Against the Armies of the Night – O’Meara

Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements

By Michael O’Meara

 

The single greatest force shaping our age is unquestionably globalization.

Based on the transnationalization of American capital and the worldwide imposition of American market relations combined with new technologies, globalization has not only reshaped the world’s national economies, it’s provoked a dizzying array of oppositional movements, on the right and the left, that, despite their divergent ideologies and goals, seek to defend native or traditional identities from the market’s ethnocidal effects.

In the vast literature on globalization and its various antiglobalist movements, Charles Lindholm’s and José Pedro Zúquete’s The Struggle for the World (Stanford University Press, 2010) is the first to look beyond the specific political designations of these different antiglobalist tendencies to emphasize the common redemptive, identitarian, and populist character they share.

The “left wing, right wing, and no wing” politics of these antiglobalists are by no means dismissed, only subordinated to what Lindholm and Zúquete see as their more prominent redemptive dimension. In this spirit, they refer to them as “aurora movements,” promising a liberating dawn from the nihilistic darkness that comes with the universalization of neoliberal market forms.

Focusing on the way antiglobalists imagine salvation from neoliberalism’s alleged evils, the authors refrain from judging the morality or validity of the different movements they examine — endeavoring, instead, to grasp the similarities “uniting” them.

They abstain thus from the present liberal consensus, which holds that history has come to an end and that the great ideological battles of the past have given way now to an order based entirely on the technoeconomic imperatives specific to the new global market system.

The result of this ideologically neutral approach is a work surprisingly impartial and sympathetic in its examination of European, Islamic, and Latin American antiliberalism.

Yet, at first glance, Mexico’s Zapartistas, Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite, Umberto Bossi’s Northern League, the incumbent governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, and European proponents of Slow Food and Slow Life appear to share very little other than their common opposition to globalism’s “mirage of progress.”

Lindholm and Zúquete (one an American anthropologist, the other a Portuguese political scientist) claim, though, that many antiglobalist movements, especially in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, “share a great deal structurally, ideologically, and experientially,” as they struggle, each in their own way, to redeem a world in ruins.

The two authors accordingly stress that these oppositional movements do not simply resist the destructurating onslaught of global capital.

Since “the global imaginary [has] become predominant, linking oppositional forces everywhere,” they claim antiglobal oppositionalists have adopted a grand narrative based on “a common ethical core and a common mental map.” For the “discourses, beliefs, and motives” of jihadists, Bolivarian revolutionaries, European new rightists, European national-populists, and European life-style rebels are strikingly similar in seeking to inaugurate the dawn of a new age — defined in opposition to global liberalism.

For all these antiglobalists, the transnational power elites (led by the United States) have shifted power away from the nation to multinational corporations, detached in loyalty from any culture or people, as they promote “hypergrowth, environmental exploitation, the privatization of public services, homogenization, consumerism, deregulation, corporate concentration,” etc.

The consequence is a world order (whose “divinities are currency, market, and capital, [whose] church is the stock market, and [whose] holy office is the IMF and WTO”) that seeks to turn everything into a commodity, as it “robs our lives of meaning [and sells] it back to us in the form of things.”

As the most transcendent values are compelled to prostrate themselves before the interests of capital, the global system disenchants the world — generating the discontent and alienation animating the antiglobal resistance.

From the point of view of the resistance, the power of money and markets is waging a scorched-earth campaign on humanity, as every country and every people are assaulted by “the American way of life,” whose suburban bourgeois principles aspire to universality.

* * *

In their struggle for the world, antiglobalists prophesy both doom and rebirth.

On the one hand, the Armies of the Night — the darkening forces of globalist homogenization, disenchantment, and debasement — are depicted as an “evil” — or, in political terms, as a life-threatening enemy.

Globalization, they claim, disrupts the equilibrium between humanity, society, and nature, stultifying man, emptying his world of meaning, and leaving him indifferent to the most important things in life.

In opposing a global order governed by a soulless market, these antiglobalists attempt to transcend its individualism, consumerism, and instrumental rationalism by reviving pre-modern values and institutions that challenge the reigning neoliberal consensus.

As one Zapartista manifesto puts it: “If the world does not have a place for us, then another world must be made. . . . What is missing is yet to come.”

At the same time, antiglobalists endeavor to revive threatened native or traditional identities, as they deconstruct modernist assaults on local culture that parade under the banner of progress and enlightenment. They privilege in this way their own authenticity and extol alternative, usually indigenous and traditional, forms of community and meaning rooted in archaic notions adapted to the challenges of the future. Even when seeking a return to specific communal ideals, these local struggles see themselves as engaging not just Amerindians or Muslims or Europeans, but all humanity — the world in effect.

Globalization, the authors conclude, may destroy national differences, but so too does resistance to globalization. The resistance’s principle, accordingly, is: “Nationalists of all countries, unite!” — to redeem “the world from the evils of globalization.”

* * *

If one accepts, with Lindholm and Zúquete, that a meaningful number of antiglobalization movements share a similar revolutionary-utopian narrative, the question then arises as to what these similarities might imply.

The first implication, in my view, affects globalist ideology — that is, the recognition that globalism is itself an ideology and not some historical inevitability.

As Carl Schmitt, among others, notes, liberalism is fundamentally antipolitical. Just as Cold War liberals tried to argue the “end of ideology” in the 1950s, neoliberal globalists since the Soviet collapse have argued that we today, following Fukuyama, have reached the end of history, where “worldwide ideological struggle that calls forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism” has become a thing of the past, replaced by the technoeconomic calculus of liberal-market societies, conceived as the culmination of human development.

In a word, liberal “endism” holds that there is no positive alternative to the status quo.

The strident ideologies and ideas of liberalism’s opponents have already dislodged this totalitarian fabrication — as The Struggle for the World, respectable university press publication that it is, testifies.

Lindholm and Zúquete also highlight globalization’s distinct ideological nature, as they contest its notion of history’s closure.

A second, related implication touches on the increasing dubiousness of right-left categories. These illusive designations allegedly defining the political antipodes of modernity have never meant much (see, e.g., the work of Marc Crapez) and have usually obscured more than they revealed.

Given the antiglobalists’ ideological diversity, right and left designations tell us far less about the major political struggles of our age than do categories like “globalist” and “antiglobalist,” “liberal” and “antiliberal,” “cosmopolitan” and “nationalist.”

Future political struggles seem likely, thus, to play out less and less along modernity’s left-right axis — and more and more in terms of a postmodern dialectic, in which universalism opposes and is opposed by particularism.

A third possible implication of Lindholm/Zúquete’s argument speaks to the fate of liberalism itself. Much of modern history follows the clash between the modernizing forces of liberalism and the conservative ones of antiliberalism. That the globalist agenda has now seized power nearly everywhere means that the “struggle for the world” has become largely a struggle about liberalism.

Given also that liberalism (or neoliberalism) ideologically undergirds the world system and that this system has been on life-support at least since the financial collapse of late 2008, it seems not unreasonable to suspect that the fate of liberalism and globalism are themselves now linked and that we may be approaching another axial age in which the established liberal ideologies and systems are forced to give way to the insurgence of new ones.

But perhaps the cruelest implication of all is the dilemma Lindholm/Zuqúete’s argument poses to U.S. rightists. For European new rightists, Islamic jihadists, and Bolivian revolutionaries alike, globalization is a form not only of liberalization but of “Americanization.”

And there’s no denying the justice of seeing the struggle against America as the main front in the worldwide antiglobalist struggle: for the United States was the world’s first and foremost liberal state and is the principal architect of the present global system.

At the same time, it’s also the case that native Americans — i.e., European Americans — have themselves fallen victim to what now goes for “Americanism” — in the form of unprotected borders, Third World colonization, de-industrialization, political correctness, multiculturalism, creedal identities, anti-Christianism, the media’s on-going spiritual colonization — and all the other degradations distinct to our age.

One wonders, then, if a right worthy of the designation will ever intersect an America willing to fight “Americanism” — and its shadow-casting Armies — in the name of some suppressed antiliberal impulse in the country’s European heritage.

