T.S. Eliot: Culture and Empire

 

T.S Eliot by Wyndham Lewis (1938)

 The following is taken from Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), Eliot's critique of the post-war dispensation and defence of  traditional, organically formed culture. In this passage Eliot discusses  various means by which  imperial hegemons spread their culture to subject societies.
 
One people in isolation is not aware of having a "culture" at all. And the differences between the several European nations in the past were not wide enough to make their peoples see their cultures as different to the point of conflict and incompatibility: culture-consciousness as a means of uniting a nation against other nations was first exploited by the late rulers of Germany.

The early British rulers of India were content to rule; some of them, through long residence and continuous absence from Britain, assimilated themselves to the mentality of the people they governed. A later type of rulers, explicitly and increasingly the servants of Whitehall, and serving only for a limited period (after which they returned to their native country, either to retirement or to some other activity) aimed rather to bring to India the benefits of Western civilisation. They did not intend to uproot, or to impose, a total "culture": but the superiority of western political and social organisation, of English education, of English justice, of western "enlightenment" and science seemed to them so self-evident that the desire to do good would alone have been a sufficient motive for introducing these things. 

The Briton, unconscious of the importance of religion in the formation of his own culture, could hardly be expected to recognise its importance in the preservation of another. In the piece-meal imposition of a foreign culture-an imposition in which force plays only a small part: the appeal to ambition, and the temptation to which the native is exposed, to admire the wrong things in western civilisation, and for the wrong reasons, are much more decisive-the motives of arrogance and generosity are always inextricably mixed; there is at the same time an assertion of superiority and a desire to communicate the way of life upon which that assumed superiority is based; so that the native acquires a taste for western ways, a jealous admiration of material power, and a resentment against his tutors. 

The partial success of westernisation, of which some members of an Eastern society are quick to seize the apparent advantages, has tended to make the Oriental more discontented with his own civilisation and more resentful of that which has caused this discontent; has made him more conscious of differences, at the same time that it has obliterated some of these differences; and has broken up the native culture on its highest level, without penetrating the mass. And we are left with the melancholy reflection that the cause of this disintegration is not corruption, brutality or maladministration: such ills have played but a small part, and no ruling nation has had less to be ashamed of than Britain in these particulars; corruption, brutality and maladministration were too prevalent in India before the British arrived, for commission of them to disturb the fabric of Indian life. 

The cause lies in the fact that there can be no permanent compromise between the extremes of an external rule which is content to keep order and leave the social structure unaltered, and a complete cultural assimilation. The failure to arrive at the latter is a religious failure

To point to the damage that has been done to native cultures in the process of imperial expansion is by no means an indictment of empire itself, as the advocates of imperial dissolution are only too apt to infer. Indeed, it is often these same anti-imperialists who, being liberals, are the most complacent believers in the superiority of western civilisation, and at one and the same time blind to the benefits conferred by imperial government and to the injury done by the destruction of native culture. According to such enthusiasts, we do well to intrude ourselves upon another civilisation, equip the members of it with our mechanical contrivances, our systems of government, education, law, medicine and finance, inspire them with a contempt for their own customs and with an enlightened attitude towards religious superstition-and then leave them to stew in the broth which we have brewed for them. It is noticeable that the most vehement criticism, or abuse, of British imperialism often comes from representatives of  societies which practise a different form of imperialism-that is to say, of expansion which brings material benefits and extends the influence of culture.

America has tended to impose its way of life chiefly in the course of doing business, and creating a taste for its commodities. Even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and the symbol of a particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes: I mention that influential and inflammable article the celluloid film. American economic expansion can be also, in its way, the cause of disintegration of cultures which it touches. 

