Anti-imperialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2021

I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an “anti-imperialist,” since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.
—Gilles Dauvé

Mark Twain was an anti-imperialist, a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1898-1920) which opposed US annexation of the Philippines. For the League, just republican government was based on the principle of the “consent of the governed” as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The imperialism of US territorial expansion thus violated the classical liberal precepts of self-government and non-intervention as put forward by British writers like John A. Hobson. Twain’s dark sarcasm and claims of America’s liberatory intent notwithstanding, he was neither so generous nor as damning regarding the US continental expansion of Manifest Destiny that expropriated the native peoples. The raison d’être of this type of anti-imperialism was simple; empire was bad and needed to be morally opposed.

The terror of history: “What’s Left?” November 2020

About paranoia […] There is nothing remarkable […] it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected […] If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I graduated with a BA in history from UCSC in 1974. That summer I went off for a 6-month program sponsored by the university to live on Kibbutz Mizra in Israel with my Jewish girlfriend. We packed a large duffel bag full of paperback books in preparation for our excursion, one of them being Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

This is the modern world: “What’s Left?” September 2020

SFMOMA. Photo by Henrik Kam

I’m old.

I’m 68 years old. My dad died of a heart attack at 67 on December 16, 1993, not quite two months after his wife—my mom—died of lung cancer at 64. I look at this two ways. He lived just one month and two days after his 67th birthday. As of today I’ve lived a year plus two months and change longer than he did when he died almost 27 years ago. I’m now 13+ months past my own 67th birthday. So I’m feeling reassured.

I’m also considered old Left by “the kids” these days. That’s despite having developed my politics during the period of the New Left—the time of SDS, the New Communist Movement, a resurgent rank-and-file labor movement, and a revived anarchism. Which is doubly ironic because we in the New Left called the Left of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—the Stalinist CP-USA and its loyal opposition the Trotskyist SWP—the Old Left. Frankly, I’m darned uncomfortable with and a bit distrustful of the current youthful Left based not on class but on non-class identities embraced by the “new” populist postmodernism. So I’m pissed off that I’m now considered a sad old Leftist anachronism.

I’m against it!: “What’s Left?” January 2019, MRR #428

I’m against it.

Groucho Marx as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
“I’m Against It,” Horse Feathers

I’m against it.

The Ramones, “I’m Against It,” Road to Ruin

I’m against it.

Capitalism that is. I’m against capitalism because it prioritizes profit over human need, exploits workers, engenders economic instability through overproduction and underconsumption, promotes social inequalities, degrades human community, destroys the environment, and encourages short term thinking at the expense of longterm planning. There is a vastly better alternative to capitalism in the form of socialism.

Anarchism for Fools: “What’s Left?” April 2014, MRR #371

Part Three: Anarchism of-by-for Fools

What has to be stressed here, regardless of the philosophical foundations of Anarchism, is that National-Anarchism is Anarchism sui generis. An Anarchism of its own kind. We are not answerable to or responsible for the actions of those who also happen to call themselves ‘Anarchists,’ be they contemporary or in the past.

Troy Southgate

When I hear the term sui generis, I reach for my gun. Also, the term “beyond left and right.” Both are attempts to provide a patina of philosophical respectability to the idiocy that is National Anarchism (NA), an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Two columns ago, I discussed the relationship of capitalist libertarianism to historical libertarianism, that is, to old school anarchism. I didn’t require more than a sentence to position anarchism, which referred to itself as social anarchism, within the context of socialism or the Left as a whole. Individualist anarchism, up to and including its current capitalist iteration, is categorical in identifying the various schools of social anarchism as leftist. And that tiny yet shrill tendency calling itself post-left anarchism, first promulgated by Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed, acknowledges the leftism of much previous anarchism by defining itself as “post.” That NA describes itself as a unique “category in itself” suits most anarchists just fine, as they would be happy to be completely rid of these poseurs. NA is far from Fascism sui generis, however. In point of fact, NA is Fascism, simple and unadorned and quite generic.

