First posted Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at 11:31
What is taken for the political right today? There are two common misconceptions. Firstly, that the right stands for proponents of free enterprise and the free market – as opposed to leftists who advocate state intervention in economic and other aspects of life. Secondly, that extreme nationalists are on the right, advocating white supremacism as opposed to multiculturalism.
Criticisms of these two positions from the left might be that:
1. The market cannot be left to its own devices. Spending by the state is required to avoid the worst of recessions. Proponents of the free market are devoid of ethical principles. State intervention is required to protect essential services such as healthcare for everyone. Social security is required for the losers in the system. State intervention is needed to ensure fairness and equity, for example, in the education system.Both the free market and nationalism are believed to be historically spent ideals.
2. Extreme nationalism is equated with fascism. Proponents are intolerant of people with differences of nationality, race, creed and sexual orientation. (Criticism of religious intolerance is problematic to the left, given its tendency to wards atheism.) Intolerance and discrimination are considered by the left to be unethical.
But where might another critique of the nationalist right wing perspective come from? The Elovian right. The traditionalist right. The perennialist right.
A traditional society consists of individuals who each affirm their individual identities through adherence to superior principles and interests. Personality is not abolished, but is integrated through participation in a society in which ‘every individual, function, and caste acquire their right place and reason for being through acknowledgement of what is superior to them and their organic connection with it’. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.338)The acknowledgement of a common spirituality and a common active propensity towards it is such that each and every action by an individual becomes a rite and the fulfilment of a role. Through this fulfilment, the individual gives a law and form to his own nature. He is sure and certain of his purpose – which is sacred.
The roots of tradition lie in the distant past, but emanate most typically in religions and systems of caste. Such is the depth of these roots of tradition that adherents refer to them as perennial, in the sense that they have always existed in one form or another and always will.
In the Middle Ages there was widespread adherence to the perennial tradition. As a result, whilst nationalities existed, nationalisms did not.
Whilst individuals conformed to this or that nature, language or exoteric religious emanation of the tradition, the social principles of caste were articulated across all nationalities. ‘Hence, the possibility for members of the same caste who came from different nations to understand each other better than the members of different castes within the same nation.’ (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.339)
With the loss of tradition, the need for a new type of unity was increasingly felt. Modern nationalism offers an artificial and centralising unity for individuals stripped of religious certainties, living out lives as commodities in a state of pure quantity, as one of the masses.
Nationalism acts upon these masses through myths and suggestions that are likely to galvanise them, flatter them with the perspectives and fancies of supremacy, exclusivism and power. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.339)
Nationalism emerged as a collectivising force. The nation, the homeland became primary as an entity that required from the individual belonging to it an unconditional declaration, as if it were a moral and not merely a natural and political entity. It led to a mentality of ‘my country, right or wrong’.
Even when nationalism parades its traditions up and down, it is living out a myth of fictitious continuity based on a minimum common denominator that consists in the mere belonging to a given group. Celebration of the nation really means the upholding of anti-tradition. The leaders of world subversion see in nationalism a way of disposing of the tradition. Turning this contingency into a science, Marx felt able to affirm ‘all that is sacred melts into air’.
Now for the nightmare vision of the kali yuga.
Today there is a trend towards universal brotherhood, reflected in ‘multiculturalism’, which is really ‘uniculturalism’. Far from abolishing the nationalist spirit and its pseudo-traditions and pride, its supreme form as the nation will be called mankind. The tradition, on the other hand, manifested most typically as religion, especially in the Muslim world, will be regarded as the enemy.
The individual will barely attain the status of a cog in the all-consuming global enterprise and lose all self-differentiation from the masses. In losing all sense of law and form of his nature, the individual will lose all sense of personality. The individual will be crushed.
Since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary"slavery" should be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.109)
Once the global enterprise has been established, there will be no escape; no Guenon-like refuge in a traditional culture beyond its borders.