This article is meant to be something of a postscript to last week’s piece.
At least that’s my intention…whether I’ll be successful or not in that endeavor is debatable, but at least I can take a stab at trying to organize my thoughts and hopefully provide some perspective about our strange age and what some at least believe to be its impending dénouement.
When I speak of “the new barbarians,” I refer to the people of our own time—the Kali-Yuga of the Hindu tradition, or the “Iron Age” of the Greek and Roman traditions. And I don’t only mean the people of this age, I also—and more particularly—mean the civilizations that shape and form them.
Many sharper and far more intelligent observers have diagnosed the especial ills and diseases of modernity. Every one of them has hit upon some crucial aspect of the degeneracy and decadence of modern civilization; perhaps that topic has become something of a dead horse lately, indecently flogged long after the noisome manifestations of rot and corruption have become only too obvious.
Still, it’s a topic that I can’t help but find endlessly fascinating. I think it probably has something to do with the glaring dichotomy between the reality of our dilapidated society, and its hubristic and insufferable self-image. The irony of a civilization that posits itself in teleological terms as the absolute pinnacle of human achievement—the forever advancing vanguard of technological, intellectual, and moral evolution—while in truth representing a pitiable falling-away from whilom heights, and a morass of senility, stagnation, moral depravity, and spiritual inanition, is just too delicious to overlook.
Maybe I’m being too hard on our contemporaries; after all, they try so very hard, and they’re just so earnest. Of course, when I condemn “modern civilization,” I mean it in a Guénonian sense—that is to say, my condemnation encompasses not only recent decades, but a broad sweep of history that comprehends centuries, and whose aberrant hypertrophy of perversion extends its black and fungoid temporal roots into at least the later Middle Ages. Our own desperate age is merely the sickly fruit of a long and protracted declension, and, alas, we can only be what we are.
But that won’t prevent me, and others, from recognizing the sheer barbarity and savagery that characterizes our civilization. That’s why I speak of the teeming masses of our society as “the new barbarians;” we are not, strictly speaking, the citizens of a civilization at all. Rather, as René Guénon himself observed, we belong to what can only be thought of as an “anti-civilization,” an indiscriminate welter of humanity that is loosely bound together, with few common linkages, and which battens on the fleeting vitality of an older, traditional culture.
This latter point is the most repellant aspect of our “civilization.” The new barbarians consume, degrade, denigrate, and finally destroy the cultural productions of a former—and now long-lost—people and civilization, and erect blasphemous travesties, shocking aberrations, and grotesque parodies in their place. The new barbarians do not merely use up the rich artistic and spiritual well of the past—they corrupt and pollute it, poisoning it for future generations.
We are all barbarians now, even those of us (like myself) who rue this fact; the truth is, we are more thoroughgoing barbarians than those storied northern tribes who irrupted into the Roman oikoumene so many centuries ago. They, at least, recognized beauty and greatness, and eschewed ugliness in all its forms.
Our anti-civilization stampedes across the face of the earth, crushing, destroying, befouling, and leveling everything of distinction and beauty into a thin, unpalatable gruel. Wherefore, the prophecies of its imminent demise—as I mentioned in last week’s article—carry more than a faint whiff of wish-fulfillment. After all, how can something so evil be suffered to endure?
But some of the new barbarians, it must be said, are very proud of their barbarity. Few things are more disagreeable, I think, than the spectacle of the global Empire of Nothing—what some call the Neoliberal or American empire—fastening its black tentacles of surveillance, militarism, filthy lucre, and naked coercion on the fair face of the planet.
This Empire, with its globalist and universalist aspirations, is a pure and simple menace; its relentless drive toward homogenization and the destruction of all distinctions is proof enough that it is the true child of the Kali-Yuga, of the final age, which is a time of dissolution. Moreover, its creed is unmitigated materialism and evolutionism, and this too is in keeping with the increasing materialization of the world as the cycle sweeps toward its inevitable conclusion.
At the heart of this Empire, of course, is the United States, which has always been at the leading edge of subversion and the dissolution of the world; this place has become the font of the perversions and degeneracy that eat away at what little is left of the Tradition. Not all of its people can be condemned as willing participants in this movement; but they are without power and influence, and so are swept along by the course of history, as are we all.
America—which preceded even the Jacobean Revolution of 1789 and the Marxist Revolution of 1917—is nothing less than the reification of Francis Bacon’s materialistic and scientistic empire of New Atlantis. It has employed Bacon’s novum organum—the “scientific method”—with merciless efficiency, producing for our present-day delectation the highly regimented economic slave state and ruthlessly effective technocracy that we all know and hate.
