The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway
CIVILIZATION IN HISTORY
Civilization, as a salient topic of the Zeitgeist, came to the fore with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This was considered by many as the end of history itself, in which conflicts over how to arrange societies were finally decided—the winner being free markets and democracy over collectivist notions such as socialism, communitarianism, populism, volk culture—not to mention the various religions of the world that have steadfastly held their own for millennia. History is still very much alive. It never died. 9-11 made that clear. Culture, sanguinity, and soil still matter, as expounded by American historian Samuel Huntington’s magnum opus, The Clash of Civilizations, first published in 1997 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Dr. Huntington challenged the universalist assumptions of western elites, by noting that countries around the world were forming into blocs. The peoples in each bloc were fostering ties around an identity shaped by an agreed set of values. These values are shared, in that “bloc” peoples share a common history. The distinguishing feature of these blocs is that it fosters loyalty to an identity of common values coextensive in space and time. A bloc of peoples, however formed and of long duration, do not make a civilization. A civilization is thought to comprise nations and kingdoms, but not always. It often relates to a transcendent idea, or way of looking at the world, that enlightens, or makes known, what was formerly unknown. Examples: transcendence can be found in a body of believers subscribing to a common creed; or to a Platonic ideal such as liberty or justice; or to mythic archetypes that are found in the stories of heroes and sages who “pointed the way”. This search for a transcendence collectively in a civilization is called culture. It is the essence of a civilization, in which a society organizes an overriding system of ritual and reverence to strengthen devotion to a particular idea or set of ideals. This body of collective ritual manifested in sacralizing objects or symbols of worship is properly known as a cult. Because there are so many cultures—let alone, civilizations—there is no one-size-fits-all Platonic, archetypal civilization that serves as an empyrean model of an ideal civilization. There are many civilizations that come and go, lighting up the sky and illuminating society, and then darkly falling into the shadows of history. Powerful kingdoms and empires have come and gone, believing hubristically they found the philosopher’s stone for governing and flourishing. They succumbed to the siren call of abandoning custom to the flame of enlightenment ‘progressiveness’. Instead of ‘light’, some of the darkest nights of the collective soul have happened under the enlightenment banner, which I discuss below.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENLIGHTENMENT
There lies an undying myth of “the Dark Ages”: that popular histories would have you believe that once the Renaissance came along— humanity discovered that the world was not flat after all. In fact, what became prevalent during the Renaissance and the early modern period—the Age of Discovery to plunder foreign lands; the international slave trade; and both church and state institutions surrendering virtually all rights to absolutist monarchs, (in both Catholic and Protestant lands) – were relatively unknown during the Medieval period. The worst kinds of barbarism sprang into being long after we left the ‘Dark Ages’ and saw the light of the revolutionary Jacobins fostering enlightenment through the guillotine.
The 18th century enlightenment was the celebration of revolution—neither reform nor rediscovery of some ancient esoteric wisdom. The real enlightenment took place in the Europe of the 11th to 12th centuries, with the rise of scholasticism in the medieval university. The 18th century may be considered as the time of dark enlightenment, in which the European (i.e., ‘white supremacist’) powers were well underway to subduing the rest of the world. The “Dark Enlightenment,” as the term is used today, is morphing from 18th , 19th , and 20th century notions of universal one-size-fits-all ways of organizing societies into ‘multipolar’ geo-political civilizations, sovereign in their own sphere, and refusing to subject their societies to the tyranny of international bodies—whether based in Brussels, New York, or the Hague.
It is not true that the 18th century Enlightenment gave birth to humanism, democracy, and equality. Humanism goes at least as far back as the Stoics; democracy from the ancient Greeks; and equality to Roman law and the development of medieval municipal institutions such as the peasants’ manorial courts and through the municipal magistracy of the échevinage. While there has been the movement towards universal suffrage, it does not yield to more humane or democratic governance. And as for equality, there is nothing to say until we define what is meant by that term.
Equality is a capacious term. As Lincoln once said in reference to liberty, could be likewise applied to equality: “We all declare for (equality); but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”
The best definition that I have seen describes equality as a personal quality. It is the “habitual disposition of the will to render to each and all we encounter their rightful due.” It is not selective. It is applicable “for all people, which requires treating all with respect and dignity.” When understood in this way, equality is not in conflict with liberty. But this liberty is of a certain kind. This is ordered liberty. It is neither boundless, nor can it synthetically stand alone. Patrick Henry’s declaration “give me liberty or give me death” may be full of passionate zeal, full of sound and fury, but it predicates nothing. It is synthetic in that it asserts something that cannot be tested through experiment or experience: Liberty for what? Ordered liberty, as a concept and applicable to reality, at least provides a framework for setting limits and defining the boundary between competing-interests.
Nationalism, Ideology, and globalism all use the enlightenment language of democracy, equality, and rights. The former grouping is not in opposition to the latter group, and, in fact, have much in common. They are all soul-killers that failed in their promise of enlightenment. Their vision was all the same: the death of the old and the birth of the new. Oswald Spengler, (more on him below), mourned that preoccupation with death of the old, trap the mind in an inescapable reversion to the old as the object of hate, without getting around towards birthing the new. They sought to replace the old, but with what? Without a vision, the Europe of today will continue to die and count for nothing. It will not die quietly. It will refuse to accept its fate. Spengler, before his death in 1936, saw his native Germany and all Europe turning to a new dark age. The question remains: is there any arresting of this certain decline, or must we wait a new age of Caesars to rescue Europe from the rot?