————–

O’Meara, Michael. “Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements.” The Occidental Observer, 16 June 2010. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/O’meara-Globalization-Lindholm-Zuquete.html >.

 

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Schmitt’s Concept of the Political – O’Meara

Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political

By Michael O’Meara

 

However it is posed, the question of the political is always about the most important issue facing every people.

The political, though, is not to be confused with “politics” or “party-politics,” which speaks to individual or special interest in parliamentary gas houses.

“Politics” is tied to rationalism, materialism, economism, and the rule of Mammon, all of which undermine authority, tradition, and the imperatives of the “political.”

One.

The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security.

Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge. (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning).

The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (”the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.

Two.

The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend–enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.

Three.

Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.

The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.

An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.

In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.

The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”

Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.

But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.

Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).

Four.

Friends, by contrast, share a commitment to a way of life that binds them together, that gives them a sense of solidarity, a sense transcending matters of economics or morality, something that resembles a shared, homogenous identity reaching beyond the imperatives of private life — even if these “friends” do not know one another.

Friendship — the condition of amity between those making up a large socially or communally cohesive association — is always prior to enmity. For it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us.”

Indeed, it is only in face of the death and destruction posed by an enemy that “we” become fully conscious of who we are and learn what is truly “rational” for us.

This friendship implies that the “particular” trumps the “universal” and that a compromised convergence of interest, based on qualities shared with the enemy, is inconceivable.

Five.

The political is ultimately, then, a question of life or death — a question that presupposes the existence of an enemy — an enemy comprehended independent of other antitheses (e.g., the moral antitheses of good v. evil) and with conceptually autonomous categories of thought.

In presupposing the political, the state in the Schmittian sense orients to external threats rather than to internal structures of government or social-economic activity (the realms of party politics). The state anchors itself, instead, in its willingness to defend — with arms, if necessary — its distinct existence.

This gives the state the “right,” in exerting its jus belli authority, to call on its individual members to kill and to risk being killed.

Such an authority makes the state “superior” to all other associations, for it alone compels its members to kill and risk being killed.

Weak peoples afraid of the “trials and risks” that come with the political inevitably disappear from history

It is this determination, implying life or death, that specifically constitutes what Schmitt sees as the essence of the political.

Whoever, moreover, makes this determination, deciding whether an enemy is to be fought or not, possesses the decisive, authoritative political power: Sovereign power.

When the imminent threat of war subsides, so too does the political.

This doesn’t mean that war in itself is the “aim, purpose, or content” of the political, only that the “mode of behavior” — the individual responsibility — the sovereign exercise of authority — that perceives the danger and decides to resist it — constitutes the political.

To be political in Schmitt’s sense requires, then, not just a prior commitment to domestic relations of friendship and the social solidarity it engenders, but also to a particular form of life in which group identity is valued, in the last instance, above physical existence.

Six.

The political, which “neither favors nor opposes war,” is thus not necessarily a function solely of war (the highest expression of the friend-enemy polarity) nor can it be said that it is per se a bellicose nihilism. Rather it is more like something determined by the possibility of armed enmity — even in cases where the parties belligérantes legitimate their belligerency in the name of freedom, justice, or some other abstraction.

War is simply an “ever present possibility,” which Schmitt recognized and designated as the core of the political sphere.

But if war for Schmitt is, above all, a reaction to an external threat, not a sought-after aggression, what does this imply existentially? (On the surface, at least, it suggests a rejection of l’esprit de conquête and the will to power, which one comrade thought was a liberal vestige in Schmitt’s thought and I thought was a Catholic moral one. In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.)

Seven.

Liberalism cannot distinguish between friend and enemy because its individualist, universalist, and pluralist ideology (”conceived in liberty and dedicated to the [abstract] proposition that all men are created equal”) denies that such a designation is conceivable in a world understood in market or moralist terms, where there are only competitors and moral entities, with whom one negotiates or reasons on the basis of universal rights and interests.

Compromise, not conflict, is accordingly the principal aim of the liberal state. Hence, its propensity for exchange, negotiation, and business.

But however it may try, liberalism cannot elude the “political.”

In cases where it is forced to designate an enemy, it is conceived as being outside “humanity” and thus something not simply to be defeated, but ruthlessly annihilated — for, by definition, the liberal’s enemy is non-human.

Eight.

Because it sees the state as essentially an instrument of society and economy, dedicated to the greatest happiness (material well-being) of the greatest number, liberalism lacks a political theory – having, in effect, only a critique of the political.

Indeed, liberal individualism and universalism negate the very possibility of the political, at least in principle. For nothing in its view should compel an individual to die for the sake of the state, which it understands in economic and ethical, instead of political terms.

Such a compulsion, it holds, would not only violate the individual’s freedom, it would make his nation/state association primary — whereas liberalism, in its humanism and rationalism, irrationally and inhumanely claims that only individualistic matters of ethics and economics are primary.

The liberal state, as such, is ethically committed to the rights and interests of individuals seen as self-contained units, whose sum is humanity — and economically, committed to untrammeled production and trade.

In practice, this has meant that the old ordered estates, along with the “prerogatives” of tradition, were forced to bow to the wishes of formless, manipulable masses, as quantity trumped quality and money overthrew the divine right of kings — a right, incidentally, that subsequently passed to the money men, this ethnic minority whose rule has proven to be more devastating than that of any former tyrant.

It has also meant that the usurer could evoke property rights to dispossess farmers of their land; that the personal interests represented by politicians takes priority over the nation’s Destiny; and that the brotherhood of man entails the greatest, most violent, and vigilant of wars to stifle expressions of political polarity.

Nine.

The political, though, cannot be done away with or evaded — it is immune to depoliticizing procedure — it is the essence of sovereignty.

In cases of war, the state, as the instrument of the political, is the ultimate authority — above the law — and as long as a state of emergency lasts.

Legal systems are based, in fact, not on legal reason, but on an authority that speaks to an existential/ontological situation needing no justification other than its own existence.

Ten.

“The protego ergo oblige [I protect therefore I oblige] is the cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] of the state.”

The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.

Protection and obedience, in healthy bondage to one another, are in this way mutually entwined.

Eleven.

Ultimately, the political is an existential matter of the highest degree.

In the face of death, one is forced to take sides and thus to take responsibility for one’s life. The enemy, in this strife, invariably highlights the true significance of friendship.

At the same time, the enemy defines what it means to be human, for only when faced with death do we confront life as a whole.

The political, then, entails Destiny, for it keeps men in historicity and it takes them beyond their private selves, into the realm of great events.

In the liberal’s envisioned one-world state, in a situation where there is only “humanity” and thus no friend-enemy distinctions (except with extra-terrestrials), there would be no political, only competition between individuals, whose highest concern would be self-enrichment, comfort, and entertainment.

Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.

The first victim of liberal depoliticization is thus always “meaning.”

If Europeans, then, are ever to regain control of their Destiny, it will only come through a political assertion of the identity that distinguishes them from the world’s other peoples.

All else is simply “politics.”

————-

O’Meara, Michael. “Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.” The Occidental Quarterly Online, 5 April 2010. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/carl-schmitts-concept-of-the-political/ >.