Which brings up the tricky task of defining Fascism proper. The thumbnail description associated with Fascism is that it’s an “anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist revolutionary ultra-nationalist ideology, social movement and regime.” This tweet-length one-liner is woefully insufficient for most academics interested in researching the nature of Fascism and coming up with a paradigmatic “Fascist Minimum” that can encompass as many types of ultra-right ideological/social phenomenon as possible. But for those on the ultra-right, the above sound bite of a description is too definitive because it tries to nail down what seeks to remain intentionally vague, flexible, and sui generis.

I noted the explosion of political ideas, associations and actions, left and right, that occurred from the fin de siècle to the beginning of the second World War. With respect to the European ultra-right in the decades inclusive of and following La Belle Époque, and aside from Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism, there was political futurism, Traditionalism (Evola), völkisch nationalism (Dickel), Novecentismo (Bontempelli), Maurras’s Action Française, young conservatism (Jung), conservative revolutionism (van den Bruck), Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, national revolutionism (Jünger), the German Freikorps, the Croatian Ustasha, National Bolshevism (Niekisch), leftist “universal fascism” (Strasser), Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Perón’s Justicialismo, ad nauseum. This is by no means an exhaustive list of fascist, quasi-fascist, para-fascist, and crypto-fascist tendencies, movements and regimes in this era, and in a European context.

Despite the short-lived attempt to found a Fascist International Congress at Montreux, Switzerland in 1934-35, the relationships between these highly fractious tendencies, movements and regimes were often less than cordial, and sometimes quite brittle. To briefly illustrate: when National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy formed their Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936 it became clear that Mussolini’s Italy was to play “second fiddle” to Hitler’s Germany in military expansion, empire building, and war against the allies. The Allied invasion of Italy led to German intervention and invasion to shore up Mussolini’s Fascist regime, resulting in the consolidation of the rump Italian Social Republic in northern Italy in 1943. The pseudo-leftist Salo Republic proved a “shrinking puppet-state of the Nazis in economic and agricultural production, in foreign affairs, and in the military campaign against the Allies.” (Roger Griffin) Both Germany and Italy came to the aid of Franco’s Nationalist rebels in Spain with military and financial assistance between 1936 and 1939. After Nationalist victory, Franco joined with Mussolini and Hitler to clamp down on liberal, democratic, secular social elements generally, and specifically to smash the international socialist working class, from anarchist to Bolshevik. But, given that Francoismo was above all traditionalist in orientation, Franco also dissolved the overtly fascist Falange as a party, declared Spanish neutrality, refused to enter the war as an ally of Germany, nixed a plan to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British fleet, and even allowed Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi Final Solution to transit Spanish territory. Italian Fascism made easy accord with the monarchy and the Vatican. Rightwing Italian critics of Mussolini and his Fascist regime were rarely imprisoned, but were occasionally placed under house arrest. Julius Evola was kept at arms length, never embraced but never renounced. Hitler’s National Socialist Germany was far more brutal in dealing with right wing critics and competitors. During the Night of the Long Knives (Operation Hummingbird) in 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of aristocratic and Catholic conservative opposition figures (von Bose, von Schleicher, von Kahr, Klausener, and Edgar Jung), as well as the purge of National Socialism’s left wing. Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was first imprisoned and then killed, while Nazi leader Gregor Strasser was assassinated. His brother, Otto Strasser, was driven into exile. The literary figure, war veteran and national revolutionary Ernst Jünger was kept under constant surveillance by the regime.

(Röhm and the Strasser brothers considered themselves “second revolutionaries.” Yet it would be a “historical mondegreen,” referencing Death in June, to believe that the actual history of the Third Reich would have been much different had either of these three been führer instead of Hitler.)