The newest type of imperialism, that of  Russia, is probably the most ingenious, and the best calculated to flourish according to the temper of the present age. The Russian Empire appears to be sedulous to avoid the weaknesses of the empires which have preceded it: it is at the same time more ruthless and more careful of the vanity of subject peoples. The official doctrine is one of complete racial equality-an appearance easier for Russia to preserve in Asia, because of the oriental cast of the Russian mind and because of the backwardness of Russian development according to western standards. Attempts appear to be made to preserve the similitude of local self-government and autonomy: the aim, I suspect, is to give the several local republics and satellite states the illusion of a kind of independence, while the real power is exercised from Moscow. The illusion must sometimes fade, when a local republic is suddenly and ignominiously reduced to the status of a kind of province or crown colony; but it is maintained and this is what is most interesting from our point of view by a careful fostering of local "culture," culture in the reduced sense of the word, everything that is picturesque, harmless and separable from politics, such as language and literature, local arts and customs. But as Soviet Russia must maintain the subordination of culture to political theory, the success of her imperialism seems likely to lead to a sense of superiority on the part of that one of her peoples in which her political theory has been formed; so that we might expect, so long as the Russian Empire holds together, to find the increasing assertion of one dominant Muscovite culture, with subordinate races surviving, not as peoples each with its own cultural pattern, but as inferior castes. However that may be, the Russians have been the first modern people to practise the political direction of culture consciously, and to attack at every point the culture of any people whom they wish to dominate. The more highly developed is any alien culture, the more thorough the attempts to extirpate it by elimination of those elements in the subject population in which that culture is most conscious.

The dangers arising from "culture-consciousness" in the West are at present of a different kind. Our motives, in attempting to do something about our culture, are not yet consciously political. They arise from the consciousness that our culture is not in very good health and from the feeling that we must take steps to improve its condition.

Anthony Ludovici: Charles I and the Grand Puritan Rebellion

Occidere Rex (To Kill a king) by Ernest Crofts

Anthony Mario Ludovici MBE (1882 – 1971) can be described as a 'Nietzschean Tory' (Ludovici was responsible on large part for the translation and propagation of the German philosopher's work in the English speaking world). In his 'Defence of Aristocracy' Ludovici argues that many aspects modernity are dysgenic; that it has engendered a physical as well as spiritual degeneration (recent discoveries such as those regarding epigenetics may well bear out some of Ludovici's assertions on this account). The aforementioned book, aside from critques of the industrial revolution, liberalism, democracy (and more eccentric passages warning of the harmful effects on the race of putting hops in beer and drinking tea) contains a chapter on the English Civil War in which Ludovici argues that the conflict was essentially a war between short term profit seeking, bourgeois Puritans (“the tradesmen and grasping landed nobility”) and those elements of the aristocracy and peasantry led by Charles I who remained custodians of the land and the race; a war of trade versus nobility; the Parliamentarian victory constituting a triumph of dysgenic, capitalistic forces over those of “flourishing life”.

To the Englishman of average culture, even when he is not biassed by any party or religious feeling, Charles I is little more than a captivating figure of misguided royalty, possessing a considerable measure of romantic charm. With his long hair, his velvet suit, lace collar and long-maned charger, it is his exterior, and, perhaps, his all too violent death as well, that chiefly endears this unhappy monarch of the seventeenth century to the sentimental Englishman. If, however, you say to such an Englishman that there is much more than romantic charm in Charles I's character and rule, he will immediately smile upon you with indulgent incredulity, and regard you as a fanatic who is suffering even more severely than he is himself from the seductiveness of bygone dramas and their principal heroes. […]

Not long ago, for instance, I had the honour of meeting a certain gentleman who is well known in the literary world of London, and who, moreover, enjoys the distinction of being at the head of one of our greatest publishing firms. He informed me that he, too, was a convinced convert to this romantic cult of the most fascinating figure of the seventeenth century, and smiled almost tearfully over the thought that his son, in whom he had implanted a strong adoration for our beheaded sovereign, had once solemnly raised his hat in the presence of Charles I's golden'armour in the Tower of London. Hoping, at the moment, that there was something more fundamental and more solid in this gentleman's hero-worship than mere sentimentality and the love of a picturesque prince, I suggested to him that there were many rational and very sound reasons for his admiration. In an instant the incredulous smile I had so often seen, and which I confess I had half-dreaded on this occasion too, again spread over the features, even of this hopeful fellow-worshipper, and I was overcome with disappointment […]

His admiration of Charles I was sartorial, romantic, sentimental, school-girlish—in fact, it was merely a foolish and empty pose! Apparently it had never occurred to him, despite his undoubted erudition and experience, to ask himself whether, in an age which is in every respect the creation of Charles I's maligners and murderers, a public school history class were precisely the best place in which to hear the truth concerning the Stuart King. 