 

World-Openness & Will to Power – O’Meara

World-Openness and Will to Power

By Michael O’Meara

 

“What, though, is culture?” There is, of course, no single definitive answer to this question. But in seeking however partial a response, Grécistes look to philosophical anthropology, a discipline associated with the post-phenomenological works of Max Scheler. [19] Dissatisfied with Edmund Husserl’s “idealist” examination of human consciousness, Scheler had sought to understand how the intellectual, institutional, and social facets of man’s existence relate to the underlying structure of his biological being. It was, however, Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976), a student of Scheler’s colleague, Helmuth Plessner, and the most famed recent proponent of philosophical anthropology, who has had the greatest impact on the GRECE’s understanding of culture. [20]

Following Scheler and Plessner, both of whom broke from a purely metaphysical concept of man in emphasizing the role of his animal nature, Gehlen singles out man’s culture-making capacity as his defining characteristic. [21] This capacity, he claims, developed as a consequence of man’s “instinctual deficiencies.” Although humans possess certain basic drives (such as self-preservation, aggression, territoriality, defense of the young, et cetera), these are few in number, limited in effect, and non-specific. If man had had only his few instincts on which to rely, he would not have long survived in nature 30,000 years ago when he lived under the open sky. To compensate for his instinctual deficiencies, he was compelled to draw on other faculties. For the evolutionary process that left him instinctually non-specific also imbued him with intelligence, self-consciousness, and an adaptable nature. By drawing on these faculties to cope with the natural exigencies of existence – exigencies resolved in animals by their “instinctual programming” – man “learned” to negotiate the environmental challenges of his world. Unlike animal instinct, though, this learning left him “world open” (Weltoffen), for his responses to external stimuli were not automatically programmed by earlier responses, but based on reflection and hence open to change and revision. Biological laws might therefore influence him, but only negatively, as a “framework and base.” [22] In choosing, then, how to respond to nature’s challenges, man had no alternative but to treat the world with care and foresight, to gain an overview of what had gone before and what was likely to happen in the future, to develop symbolic systems to communicate this knowledge, and, not least of all, to establish those institutions that would socially perpetuate the lessons of earlier responses.

The complex of habits, judgements, and techniques arising from man’s worldopen responses to his environment is, for Gehlen, the fundament of his culture, insofar as this complex informs, disciplines, and stylizes all his subsequent responses to the world. Then, as this cultural complex becomes the unconscious frame of his behavior, it acquires the character of a “second nature” (zweite Natur), serving him somewhat in the way instinct serves animals. This second nature, his culture, is, however, neither automatic nor immutable, for man retains the capacity to make new choices and hence to modify his behavior. [23] This “condemns” him to endless choice-making and an on-going process of becoming. Yet, even while subject to an endless process of development, his culture continues to be influenced by the legacy of earlier choices. [24] Like Heraclitus’ river, whose waters are never stepped into twice, man’s “cultural nature” remains the “same,” even as it constantly changes. That is, through various feedback processes based on an ever-widening accumulation of experience, it develops according to a “logic” – a vitality – distinctly its own, even though in developing it never mechanically replicates itself. On this basis, Gehlen characterizes culture as combining permanence and innovation, which makes man both its creature and its creator. [25]

Virtually every conscious realm of human activity, Gehlen holds, comes to be affected by culture. In his anthropology, it is virtually inseparable from man. For without it, and the role it plays in negotiating his encounters with the world, man would be only an undifferentiated and still unrealizable facet of nature – unable, in fact, to survive in nature. [26] Contrary to a long tradition of rationalist thought (the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss being the foremost recent example), there are no “natural men.” Free of culture, man would be a cretin, unable even to speak. [27] Given the inescapable character of his culture, Gehlen argues that man is best described as a biocultural being: for although culture and nature are two distinct things, in him they form an indivisible unity. [28]

Since different families of men, in different times and environments, respond differently to the limitless choices posed by their world, their cultures grow in different ways. Evident in all that distinguishes a Californian from a man of Connemara, a Chinese from a Cameroon, such disparities account for the great diversity of human cultures, with their different valuations, different symbolic systems, different ways of making sense of and responding to the world. [29] As an organic unity with forms congruent with its distinct vitality, a culture, then, is understandable only in its own terms. For its essence lies neither in rationalist nor objectivist criteria, but in the conditioned behaviors and beliefs constituting the interrelated patterns and categories specific to it. As a consequence, there is no single Culture, only different cultures, specific to the different peoples who engender them. An appeal to the universal or generic – to that which is not specific to a specific culture – can thus only be an appeal to its own negation. There can, it follows, never be a world culture, a single planetary consciousness, a single mode or distillation of life common to all men. For the heritage of choices that goes into making a culture and giving it its defining forms is distinct to each organic formation, rooted in those cycles of growth and vitality distinct to it. [30]

Because man’s “membership in humanity is mediated by his particular cultural belonging,” the only universals he shares with those of another culture are those found in his animal nature (and even these are affected by different phylogenetic developments). [31] This diversity of human cultures cannot, then, but imply diverse, if not incommensurable cultural perspectives, as different peoples define their interests, order their perceptions, and regulate their behaviors differently. [32] Similarly, all that a specific culture accepts as “objective” derives, in the last instance, from its particularistic valuations and vitality. This is not quite the same as subjectivism – unless a culture is in decline and overly self-conscious of its conventions – but it is testament to culture’s relativist character. [33] Since all men are heirs to particular formations, without which they would not be men, even an individual seeking to individuate himself in a foreign culture is obliged to do so within a frame predetermined by his original heritage. As Gehlen argues, man can never be more than an individuated expression of his native culture. For it is through such an individualization that he realizes who he is and achieves his specific humanity. [34] All men may therefore possess the powers of cognition and the capacity to create culture, but because reason is informed by its specific concerns, it never – ultimately – transcends its specific subjectivity, even when drawing on objective and instrumentalist criteria to do so. A truly neutral reason without inherent cultural “bias” (as liberal modernity posits) would require a cultureless world – that is, a world without real human beings.

Just, then, as there is no single culture common to all men, there is no single definable reality in Gehlen’s anthropology. The only reality man knows is informed by the intrinsically subjective and evolving tropes his specific heritage provides for making sense of it. [35] “Man,” Protagoras said 2500 years ago, “is the measure of all things.” Given the world’s different cultures, there are necessarily a plethora of different measures in the world. Conversely, an individual is never distinguishable from his culture: never independent of the “measures” he applies. He may be free to express his culture in his own way and a culture may permit an infinite number of individual variations and even considerable rebellion against it, but no culture is ever the sum of its parts nor is any individual independent of its encompassing attachments. [36] Culture alone imbues the individual with his distinct consciousness . . . and the consciousness of his distinctiveness. It is likewise more than a spiritual or mental state, for its supraindividual unity inevitably takes social, institutional, and demographic form. It is always a people in its specificity, not a programmed abstraction labelled “humanity,” that situates a culture. [37] Man’s animal nature and his culture-making capacity may therefore be universal, but his second nature is not. Once culture is “pealed away,” the only “nature” remaining is animal or physiological. Ontologically, this implies not the primacy of objective abstractions, but of hermeneutical processes (culturally specific self-understandings) embedded in the history of a people’s particular growth.

Similarly, different cultures, like the peoples animating them, are never arbitrary, but anchored in organically evolved ways of life that the reasoning mind may render into rational terms, but is nevertheless powerless to justify or explain. It is always culture that establishes the ground – the “objective” basis – upon which the individuals making it up are able to communicate, judge the meaning of things, and reach consensus. Without it, they would be unable to agree on common standards of truth and value – and thus live together. But more than establishing the basis of a people’s existence, culture frames whatever a people will attempt in its future, for it endows its world with meaning – and hence direction. [38]

If healthy and self-confident, a culture takes into account man’s world-open capacity, allowing him to make himself according to those of its norms and categories that best sustain him. An authentic or a “natural” enculturation, however, has become increasingly problematical in the modern age. As Giorgio Locchi (who played the greatest role in making Gehlen’s anthropology central to the GRECE’s cultural politics) argues, the traditional organic model of culture is now threatened by a functional one that jeopardizes the vitalistic basis of the enculturating process. [39] Shaped by socioeconomic circumstances influencing both the micro and macro levels of existence, the functional model specific to modernity enculturates the individual according to systemic imperatives, which subordinate communal relations and individual subjectivities to large-scale social and institutional requirements. In the process, it orients to man’s sensuous and egoistical nature, leaving room only for the internalization of its generic ideals, which are experienced as either external imperatives or animal drives. Such a culture, moreover, addresses men solely in their functional specificity or generic egoism, isolating them from those particularistic ways of life and behavior that have grown out of earlier forms of meaning. Swept along, then, by the macro-structures conditioning everyday existence and powerless to experience life according to imperatives based on a lived “fusion of purpose,” the “other-directed” man of functional culture has no alternative, integrated as he is from the top down, but to rely on external stimuli for his direction. His life, therefore, is lived according to mechanical forms over which he has no control and which tie him to pre-determined patterns of behavior. Nietzsche (an important influence on Gehlen) calls this sort of enculturation “subjective culture for outward barbarians” – for it leaves man’s inner self dependent on outside forces for its direction, devoid of development and hence susceptible to the most extreme forms of subjectivism. [40]