Fascism guilefully thinks of itself as sui generis, beyond left and right. The various groupings within and surrounding Fascism, as well as its National Socialist “blood brother,” each insist on their status as sui generis. In attempting to synthesize a violent opposition to Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism, and capitalism with an embrace of populism, revolutionism, and ultra-nationalism, these ultra-right ideologies, movements and regimes exemplify not fusion and unification but splitting and division. Their sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness might be laid at the feet of Nietzsche and his philosophy of aristocratic individualism, what Jünger called the sovereign individualism of the Anarch. Yet more fundamental socio-political causes must be cited. Unlike Marxism’s highly programmatic politics, the Fascist ultra-right was decidedly less programmatic, and what platforms it did generate were intensely idiosyncratic. Leninism posited a scientific, universalist, international socialism that, when corrupted by nationalism, devolved into particular socialist types, say, a socialism with Chinese or Vietnamese or Cuban characteristics. By contrast, the particular cultural, social and national characteristics of the countries out of which Fascism arose, combined with Fascism’s innate syncretic tendencies, has produced a plethora of Fascist types. Consider the problem of nationalism. In opposition to the secular nationalism born of the Enlightenment, there is Evola’s Traditionalist pan-European Imperium on the one hand and on the other hand de Benoist’s Europe of a thousand flags comprised of separate tribal ethnies. Way stations along this spectrum are völkisch pan-Germanic Aryanism and the Romantic organic nationalism that was a fusion of local ethnic groups within a given nation-state. Then there is the issue of racism. National Socialism’s biological racism and virulent anti-Semitism stands in stark contrast to Italian Fascism which was relatively free of anti-Semitic and eugenic strains until influenced and then subsumed by Nazi Germany.

Academics and intellectuals, whose job it is to formulate unifying theories and overarching explanations of phenomenon, have been stymied by the variegated nature of Fascism. Attempts to define a “Fascist Minimum” have been as diverse as Fascism itself. Marxist approaches have predominated, and at times have been augmented by post-Marxist modernization, structural and psycho-historical theories. Liberal reactions to Fascism have remained thoroughly splintered, ranging from Nolte’s theme of resisting modernization to Payne’s understanding of a new kind of nationalist authoritarian state. A related conceptual constellation offered by Mosse’s “third way,” Sternhell’s “new civilization” and Eatwell’s “new synthesis” hints at a way forward. Personally, I find Roger Griffin’s summation that “Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” the most convincing.*

Which brings us back to National Anarchism. Troy Southgate has been engaged in “serial Fascism” based on a “palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” for most of his political career, pursuing the next big Fascist thing from the National Front, through the International Third Position, the English Nationalist Movement, the National Revolutionary Faction, Synthesis and the journal Alternative Green, to his current New Right and National Anarchist affiliation. “As a prelude to an anticipated racial civil war and a collapse of the capitalist system,” NA seeks to “[E]stablish autonomous villages for völkisch communities, which have seceded from the state’s economy and are no-go areas for unwelcomed ethnic groups and state authorities.” Setting aside the ersatz weekend hipster tribalism of your typical Burning Man participant as an outright insult to aboriginal realities, NA’s anti-statist ethnic tribalism is, in actuality, well within the range of Fascist nationalism demarcated by Evola and de Benoist. NA’s racism falls within the spectrum defined by German Nazism and Italian Fascism as well. (“My race is my nation,” or so goes the White Nationalist slogan.) Whether NA prefers mutualism or autarky to national socialism or corporatism for its so-called anti-capitalist economics is also not unusual. Presenting itself as a resynthesis of “classic fascism, Third Positionism, neo-anarchism and new types of anti-systemic politics born of the anti-globalization movement” simply reveals the syncretic character inherent in Fascism as a phenomenon. That this segment of the “groupuscular right” champions a “a stateless palingenetic ultranationalism” amounts to subtle nuance, not radical difference. Nothing distinguishes NA from Fascism proper. Nothing sui generis here. Absolutely nothing.

So, let’s forego all the academic abstractions and get down to brass tacks. Individuals who claim NA talk to, hang out with, organize among, and act alongside fellow ultra-right Fascists. They claim to “go beyond left and right,” but they fully identify themselves as New Right. If NAs rear their ugly pinheads on internet forums like anarchist LibCom or leftist RevLeft, they are immediately identified, isolated, and purged. And if they openly show their faces at explicitly anarchist and leftist events, they risk a serious beat down. In contrast, NAs can and do freely join, discuss, argue and debate on white nationalist/white supremacist forums like Stormfront. They’re also welcome on disgruntled anarcho-individualist and self-styled pan-secessionist Keith Preston’s greatly attenuated Attack The System forum. His American Revolutionary Vanguard argues that “the mainstream of the anarchist movement has become unduly focused on left-wing cultural politics, countercultural lifestyle matters, and liberal pet causes.” His stated goal is to go beyond the Left/Right political spectrum to: “work towards a synthesis of the currently scattered anarchist tendencies. These include anarcho-collectivism, syndicalism, mutualism, post-structuralism, Green anarchism, primitivism and neo-tribalism from the Left, and anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-feudalism, national-anarchism, tribal-anarchism, paleo-anarchism and Christian anarchism from the Right.”