Seemingly, he had never inquired whether, at a time when vulgarity, trade and hedonism are paramount, a sober judgment— not to speak of a friendly one—could possibly be formed on this vital question. Without hesitation, without a moment's doubt or shrewd suspicion, this apparently sceptical person had accepted the verdict of a most deceptive and unreliable age, age, concerning a man who had so little in common with its principles, that in a hopeless endeavour to oppose and defy them, he had heroically given up his life.

And yet the evidence of this fact is accessible to all. The proof of it can be read by everybody and anybody, at any hour, any day. Only a bias that is friendly to the evils of this age, only a prepossession in favour of our materialistic, mechanical, unscrupulous and supinely irresponsible civilisation of "Progress," could so distort the facts as to make Charles I appear as the felon, and the ignoble band of grasping, bigoted and filthy-minded Puritans as the just accusers, in this historical trial and tragedy. For in spite of all that the school history book may say, Charles I fought for a cause very much more vital and more fundamental than that of despotism. He fought for the cause of flourishing life against the growing, but already powerful forces of modern capitalistic trade, of democracy, and of mere quantity as distinct from quality. He himself, the whole of his government, and his lieutenants were inspired by the watchword  "Respect the Burden." Their downfall can be ascribed to the fact that they were no respecters of persons, that they upheld the oppressed against their oppressors, and that they tried, wherever possible, to arrest that vile greed of gain and accumulation, at the mercy of which the lower classes were to be left for evermore, after the opening of the Grand Rebellion. This is not fancy or exaggeration; it is a plain statement of fact.

Charles I was unfortunate in his predecessors, and still more unfortunate in his contemporaries. We have seen that the upstart owners of the Church lands, forced upon the country by that unscrupulous Bluebeard, Henry VIII, had introduced a commercial spirit into the English soil. These parvenus, the majority of whom had been obsequious sycophants in the entourage of that most outrageous specimen of English royalty, were now quite settled on their estates, and were running them on purely mercenary lines with a view to reaping the maximum amount of gain possible irrespective of the comfort or happiness of the inhabitants.

But there was also another class, that of the successful tradesman, which was now invading the rural districts and buying estates in all parts of the country. This element tended only to intensify the commercial spirit which was now spreading over the whole land and transforming its customs just as much as its temper; while in the towns themselves a great and powerful middle class was rising into prominence, thanks to the fortunes which were constantly being amassed in home and over-sea trade. The destructive influence which these changes brought to bear upon the patriarchal relationship between the lower and the higher orders—a relationship which, though it was never complete or hearty and never worked smoothly, at least had qualities infinitely superior to those of the new regime —this destructive influence, together with the abolition of the monasteries, and that still more heinous crime, the appropriation and confiscation of the Guild funds and lands, gave rise to widespread discontent and considerable unrelieved poverty. The fact that Henry VIII alone put 72,000 thieves to death in his own reign, shows the extremes to which desperate indigence had been driven even in his time. Edward VI and Elizabeth had infinite trouble with the poor, and we have only to examine the numerous statutes dealing with the problem of poverty, passed in the latter's reign, in order to realise the extent to which the evil must have been increasing.

I should like to lay stress only upon the close connection which the commercial element in the nation bore to Puritanism. In addition to the wealthy tradesmen who had wandered into the country in search of a pastoral and gentlemanly existence, and the large number of landowners, after the style of Cromwell himself, whose Puritanism was almost a conscientious justification of their being in possession of lands which had once belonged to the Holy Church, London, in which at that time nearly the whole trade of the kingdom was concentrated, was almost entirely Puritan; whilst practically the only two important towns in the west which ultimately opposed Charles in the great struggle, I refer to Bristol and Gloucester, were both likewise strong in trade and in Puritanical opinions. It should also be remembered that East Anglia, Kent and other southern counties, had recently been overrun by Flemish refugees and French Huguenots, and although many of these aliens were at first not necessarily extreme Puritans, as tradesmen and manufacturers they threw in their lot with the Puritan party against the King, and thereby revealed that their sympathy with the religious views of the Parliamentary forces was deeper than with those of the Cavaliers.