That is why it is the United States, and not the totalitarian Fascist states of twentieth-century Europe, nor even the now-defunct Soviet Union, that has always been the enemy of mankind. It is this country that is without doubt the nucleus of the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation—the latter aspect most clearly evinced in the new counterfeit spirituality, called “wokeism” by some, which is really nothing more than the pseudo-traditional apotheosis of the materialism, evolutionism, and misguided scientism that have always been worshiped and adored in that land.
Few critiques of America, and more precisely the pernicious American mentality or “soul” which has had such a corrupting influence on the world, are more incisive and devastating than Julius Evola’s analysis at the end of his great masterwork Revolt Against the Modern World. I will only quote a short passage to illustrate my point, particularly that the Soviet Union and the United States were not really unalike in any meaningful way, but were simply two similar totalitarian ideologies competing for the same territory—in this case, the entire planet:
“…it would be easy to produce more evidence concerning the similarities between the two countries that would allow us to see in communist Russia and in America two faces of the same coin, or two movements whose destructive paths converge. The former is a reality unfolding under the iron fist of a dictatorship and through a radical nationalization and rationalization. The latter is a spontaneous realization (and therefore more worrisome) of a mankind that accepts and even wants to be what it is, that feels healthy, free, and strong and that implements the same tendencies as communism but without the fanatical and fatalistic dedication of the communist Slav. And yet, behind both ‘civilizations’ those who have eyes to see can detect the warning signs of the advent of the ‘Nameless Beast.’”1
The Baron hits the nail right on the head, as they say. And his passing mention of the “Nameless Beast” returns us to the theme of last week’s article, for there is something eschatological and redolent of the end of the cycle in the counter-traditional and anti-metaphysical “ideas” and “values” that are at the heart of America’s global Empire of Nothing.
Robert Bolton, in his book The Order of the Ages, discusses the role that certain ideas and secularist dogmas might play in paving the way for the End Times, and for the dominance of evil—or what might be called the Reign of the Antichrist. It should come as no surprise that the materialist beliefs promulgated as a sort of pseudo-religious litany by the scientistic technocracy governing the Empire of Nothing have a prominent part to play in opening the human soul to the tolerance of evil and the acceptance of the Counter-Initiation. Foremost among these beliefs is that corrosive evolutionism that holds such strong sway over the popular imagination, a “strong delusion”2 that undoubtedly misleads men and is at the back of so many of the evils of the modern world:3
“Ideas with living force in today’s world are few, but a clear example among them is the revalution of events made under the influence of evolutionist thought…The evolutionist creed is a logical fruition of the historicist mentality which places everything in a linear progression where all interest is centered on the part of the linear process which has not yet been lived through, regardless of its qualities or lack of them. The domination of this outlook makes society like an organism without an immune system, as mere historical opportuneness ensures an entry and a validation for just about anything…The direction of a civilization by evolutionist and progressist beliefs makes the emergence of the Antichrist all but inevitable, because for this outlook, there can be no such being as an Antichrist” [emphasis added].4
The false belief mentioned in the Epistle is designed to prepare men’s hearts to accept the Antichrist, and is a clear sign of the imminent end of the cycle. In Bolton’s argumentation, only evolutionism fits the bill as a subversive doctrine of the requisite power and influence:
“It is true that the modern world is full of dubious doctrines which have spread in proportion as traditional doctrine has lost influence, but the fact remains that only one of them could be said to have attained universal acceptance, and that is the pseudo-mysticism of evolution. If this could not be identified with the ‘strong delusion’ there would be no comparable belief to put in its place. The essence of the delusion referred to in the above text is a ‘faith’ which is calculated to break down resistance to the invasion of falsehood under the guise of novelty, and there is no equality among the possible contenders for this role.”5
The outcome of this delusion is the “anti-order” or “pseudo-order” that holds sway in our perverted parody of a civilization. This is not an absence of order, per se, but is more in line with the inversion of traditional civilization envisioned by Guénon as the end-state of our cycle;6 it is the “anarcho-tyranny” of our anti-civilization, a counterfeit hierarchy within which the new barbarians thrive. It ties in further to that other plank of the Empire of Nothing—the almost ecstatic reverence for “democracy,” or whatever hollowed-out thing does duty for that idea in the modern world.