Fuck this fascist noise!
—
*[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.
Roger Griffin, Nature of Fascism
[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.
Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology

To praise the modern world: “What’s Left?” October 2010, MRR #329

I enjoy the modern world.

I like brewing a cup of pu-erh tea, an aged, bricked leaf imported from China. I like catching up on current events by reading my Weekly Guardian or Christian Science Monitor in the comfort of my soft bed. I like typing these words on this cool 14-inch Titanium MacBook Pro, even though it’s nearly three years old.

This is all very civilized, and I’m a big fan of civilization, modernity, science, and all that. Call me a booster for modernism, I don’t mind. I’ve got my criticisms of Marxism, but I’m a Marxist insofar as I assert the importance of a concept of totality, and of the possibility for a theory of everything. I like to point out that postmodernism’s ongoing debate with modernism is occurring in the modern world, in a world of rampant capitalism, enshrined science, and mass culture. Whether or not there are any more “grand narratives” is rather incidental to this basic reality.

Equally inconsequential, for different reasons, is primitivism’s carny hokum. Sure, there are a half dozen ways in which modern civilization is teetering on the brink of collapse. The popularity of post-apocalyptic fantasies and survivalist/prepper milieus speak to these ubiquitous fears. The idyllic hunter-gatherer societies touted by primitivists is utopia in the literal sense of that word however. That is, no place. Nowhere, and not possible. Because this fantasy is consistently envisioned and proposed despite the inescapable fact that civilization’s collapse would produce suffering, brutality and slaughter beyond measure, my guess is that some type of delusional disorder is involved, at the very least. Actually, I’ve always suspected that the great human die-off is a secret primitivist wet dream, born of their profound misanthropy.

The anti-civilization critique offered up by certain ultraleftists, brought to the fore by the Invisible Committee’s incorporation of recent French intellectual currents, is much more nuanced. This critique accentuates the capitalist production of human alienation, and highlights the bonds of human community, friendship, and love destroyed by modern civilization. I clearly sympathize with, and take much from this assessment. But since the solution to civilization and its discontents is dependent on the equally unlikely prospect of international communist revolution, or as “The Coming Insurrection” would have it permanent insurrection, we are again left with a critique without teeth.

The challenge to modernity and the modern world that I take seriously is what I will broadly call anti-modernism. Anti-modernism is going to take a little while to unpack, so be patient. Let’s begin with how I encountered this anti-modernist perspective personally.

I was a sputnik kid, a child reared after the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into earth orbit and the US went apeshit tracking youngsters into math and science so that we could beat the Reds in the space race. I was encouraged to be a nerd, before the word existed. I wasn’t big on math, but I did love science. I was twelve, in seventh grade at Barton Elementary in San Bernardino, California, and I did a science project for the school fair that wound up at the county-wide mega science fair, held at the Orange Show Fairgrounds.

Aside from elementary, junior and senior high schools, the US military, various companies, and the occasional individual had booths at the Fairgrounds. Not all of the exhibitors were strictly science-oriented either, with some definitely crossing the line into pseudoscience. I recall a rather dramatic stand with a working Tesla Coil spitting out miniature lightning bolts, alongside diagrams purporting to illustrate perpetual motion machines. The sponsors of the booth were into exposing the vast conspiracy to suppress Nikola Tesla’s supposed discovery of limitless wireless power, and they had an interest in virtually everything occult. I scrounged together all my change to purchase a rather shoddily mimeographed, stapled book entitled The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Discovery in History by Dr. Raymond Bernard, AB, MA, PhD, from their booth. That bizarre, smudged volume was my introduction to a lunatic fringe that, thanks to the internet, has become all too commonplace.

Occult, metaphysical, esoteric, paranormal, psychic, supernatural; these terms cover an immense and extremely nebulous territory. To give the subject some coherence, I’ll stick to my very narrow thread of fascination during those years.