This relationship of trade to religion was a most important factor in the struggle between the King and his more powerful subjects. Even in our analytical times it is difficult enough to find people who are sufficiently honest to see clearly into the springs of their actions and desires; but in those days, in which mankind was scarcely conscious at all of the multiplicity of motives that may sometimes conduce to bring about an action which has all the appearance of having sprung from a single desire or aspiration, it was easy—nay, almost inevitable—for the Puritan tradesmen to marshal all their mercenary objections to Charles and his lieutenants' paternal and protective government, his beneficent interference with trade, and the check he put upon their rapacious oppression of the lower orders, under two such high-sounding and empty terms as " Liberty " and " No Popery." In this way they appropriated from the start the two most deceptive and most attractive war-cries which could possibly have been found, to appeal to the masses. And the fact that, despite these seductively alluring devices upon their banner, they failed to draw the non-commercial and poorer classes of the community over to their side, only shows the extent to which Charles I's rule must have endeared him to these portions of the population. [...]

With the impudent effrontery of extreme Protestants, these people who supposed that the Almighty was always hobnobbing with them and standing perpetually at their elbow, just as the Low Churchmen, Methodists and other Nonconformists believe to-day, were not the sort of persons to respect an earthly King, however great. They had harassed poor Elizabeth, who detested them. But, not being strong enough during her reign to defy her openly, they had contented themselves with creeping into corners, allowing their resentment to ferment, and growling that she was an " idle slut" and an " untamed heifer."[…]

The basis of the King's unpopularity among the rich and powerful was, of course, in the first place, ostensibly of a religious nature […] The true reason, the genuine, though often unconscious, reason was neither a religious one, nor due to the fact that the King's taxation was illegal or levied without the consent of the Commons. An essential part of the real grievance was that the weight of this taxation fell entirely upon the trading and wealthy classes. It reduced the profits of the tradesman and took a percentage from the incomes of the landed gentry. The taxes on food, on the poor man's sustenance, were to be the innovation of a free Parliament a few years later. But Charles was content to tax the profits of trade, and, for the rest, to demand a contribution to the expenses of government from the wealthy landed classes. The nobler among Charles's wealthy subjects understood and accepted it. They saw the King daily making sacrifices himself, in order to rule beneficently. They knew that he had pledged the Crown jewels and plate, and sold property to the City of London to the extent of £ 120,000, at the very moment when he was appealing to the clergy to help him, early in his reign. And they saw that he did not spend this money in idle merriment or wasteful extravagance.

It is well known that the Tudors were consistently opposed to the introduction of all engines and machines which tended to prove injurious to handicraftsmen, or to deteriorate the quality of the articles produced. Edward VI and Elizabeth were both equally vigorous in their attitude towards mechanical innovations […] The course which these two monarchs had inaugurated, however, James and Charles continued with even greater vigour. But, in the reigns of the last two monarchs, the men who firmly believed that mechanical innovations per se, quite irrespective of whether they improved or deteriorated man, constituted " Progress," were beginning to lose patience and to grow in number. They could no longer brook this paternal control from on high. To them any thought of directing or limiting the march of mechanical science amounted to intolerable interference, insufferable tyranny. They scoffed when James I prohibited the use of a machine for making needles; but they scoffed still more when Charles reinforced the Tudor enactments, and also upheld his father's attitude in this struggle against the besotting machine. Their surprise, however, must have been great when the noblest of the Stuarts, on June 15, 1634, not only issued a proclamation against " that great annoyance of smoke which is so obnoxious to our City of London," but also carried his concern about the beauty and happiness of this city so far as actually to recommend the use of a new and special furnace calculated to mitigate the evil. Incidentally, it is obvious from this royal proclamation that the great Stuart King was not blindly suspicious of innovations as such; otherwise he would have looked askance even at a furnace calculated to mitigate the evil of smoke [...]

But one does not require to be a deep student of the vulgar and unthinking class of mechanical innovators, to understand the kind of exasperation to which such an attitude on the part of the ruler would soon give rise in their ranks. Big-sounding, bombastic phrases, such as the " Forward March of Humanity," " The Progress of the Race," welled up in their foolish and sentimental throats and caused them to look with rankling indignation at that superb figure in lace and velvet whose consummate taste preferred to cling devotedly to Beauty rather than to their absurd and inhuman idea of advancement! There was, however, a deeper and perhaps more unconscious hatred in Charles I and his father against mechanical innovations than the mere hatred of their threatened deterioration of both the handicraftsman and the quality of the goods produced. There was the profound suspicion that machinery implied expensive and elaborate installations which must necessarily lead to the extinction of the poor home-worker, or even of the artisan of moderate means, and the yielding up of his liberty, his power and his gifts to a more unscrupulous and less desirable taskmaster than the buying public, i. e. the capitalistic traders, out for personal gain. For machinery and capitalism are plighted mates and are necessarily allies. […]