By contrast, the second type of culture (organically emerging from historically formed and tradition-based communities) fosters an “inner-directed” individual possessing an internalized frame of reference congruent with his second nature and geared to a sociability that integrates individual and community in an interactive synthesis. Experienced as an inheritance bequeathed by “great ancestors,” organic culture is lived as a project whose rhythms respond to the individual’s distinct vitality, as that vitality is shaped by a stylization native to it. The individual, as such, does not consume culture, but applies it, for his behavior is not determined, but inspired by it. This gives the man of organic culture, who encounters his world as an on-going project, the freedom and confidence to realize his cultural ideal in face of the specific exigencies challenging him. Organic culture accordingly grows from the inside out, becoming a personalized expression of a collective way of life, not an anonymously “consumed” commodity marketed to generic individuals situated in anonymous, indifferent social systems. [41]

For the last two centuries liberal societies have endeavored to impose their functional model on the whole world. Europeans, however, have lived most of their history according to the organic model. The hero, the genius, and the great artist, all of whom have played exemplary roles in their civilizational epic, were emulated not because they rebelled against the prevailing culture, but because they succeeded in giving new form and vitality to it. Indeed, such a disposition for renewal was inherent in their culture, for it was lived as an on-going response to an evolving world. By contrast, late modern society, subject to liberalism’s market-driven functional culture, is virtually powerless to reformulate its cultural identity or alter its relationship to the larger world, for individual adaptation is now subsumed to a mass-manufactured model responsive to systemic, not communal, personal, or vitalist imperatives. Thus, whenever this model becomes dysfunctional, so too does the cultural orientation of those situated within it, for its failures cannot but plunge the individual into a state of indeterminacy, away from established patterns of conduct and toward greater subjectivity. Unlike the hero of organic culture, who confronts the decomposition of his age for the sake of revolution – a conservative revolution that returns to first principles and allows the cultural ideal to be reasserted at a higher level – the other-directed man of functional culture tends to slip further and further into a state of formlessness, aimlessness, and inaction, vulnerable as he is to those external influences that leave his inner self uncultivated and subject his social persona to criteria alien to his felt needs. [42] From the perspective of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, Locchi argues that the instrumentalist rationality of functional culture may have the power to undermine organic cultures, but its generic dictates fail to generate those behaviors and beliefs compatible with man’s second nature.

It is in this context that the postmodern critique needs to be situated. Against modernist claims to universality, which justify the worldwide imposition of a functional cultural model geared to faceless individuals situated in impersonal social structures, postmodernists highlight the pathologies that follow from its suppression of the lived and the particular. They thus array themselves against modernity’s homogenizing model of enculturation. Yet, while advocating a new cultural pluralism, they nevertheless dismiss, disparage, or ignore the significance of earlier organic cultures, often slipping into a pure relativism that mistakes man’s second nature for a construct susceptible to endless – and arbitrary – reconstructions. Relatedly, they treat cultural particularisms as if they were akin to exchangeable market options and favor the widest variety of cultural formations. This causes them to advocate a free-floating subjectivity attuned to global markets and microgroups, but resistant to specific organic formations, which are considered “totalizing” in the sense that the Great Narrative is. [43]

Although Grécistes ally with postmodernists in rejecting the instrumental dictates of modernity’s functional culture, they take their distance from them in affirming the necessity, not the option, of organic cultures. Without such cultures, they claim an individual is powerless to negotiate the anonymous forces of contemporary society, with dysfunction, decadence, and alienation the inevitable consequence. To be at home in the world and in accord with one’s own vitality, a people needs not only to be free of alienating functional restraints, as postmodernists insist, it also needs a sense of belonging that anchors it in a meaningful reality. Belonging, however, comes only with the particular and the enrooted – and the particular and the enrooted cannot be discarded, deconstructed, or selectively reappropriated, as postmodernists advocate, without risk of greater deculturation. [44]

This should not be taken to mean that New Rightists advocate a literal return to pre-modern cultural forms, whose naturalistic models are holistic and relatively simple. Complex societies cannot function in this way. Nevertheless, the traditional organic culture [45] out of which present-day societies have emerged need not, they argue, be rejected in toto, for even as a people evolves and assumes the need for certain functional forms, it retains a need for continuity, balance, and vitality, which can be meaningfully sustained only when rooted in the native soil of a primordial cultural identity. Tying vitality to one’s native culture, New Rightists endeavor, then, to replenish all that has given life and form to the European idea over the ages, seeking to adapt Europe’s organic culture to the complexities of contemporary social systems, fully conscious that its on-going adaptation gives new meaning, as well as providing new depths to the culture as a whole. [46]

Notes:
19. H. O. Pappe, “On Philosophical Anthropology,” in Austrasian Journal of Philosophy 39 (May 1961); Otto F. Bollnow, “Die philosophische Anthropologie und ihre methodischen Prinzipen,” in R. Rocek and O. Schatz, eds., Philosophische Anthropologie Heute (Munich: Beck, 1972); Arnold Gehlen, “Philosophische Anthropologie” (1971), in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1983), vol. 4.

20. On Gehlen, see Christian Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2000); Karlheinz Weissmann, Arnold Gehlen: Vordenker eines neuen Realismus (Bad Vilbel: Antois, 2000); Karlheinz Weissmann, “Arnold Gehlen: Von der Aktuatität eines zu Unrecht Vergessen,” in Criticón 153 (January-March 1997).

21. Giovanni Monartra, “L’anthropologie philosophique d’Arnold Gehlen,” in Nouvelle Ecole 45 (Winter 1988-89).

22. Alain de Benoist, “Racism and Totalitarianism,” in National Democrat 1 (Winter 1981-82).

23. Giorgio Locchi, “Ethologie et sciences sociales,” in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (Summer 1979); Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-on être païen (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), p. 67.

24. Alain de Benoist, Vu de Droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines, 5th ed. (Paris: Copernic, 1979), pp. 171-73; Alain de Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), pp. 95-97.

25. Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, tr. by C. McMillan and K. Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 24-31. After his exchange with Lorenz, Gehlen was forced to modify his depiction of man’s instinctual non-specificity (Mängelwesen). For a discussion of these later revisions to his theory of culture, see Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung, op. cit., pp. 35-104.

26. “Entretien avec Konrad Lorenz,” in Nouvelle Ecole 25-26 (Winter 1974-75); Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung, op. cit., p. 32.

27. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., p. 41.

28. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., p. 217. It is this emphasis on the culture-nature link that distinguishes Gehlen’s anthropology from the “cultural determinism” of the Boas’ school, which ignores man’s animal nature, posits an idealist concept of culture, and relies on a good deal of fraudulent research. Typically, Franz Boas is feted in the American academy, but his culturalism is no less vulgar than the biological determinism he sought to refute. Much of contemporary research has, in fact, weighed in against Boas. For example, see Stephen Horigan, Nature and Culture in Western Discourse (London: Routledge, 1988).

29. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et culture (Paris: Denoël, 1987), pp. 22-23; Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., p. 216.

30. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “The French New Right in the Year 2000,” in Telos 115 (Spring 1999); Alain de Benoist, Dernière année: Notes pour conclure le siècle (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2001), p. 88; Alain de Benoist, “Pour une déclaration du droit des peuples,” in La cause des peuples: Actes du XVe collogue national du GRECE (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982).

31. See John R. Baker, Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 468-529.

32. Friedrich Nietzsche: “No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbor evaluates. Much that seems good to one people seems shame and disgrace to another . . . much that is called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honors.” See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968), “Of the Thousand and One Gods.”

33. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., pp. 42 and 101; Alain de Benoist, “L’ordre,” in Etudes et recherches 4-5 (January 1977).

34. Henri Gobard, La guerre culturelle: Logique du désastre (Paris: Copernic, 1979), p. 13.

35. Alain de Benoist, “Minima moralia (2),” in Krisis 8 (April 1991).

36. Alain de Benoist, “Fondements nominalistes d’une attitude devant la vie,” in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (Summer 1979).

37. Cf. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Der Mensch – das riskierte Wesen. Zur Naturgeschichte menschlicher Unvernunft (Munich: Piper, 1988).

38. Stefano Paltrinieri, “La théorie sociale d’Arnold Gehlen,” in Nouvelle Ecole 46 (Fall 1990); Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, tr. by P. Lipscomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

39. Locchi, “Ethologie et sciences sociales,” op. cit.; Alain de Benoist, “‘Communauté’ et “société’,” in Eléments 23 (September 1977).

40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 79; Guillaume Faye, “Le culture-gadget,” in Eléments 46 (Summer 1983).

41. Cf. Ferg, “Identité européenne et multiculture,” in Devenir 13 (Summer 2000).

42. Locchi, “Ethologie et sciences sociales,” op. cit.

43. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991), in Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

44. The GRECE’s defense of particularistic culture – a defense that makes no valuative differentiation between different cultures, but simply defends their specificity against the homogenizing impulses of liberal modernity – is seen by the Left as a sophisticated repackaging of traditional racism (insofar as culture is alleged to replace race as a criterion of exclusion). See Pierre-André Taguieff, “Le néo-racisme différentialiste. Sur l’ambiguité d’une evidence commune et ses effets pervers,” in Langage et société 34 (December 1985). For a critique of this conflation of culturalism and racism, see Raymond Ruyer, Les cents prochains siècles: Le destin historique de l’homme selon la Nouvelle Gnose américaine (Paris: Fayard, 1977), pp. 49-61. It is, in fact, the nature of authentic cultures to privilege their own imperatives. To the degree it remains authentic, every culture has no option but to “reject” other cultures (which may be “objectively” just as “good”) because they are irrelevant to its own concerns. It is precisely this aspiration towards a self-sufficient unity in its representational modes that makes culture inherently “exclusive” and its members part of a living whole, distinct from others. See Benoist, “Culture,” op. cit.; Richard M. Weaver, Vision of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies, 1995), pp. 3-21; Claude Lévy-Strauss, Le regard eloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 24-30. Finally, the New Right’s identitarianism ought not to be confused with the Left’s “identity politics,” which is a radical form of liberal pluralism that seeks to validate the postmodern fragmentation of identity (usually of sexual and racial minorities). On the Left’s identity politics, see Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990). “Identitarism” is here used to denote those tendencies defending traditionalist and anti-liberal – i.e. organic – concepts of identity.

45. This allusion to “traditional culture” – like all subsequent references to “traditional society,” “traditional community,” “traditional ideas,” etc. – refers not to those primitive, tribal formations studied by anthropologists, but to the pre-modern formations that characterized Europe up to the 17th century – that is, to the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Medieval forms of the European civilizational heritage.

46. Cf. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, op. cit., p. 83.

 

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O’Meara, Michael. “World-Openness and Will to Power.” Excerpt from: New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, IN, USA: 1stBooks, 2004), pp. 46-51. Text retrieved from: <http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2007/07/16/world-openness-and-will-to-power.html >.

Note: Concerning Arnold Gehlen’s works, see also his Man in the Age of Technology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). See also the work of one of Gehlen’s most important teachers, Hans Freyer’s Theory of Objective Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).

 

Race, Culture, & Anarchy – O’Meara

“Race, Culture, & Anarchy” by Michael O’Meara (PDF – 1.37 MB):

Race, Culture, and Anarchy

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O’Meara, Michael. “Race, Culture, & Anarchy.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 35-64. <http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2OMeara.pdf >.

Note: For further reading on the matter of race and identity, see Alain de Benoist’s “What is Racism?”.

 

Shock of History – O’Meara

The Shock of History

By Michael O’Meara

 

A propos:
Dominique Venner.
Le choc de l’Histoire. Religion, mémoire, identité.
Versailles: Via Romana, September 2011.

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking, Karl Mannheim notes, is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Some anti-liberals are wont thus to situate their ‘conservative’ project within the frame of Europe’s historical destiny and the higher design informing it.

The most renowned of such historical thinkers (representing what Carolina Armenteros calls the ‘the French idea of history’) was the father of European anti-liberalism, Joseph de Maistre—though he is not our subject. Rather, it is the foremost contemporary avatar of anti-liberal historical thought: Dominique Venner.

The 75-year-old, French-speaking European of Celt and German descent, father of five, Venner is a historical scholar, a writer of popular histories and of various works on firearms and hunting, as well as the editor of two successful, artfully illustrated historical journals.

But whatever his genre, Venner bears the knightly (or legionnaire) standard of Europe’s multi-millennial heritage—the heritage, he claims, that took form with the blind poet, who is the father of us all—the heritage whose Homeric spirit knows to honor the brave, bare-foot soldiers of the Confederacy and the social banditry of Jesse James—and, most insistently, the heritage that expects a future commensurate with Europe’s incomparable past.

Venner is not your average academic historians; indeed, he’s not an academic at all. His life has been lived out on the last of France’s imperial battlefields; in Parisian street politics, in the outlawed OAS, in prison, and in laying the conceptual foundations of the European New Right; and finally, since his early thirties, in the various libraries, archives, and communal memories he’s searched to produce the 50 books he’s written on the key historical upheavals of the last century or so.

Unsurprisingly, his historical sense is ‘over-determined’—not solely by an intelligence steeped in the life of the mind, but also by disciplines acquired in those schools of initiands known only to the political soldier.

His latest book—Le Choc de l’Histoire—is not a work of history per se, but a series of meditations, in the form of a book-long interview (conducted by the historian Pauline Lecomte) on the historical situation presently facing Europeans. These meditations approach their subject in parallel but opposite ways: 1) one approach surveys the contours of Europe’s longue durée—those centuries of growth that made the great oak so venerable—and, in the spirit of the Annales School, reveals her ‘secret permanences’, and, 2) a very different but complementary approach that silhouettes the heroic individuals and individual events (Achilles and the Iliad foremost) exemplifying the Homeric spirit of European man—disclosing his possibilities, and offering him thus an alternative to his programmed extinction.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind.

The Sleep

The Second European Civil War of 1939-1945, however it is interpreted, resulted in a cataclysmic defeat not just for Hitler’s Germany, but for Europe, much of which, quite literally, was reduced to mounds of smoldering rumble. Then, at Yalta, adding insult to injury, the two extra-European super-powers partitioned the Continent, deprived her states of sovereignty, and proceeded to Americanize or Sovietize the ‘systems’ organizing and managing the new postwar European order.

As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization—believing, as they were encouraged, that they were simply one people, equal among the world’s many peoples.

Worse, for their unpardonable sins—for what Europeans did to Jews in the war, to Blacks in the slave trade, to non-White peoples in general over the course of the last 500 years—for all the terrible sins Europeans have committed, they are henceforth denied the ‘right’ to be a ‘people’. In the Messianic spirit of Communism and Americanism, the Orwellian occupiers and collaborators have since refused them a common origin (roots), a shared history, a tradition, a destiny. This reduces them to a faceless economic-administrative collectivity, which is expected, in the end, to negate the organic basis of its own existence.

The postwar assault on European identity entailed, however, more than a zombifying campaign of guilt-inducement—though this campaign was massive in scale. Europe after Jahre Null was re-organized according to extra-European models and then overwhelmed with imported forms of mass consumerism and entertainment. At the same time and with perhaps greater severity, she was subject to an unprecedented ‘brain-washing’ (in schools, media, the so-called arts, public institutions, and private corporations)—as all Europe’s family of nations, not just the defeated Germans, were collectively made to bear a crushing guilt—under the pretext of the Shoah or the legacy of colonialism/imperialism/slavery—for sins requiring the most extreme penance. Thus tainted, her memory and identity are now publicly stigmatized.