My dad worked in civil service connected with the US military, and due to military base downsizings, he moved the family to Layton, Utah, where I spent nine miserable months when I was thirteen. The Hallow Earth became a secret obsession of mine in the Mormon wasteland. The book’s thesis was that the earth was hollow and possessed of a central sun, that access to the earth’s interior could be gained through holes in the north and south poles, and that this hidden world was inhabited by a superior race of technologically advanced beings who were responsible for UFOs. In the process of hacking out these themes, the book also touched on the legendary lost continents and civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, the mysterious, unitary knowledge allegedly possessed by all ancient human civilizations, and the vast network of tunnels, caverns and underground cities rumored to exist between the outer surface and the inner world. Bernard’s The Hallow Earth claimed to weave these disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and even though I was a hardcore science geek, I was captivated by the audacity and quasi-scientific nature of the book’s assertions. I was also a fan of science fiction, and this was like science fiction that professed to be real, yet couldn’t quite be proven false.

Dad got us out of the Mormon hellhole as quickly as possible, and by fourteen, I was a student at Balboa Junior High in Ventura, California. Now, Ventura is near Ojai. Ojai is home to the Krotona Institute, established by the Theosophical Society, which was founded by Madame H.P. Blavatsky who was mentioned in passing several times by Bernard in The Hollow Earth. Theosophy is a wacky set of ideas, based on the teachings of Blavatsky, who believed in Atlantis and Lemuria, and who claimed to have discovered a secret, universal esoteric core of wisdom to all of humanity’s major and minor religions. In turn, Theosophy styles itself a synthesis of religion, philosophy, science and metaphysics. Theosophy was mystical, New Agey horseshit before mystical, New Agey horseshit existed. Thanks to very tolerant parents, I attended a number of lectures by prominent Theosophist J. Krishnamurti at Krotona. There I encountered a wizened old codger named Albert who took me aside after one of Krishnamurti’s talks, proclaimed that “Theosophy was for pussies,” and gave me a dog-eared copy of The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guénon, the founder of Traditionalism.

Finally, we’ve arrived at the most prominent form of anti-modernism, Traditionalism. Not all anti-modernists are Traditionalists, but all Traditionalists are anti-modern. Mistakenly equated with Perennial Philosophy, Traditionalism identified a “primordial tradition” which was directly inspired by on-going revelation from a transcendental source and from which all of humanity’s great religions were derived. All exoteric religious traditions, at their core, embodied a single, enduring esoteric truth or principle that made them different expressions of the same divine essence, and hence equally valid spiritual paths to enlightenment. This primordial tradition based on divine revelation was at the heart of an authentic spiritual civilization that Traditionalism identified with the ancient world, which meant that modernity was a degeneration and corruption of nothing less than a golden age. Indeed, Traditionalist anti-modernity rejected anything in the modern world that conflicted with traditional understandings of the universe, to include evolutionary science. And pre-modern social structures, like feudalism, were glorified because they were considered to be products of true Traditional beliefs.

Frankly, I found Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World so abstruse and alien, I didn’t develop an understanding of Traditionalism until much later, and then only through the side door by studying Henry Brooks Adams. Scion of Boston Brahmins, member of the famous Adams family (as in the 2nd and 6th US presidents), historian and man of letters, virulent anti-Semite, Henry Adams was born in 1838 and died in 1918. His life thus straddled the turn of the century.

Henry Adams was not a Traditionalist, but rather a traditional conservative, a Burkean conservative, much like his junior T.S. Elliot. Traditional conservatism is a political track that parallels spiritual Traditionalism so closely at times, it’s quite easy to step from one to the other. Once having understood Adams’s take on the modern world, I found it easy to grasp the Traditionalist ethos.

Obsessed with the erosion of faith by science, convinced that a world of order and unity was disintegrating into chaos around him, Henry Adams distilled the history of western civilization down to the metaphor of the Virgin and the dynamo in a curious duet of books; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. The first book, subtitled A Study in 13th Century Unity, is an historical and philosophical meditation on the 12th century Norman construction of the Mont-Saint-Michel cathedral and the 13th century cult of the Virgin at Chartres. For Adams, Europe in the century from 1150 to 1250 was “the point in history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe.”