In the Grand Rebellion, therefore, we see the curious anomaly of a powerful minority of agitators, supported by a large contingent of aliens, landed upstarts, town tradesmen and thousands of deluded followers fighting against the poorer people and the King, for the "liberties of the people." Only unsuspecting spinsters or modern democrats, however, could ever believe such a tale; and, when we know what followed, when we read of the oppression and slavery to which the victory of the Parliamentary party prepared the way; when, moreover, we keep steadily before us the facts of Charles I's reign, we not only suspect, we know, that there were other, more personal, less disinterested and far less savoury motives behind the so-called popular party, than a desire to vindicate the " liberties of the people." The triumph of Parliament did not mean the triumph of the liberties of the people. It meant the triumph of a new morality, a new outlook on life, and a new understanding of what life was worth. It meant the triumph of the morality of unrestricted competition, of uncontrolled and unguided trade, and of a policy of neglect in regard to all things that really mattered.

This was what the Grand Rebellion achieved, and this, in the main, was the sole object of the Grand Rebellion.

Excerpted  from A Defence of Aristocracy: A Text-Book for Tories. London: Constable, 1915. Boston: Phillips, 1915

The Lost Philosopher: The Best of Anthony M. Ludovici is available from Counter-Currents Publishing:
http://www.counter-currents.com/the-lost-philosopher/

François-René de Chateaubriand: Against Equality, Against Progress

 

François-René de Chateaubriand,  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson ca. 1809

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand  (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) is best known as the father of French literary Romanticism. A captain in the army, Chateaubriand left France after the violence of the revolutionary regime became apparent and travelled to America. On hearing of the arrest of the king he returned to France and served in the Prince de Condé's army, being seriously wounded and left for dead at the siege of Thionville in 1793 before escaping to a life of exile and abject poverty in Britain, during which time he was reconciled to the Catholic faith he had rejected  as a younger man.

Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800 after an amnesty for exiles was declared  and the publication of his "Le génie du Christianisme", an apologia for the Christian faith, in 1802,  led Napoleon to enlist the vicomte in his attempts at rapprochement with the Catholic Church. Chateaubriand was made Plenipotentiary Minister of the First Consul to the Vatican but was soon dismissed for arguing with his superior  (his quarrelsome nature would lead to dismissal from nearly all  the other positions which he was to hold under both Bonaparte and the monarchy). The 1804 execution of Louis Antoine, Duke of Enghien on trumped up charges caused Chateaubriand to break totally with the Napoleonic regime, his publication of  criticism of the emperor led Bonaparte to threaten to have Chateaubriand sabered on the steps of the Tulieries Palace. 

Made a minister  after the Restoration, Chateaubriand pursued a hugely successful  and influential literary career. He defended  first conservatism then liberalism, was dismissed or resigned from various political offices and after 1830 took no further part in politics. Chateaubriand would spend the remainder of his life writing, most notably  the autobiographical masterwork  Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe ( literally "Memoirs from Beyond the Grave") , in which he foresaw the future triumph of Democracy over Louis Philippe's monarchy and the bourgeoisie,  and espoused the  cause of the elder branch of the Bourbons once more. Menczer†  writes that "He ended his long career with this melancholy love for a cause he believed to be lost, dying at the age of eighty on July 4th, 1848. Mental decay preceding his physical end, during the last year of his life he was hardly conscious of the new Revolution and of the fighting at the barricades in June 1848."

In these excerpts from the epilogue to Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, Chateaubriand, in a classic reactionary conservative critique,  attacks the notion of ascensional, linear human progress and attempts at the worldly realisation of absolute human equality.

 

During the eight centuries of our monarchy, France was the centre of the intelligence, the continuity and the peace of Europe; no sooner had that monarchy been lost than Europe tended in the direction of democracy. The human race, for good or for ill, is now its own master; princes once had the keeping of it; having attained their majority, the nations now claim that they have no further need of tutelage. From the time of David down to modern days, kings have always been called; now the vocation of the peoples begins. Apart from the short-lived and minor exceptions of the Greek, the Carthaginian and the Roman republics, with their slaves, the monarchical form of government was normal throughout the entire world. 

