Friedrich Nietzsche - A Lack of Noble Manners

On the lack of noble manners. 

-- Soldiers and their leaders have always a far better relationship with one another than workers and their employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military foundation still stands high above all so called industrial civilisation; the latter, in its present form, is in general the meanest mode of existence that has ever been. It is simply the law of necessity that operates here: people want to live, and have to sell themselves; but they despise him who exploits their necessity and purchases the worker. It is curious that the subjection to powerful, fear inspiring, and even dreadful individuals, to tyrants and leaders of armies, is not at all felt so painfully as the subjection to such undistinguished and uninteresting persons as the captains of industry; in the employer the worker usually sees merely a crafty, blood sucking dog of a man who speculates on all misery and the employers name, form, character, and reputation are altogether indifferent to them. It is probable that the manufacturers and great magnates of commerce have hitherto lacked too much all those forms and attributes of a superior kind, which alone make persons interesting; if they had had the nobility of the nobly born in their looks and bearing, there would perhaps have been no socialism in the masses of the people. For these are really ready for slavery of every kind, provided that the superior class above them constantly shows itself legitimately superior, and born to command by its noble presence! The commonest man feels that nobility is not to be improvised, and that it is his part to honour it as the fruit of long periods of time. But the absence of the higher presence, and the notorious vulgarity of manufacturers with ruddy, fat hands, gives him the idea that only accident and luck has elevated the one above the other. Well then so he reasons with himself - let us try accident and luck! Our turn to throw the dice! And thus socialism is born. 

~ The Gay Science, BK. 1, 40.

Thomas Carlyle - The Great Machine

Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle [1873]

Here follows extracts from Thomas Carlyle's  1829 essay Signs of the Times, an early attack on the utilitarian, materialist and mechanistic worldview that has come to dominate much of the modern world.

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. 

It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends […] Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character […] 

Nowhere, for example, is the deep, almost exclusive faith we have in Mechanism more visible than in the Politics of this time. Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements […]

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws. Thus is the Body-politic more than ever worshipped and tendered; but the Soul-politic less than ever. Love of country, in any high or generous sense, in any other than an almost animal sense, or mere habit, has little importance attached to it in such reforms, or in the opposition shown them. Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a 

"taxing-machine "; to the contented, a "machine for securing property." Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable[...]

But though Mechanism, wisely contrived, has done much for man in a social and moral point of view, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the chief source of his worth or happiness. Consider the great elements of human enjoyment, the attainments and possessions that exalt man's life to its present height, and see what part of these he owes to institutions, to Mechanism of any kind; and what to the instinctive, unbounded force, which Nature herself lent him, and still continues to him [...] Science and Art have, from first to last, been the free gift of Nature; an unsolicited, unexpected gift; often even a fatal one […] They originated in the Dynamical nature of man, not in his Mechanical nature.[...] 

Strange as it may see if we read History with any degree thoughtfulness, we shall find that checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men. that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one. The Crusades took their rise in Religion; their visible object was, commercially speaking, worth nothing. It was the boundless Invisible world that was laid bare in the imaginations of those men; and in its burning light, the visible shrunk as a scroll. Not mechanical, nor produced by mechanical means, was this vast movement. No dining at Freemasons' Tavern, with the other long train of modern machinery; no cunning reconciliation of "vested interests," was required here: only the passionate voice of one man, the rapt soul looking through the eyes of one man; and rugged, steel-clad Europe trembled beneath his words, and followed him whither he listed. […] 

Man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely. On the whole, Institutions are much; but they are not all. The freest and highest spirits of the world have often been found under strange outward circumstances: Saint Paul and his brother Apostles were politically slaves; Epictetus was personally one. Again, forget the influences of Chivalry and Religion, and ask: What countries produced Columbus and Las Casas? Or, descending from virtue and heroism to mere energy and spiritual talent: Cortes, Pizarro, Alba, Ximenes? The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were indisputably the noblest nation of Europe: yet they had the Inquisition and Philip II. They have the same government at this day; and are the lowest nation […] 

These and the like facts are so familiar, the truths which they preach so obvious, and have in all past times been so universally believed and acted on, that we should almost feel ashamed for repeating them; were it not that, on every hand, the memory of them seems to have passed away, or at best died into a faint tradition, of no value as a practical principle […]

By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages[...] In fact, if we look deeper, we shall find that this faith in Mechanism has now struck its roots down into man's most intimate, primary sources of conviction; and is thence sending up, over his whole life and activity, innumerable stems, — fruit-bearing and poison-bearing. The truth is, men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible; or, to speak it in other words: This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised among us, or is mechanically explained into Fear of pain, or Hope of pleasure. Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also[...] 

