ideas without binding them to any established ideological center.

The essence of totalitarianism is its apoliticism. Faced with a globalized and unified Western society—humanitarian, irenic, and economistic—no revolt is possible, since the legitimacy of technocratic states is founded upon freedom and non-violence. The single ideology penetrates the mind, and each person becomes his own censor and oppressor. A genuine ideology of liberation must be political and must admit the struggle of national wills. It is both political and liberating to fight for a planet composed of nations and peoples competing through their wills and projects, for in this way the freedom of peoples, tensions, and master-slave dialectics—foundations of human autonomy—are preserved. This autonomy still persists in the political war of liberation against the oppression of a political prince. Likewise, in the confrontation among wills and nations, one remains free, for the existence of an adversary allows one to exist and to have a destiny. If the central category of politics consists in designating an enemy, then the best way to act politically today is to designate as enemy Western ideology itself: that which rejects ideologies, tends toward the globalism of techno-economic pacification, and seeks to dethrone political princes in favor of accountants, regulators, and Big Brothers, organizing and programming our gentle death under the pretext of preventing us from fighting.

As we have seen, only that which opposes the Western system can be truly political. Yet the Left, through its progressivism and internationalism, constitutes the spearhead of Western ideology. [2] The function of the Left has been to compel the Western system to fulfill its promises of equality, welfare, rationality, and depoliticization. The Left was provisionally and minimally political until it succeeded in ensuring that Western civilization realized its promises. Once the revolution was achieved, it concerned itself only with social patchwork and sectoral protest within a system whose foundations it no longer questioned. Even the radical ex-revolutionary Left becomes depoliticized and converges within the ideological arch of neutralized bourgeois ideologies. Its discourse is nothing more than the literary simulacrum of a betrayed political revolution.

This Left gravitates toward the practice of minute revolutions aimed at the management of daily life and the improvement of material well-being. It is an ideological regression marked by the abandonment of politics in favor of sociology—precisely what the system seeks: to transform revolutionary ideologies, political in nature, into protest energies of a local, social, and non-historical character.

Even the proletarian terrorist movements corresponded to the swan song, the final expression of the European revolutionary movement before its digestion by the neo-totalitarian and techno-humanist bourgeois civilization. These movements represented the ultimate stage, the senile phase of the Left as political consciousness. Their rebellion was not directed against the Western dinosaur-society—invincible to their blows, which were absorbed and transformed into morbid spectacle for the media-conditioned masses—but rather against their own movement, against their vanished proletariat, and against the progressively depoliticized progressive forces. The struggle of the terrorist movements was the last desperate battle to preserve within the Left the essence of politics.

The heirs of the contestatory extreme Left (the alternatives, autonomists), falsely presented as opposed to the Western system, are in truth not opposed to it. Their ideology develops the same universalism, the same humanitarianism, and the same project of a techno-economic planetary society as Western ideology itself. Moreover, their rejection of the political idea of national will, their hatred of political sovereignty, renders them incapable of developing an authentic ideology of liberation. The oppressions and totalitarianisms they denounce are apolitical in nature and stem from a lack of political power and an excess of cosmopolitanism and apolitical techno-economic powers.

Another of the characteristics of Western ideology is its rejection of conflict. For pre-Socratic philosophy, conflict was a creative principle. Contemporary sciences corroborate these intuitions: astrophysics explains the world through energetic struggle; biology is founded upon the selective confrontation of organisms; ethology and genetics emphasize inter- and intraspecific aggression as a key element of phylogenesis. To the extent that Western civilization—heir to Christianity—seeks to eliminate conflict in all its forms, it may be said that it attacks one of the fundamental principles of all life.

Western societies are based on an ideology of security and find their legitimacy in protection and in the guarantee of non-violence. Yet a series of paradoxes emerge: the individual experiences a feeling of insecurity in the face of a threatening and anonymous society; at the same time, individual aggressiveness increases as a consequence of social atomization, produced by the destruction—by the egalitarian State—of the original communities that once channeled individual aggression.

The rationalizing Western State interprets conflictual phenomena as accidents, social pathologies, or technical imperfections of the social machine, in order to preserve the paradigm of a transparent, peaceful, and rational society. In a deterministic and rational society, governed by economy, forecasting, and statistics, risk and the unforeseen are regarded as pathological. This horror of conflict stems from the fear that any confrontation might disturb the normal trajectory of individual comfort and well-being guaranteed by technocracy.