Modern society in its entirety has forsaken the monarchy since the flag of the kings of France no longer flies. In order to hasten the degradation of royal power, God has in various countries delivered up the sceptre to usurper kings, to young girls who are either still in the nursery, or are just of marriageable age; it is lions such as these, without any jaws, lionesses without any claws and baby girls suckling at the breasts, or giving their hand in marriage, whom the men born of this believing age must follow. The wildest principles are proclaimed under the very noses of monarchs who imagine that they are safeguarding themselves behind the triple hedge of a doubtful protection. Democracy is overtaking them; stage by stage, they are retreating from the ground floor of their palaces to the topmost part, so that finally they will cast themselves upon the waters from the attic windows. Furthermore, consider a phenomenal contradiction: material conditions are improving and education is spreading, yet instead of this being a boon to the nations their stature is diminishing—from whence comes this contradiction?

The explanation lies in this: that we have deteriorated in the moral order. Crimes have always been committed, but they were not committed in cold blood, as they are today, because we have lost all feeling for religion. They no longer fill us with revulsion today, they seem only to be a consequence of the march of time; if they were judged differently in former times, it was because, as they dare to assert, our knowledge of human nature was not advanced enough. Nowadays crimes are analysed; they are passed through a crucible in order that we may discover any useful lesson accruing from them, as chemistry discovers constituents in garbage. Corruption of the mind, far more destructive than corruption of the senses, is accepted as a necessary result; it is not only to be found now in a few perverted individuals; it has become universal.

Men of this type would feel humiliated if it were proved to them that they had a soul and that after this life they will discover the existence of another one; they would think themselves devoid of all steadfastness, strength and intelligence if they did not rise above the pusillanimity of our fathers; they accept nothingness, or if you prefer it, doubt, as an unpleasant fact perhaps, but nevertheless as an incontestable truth. How admirable is our fatuous pride!

The decay of society then and the increasing importance of the individual can be accounted for in this manner. If the moral sense developed logically from the increase in intelligence, we should have a counterweight and humanity would increase in stature without any danger, but the exact opposite happens; our apprehension of good and evil grows dim as our intelligence becomes more enlightened; our conscience contracts as our ideas broaden. Yes, society will certainly perish; liberty, which might have saved the world, will not work, because it has cut itself off from religion; order, which could have ensured continuity, cannot be firmly established because the present anarchy of ideas prevents it. The purple, which once denoted power, will henceforth serve only to cradle disaster; no man will be saved unless he was born, like Christ, on straw. 

When the monarchs were disinterred at St. Denis, as the revolutionary tocsin rang out; when, dragged from their crumbling tombs, they were awaiting plebeian burial, rag merchants came upon this scene of the last judgement of the centuries; holding high their lanterns, they gazed into the eternal night; they rummaged amongst the remains which had escaped the original pillage. The kings were no longer there, but royalty was still there; they tore it out of the entrails of time and cast it on the rubbish heap.

So much for ancient Europe : it will never live again. Does the young Europe offer us any higher hopes ? The world of today, lacking any consecrated authority, seems faced with two impossibilities: it is impossible to return to the past or to go forward into the future. Do not run away with the idea, as some people do, that if we are in a bad pass today, good will be reborn out of evil; human nature, when it is out of order at its very source, does not function so smoothly. The excesses of liberty, for example, lead to despotism, but the excesses of tyranny lead only to tyranny; tyranny, by degrading us, makes us incapable of independence; Tiberius did not have the effect of making Rome return to the republican form of government, he merely left Caligula behind to succeed him. Not desiring to find the true explanation of our present situation, men are content to say that a political constitution which we cannot as yet discern may possibly be hidden in the bosom of time. Did the whole of antiquity, including the most splendid of its geniuses, understand that a society could exist without slaves? Yet we know that it can. People say—I have said it myself—that mankind will increase in stature in this new civilisation which is to come: yet is it not to be feared that the individual man will decrease in stature ? We can well be busy bees, engaged in making our own honey together. In the material world, men group themselves together for the purpose of work, because many people working together find what they want quicker and by devious means; individuals working in the mass can build pyramids; these individuals, studying each in his own way, can make scientific discoveries and explore all the corners of the physical creation.

