/lit/ - Literature

>>20948110

Politics seem to be altogether controlled by finance, and trade competition seems to be the dominant influence in determining the relations between peoples.

>Chapter 7 - A Material Civilization

Industry is no longer merely an application of science, an application from which science should, in itself, remain completely independent; it has become the reason for, and justification of, science to such an extent that here too the normal relations between things have been reversed. What the modern world has striven after with all its strength, even when it has claimed in its own way to pursue science, is really nothing other than the development of industry and machinery; and in thus seeking to dominate matter and bend it to their service, men have only succeeded in becoming its slaves. Not only have they limited their intellectual ambition—if such a term can still be used in present state of things—to inventing and constructing machines, but they have ended by becoming in fact machines themselves. Indeed, it is not only scholars but also technicians and even workers who have to undergo the specialization that certain sociologists praise to highly under the name of ‘division of labor’; and for the ‘workers’, it makes intelligent work quite impossible. Very different from the craftsmen of the former times, they have become mere slaves of machines with which they may be said to form part of a single body. In a purely mechanical way they have become mere slaves of machines with which they may be said to form part of a single body. In a purely mechanical way they have constantly to repeat certain specific movements, which are always the same and always performed in the same way, so as to avoid the slightest loss of time; such at least is required by the most modern methods which are supposed to represent the most advanced stage of ‘progress’. Indeed, the object is merely to produce as much as possible; quality matters little, it is quantity alone that is of importance, which brings us once more to the remark we have already made in other contexts, namely, that modern civilization may truly be called a quantitative civilization, and this is merely another way of saying it is a material civilization.

>>20948054

Finally, there remains one direct consequence of the democratic idea to consider, and this is the negation of the idea of an elite; it is not for nothing that ‘democracy’ is opposed to ‘aristocracy’, for this latter word, at least when taken in its etymological sense, means precisely the power of the elite. The elite can by definition only be the few, and their power, or rather their authority, deriving as it does from their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical strength on which democracy is based, a strength whose inherent tendency is to sacrifice the minority to the majority, and therefore quality to quantity, and the elite to the masses. Thus the guiding function exercised by a true elite, and its very existence—since of necessity it plays this role if it exists at all00is utterly incompatible with democracy, which is closely bound up with the egalitarian conception, and therefore with the negation of all hierarchy; the very foundation of the democratic idea is the supposition that one individual is as good as another, simply because they are equal numerically and in spite of the fact that they can never be equal in any other way. A true elite can only be an intellectual one; and that is why democracy can arise only where pure intellectuality no longer exists, as is the case in the modern world.

>>20948049

The tendency of which we have just spoken is identical with that ‘individualizing’ tendency that is represented in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the ‘Fall’ of those who broke away from the original unity*. Multiplicity, considered apart from its principle, and therefore as no longer capable of being reduced to unity, takes the form in the social realm of a community conceived only as the arithmetical sum of its component individuals; in fact, a community is no more than this, once it has ceased to be attached to any principle superior to these individuals. The law of such a community is literally that of the greatest number, and it is on this that the democratic idea is based.


*This is why Dante puts the symbolical abode of Lucifer at the center of the earth, that is to say at the point where the forces of weight converge from all sides; from this point of view it is the opposite of the spiritual or ‘heavenly’ center of attraction symbolized in most traditional doctrines by the sun.

>>20948041

But let us probe still more deeply into the question: what is this law of the greatest number which modern governments invoke and in which they claim to find their sole justification? It is simply the law of matter and brute force, the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track. It is precisely here that we find the point of junction of the democratic conception and materialism, and here also is to be found the reason why this conception is so firmly rooted in the present-day mentality. By this means, the normal order of things is completely reversed and the supremacy of multiplicity as such is upheld, a supremacy that actually exists only in the material world.