This technocratic democracy furthermore seeks to replace political and ideological antagonisms with a homogeneity founded upon the neutrality of the technical administration of things.

The inhibition of conflict can be explained by the Judeo-Christian filter. From the biblical perspective, sinful existence—the vale of tears here below—was produced by a conflict (the death of Abel) that disturbed the harmony of the “Golden Age.” Human history merges with that of the redemption of humanity, condemned to competitive difference and to confrontation among peoples. At the same time, values of power are confused with derisory manifestations of pride—challenges to a God radically separated from the earthly world, that is, from the polemical laws of life.

Aggressive impulses come to be perceived as sins, running the risk of becoming unbridled, since no social order integrates or codifies them. The only legitimate conflict is that of apocalyptic war, founded on “diabolical causality” against the absolute enemy. This conflict, conceived as crusade or holy war, breaks all moral codification and exalts the fanaticism of the definitive elimination of the last culprit before the advent of final peace and universal love. These monotheisms of absolute love and dogmatic brotherhood have given rise to the most cruel wars, since they are based on the realization of a universe of absolute fraternity, of the definitive resolution of conflicts and antagonisms, and on the elevation of individual happiness to the summit of values.

For the ND, it is preferable to adopt a conflictual vision of life and to attempt to integrate conflict into social and political relations. Conflict is the creator of sociability, for it weaves communal bonds through the regroupings and polarities it generates. Moreover, conflict mobilizes emotions and intensifies bonds of solidarity. Conflict is positive insofar as an authority arbitrates it and maintains it within limits that prevent it from disaggregating social relations. In principle, a group defines itself in relation to its neighbor. Man affirms himself within his external environment through aggressions that counterbalance the aggressions of that environment. Friendship is created through a defense against a third party. Furthermore, the agonal dimension (contained conflict) of human relations structures the internal life of groups. In this respect, the friend–enemy polarity that defines the essence of politics finds its immediate foundation in biology and ethology. For all these reasons, it may be affirmed that pagan worldviews, which admit conflict as a structuring part of reality, prove better adapted to the new scientific spirit than the harmonizing rationalism of egalitarianism.

The theme of the end of history, which characterizes Western civilization, also has its origin in Judeo-Christianity. History, according to this conception, is an eschatological process that leads to the end of time. The exit from history—the realm of sin and struggle—is the divine reward that gives meaning to that very history.

Insofar as history, for cultures, serves as the substitute for biological evolution in nature, this rejection of history as punishment is a profound rejection of the human condition.

The Christian conception of history is dialectical: history is the result of a provisional divine curse, as a consequence of a sin committed by man, and in turn it is the condition for victory over that sin. Sin condemns man to division into peoples, to labor, and so forth, but the end of history will restore, in the Kingdom of God, the conditions of the Garden of Eden—at another level. The mitemes of original sin, divine curse, redemption, the Last Judgment, and the blessed eternity of the heavenly Jerusalem are found secularized within Western ideologies. Such is the case with Rousseau, who transposes the Garden of Eden into the state of nature, whose social contract must be interpreted as the redemptive act that will lead to a just civil society. It is also the case with Marxism, which more concretely secularizes the Catholic mitemes: history is a class struggle, a transposition of the struggle between sin and grace. The Garden of Eden becomes primitive communism. The divine curse upon the first man becomes the socio-economic curse of the first sedentary farmers, who provoked the division of labor, reciprocal exploitation, and the exclusive ownership of the means of production. This miteme of private property, which broke the original natural harmony and drew sinful humanity into history, is also found in Rousseau. The Marxists transpose redemption into revolution and the coming of Christ into the proletariat’s awakening to its condition. The passage through history in anticipation of the final liberating victory is accomplished by the Communist Party, and among Catholics by the Church. Both prefigure the future state of man: the Church will become universal, and the social model of the Communist Party will become that of humankind. The disappearance of history—that is, of nations in competition, of class struggles, of hierarchies—will constitute for future generations the secularization of the heavenly beyond of Jerusalem.