But do things work out in this wise in the moral order? A thousand brains can collaborate in vain: they can never compose the masterpiece which comes out of the head of a Homer.

It has been said that a city, all the inhabitants of which have an equal share of wealth and education, will be a more pleasing sight in the eyes of Divinity than was the city of our fathers. 

The folly of the age is to achieve the unity of the peoples, while turning the whole species into a single unit—granted; but while we are acquiring these general faculties, is not a whole chain of private feelings in danger of perishing? Farewell to the sweetness of home ; farewell to the delights of family life; amongst all these white men, yellow men and black men, reputedly your brothers, you will not find one whom you can embrace as a brother. Was there nothing then in your former life, nothing in that restricted piece of space which you could see from your ivy-mantled window? Beyond your immediate horizon, you conjectured the existence of unknown countries from the presence of the birds of passage, the only travellers that you saw in the autumn days. Happiness lay in knowing that the surrounding hills would always be there; that they

would be the scene of your friendships and your loves; that the sighing of the night wind around your retreat would be the only sound to lull you to sleep ; that the peace of your soul would never be disturbed and that the familiar thoughts would always be waiting for you to commune with them. You knew where you had been born, you knew where your tomb would lie; as you penetrated deeper into the forest you could say: 

Beautiful trees that saw my birth,
Soon you will see me die. 

Man has no need to travel to become more powerful; he carries immensity within him. The impulses of your heart cannot be measured, they find an echo in thousands of other hearts; he who has nothing of this harmony in his innermost being will implore the universe to give it to him in vain. Sit on a fallen tree-trunk deep in the woods: if in these moments of complete self-forgetfulness, in your immobility and silence, you do not find the infinite, it is of no avail to wander along the banks of the Ganges.

What sort of a universal society would it be which possessed no individual country, which would be neither French nor English, nor German, nor Spanish, nor Portuguese, nor Italian, nor Russian, nor Tartar, nor Turkish, nor Persian, nor Indian, nor Chinese, nor American, or rather, what would all these societies be like if they were rolled into one? What would the effect be on the way of life, on the sciences, the arts and the poetry of a universal society? What expression could be given to passions felt at the same time by different peoples under different climates? How would this medley of needs and images which the sun produces in divers lands, and which light up the youth, the maturity and the old age of men, enter into the language? And what language would it be? Will a universal idiom be born out of the fusion of societies, or will there be a business dialect for everyday purposes, whilst each nation retains its own language, or, on the other hand, will all the divers languages be understood by all? Under what sort of rule and under what sort of universal law would this society live? How should we find a place on an earth which has been extended by the power of ubiquity and shrunk by the small proportions of a globe which is everywhere dishonoured? It only remains to ask science to show us how we can go and live on another planet.

Let us suppose that you have had enough of private property and that you propose to turn the government into a universal landlord, who is to distribute to the destitute community that share which each individual deserves. Who is to be the judge of individual merits? Who will have the strength and the authority to carry out your decrees? Who is to be responsible for and assess the capital value of this human property? What is to be the contribution of the weak, the sick and the stupid in a community burdened by their unfitness? There is another suggestion: instead of working for a salary, men could form limited companies, or limited partnerships between manufacturers and workers, between intelligence and matter, whereby some would contribute ideas and others their industry and their work; profits would be shared in common.

It is an excellent thing thus to acknowledge complete perfection in mankind: excellent, if quarrels, avarice or envy are unknown : but once an associate registers a grievance, the whole edifice crumbles; dissension and lawsuits will henceforth be the order of the day. This method, which is slightly more plausible than the others in theory, is as impossible in practice.

Would you prefer to follow a moderate line and build a city in which each man has a roof, fuel, clothing and adequate food? You will no sooner have presented each citizen with these things, than individual qualities and defects will either upset your system of distribution, or will make it unjust: one man needs much more food than the other; this man cannot work as hard as that one can; men who are frugal and work hard will become rich, those who are extravagant or idle will relapse into poverty; for you cannot bestow the same temperament on all: an innate inequality is bound to reappear in spite of all your efforts.

Do not be under any illusion that we are going to allow ourselves to be caught up in all the legal processes which have been invented for the protection of the family, for inherited rights, the guardianship of children, claims to property, etc.; marriage is notoriously an absurd oppression: we shall abolish all that. If a son kills his father, it is not the son, as we can very well prove, who is guilty of patricide, it is the father, who, by the very act of living, sacrifices the son's chances. Do not let us trouble our heads then with the labyrinths of an organisation which we intend to raze to the ground; it is a waste of time to linger over the obsolete nonsense of our grandfathers.