>>20948036

This now leads us to elucidate more precisely the error of the idea that the majority should make the law, because, even though this idea must remain theoretical—since it does not correspond to an effective reality—it is necessary to explain how it has taken root in the modern outlook, to which of its tendencies it corresponds, and which of them00at least in appearance—it satisfies. Its most obvious flaw is the one we have just mentioned: the opinion of the majority cannot be anything but an expression of incompetence, whether this be due to lack of intelligence or to ignorance pure and simple; certain observations of ‘mass psychology’ might be quoted here, in particular the widely known fact that the aggregate of mental reactions aroused among the component individuals of a crowd crystalizes into a sort of general psychosis whose level is not merely that of the average, but actually that of the lowest elements present.

>>20948030

One must guard against being misled by words: it is contradictory to say that the same persons can be at the same time rulers and ruled, because, to use Aristotelian terminology, the same being cannot be ‘in act’ and ‘in potency’ at the same time and in the same relationship. The relationship of ruler and ruled necessitates the presence of two terms: there can be no ruled if there are not also rulers.

>>20948029

It is abundantly clear that the people cannot confer a power that they do not themselves possess; true power can only come from above, and this is why—be it said in passing-it can be legitimized only by the sanction of something standing above the social order, that is to say by spiritual authority, for otherwise it is a mere counterfeit of power, unjustifiable thorough lack of any principle, and in which there can be nothing but disorder and confusion. This reversal of the true hierarchical order begins when the temporal power seeks to make itself independent of the spiritual authority, and then even to subordinate the latter by claiming to make it serve political ends.

>>20948025

The most decisive argument against democracy can be summed up in a few words: the higher cannot proceed from the lower, because the greater cannot proceed from the lesser; this is an absolute mathematical certainty that nothing can gainsay. And it should be remarked that this same argument, applied to a different order of things, can also be invoked against materialism.

>CHAPTER 6 - The Social Chaos

Under the present state of affairs in the Western world, nobody any longer occupies the place that he should normally occupy by virtue of his own nature; this is what is meant by saying that the castes no longer exist, for caste, in its traditional meaning, is nothing other than individual nature, with the whole array of special aptitudes that this carries with it and that predisposes each man to the fulfillment of one or another particular function.

>>20947952

An objection might here be raised: although it broke away from the Catholic organization, might not Protestantism, in that it continued to admit the validity of the Sacred Books, have preserved the traditional doctrine contained therein? But the introduction of ‘free criticism’ completely refutes such a hypothesis, since it opens the door to all manner of individual fantasy; moreover, the preservation of the doctrine presupposes an organized traditional teaching to keep alive the orthodox interpretation, and in actual fact this teaching has, in the Western world, been identified with Catholicism.

>>20947948

Actually, religion being essentially a form of tradition, the anti-traditional outlook cannot help being anti-religious; it begins by denaturing religion and, when it can, ends by suppressing it entirely. Protestantism is illogical: while doing all it can to ‘humanize’ religion, it nevertheless, in theory at least, retains revelation, which is a supra-human element. It does not dare carry its negation to the logical conclusion but, by subjecting revelation to all the discussions resulting from purely human interpretations, it does in fact reduce it to next to nothing; and seeing, as one does, people who persist in calling themselves Christian even though they deny the very divinity of Christ.

>>20947944

At this stage the final products of religious and of philosophical decline mingle together and ‘religious experience’ becomes merged in pragmatism, in the name of which a limited God is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God, insofar as one ca feel for him sentiments comparable to those one would feel for a higher man. At the same time, the appeal to the ’subconscious’ joins hands with modern spiritualism and all those ‘pseudo-religions’ characteristic of our age.

>>20947939

From rationalism, religion was bound to sink into sentimentalism, and it is in the Anglo-Saxon countries that the most striking example of this are to be found. What remains is therefore no longer even a dwindling and deformed religion, but simply ‘religiosity’, that is to say vague and sentimental aspirations unjustified by any real knowledge.