However, to this theory of the end of history a small corrective has been added. The modern enemies of history are no longer Marxists. The end of history must indeed be realized—but without revolution, without an intermediate socialist state, and without provisional politics. This end of history takes concrete form in the liberal and mercantile project of capitalist West, more efficient than Leninism with its dialectical stages and revolutions. Heirs of Locke and Paine, they have simplified the Christian philosophy of history, holding that expiation through a provisional historical process is no longer necessary. Happiness stands in opposition to historical movement, which is synonymous with violence and domination. Redemption through a revolutionary dialectic is not admitted. Happiness must result not from rupture but from linear progress, dispensing once and for all with any notion of the State and concentrating upon civil society (the thesis of the minute revolutions of the non-Marxist alternative Left). This segmentary vision of history, without redemptive ruptures or founding revolutions inaugurating new epochs, may rightly be called progressivist.

The zero point toward which progress must tend is not interpreted in the naïve and paradisiacal manner of Christian mythology or Marxist-Leninism. The modern apostles of the end of history still maintain the utopia toward which one must ceaselessly strive, yet they are skeptical regarding the realization of their ideal. Moreover, the end of history is less and less theorized, less dogmatic and proletarian, and increasingly practical and managerial.

This philosophy of the end of history corresponds to Nietzsche’s conception of the last man, who concerns himself only with his own happiness and despises his destiny. To this last man, Nietzsche opposes the overman—the will to perpetual overcoming that animates human groups immersed in a dynamic and risk-laden conception of their own history. Man gives himself a destiny, which is none other than the one his will assigns to his world and his time. The meaning of history merges with historical action: a succession of objectives to achieve and challenges to surpass. Such a comprehension of history proposes mobilizing elements that are not abstract, universal, moral, or economic, but absolutely proper to a given people. The future is not regarded as the advent of an abstract idea, but as a concrete destiny. Likewise, the past remains present in the current moment as a prefiguration of the future. It is the living memory of a people, ceaselessly metamorphosing according to its projects for the future. This overhumanist vision of time closely resembles, in its subjectivism and relativism, the space-time structure of modern science.

It is the untimely nature of these overhumanist values, and their incompatibility with those of Judeo-Christianity, that allows them to be genuinely innovative. A regeneration of the ancient European consciousness was impossible during the triumphant rise of egalitarianism. Today everything has changed, for the last man is already installed. The regeneration of European history will take place in unimaginable forms. The only thing that can be said about this future is that it will mark the end of the millennial hegemony of Western consciousness. Yet the freedom of history may also imply that this day will never come, and that we may indeed reach the definitive end of history.

For the ND, we are not presently witnessing the decadence of the West, but rather the westernization of the Earth—as the culture of humankind. What we are witnessing, on the contrary, is the decadence of Europe. The West is not in decline—it is decline. The very essence of the West (the place where the sun sets) is confounded with a metaphysics of decadence. Although Western ideologies are in crisis, Western civilization continues to expand. We are witnessing an explosion of the forms of civilization and an implosion of the spiritual values that once gave meaning to society. The deep logic of the West is the reduction of the organic to the mechanical, and entropy—the growing homogenization of ways of life—represents, according to both astrophysics and biology, the very form of decadence, comparable to the cancerous growth of undifferentiated cells.

Unlike the West, which is founded upon an abstract principle (Western ideology, the secularization of Christianity), Europe is a people, a living history—organic, not mechanical. Europe is ill, but it can heal itself through autometamorphosis, whereas the West is incurable, for it cannot metamorphose. Western civilization, normalized and having transformed its own founding spiritual principles into prosaic and regulatory morality, no longer allows for the creation of new mobilizing values. Paradoxically, Europe’s opportunity to be reborn may lie precisely in its old age, which it may transmute into youth. Europe, having been the first to be struck by Western civilization, may likewise be the first to react against it. Children of decadence, the neo-Europeans—like new barbarians, decultured and deprived of historical memory—find themselves also freed from the scholasticism and the taboos of the death-bearing ideology of the West, whose great sacred concepts (Equality, Liberty, Democracy, Development) float like dead bodies in the mental pantheon of new generations. Two things may occur: either the radical end of classical culture and the immersion into neo-primitivism, or the purified resurgence of the European psyche—that is, of our “Greek instinct.”

Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.

 Notes

[1] Faye, Guillaume: “Les nouveaux territoires du politique,” in: Etudes et Recherches pour la culture européenne, no. 3, pp. 49-59.

[2] Faye, Guillaume: Le Système a tuer les peuples, Copernic, Paris, 1981, pp. 21-177.