Notwithstanding this, some of our sectarian modernists, having an inkling of the impracticability of their doctrines, introduce certain phrases concerning morality and religion, in an attempt to make them more palatable; they imagine that all they can realise at the moment is to bring us into line with the American ideal of mediocrity, ignoring in their blindness the fact that the Americans are not only landowners, but very enthusiastic ones, which makes all the difference.

Others, who are of a kindlier disposition still, and who are not hostile to the polish which a civilisation can confer on men, would be satisfied if they could transform us into constitutional Chinamen, atheist to all practical purposes, enlightened and free old gentlemen, sitting for centuries amongst our flowerbeds in our yellow robes, whiling away our days in a wellbeing which has spread to the masses, having invented all things and discovered all things, peacefully vegetating amidst all the progress which has been accomplished, carried in the train like a parcel merely to go from Canton to the Great Wall to discuss with another business man of the Celestial Empire a piece of marshland which has to be drained, or a canal which is to be cut. In either hypothesis, American or Chinese, I should be thankful to have departed this world before such felicity befell me.

 There is one final suggestion: it could happen that, as a result of the total deterioration of the human character, the peoples of the world would be content to make do with what they have got : love of gold would take the place of a love of their independence, while kings would barter their love of power for love of the civil list. A compromise would thus be reached between monarchs and their subjects, who would be delighted to fawn upon them without let or hindrance in a bastard political order; all men would display their infirmities in front of each other, as they used to do in the old lazar houses, or as sick people do today, when they take mudbaths as a cure for their ailments; mankind would flounder in unmitigated mud after the fashion of a peaceable reptile. It is, nevertheless, a mere waste of time at the present stage of our development to desire to replace intellectual pleasures by the delights of physical nature. These latter, as we can well imagine, filled the lives of the aristocratic peoples of antiquity; masters of the world, they possessed palaces and vast numbers of slaves ; their estates comprised whole regions of Africa. But under which porticoes can you wander now, in your rare moments of leisure? In which huge and ornate baths can you find nowadays the perfumes and flowers, the flute-players and courtesans of Ionia? You cannot be Heliogabulus for the asking. Where would you lay hands on the necessary treasure for these material delights? The spirit is frugal, but the body is extravagant.

And now, to be more serious, a few words on the question of absolute equality: such an equality would mean a return not only to bodily slavery, but to spiritual slavery; for it would mean nothing less than the destruction of the moral and physical inequality of the individual. Our wills, controlled and supervised by all, would witness the atrophy of our faculties. The infinite, for example, is part of our very nature; if you forbid our intelligence, or even our passions, to dream of unbounded prosperity, you reduce a man to the level of a snail and you metamorphose him into a machine. For make no mistake, if we cannot hope to penetrate the ultimate, if we do not believe in eternal life, there is annihilation everywhere; no man is free if he does not possess any property of his own ; a man who has no property cannot be independent, he becomes a member of the proletariat or he works for a wage, whether he live within our present system of private property, or in a future one of communal property. Property held in common would mean that our society would be like one of those monasteries which used to distribute bread to the needy at the gates. 

Property which we hold inviolate from our fathers is our means of personal defence; property really means the same thing as liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission to this equality, would make us revert to the most wretched servitude; it would make of individual man a beast of burden, submitting to his bonds and obliged to walk endlessly along the same path.

Young men hurl themselves into the fray, animated by generous courage; with their eyes on the ground, they climb towards the heights which they can dimly see and which they struggle to attain: nothing is more admirable; but they will waste their lives in these attempts and when they have reached the allotted span and piled error upon error, they will impose on succeeding generations by bestowing the burden of their disillusionment upon them, which they in turn will carry to neighbouring graves; and so on. The times of the desert have returned; Christianity starts afresh in the sterility of the Thebaid, amidst a formidable idolatry, the idolatry of man for himself. 

From the epilogue to Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, 1841, published in English in Catholic Political Thought 1789-1848 ed.  Bela Menczer, 1953 

†Menzczer, ibid.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Ruin

 "We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other words a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers.
 
The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age." 
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Monte Cassino 1944