This was the Europe of the Middle Ages; of manorialism and feudalism, chivalry and serfdom, the Holy Roman Empire and the Crusades; of nobility, clergy and peasantry unified in Christian holy war against infidel Islam. Adams admired the infusion of religious ideals throughout European economic, political and military institutions in this age when philosophy, theology and the arts were all informed by faith. In Mont-Saint-Michel he symbolized this organic unity of reason and intuition, science and religion in the statue of the Virgin Mary in Chartres cathedral. In turn he saw in the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas, with its emphasis on human reason, the beginning of the destruction of this coherent, totalizing worldview.

The humanism of the Renaissance, the individual faith of the Reformation, the universal reason of the Enlightenment, and the egalitarian democracy of the modern era all furthered the disintegration of this organic unity, replacing the singularity of faith with the fragmenting logic of science. In The Education, Adams described this historical transition as one from “evolving the universe from a thought” to “evolving thought from the universe.” This movement from religious spiritualism to scientific materialism produced “Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos,” with no way to prevent the proliferation of conflicting, contradictory thoughts from scientific observation of the universe. Adams symbolized this atomizing scientific worldview in the mechanistic force of the dynamo he saw at the 1900 Great Exposition in Paris. A two volume philosophical and autobiographical reflection on the woeful inadequacy of his “education” for the modern world, Henry Adams subtitled the second book A Study of 20th Century Multiplicity.

When the Virgin was central man was at his pinnacle of unity with the universe, yet when the dynamo of human achievement replaced faith man was eventually subordinated to mere mechanical forces.

The primary paradox embodied in Adams’ Virgin/dynamo metaphor has been described by others in different ways. Friedrich Nietzsche decried the “collective degeneration of man” into the “perfect herd animal” of our democratic era when, under corrupt “modern ideas,” human beings behave “too humanely.” He maintained in Beyond Good and Evil that: “[e]very elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society-and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other.” In his Revolt Against the Modern World, Julius Evola praised Medieval Europe for “its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred” which made man heroic. When the humanism of the Renaissance supposedly “emancipated itself from the ‘darkness of the Middle Ages’,” “[c]ivilization, even as an ideal, ceased to have a unitary axis.” Degeneration and decadence inevitably followed, marked by “restlessness, dissatisfaction, resentment, the need to go further and faster, and the inability to possess one’s life in simplicity, independence, and balance” in which man was “made more and more insufficient to himself and powerless.”

Julius Evola brings us back to Traditionalism. A contemporary of Guénon’s, an aristocratic metaphysician, Evola was cozy with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism as well. He’s become the darling of today’s neo-Nazis, his brand of ultra-right Traditionalism an inspiration to the New Right. Evola’s reactionary politics are by no means exceptional when we examine those who also called themselves Traditionalists (Schuon, Burkhardt, Lings, Coomaraswamy, Nasr, deLubicz) and those who sympathized with Traditionalism (Campbell, Eliade, Smith, Danielou). Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen makes the point that “Traditionalism is politically reactionary” in his essay “Why I Am Not a Traditionalist.” He argues that Traditionalism is a modern European reaction against modernism, and amounts to a modern ideology in every sense of that word, despite its disdain for modern ideology. Claiming to be concerned solely with metaphysics, as an ideology Traditionalism nevertheless “sets out a general program of social and political direction” that more often than not is rightwing, whether conservative, reactionary or fascist.

Legenhausen makes the case that Traditionalism was also simplistic, intellectually dishonest, and procrustean in its approach to religion, as when it conflates the anti-idolatry of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions with the ultra idolatry of pantheistic Hinduism. Mark Sedgwick’s recent book, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, makes the case for Traditionalism as “a major influence on religion, politics, even international relations” according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of The Occult Roots of Nazism. “Famous scholars, theosophists and masons, Gnostic ascetics and Sufi sheikhs, jostle with neo-fascists, terrorists and Islamists in their defection from a secular, materialist West” as embodied in Traditionalism. Unfortunately, the neo-fascists, terrorists and Islamists have come to dominate this type of anti-modernism, even making common cause with particular elements of the far Left with pretensions of going beyond Left and Right. The Communist/neo-Nazi Red-Brown alliance in post-Soviet Russia is the most obvious example.

Shit by any other name…