We figure Society as a "Machine," and that mind is opposed to mind, as body is to body; whereby two, or at most ten, little minds must be stronger than one great mind. Notable absurdity! For the plain truth, very plain, we think is, that minds are opposed to minds in quite a different way; and one man that has a higher Wisdom, a hitherto unknown spiritual Truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not; and stands among them with a quite ethereal, angelic power, as with a sword out of Heaven's own armory, sky-tempered, which no buckler, and no tower of brass, will finally withstand.

L'action française 2000 interviews Dominique Venner

 

Translation by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini

L’Action française 2000: You define yourself as a "meditative historian". What precisely do you mean by this term?


Dominique Venner: To meditate is not to daydream, but to intensely fix one's thoughts on a precise object. I have always been astonished by the fact that people are so little astonished. Above all when it comes to history. And yet, astonishment is the first condition of thought. In the conventional interpretation of History, one describes a succession of events as though they were necessary or self-evident. But that's false. Nothing is ever necessary or self-evident. Everything is always held in suspense by the unforeseeable. Neither Richelieu nor Mazarin, for example, neither Caesar nor Octave, nor the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi, the great founder, were necessary or pre-ordained by Providence. They could all have never existed or have died before completing their work. In the face of facts and unforeseeable historical events, I ask myself the questions that lazy history doesn't ask, I meditate. For example: Louis XIV was called le Roi Très Chrétien ("the Most Christian King"). Despite this, he had Versailles and his park built as a hymn to the divinities of ancient paganism. Surprising, isn't it? And the source of new reflections on the representations of the king and the religion of his time, which has nothing to with the pious story invented in the nineteenth century. Let's dwell for a moment upon the Great King, who witnessed the English revolution and the execution of Charles the first in january 1649. An astonishing revolution! In the following century, Edmund Burke could oppose the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution of 1789. Why did a "conservative revolution" take place in England  and a destructive revolution take place in France? That's a good question, and there are a hundred answers. There's something to meditate upon. Moreover, since I was born in troubling times for a Frenchman and a European, a time that has seen the collapse of our old power and the destruction of certainties that were considered eternal, I meditate by studying History outside of all conventions. Following the example of Ulysses, I believe that thought is a prerequisite for action. I even believe that it is action.


AF: Europe today is "dormant", as you nicely put it. Why is that?


DV : When I think of Europe, I'm not thinking about political or technocratic structures, I'm thinking of our multi-millenial civilisation, our identity, a certain "European" way of thinking, of feeling and of living, across time. Yes, Europe is historically "dormant". Since when? Since the second half of the twentieth century, after the catastrophe of the two wars that started in 1914 and ended in 1945. When the universal exhibition opened in Paris in 1900, Europe was the intellectual and spiritual centre of the world. She dominated everything, almost everywhere. The United States was still only a marginal power. Fifty years later, everything was reversed! After Yalta, a Europe bled of its strength was divided up between the two new powers that had emerged in the Century of 1914: the United States and the USSR. Two Messianic powers that wanted to impose on her their models: Americanism and communism. I might add that Europe has not only lost its power and its colonies, worse still, it has lost faith in itself, eroded by an unheard of moral crisis and manipulation by guilt. She is "dormant".


AF: You are nevertheless optimistic with regard to her identitarian awakening. So what are, this time, the reasons for hope?


DV: Those reasons are above all connected with the "shock of History" that we are currently experiencing without knowing it. This "shock" heralds a new era. It began with the collapse of the USSR and of communism in 1989. At the same time, old powers and old civilisations, previously thought to be dead, went through a spectacular revival, China, India, Islam (despite its conflicts), South America, to speak only of large entities. The unipolar world that the power of the dollar wanted is being replaced by a multipolar world, and that will give Europe its chance. However, she is confronted with a  huge and unprecedented historical danger, the mass immigration of populations that bring with them another civilisation. Mass immigration is producing, on European soil, a shock of civilisations that could end up being deadly. But, in an astonishing historical surprise, it could also reveal itself to be our salvation. From the alterity represented by the immigrant populations, their customs, and their treatment of women, which deeply shocks us, we are seeing a new awareness being born among Europeans of their identity, an awareness that they rarely possessed in the past. Let me add that in spite of all these dangers, I also believe in the survival of the fundamental qualities of energy and innovation that are characteristic of Europeans. For the moment, they are not being exercised in the realm of politics, which is why we can't see them.


