Theme: Civilization

by Daniel Gurpide

A particular animating force, the Jewish-Christian spirit, has been travelling and ever moulding the outlook, the discourse, and values that today inform Western consciousness. The defining character of this spirit is egalitarianism. It has expressed an egalitarian will, an egalitarian mentality – instinctive at the beginning, but increasingly conscious of itself until, in our own times, it has become fully aware of its aspirations and final goals.

Western civilisation is condemned because the egalitarian utopia that has inspired it for the last two thousand years is in contradiction with the demands of modern society. Enthralled by this utopia, European man can no longer assume control of the world’s destiny, or be creator of a new future.

Ashamed of a past which over time has given it undisputed superiority, the egalitarian West now wants the ‘end of history. ‘ It desires a return to the static stage of mammalian happiness: to an Edenic pre-human past.

Egalitarianism has passed through different phases: mythical, ideological, and synthetic. It entered history (Phase One) in the garments of the Christian myth – “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28) – and, as with any other myth, without explaining itself in either its discourse or in its actions, sensing its internal dialectics still as unity and harmony.

Then (Phase Two) the ‘contradictions’ began to be felt and rationalised: first on a religious level, when the theologies of the Reformation and Counter- Reformation became ‘ideologies’ and the dialectical contraries took social and political shape – becoming ‘parties’. In this second phase, egalitarian consciousness becomes deeper, re-conceiving the idea of ‘equality’ of souls before God’ as ‘equality of men as citizens before their institutions ‘. This has come to be called ‘the revolutionary era’, since its manifestations were sometimes, though not always, violent. Liberalism – in its Anglo-Saxon and French modalities – started here.

Goethe was wont to say that ideas, taken to their ultimate consequences, become absurd. Egalitarianism was indeed pursued to its ultimate consequences: the aspiration and will of attaining ‘equality of men before Nature itself’. This Third Phase may be characterised as ‘theoretical’ since it claimed to merge – ‘rationally’ and ‘ecumenically’ in a superior synthesis – the ideologies that derived from the myth. It started in an embryonic manner with Hegelianism; then came a first political- manifestation: Marxism.

In the synthetic phase in which we currently find ourselves, the dialectics of egalitarianism are felt as an obstacle to achieving a global ecumene. Hence the constant presence of terms like ‘internationalism,’ ‘cosmopolitism,’ and ‘multiculturalism’ – and the establishment of ‘political correctness ‘ as the only legitimate discourse.

With hindsight, Marxism-Leninism may be considered a ‘deviation’ from the main current of the egalitarian tendency, since it tried to ‘force’ or ‘anticipate’ the natural evolution of egalitarianism towards a final synthesis. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the peaceful ending of the Cold War – when Communism became reabsorbed into the common egalitarian matrix (partly because the objectives pursued by Marxism in the Eastern bloc had already been attained in the West) that the final and true ‘recovered unity’ of the egalitarian tendency took shape.

Its consecration may be observed today in the unanimous acceptance of the doctrine of human rights and its expansion through liberal-capitalistic or socialist-Third Worldist globalisation – a project of planetary homogenisation which seeks to progress till the conclusive exit of humankind from history.

Christianity and its secular derivatives – the liberal, socialist, communist, or anarcho-communist ideologies – are successive manifestations of the same egalitarian principle. They appeared in sequence historically, but they remain present in one way or another – all of them tending with different degrees of awareness – to the same end. All of them contribute to the spiritual and material decadence of Europe, to the progressive degradation of European man,and the disaggregation of Western societies. This has given rise to the more or less conscious nihilism that today permeates our culture, and the creation of a gigantic ‘mass of slaves’ alienated and devoid of any purpose.

THE GERMANIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY – AND THE FUTURE OF OUR CIVIL RELIGION

(must read!)

by Daniel Gurpide

Catholic Christianity, in both Northern and Southern Europe, turned during medieval times into a different syncretic religion as a result of encountering Greco -Roman and Celto -Germanic culture. The pagan component of this religion, though usually unacknowledged, remained strong for a long time and it is this syncretic religion that people think of when they speak of ‘traditional Christianity’.

However, the secularisation of the Christian West prevents any return to a sort of sociological Christianity which could be the vehicle in which to transmit a message of protest against modernity.

The ‘right’-understood in a counter-revolutionary sense- has ceased to exist and religious Christianity no longer plays the role of a social-religious pillar or an ideal projection of a mythical -communitarian residue which could keep the different fragments of the egalitarian ecumene together. That role is played today by the religion of human rights and political correctness.

The Christian churches themselves become fully aware of the situation and no longer identify themselves -if they ever did -with the destiny and culture of Europe, but rather with their own projects and historical interests. They merely constitute a minority within the egalitarian matrix :a backward and folkloric variation on the same theme.

Christendom -as a marker of the European continent and peoples -is, in many ways, a fleeting sideshow in the world-historical development of the Christian faith. Christianity’s future lies in the ‘global South’, where its message of ‘pauper as Pantocrator ‘ – and its veneration of the meek and downtrodden – will no doubt be well received. Pope Francis (Bergoglio) is not an anomaly.

In Curt Doolittle’s Summer School several ‘solutions’ have been proved to be false, a waste of time and energy: Libertarianism, petty intra-European fratricidal Nationalism, National-Socialism/Hitlerism, and also (traditional) Christianity. What’s next?

I believe the iconoclasm of this ‘via negativa’ is the proper way forward :first clear the terrain of rubble and then begin the construction on more solid foundations.

Ave et Salve.