The evolutionary endpoint, we might say, of this democratic anti-order is something that looks suspiciously similar to the “civilization” of the new barbarians:
“There are many forms of order which, being both human and divine in origin, are created for the specific purpose of guiding minds and wills in accordance with the will of God. Such is the meaning of traditional civilization, and order of this kind implies the possibility of an inverse kind of order which would have the opposite effect. It would certainly still be order from a short-term human point of view, while by absolute standards it would be the extremity of disorder inasmuch as it set human life at variance with the law of God…
[…]
“This points to a kind of world state of which the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century were so many adumbrations. The popular tendency to identify the State with God is at the present time far advanced in the modern world, as people have recourse to government for deliverance from evils which in the past were accepted as willed by God. They act as though human beings had the power to elect an immunity or preservation from evils which result from the abuse of their own free will. This ad hoc attribution of ultimate power to the State is widely desired because it is seen as an empowerment of those who vote for it. Consequently, the State increasingly performs functions which are material parodies of the actions of God as provider, sustainer, avenger, enlightener, and protector. Although this power is false because it means a transfer of a power which should be inward and spiritual to a system of more or less fragile practical relations in the outside world, it is hard to oppose, because the desire for a God-substitute is so strong and so widespread…In proportion as belief in God declines, belief in the power of the State increases, and with it, the range of powers over individual lives which the State can assume. If this tendency went to completion it would be bound to result in a formal claim to divinity by the head, or figurehead, of the ultimate government.”7
The barbarism, the disorder, the illegitimacy, and the intellectual poverty of our civilization is therefore, in a way, a kind of order in its own right. But it is an inversion and a perversion of true, rightly-ordered traditional civilization, and it is something to be shunned and regarded with abject horror.
Perhaps this explains the manifest senility and intellectual debility of our leaders, which few can honestly deny. There is a rot infecting this world, and its spread is almost complete.
The new barbarians will have their day, but all is not lost. Guénon explains that the pace and tempo of time itself accelerates as the cycle speeds toward its end; the senility of time is as the senility of man himself. Whereas to a child the passage of time is agonizingly slow, so it is serene and sedate in the early ages of the cycle; but as time slips by practically unnoticed in the evening of life, so it accelerates precipitately in the Kali-Yuga.8
If that is true—and certainly history seems to be ever more crowded with momentous events, occurring at breakneck pace, as the decades fly—then there is reason to hope that the final dénouement of our cycle cannot now be far off. When that day comes, the new barbarians, the Empires of Nothing, and the “strong delusions” will be swept aside, and this age will be recalled as nothing but a passing nightmare, imperfectly remembered. There is nothing in this belief that is chiliastic, or utopian, or an attempt to “immanentize the Eschaton”—it is simply the observance of a natural law, for the future Golden Age will be transient and all too temporary itself, declining inevitably toward its own Iron Age in a yet remoter future.
These are the things I like to think upon when the smug savants of our time denigrate the traditions of the past, and make spurious predictions about the future, or blindly foresee the inevitable progress and advance of our anti-civilization, which in their ignorance they believe is the teleological culmination of all human striving…
Julius Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1969) [Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995) trans. Guido Stucco, pg. 356].
“And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12)
This can be clearly seen even in such popular evolutionist fantasies as appear from time to time in science fictional form, viz. Last and First Men and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, Childhoods’ End by Arthur C. Clarke, or even films such as Interstellar or 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Robert Bolton, The Order of the Ages: The Hidden Laws of World History (Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2015) pp. 236-7.
Ibid., pg. 238. I’ll have to reserve a more detailed consideration of the evils and falsehoods of Darwinian evolutionism, as well as “progressism” or “progressivism” in general, for future posts; the subversive and socially destructive effects of these counterfeit faiths deserve special treatment.
René Guénon, La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945)[The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001)]; see especially the thirty-ninth chapter, “The Great Parody: or Spirituality Inverted.” In speaking of the reign of Antichrist, Guénon explains: “His time will certainly no longer be the ‘reign of quantity,’ which was itself only the end-point of the ‘anti-tradition;’ it will on the contrary be marked, under the pretext of a false ‘spiritual restoration,’ by a sort of reintroduction of quality in all things, but of quality inverted with respect to its normal and legitimate significance. After the ‘egalitarianism’ of our times there will again be a visibly established hierarchy, but an inverted hierarchy, indeed a real ‘counter-hierarchy,’ the summit of which will be occupied by the being who will in reality be situated nearer than any other being to the very bottom of the ‘pit of hell’” (pg. 271).
The Order of the Ages, pp. 239-41. Anyone who has lived through the tyrannous usurpations of the recent “Pandemic Era,” and whose mind is not completely warped by the new barbarism of our times, can testify to the perspicacity and timeliness of this prophetic passage.
Cf., for instance, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times: “…events are being unfolded nowadays with a speed unexampled in the earlier ages, and this speed goes on increasing and will continue to increase up to the end of the cycle…” (pg. 42).