>>20947937

Individualism necessarily implies the refusal to accept any authority higher than the individual, as well as any means of knowledge higher than individual reason; these two attitudes are inseparable. Consequently the modern outlook was bound to reject all spiritual authority in the true sense of the word, namely authority based on the supra-human order, as well as any traditional organization, that is, any organization based essentially on this authority, whatever be its form—for the form will naturally vary with each civilization. This is what in fact did happen: Protestantism denied the authority of the organization qualified to interpret legitimately the religious tradition of the West and in its place claimed to set up ‘free criticism’, that is to say any interpretation resulting from private judgement, even that of the ignorant and incompetent, and based exclusively on the exercise of human reason.

>>20947934

It is certain that all modern philosophy has its origin in Descartes

>>20947931

There remained but one step: the total denial of intelligence and knowledge altogether and the substitution of ‘utility’ for ‘truth’. This step was pragmatism, to which we have just referred; here we are no longer even in the merely human domain as with rationalism, for the appeal to the ’subconscious’, which marks the complete reversal of the normal hierarchy, brings us down in fact to the infra-human.

>>20947927

In a traditional civilization it is almost inconceivable that a man should claim an idea as his own; and in any case, were he to do so, he would thereby deprive it of all credit and authority, reducing it to the level of a meaningless fantasy: if an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it; if it is false, there is no credit in having it invented it. A true idea cannot be ‘new’, for truth is not a product of the human mind; it exists independently of us, and all we have to do is to take cognizance of it; outside this knowledge there can be nothing but error: but do the moderns on the whole care much about truth, or do they even know what it is?

>>20947925

It would seem, indeed, as if philosophers are much more interested in creating problems, however artificial and illusory they may be, than in solving them.

>>20947918

What has never been seen before is the reaction of an entire civilization on something purely negative, on what indeed could be called the absence of principle; and it is this that gives the modern world its abnormal character and makes of it a sort of monstrosity, only to be understood if one thinks of it as corresponding to the end of a cyclical period, as we have already said. Individualism, thus defined, is therefore the determining cause of the present decline of the West, precisely because it is, so to speak, the mainspring for the development of the lowest possibilities of mankind, namely those possibilities that do not require the intervention of any supra-human element and which, on the contrary, can only expand freely if every supra-human element and which, on the contrary, can only expand freely if every supra-human element be absent, since they stand at the antipodes of all genuine spirituality and intellectuality.

>>20947912
>CHAPTER 5 - Individualism

By individualism we mean the the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all its branches, to purely human elements; fundamentally, therefore, individualism amounts to the same thing as what, at the time of the Renaissance, was called ‘humanism’; it is also the characteristic feature of the ‘profane point of view’.

>>20947908

The root of this (rationalist) error, as of a great many other modern errors—and the cause of the entire deviation of science that we have just described—is what may be called ‘individualism’, an attitude indistinguishable from the anti-traditional attitude itself and whose many manifestations in all domains constitute one of the most important factors in the confusion of our time.

>>20947902

What is true of the sciences is equally true of the arts, since every art can have a truly symbolic value that enables it to serve as a support for meditation, and because its rules, like the laws studied by the sciences, are reflection and applications of fundamental principles: there are then in every normal civilization ‘traditional arts’, but these are no less unknown to the modern West than are the ‘traditional sciences’.*


*The art of the medieval builders can be cited as a particularly remarkable example of these traditional arts, whose practice moreover implied a real knowledge of the corresponding sciences.

>>20947901

By seeking to sever the connection of the sciences with any higher principle, under the pretext of assuring their independence, the modern conception robs them of all deeper meaning and even of all real interest from the point of view of knowledge; it can only lead them down a blind alley, by enclosing them, as it does, in a hopelessly limited realm*


*It should be noted that an analogous rupture has occurred in the social order, where the moderns claim to have separated the temporal from the spiritual. We do not mean to deny that the two are distinct, since they are in fact concerned with different provinces, just as are metaphysics and the sciences; but due to an error inherent in the analytical mentality, it has been forgotten that distinction does not mean separation. Because of this separation, the temporal power has lost its legitimacy—which is precisely what can be said, in the intellectual order, of the sciences.