Venner’s Europe is not, of course, the Soviet/New Class-inspired EU, just as she is not the geographical entity labeled ‘Europe’. Rather than a market, a political/administrative structure, a geographic category—rather even than a race (though in a certain sense it is all about race in the end)—Europe for him is a multi-millennial community of closely-related national families made up of Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others, having the same ancient (Indo-European, Borean, Cro-Magnon) roots of blood and spirit: that is, having the same Thirty-thousand Years of European History and Identity.

This makes his Europe a community with a common civilizational heritage that stretches back to the depths of prehistoric time. Historically, the tradition and identity of this heritage has informed Europe’s representations and values in ways distinguishing/identifying her and her peoples from other civilizations and peoples.

Tradition, though, is not for Venner the metaphysical abstraction of the perennialists or the historical repository of the Burkeans: it is not something outside history nor is it something forged once and for all in the night of time.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass. It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition may originate in Prehistory, but Venner claims it is preeminently contemporary—just as every origin represents a novel outburst of being. It serves thus as a people’s inner compass. It directs them to what and whom they are. It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition, Venner insists, is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century. But he is no knee-jerk anti-American (though the French, in my view, have good cause to be anti-US). He’s also written several books on the US War of Secession, in which much of America’s Cavalier heritage is admired. Knowing something of the opposed tendencies shaping American ‘national’ life, he’s well aware of the moral abyss separating, say, Jesse James from Jay Gould—and what makes one an exemplar of the European spirit and the other its opposite.

Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World, Venner claims America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents—which meant disowning the idea (old as Herodotus) that Europe is ‘the home of liberty and true government’.

Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

New England, to be sure, is not the whole of America, for the South, among another sections, has a quite different narrative, but it was the Yankee version of the ‘American epic’ that became dominant, and it is thus the Yankee version that everywhere wars on Americans of European descent.

Citing Huntington’s Who Are We?, Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational/universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Seventeenth century’, these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

The Shock

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition.

The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes (in discrediting the collaborators managing the EU, as well as de-legitimatizing the continent’s various national political systems), combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign.

Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals, Venner notes, are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

The Unexpected

History is the realm of the unexpected. Venner does not subscribe to notions of historical determinism or necessity. In contrast to Marxists and economic determinists, anti-Semites and Spenglerians, he believes there are no monocausal explanations of history, and unlike liberals such as Fukuyama, he believes there’s no escape from (no ‘end’ to) history.

In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

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O’Meara, Michael. “The Shock of History.” Alternative Right Magazine, 23 October 2011 (published online). <http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-shock-of-history/>.

Notes: Venner’s book Le choc de l’histoire has recently been published in English translation as The Shock of History by Arktos (London, 2015). In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

 

From Nihilism to Tradition – O’Meara

From Nihilism to Tradition

By Michael O’Meara

Histoire et tradition des européennes:
30,000 ans d’identité
Dominique Venner
Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2002

I. Race of Blood, Race of Spirit

In the United States, nationalists take their stand on the question of race, arguing that it denotes meaningful differences between subspecies, that these differences have significant behavioral and social ramifications, and that the present threat to white racial survival constitutes the single, most vital issue facing our people. In Europe, by contrast, our counterparts pursue a somewhat different strategy. Against the antiwhite forces of multiculturalism, Third World immigration, feminism, and globalization, European nationalists tend to privilege not race per se, but the defense of their cultural/historical identity.

This identitarian emphasis might be explained by the absence in Europe of “First Amendment rights” and hence of the freedom to treat racial questions forthrightly. But there is, I think, another, more interesting reason for these transatlantic differences: namely, that European nationalists define race not simply as a matter of blood, but also as a spiritual—that is, as a historical and cultural—phenomenon. Implicit in this view is the assumption that the body is inseparable from the spirit animating it, that biological difference, as a distinct vitality, is another form of spiritual difference, and that the significance of such differences (given that man is a spiritual being, not merely an animal) is best seen in terms of culture and history rather than nineteenth-century biological science.

Race, then, may be the necessary organic substratum to every historically and culturally distinct people, but its biological properties, however primordial, are only the form, not the substance, of its spiritual manifestation. Thus, whilst we Americans search for psychological, sociological, conspiratorial, or political explanations to account for the racially self-destructive behavior of our people, Europeans look to the loss of their culture and tradition—and the identity they define.

II. Dominique Venner
These distinctions reflect not just strategic differences between US and continental nationalisms but the larger civilizational divide separating America from Europe—and hence their different historical trajectories. This is especially evident in the fact that Europeans of all political persuasions are presently embarked on an epoch-making project—a politically united Europe—that promises them dominance in tomorrow’s world. There is, moreover, real debate about how the European project is to be realized, especially in France, where the will to power is most developed. The New Class forces in control of the European Union, as might be expected, favor the liberal, economic, and quantitative principles that are leading white people everywhere to ruin, envisaging Europe as a multiracial civilization based on free markets, unguarded borders, and an ethnocidal humanitarianism. Against them, the various anti-system parties challenging the “liberal-democratic” order of money imposed on Europe in 1945, along with hundreds of New Right, far Right, revolutionary nationalist, and revolutionary conservative formations making up the Right’s extra-parliamentary wing, marshal an array of persuasive counter-arguments and do so not simply in the language of race. For unlike their New World homologues, these anti-liberals have the millennia-long tradition of Europe’s race-culture to buttress their opposition.

It is as part of this larger debate on Europe that Dominique Venner’s Histoire et tradition des européennes: 30 000 ans d’identité (History and Tradition of the Europeans: 30,000 Years of Identity) is to be situated. Few living writers are better qualified than Venner to speak for the white men of the West. For five decades, on paper and on numerous battlefields, he has earned the right to do so. His first arena in service to the European cause was French Algeria, where he served as an elite paratrooper. Later, in the 1960s, after discovering that the cosmopolitan forces of international capital had captured all the seats of power, he fought on another front, playing a leading role in the period’s far-right campaigns. Besides getting to know more than one French prison, he helped launch the metapolitical career of the “European New Right” (or “New Culture”), which has since become the chief ideological opponent of the Judeo-liberal forces allied with le parti américain.

In addition to having shown courage and integrity under fire, Venner is a favorite of the muses, having authored more than forty books and innumerable articles on the most diverse facets of the European experience. Most of his books are works of historical popularization. His books on Vichy France, however, rank with the most important scholarly contributions to the field, as do his numerous books on firearms and hunting (one of which has been translated into English). Venner’s military history of the Red Army (Histoire de l’Armée Rouge 1917-1924) won the coveted prize of the Académie Française. His Le coeur rebel, a memoir of his years as a paratrooper in Algeria and a militant in the thick of Parisian nationalist politics during the 1960s, I think is one of the finest works of its kind. Venner has also founded and edited several historical reviews, the latest being the Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, whose web address is http://www.n-r-h.net/.

In his most recent work, Histoire et tradition des européennes, this gifted European turns to his people’s distant past to answer the great questions posed by their uncertain future.

III. Nihilism

Writing at the advent of the new millennium, Venner notes that for the first time in history, Europeans no longer dominate the land of their fathers, having lost control of their borders, their institutions, and the very means of reproducing themselves as a people. He characterizes the present period as one of cultural chaos and racial masochism. No fluke of fate, this dark age culminates a long period of spiritual upheaval, in which Europeans have been severed from their roots and forced to find themselves in all the wrong places, including the negation of themselves. The loss of meaning and purpose fostered by this upheaval in which traditional forms of identity have given way to false ones, Venner calls “nihilism.”