AF : How may the lessons of the great masters of the dawn of European civilization, Hesiod and Homer, be salutary for us?


DV : Homer has bequeathed to us, in its pure state, the model of a specific mental morphology - our own - prior to the distortions of contrary influences. We need to impregnate ourselves with it if we are to be spiritually reborn, as a precondition to other forms of renaissance. The consequences of the Century of 1914 have cast the French and Europeans into an immense disorder. Nothing escapes it. This disorder affects both churches and laymen. So much so that we we are witnessing apparently bewildering attempts on the part of the upper hierarchies of the church to come together with the Islam of the immigrants. These attempts rightly shock many Catholics. They go beyond the "obligation of hospitality" invoked by the pastoralism of submission, and also have to do with a kind of solidarity between monotheistic "believers" in the face of the growing religious indifference of society. That is the explicit meaning of meetings like the one in Assisi. In short, when disorder has become general, you have to go back to what is completely pure, to the fundamental sources of our civilisation, which go back much farther than Christianity, as Benedict XVI reminded us in his Regensburg speech. That is why we have to go back to Homer and the granite foundations of our founding poems, nature as a bedrock, excellence as a goal and beauty as the horizon. That's a truth that Charles Maurras had seen clearly since his youth.


AF : You speak, not without admiration, of the "intractable character" of Maurras. Did he influence you intellectually?


DV: I have never concealed my admiration for Maurras' bravery in the face of hardship. But I have also been a close reader of his early writings and an observer of his development. Just recently I read the correspondence between Charles Maurras and the abbé Penon (1883-1928), published by Privat in 2008. It's a primary source. As you know, abbé Penon, who later became the bishop of Moulins, had been the private tutor and later the confessor of the young Maurras. He saw his task compromised by development of his pupil and the inflexible autonomy of his mind. The abbé had introduced the boy to Greek and Roman literature, which little by little turned him away from Christianity. The young Maurras' stay in Athens on the occasion of the first Olympic games in 1898, completed the transformation. It's all summed up in a letter of June 28, 1896, which I can quote for you: "I return from Athens more remote, more hostile to Christianity than before. Believe me, it was there that the perfect men lived…" After having referred to Sophocles, Homer and Plato, the young Maurras concludes: "I am returning from Athens as a pure polytheist. All that was still vague and confused in my thought has become sparklingly clear…" Right until his death in 1928, l’abbé Penon tried to make Maurras go back on this conversion. All he could get out of him were purely formal concessions, but also Maurras' argument that in his eyes, the Catholic church had once corrected, through its principle of order, the pernicious nature of primitive Christianity.


AF : You are a Jüngerian practitioner of the "recourse to the forest". Have you found peace there, or a way to prepare for the wars of the future?


DV: Before writing so many books, Ernst Jünger started out by living, in the trenches of WWI, certain ideas that he later articulated. Jünger was authenticated by his life. That made me take his writings seriously. I should also add that the image of the "recourse to the forest" resonates very strongly with me. I don't see it as an incitement to go underground, but to discover the noble spirituality manifested in trees and nature, or as Bernard de Clairvaux said: "You will find more in forests than in books. The trees will teach you things that no master will speak to you of". That's proof that in him, the spirituality of his Frankish and Gallic ancestors was still alive. That is what I call tradition. It makes its way through us, unbeknownst to us.

From the journal of the Centre royaliste d'Action française

Roger Scruton - On Free Trade

 

The Money Changers Marinus van Reymerswaele (Follower of) c.-1548

It is only free-market dogma that persuades people that free trade is a real possibility in the modern world.  

All trade is massively subsidized, usually in the interests of the stronger party—as American agriculture is subsidized, not merely by direct payments to farmers but by laws that permit crops ruled unsafe elsewhere, by standards in animal welfare that we in Britain would not countenance, by the existence of publicly funded roads and infrastructure that ensure rapid transport of goods to the port of exit, and so on. 

And all trade is or ought to be subject to prohibition and restriction in the interest not merely of local conditions but also of moral, religious and national imperatives.

 If free trade means the importation of pornography into Islamic countries, who can defend it? If it means taking advantage of sweated or even slave labour where that is available and importing the tortured remains of battery-farmed animals wherever they can be sold, why is it such a boon? If it means allowing anonymous shareholders who neither know nor care about Hungary to own and control the Budapest water supply, is it not the most dangerous of long-term policies? The fact is that free trade is neither possible nor desirable. 

It is for each nation to establish the regulatory regime that will maximize trade with its neighbours, while protecting the local customs, moral ideals and privileged relations on which national identity depends.

Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy [London and New York: Continuum, 2006].

Herodotus - Advice for Rulers

King Croesus to his vanquisher Cyrus on how to pacify his new subjects, as related by Herodotus in The Histories:

“What end to this business, Croesus? It seems that the Lydians will never stop making trouble for me and for themselves. It occurs to me that it may be best to make slaves of them; for it seems I have acted like one who slays the father and spares the children. So likewise I have taken with me you who were more than a father to the Lydians, and handed the city over to the Lydians themselves; and then indeed I marvel that they revolt!” 

So Cyrus uttered his thought; but Croesus feared that he would destroy Sardis, and answered him thus: “O King, what you say is reasonable. But do not ever yield to anger, or destroy an ancient city that is innocent both of the former and of the present offense. For the former I am responsible, and bear the punishment on my head; while Pactyes, in whose charge you left Sardis, does this present wrong; let him, then, pay the penalty. But pardon the Lydians, and give them this command so that they not revolt or pose a danger to you: send and forbid them to possess weapons of war, and order them to wear tunics under their cloaks and knee-boots on their feet, and to teach their sons lyre-playing and song and dance and shop-keeping. And quickly, O king, you shall see them become women instead of men, so that you need not fear them, that they might revolt.”

Juan Donoso Cortés - Negations

Juan Donoso Cortés, marqués de Valdegamas (6 May 1809 – 3 May 1853), a descendant of the conquistador Hernando Cortés, author, political theorist, and diplomat.

Influenced by the philosophes of the Enlightenment and entering politics as a liberal, Donoso's views altered radically, primarily as a response to anti-monarchical uprisings which took place while he was private secretary to Queen Maria Cristina. By the time of the revolutionary crises of 1848-49 Donoso stood as a major counter-enlightenment, traditionalist intellectual figure.

Taking the reactionary critiques of liberalism of the likes of de Bonald and de Maistre , Donoso developed his counter-revolutionary world view to take into account the then emerging socialist movement which he saw as an inverted religion, a 'satanic theology'. As much a prophet of coming disaster (he predicted a successful socialist revolution and subsequent tyranny in Russia ) as a defender of traditional religious and political authority, Donoso would influence Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola. The 1851 Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism: Considered in Their Fundamental Principles  is generally considered his most important work.

Now these same revolutionaries and Socialists affirm quite unconsciously by their practice the very thing they deny in theory in other people. When the French Revolution in its frenzy and blood-lust had trampled all the national glories underfoot; when, intoxicated with its triumphs, it believed final victory certain, a mysterious aristocratic pride of race took hold of it, which was in direct contradiction to all its dogmas. Then we saw the most famous of the revolutionaries, as proudly as any feudal baron of old, behave with great circumspection, so that the privilege of entering their family was only accorded with reserve and at the cost of many scruples. My readers will remember that famous question put by the doctors of the new law to those who presented themselves as candidates—" What crime have you committed ? " Who could not but sympathise with the unfortunate man who had committed no crime, for never would the gates of the Capitol, where sat the demi-gods of the Revolution, terrible in their majesty, be opened to him. Mankind had instituted the aristocracy of virtue, the revolution instituted the aristocracy of crime.

 . . . Examine all the revolutionary schools one by one and you will see that they all vie with each other in an effort to constitute themselves into a family and to claim a noble descent: Saint-Simon the aristocrat is the ancestor of one group ; the illustrious Fourier of another, and Babeuf the patriot of a third group. In each one you will find a common leader, a common patrimony, a common glory, a common mission; each group is distinct from the other, then breaks away from the others to form a splinter group, all the members of which are linked together by a narrow solidarity and seek out of the depths of the past some famous name as a rallying cry. Some have chosen Plato, the glorious personification of the wisdom of the ancients; others, and they are numerous, carrying their mad ambition to the heights of blasphemy, do not fear to profane the sacred name of the Redeemer! Poor and abandoned, they would perhaps have forgotten Him; humble they would have scorned Him; but in their insolent pride they do not forget that poor, wretched, and humble as He was, He was a King and that royal blood flowed in His veins. As for M. Proudhon, that perfect type of Socialist pride, which in its turn is the prototype of human pride—carried away by his vanity, he goes as far back as he can to the remotest ages, in an attempt to seek his ancestry in those times which bordered upon Creation, when the Mosaic institutions flourished amongst the Hebrews. As a matter of fact, his lineage and his name are still more ancient and illustrious than he thinks; to discover their origin, we must go back still further, to times beyond the pale of history, to beings who in perfection and dignity are incomparably higher than men. At present, suffice it to say that the Socialist schools of thought tend inevitably towards contradiction and absurdity; that each one of their principles contradicts those which precede or follow; and that their conduct is a complete condemnation of their theories, as their theories are a radical condemnation of their conduct.