For Nietzsche, the most prominent popularizer of the term, nihilism is a product of “God’s death,” which undermines Christian belief and leaves the world without a sense of purpose. Venner sees it in somewhat broader terms, designating not simply the loss of religious belief, but the loss of the larger cultural heritage as nihilism’s principal source. In this sense, nihilism subverts those transcendent references that formerly oriented the Occident, leaving modern man with a disenchanted world of materialist satisfactions and scientific certainties, but indifferent to “all the higher values of life and personality.” Given its focus on the physical basis of existence, nihilism fosters a condition devoid of sense, form, or order and hence one deprived of those standards that might aid us in negotiating the great trials of our age. An especially dire consequence of this loss of transcendence is a civilizational crisis in which the survival of our race becomes a matter of general indifference.

Venner traces nihilism’s roots to the advent of Spengler’s “Faustian civilization,” which began innocently enough when Saint Thomas introduced Aristotelian logic to Christian theology, privileging thereby the forces of rationality. Because Christianity held that there was a single truth and a single spiritual authority (the Church), reason in this Thomist makeover was made the principal means of accessing the divine. But once the Christian God became dependent on reason, He risked eventually being repudiated by it. This came with Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, who turned reason into a purely instrumental and calculative faculty. In the form of science, technology, and industry, Cartesian rationalism reduced everything to a mechanical causality, associating reason with the progressive mastery of nature, a belief in progress (soon to supplant the belief in Providence), and, ultimately, the rule of money.

Venner claims a desiccated mathematicized reason, no matter how technologically potent, is no substitute for transcendent references, for a disenchanted world governed by its principles is a world devoid of meaning and purpose. The ongoing mechanization of human existence and the quantitative, economic priorities it favors are, indeed, premised on the eradication of those transgenerational structures of history, tradition, and culture which inform all traditional belief systems. And once such structures give way to rationalism’s anti-organic propositions, so too does the significance of those qualities distinguishing Europeans from other members of the human family. In this spirit, the world born of nihilism takes as its ideal an abstract, uniform, and coffee-colored humanity indifferent to pre-rational life forms based on Europe’s organic heritage.

The greater the barrenness of the encroaching nihilism, the greater, Venner contends, is the need to reconnect with the primordial sources of European being. This, however, is now possible only through research and reflection, for these sources have been largely extirpated from European life. In uncovering the principal tropes of Europe’s history and tradition, Venner does not, then, propose a literal return to origins (which, in any case, is impossible), but rather a hermeneutical encounter that seeks out something of their creative impetus. From this perspective, Homer’s Iliad, written thirty centuries ago, still has the capacity to empower us because it expresses something primordial in our racial soul, connecting us with who we were at the dawn of our history—and with what we might be in the adventures that lie ahead. Whenever Europeans reconnect with these primordial sources, they take, thus, a step toward realizing an identity—and a destiny—that is distinctly their own.

IV. Tradition

When Venner speaks of tradition, he refers not to the customary rites and practices that anthropologists study, nor does he accept the utilitarian approach of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, who treat it as the accumulated wisdom of former ages, nor, finally, does he view it as that transhistorical body of principles undergirding the world’s religions, as René Guénon and Julius Evola do. Tradition in his view is that which is immutable and perpetually reborn in a people’s experience of its history, for it is rooted in a people’s primordial substratum. It ought not, then, to be confused with the traditions or customs bequeathed by the past but, instead, seen as the enduring essence—the truth—of a particular historical community, constituting, as such, the infrastructural basis—the cultural scaffolding—of its spirit and vitality.

From this perspective, Europe was born not with the signing of certain free-trade agreements in the late twentieth century, but from millennia of tradition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the themes linking the Iliad, the medieval epics, the Norse sagas, even the national poem of the Armenian Maherr, where we encounter the same warrior ethic that makes courage the ultimate test of a man’s character; the same aristocratic notions of service and loyalty; the same chivalric codes whose standards are informed by beauty, justice, and harmony; the same defiance in face of unjust authority and ignoble sentiments, but, above all, the same metaphysical rebellion against an unexamined existence. From these Aryan themes, Venner claims the organic legacy that is Europe takes form.

The word itself “Europe” is nearly three millennia old, coined by the Greeks to distinguish themselves from the peoples of Africa and Asia. Not coincidentally, Hellenic Europe was forged—mythically in Homer, historically in the Persian Wars—in opposition to Asia. The roots of Europe’s tradition reach back, though, beyond the Greeks, beyond even the Indo-Europeans, who shaped the linguistic and cultural structures of its root peoples. It begins 30,000 years ago, at the dawn of Cro-Magnon man, whose cultural imagery lingers in the extraordinary cave paintings of Chauvet (France) and Kapova (Ukraine), in that region stretching from the Pyrenees to the Urals, where, for nearly 20,000 years, until the last Ice Age arrived, the germ of European civilization took form, as race and culture fused in a uniquely brilliant synergy. Every subsequent era has passed on, reframed, and added to this traditional heritage—every era, that is, except the present nihilist one, in which liberals and aliens dominate.

V. History

Darwin may have been right in explaining the evolution of species, but, Venner insists, history operates irrespective of zoological or scientific laws. As such, history is less a rectilinear progression than a spiral, without beginning or end, with cycles of decay and rebirth intricate to its endless unfoldings. No single determinism or causality can thus conceivably grasp the complexity of its varied movements. Nor can any overarching cause explain them. Given, therefore, that a multitude of determinisms are at work in history, each having an open-ended effect, the course and significance of which are decided by the historical actor, human freedom regains its rights. And as it does, history can no longer be seen as having an in-built teleology, as “scientific” or ideological history-writing, with its reductionist determinisms, presumes. This means there is nothing inevitable about the historical process for, at any moment, it can take an entirely new direction. What would the present be like, Venner asks, if Hitler had not survived the Battle of Ypres or if Lee had triumphed at Gettysburg? None of the great events of the past, in fact, respond to “necessity,” which is always an a posteriori invention.

In conditioning a people’s growth, the existing heritage constitutes but one determinant among many. According to Venner, the existing heritage enters into endless combination with the forces of fortune (whose classic symbol is a woman precariously balanced on a spinning wheel) and virtù, a Roman quality expressive of individual will, audacity, and energy, to produce a specific historical outcome. In this conjuncture of determinism and fortune, the virtù of the historical actor becomes potentially decisive. Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini—like Alexander, Caesar, and Arminius before them—or Frederick II, Peter the Great, Napoleon—were all men whose virtù was of world historical magnitude. Without their interventions, in an arena organized by the heritage of the past and subject to the forces of chance, history might have taken a different course. This suggests that history is perpetually open—and open in the sense that its unfolding is continually affected by human consciousness. History’s significance, therefore, is not to be found in the anonymous currents shaping its entropic movements, but in the meanings men impose upon them. For in face of the alleged determinisms justifying the existing order, it is the courage—the virtù—of the historical actor that bends the historical process in ways significant to who we are as a people.

In Venner’s view, the European of history is best seen as a warrior bearing a sword, symbol of his will. The virtù of this warrior is affirmed every time he imposes his cosmos (order) upon a world whose only order is that which he himself gives it. History, thus, is no immobilizing determinism, but a theater of the will, upon whose stage the great men of our people exert themselves. Both as intellectual discipline and individual act of will, it seems hardly coincidental that history is Europe’s preeminent art form.

VI. In Defense of Who We Are

Like history, life has no beginning or end, being a process of struggle, an overcoming of obstacles, a combat, in which the actor’s will is pivotal. While it inexorably ends in death and destruction, from its challenges all our greatness flows. The Hellenes entered history by refusing to be slaves. Bearing their sword against an Asiatic foe, they won the right to be who they were. If a single theme animates Venner’s treatment of Europe’s history and tradition, it is that Europeans surmounted the endless challenges to their existence only because they faced them with sword in hand—forthrightly, with the knowledge that this was not just part of the human condition, but the way to prove that they were worthy of their fate. Thus, as classical Greece rose in struggle against the Persians, the Romans against the Carthaginians, medieval and early modern Europe against Arabic, then Turkish, Islam, we too today have to stand on our borders, with sword in hand, to earn the right to be ourselves.

Europeans, Venner concludes, must look to their history and tradition—especially to the honor, heroism, and heritage Homer immortalized—to rediscover themselves. Otherwise, all that seeks the suppression of their spirit and the extinction of their blood will sweep them aside. The question thus looms: In the ethnocidal clash between the reigning nihilism and the white men of the West, who will prevail? From Venner’s extraordinary book, in which the historian turns from the drama of the event to the scene of our longue durée, we are led to believe that this question will be answered in our favor only if we remain true to who we are, to what our forefathers have made of us, and to what Francis Parker Yockey, in the bleak years following the Second World War, called the primacy of the spirit.

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O’Meara, Michael. “From Nihilism to Tradition.” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 2004. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/from-nihilism-to-tradition/>

Note: In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

 

Review of O’Meara’s ‘New Culture, New Right’ – Stevens

Review of Michael O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right

By Brett Stevens

New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
by Michael O’Meara
224 pages, 1st Books.

With New Culture, New Right, Michael O’Meara undertakes an exhaustive survey of the post-war conservative renewal. Every concept that will become a talking point is mentioned here, and analyzed without excessive self-interested criticism. The book is dense, detailed and technically accurate, which means it is not for everyone, but for any person seriously considering the New Right as an option, this is essential reading.

This fiery little volume, weighing in at just over 200 pages, has quickly become one my favorite go-to books about the New Right. It is academic (mostly) in style, but more importantly, it is a walk through history by way of its thinkers, point-by-point showing us the evolution of the ideas that are incorporated into the New Right. This is not propaganda or leisure reading; it’s a history of politics through philosophy.

Through a complete study of the different facets of the New Right and related movements, including the difference between its US, UK and European variants, O’Meara triangulates on a central point that is too often forgotten: this movement is a revolt against what liberalism has wreaked from 1789 to the present day, and its key struggle is finding an anti-liberal viewpoint that is also popularly selectable, and its greatest self-contradiction is its tendency to adopt liberal ideas.

Academics will recognize in this book the kind of political study through historical events that qualifies a great secondary source, meaning that after you’re done perusing the Churchill speeches and Stalin bodycounts, you turn to a book like this to figure out what it all meant.

If you want “The War Nerd” or Paul Krugman for educated adults, this is the source to which you will most likely turn; it is reminiscent of the detailed historical analyses of R. Palmer or Alexis de Toqueville, in that it traces history as a progression of ideas evolving in response to their environment.

Unlike the works of Guillaume Faye or Tomislav Sunic, this book does not take a particular position, but instead reports on the birth of the New Right and its ideas, including credible options and contrarian opinions. Through this method, an aggregate forms in the mind of the reader which shows not only the details of the New Right, but where it fits as a transition between periods of history.

O’Meara is superb in his concise insights into the underlying meanings of the terms we find bandied about, a process he creates by anchoring these terms to their structural significance in the construction of nations from political methods. Often in the course of a few sentences, he clarifies what has been vague for decades, and in doing so, smooths out a concrete foundation on which other ideas can build.

He writes in the chapter “Metapolitics”:

Like other politicians of the “corrupt, cosmopolitan oligarchy” (Le Pen), Gisgard d’Estaing assumed that economics was primary, where culture was a mere accounterment — sign, perhaps, of finesse — but nothing more consequential.

Benoist, by contrast, reversed the relationship. It is not the political economy that determines a society’s ideology (that is, the meaning-bearing way a people culturally understands itself), but ideology that dictates its politics. As postmodernists would emphasize, culture is not power per se, but its sheathe. How things are perceived, symbolized, and evolutioned influence how society’s agenda is set and how power is wield. If the anti-liberal forces were ever to regain control of the state, they would, Benoist concluded, first have to change the culture. (43)

This concept shows up in other books on the New Right, but never quite gets explained as being as pivotal as it is. O’Meara coaxes it from the limelight into its rightful place and shows how essential this difference between the New Right and other political factions is, and then launches into a short chapter that skillfully analyzes the symbols in use by the anti-liberal movement and explains their relevance to the overall theory of that movement.

One unique factor of this book is that it integrates the writings of European philosophers and political philosophers beyond Nietzsche, Evola and a handful of right-wing thinkers; it is a broad-spectrum survey that attempts to incorporate the learning of the path and show the New Right as one of its culminating options, the other being a Fukuyama-styled globalist, multicultural, consumerist liberal democracy.

Approaching the topic from the philosophical perspective enables this book to go deeper into the topic than politics will allow, finding the relevance of symbols apart from their use as slogans or responses to the immediate political situation, and instead showing us the evolution of ideas over time as producing the current conflict out of the necessity of moving past an obstructed past.

By doing so, O’Meara takes us past a reactionary longing for nationalism and instead shows us a conflict between civilization types: (a) the civilization led by its economy and (b) the civilization grounded in the organic, biocultural and tradition. Here he explores the issue of nationalism in its most lucid form to date:

As argued in all the above chapters, the single most consequential force assailing these significations, and hence compromising the integrity of European being, is liberalism, which conceives of man in the way modern science conceives of inert matter. On the basis of its simplistic reductions, the European is rendered into a quantitative abstraction, undifferentiated from the rest of humanity.

So reduced, he is subject to laws that isolate and decontextualize him, limit his motivation to material self-interest, relate him to other individuals through faceless contractual arrangements, and, most damagingly, lock him into a mono-directional temporality at at odds with his world-open nature. Then, as the instrumentalist dictates of this condition override deeply rooted meanings, life is made barren and new anxieties arise to haunt it.

With postmodernity, this process attains nihilistic proportion, as historically formed peoples are transformed into consumerist tribes and identity is reduced to an array of vacuous lifestyle choices that threatens to extinguish the last vestiges of their ancient heritage. By severing Europeans from all that makes them a distinct people, liberalism has created the worst possible world for them.

As Jose Ortega y Gasset describes it: “Europeans do not know how to live unless they are engaged in some great enterprise. When this is lacking, they grow petty and feeble and their souls disintegrate.” (208-9)

The author intelligently summarizes not just what points are relevant to the New Right, but why not in the context of political dogma, but in the question of the philosophy of the individuals that make up a society and thus make that a pleasant or miserable place to be.

Not all is perfection. For a start, this book needs an editor to go through and find the spelling mistakes and typos that mar several chapters. Further, sometimes O’Meara speaks too much in the language of his specific audience at the expense of the wider academic field; among the right, “negro basketball player” and “‘anti-racist’ organizations (most dominated by Zionists)” may be considered sensible, but for him to use those terms in such a vividly factual book seems to me wrong not on a moral level, but an informational one; he simply hasn’t explained, nor revealed the history for this verbiage or why it is relevant. Ideally, O’Meara will expand on this volume with an explanation of where Zionists, who are like right-wing anti-liberal Jewish nationalists, and descriptive terms for the African races fit into this picture. Clearly he can do it and would reveal a good deal about how we should visualize our relationship to those groups.

O’Meara sensibly summarizes the views of the New Right, then tacks on a final chapter where he covers honest critics — not those who hope to refute, but those who hope through pointed questioning to force evolution — of the New Right, and injects some of his own thinking through questions as well. This allows the reader to make up his or her own mind, and because the buildup of ideas has been so diligent, requires relatively few words to make itself clear.

If Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism is the call to arms for the New Right, and writings by Sunic, Benoist, Evola and Guenon its cornerstones, New Culture, New Right is its textbook — clear writing for those who wish to understand this movement on a structural level as it emerges from history. For many of us, it has become a favorite reference because it traces these ideas to their roots and in doing so, makes them come alive.

 

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Stevens, Brett. “New Culture, New Right, by Michael O’Meara.” Amerika.org, 15 June 2011. <http://www.amerika.org/books/new-culture-new-right-by-michael-omeara/ >.

Note: A second edition of O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right has been recently published in 2013 by Arktos (London). See: <http://www.arktos.com/our-authors/michael-o-meara/michael-o-meara-new-culture-new-right-second-edition.html >.