 . . . The fundamental negation of Socialism is the negation of sin, that grand affirmation which is, as it were, the focal point of the Catholic affirmation. This denial logically implies a whole series of further negations, some of them relating to the Divine Person, others to the human person, others still to man in society. The most fundamental of them all is this: that the Socialists not only deny the fact of sin, but the possibility of sinning; from this double negation follows the negation of human liberty, which is meaningless if we ignore the power given to mankind to choose between good and evil and to fall from the state of innocence into a state of sin. The denial of free-will leads to a disclaimer of human responsibility; the responsibility of man being denied, penalties for sin are also denied, from which follows on the one hand the negation of divine government, and on the other, the negation of human governments. Therefore, as far as the question of government is concerned, the negation of sin ends in nihilism. To deny the responsibility of the individual in the domestic, political and human spheres is to deny the solidarity of the individual in the family and in the State; it is to deny unity in the species, in the State, in the family and in man himself, since there is such complete identity between the principles of solidarity and unity that one thing cannot be conceived in isolation without reference to the principle of solidarity and vice-versa. Therefore, as regards the question of unity, the negation of sin ends in nihilism. Unity being denied absolutely, the following negations are implied—that of humanity, of the family, of society and of man. The fact is that nothing exists at all except on condition of being "one," so that the existence of the family, of society and of humanity can only be postulated on condition that domestic, political and human unity is affirmed. If these unities are denied, the negation of these three things must follow; to affirm that they exist, and to deny unity between them, is a contradiction in terms. Each of these things is necessarily " one," or it cannot exist at all; therefore if they are not " one " they do not exist; their very name is absurd, for it is a name which does not describe or designate anything. The negation of individualism also follows from the negation of the principle of unity, although by a different process. Only individual man can, up to a certain point, exist without being "one" and without having any solidarity with his fellows: what is denied in this case, if his unity and solidarity with man- kind is denied, is that he is always the same person at different moments of his life. If there is no bond of union between the past and the present and between the present and the future, it follows that man exists only in the present moment. But in this hypothesis, it is clear that his existence is more phenomenal than real. If I do not live in the past, because it is past, and because there is no unity between the present and the past; if I do not live in the future, because the future does not exist and because when it will exist it will not be future ; if I only live in the present and the present does not exist, because when I am about to affirm that it exists, it has already passed, my existence is manifestly more theoretical than practical; for in reality, if I do not exist at all times, I do not exist at any time. I conceive time only in the union of its three forms and I cannot conceive it when I separate them. What is the past, unless it is something which no longer is? What is the future, unless it is something which does not yet exist ? Who can halt the present long enough to affirm that it is here, once it has escaped from the future, and before it relapses into the past? To affirm the existence of man, denying the unity of time, amounts to giving man the speculative existence of a mathematical point. Therefore the negation of sin ends in nihilism, as regards both the existence of individual man, of the family, of the body politic and of humanity. Therefore, in every sphere, all Socialist doctrines, or to be accurate, all rationalist doctrines must end inevitably in nihilism. 

From Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism [1851]. Translation by Rev. William NT Donald [1874]

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck - The Death of Nations

Liberalism has undermined civilization, has destroyed religions, has ruined nations. Primitive peoples know no liberalism. The world is for them a simple place where one man shares with another. Instinctively they conceive existence as a struggle in which all those who belong in any way to one group must defend themselves against those who threaten them.

Great states have always held liberalism in check. When a great individual arose amongst them who gave the course of their history a new direction, they have been able to incorporate him into their tradition, to make his achievements contribute to their continuity.

Nations who had ceased to feel themselves a people, who had lost the state-instinct, gave liberalism its opportunity. The masses allowed an upper crust to form on the surface of the nation. Not the old natural aristocracy whose example had created the state; but a secondary stratum, a dangerous, irresponsible, ruthless, intermediate stratum which had thrust itself between. The result was the rule of a clique united only by self-interest who liked to style themselves the pick of the population, to conceal the fact that they consisted of immigrants and nouveaux riches, of freedmen and upstarts. They did not care whether their arrogance and new-won privilege was decked out with the conceptions of feudal or of radical ideology, though they preferred a delicate suggestion of aristocracy. But they found it most effective and successful to style themselves democrats.

From Germany's Third Empire (1923)