SOVEREIGNTY
The worldwide movement now taking place is not towards international governance but towards national sovereignty. The appearance of anarchy in Europe may seem like civilizational decline. But with widespread censorship; banning of national sovereignty candidates and parties; and an increasing unwillingness of European citizens to surrender their country to deracinated oligarchs and unassimilable migrants—there is now a gathering storm of pushback fighters against the pestilence of grooming, gangster-like terrorism, and gender disorientation. Moreover, the rigging of election results against popular feeling has turned the word democracy into an Orwellian term in which democracy no longer means direct rule by the people, but the Hobson’s choice of choosing elected officials allowed by ruling oligarchs. The iron rule of oligarchy is in full sunlight in the European union.
THE END OF HISTORY*
*The word “end” has two essential meanings: first, as final or terminal; second, as connoting purpose or destiny, as in the phrase end-in-view. I use this word in both senses throughout this essay. Look at the context in which it is used.
Defenders of international globalism’s version of democracy are expounded in delimited, Churchillian apologetics** in a faute de mieux*** fashion. Whether online or on bookshelves, democracy, in the liberal globalist sense, has presented itself as the revelation**** that put an end to history itself. No more making of books unending;***** the end of political philosophy as we know it; free markets and democracy overcoming custom and tradition; offshoring jobs, industries, and ways of life as the inexorable march of “progress”.
**Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill (1947)
***French: For lack of something better.
****I testify and warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book. – Revelation 22:18
*****“And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” – Ecclesiastes 12:12
Critics of enlightenment philosophy are not necessarily hostile to the democracy project. What they oppose is a hubris that believes there is only one way to rule as manifestation of the consent of the governed. While monarchy is often cited as an alternative, it is not an endorsement of absolutist power. What is often overlooked is that the process of selecting monarchs***** * have included a broad ruling class representing interests, regions, and classes.
***** *Under Pepin, King of the Franks (751-768), the Carolingians asserted their right to hereditary rule. They were never successful in ending the traditional practice of electoral monarchy by the Prince-Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, who selected the emperor.
THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
In Weimar Germany, a polymathic autodidact published a philosophy of history that challenged the widely taken-for-granted assumptions that Europe’s culture, economies, and democratic governance would continue to ‘progress’ in all measures of a healthy civilization, leaving the rest of the world in the dustbin of history.***** ** Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) challenged this as hubris, in a timely reckoning on the future of Europe. Published in 1923, known by rendered English title The Decline of the West, his chef d’oeuvre is not just documentation of recent events and subsequent developments. It is a study in the philosophy of history—a philosophical reflection of history itself, apart from any particular nation or civilization in space and time. Spengler contended that civilizations pass through a life cycle. They emerge from the darkness, they grow, become strong, mature in peak creativity, start to lose their spark, declining steadily as they descend into old age, senility, and finally die.***** *** He believed that the West had already passed through the creative stage of “culture” into that of reflection and material comfort (“civilization” proper, in his terminology). In fact, he contended that a civilization enters early winter as its culture abandons inner knowledge – its organic ties to community or soil, becoming a rootless, spiritually-dead, globalist civilization of homines economica, no longer capable of producing great art or music.
***** **Where does America fit into Herr Spengler’s schemata? Oswald Spengler saw the United States as the world colossus, a late-stage Faustian experiment, athwart the globe—all technocracy and speed, but no soul to be found in its cultural creations—art, literature, and music. America can entertain and create spectacles, but not artistic excellence. He saw America as the inevitable extension of the Faustian will-to-power: capitalism as the golden fleece, the machine as Promethean.
***** ***Since philosophical reflection upon history is open to more than one interpretation, Spengler contended that the spirit of a culture can never be transferred to another culture. Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), on the other hand, later held that cultures are usually “apparented” to older cultures, which is more a form of continuity than a break with the past.
EUROPEAN DELUSIONS
If Spengler were alive today, he would readily notice that Europe is in a state of civilizational exhaustion, in accordance with predications in his own time about Europe’s cults that would bring about her downfall. Going down that primrose path of dalliance with ideologies, Europe flirted with fascism and national socialism, then tried to save face by turning to communism and liberalism. Communism was found wanting, so she shuttered its door. Liberalism, the final ideology, is tired, and needs much more than a facelift and reconstructive surgery.
Spengler saw that all the old, but brief, twentieth century ideologies, were living fast and would eventually die hard, unmourned and forgotten. He called for something new, something beyond liberalism, beyond democracy, beyond capitalism — a return, perhaps to tradition, but not to tradition as a museum piece, but as a missile.
Spengler thought that as civilizations decline, they make take a long time to die. Many, though, usually collapse, not by external force, but under their own weight. But what happens when an old man refuses to die? Look at Europe: a continent in the final stages of consumption, wheezing out empty slogans about “democracy” and “human rights” while its cities burn and its borders dissolve. They are unable to let go, clinging to the dream of eternal progress as it spirals into the void. According to Spengler, a mythic Caesar may come on the scene deus ex machina to disentangle Europe from its slow suicide, but don’t count on it. As in World War II, the Caesars arrived from outside Europe—America and the Soviet Union—to rescue Europe from its own ideological descent into doom.
The European Union is now in a terminal phase. Its greatest failing is draining the word “Europe” of any substantial content (identity, power, borders, principles) to make it synonymous with “universal values,” which, when applied to concrete situations, mean absolutely nothing. What Europe needs is not more money, more democracy, more power. European civilization needs to abandon notions of going gently into the good night. Europeans are called to a purpose beyond tolerance and material well-being. They know their fate is in their hands, and with high hope for the future, they may learn the meaning of destiny once again.
TWILIGHT OF CIVILIZATION
Those who devote their lives to the study of how culture gives rise to civilization assume as a matter of course of the idea that there is an order or design in history. They believe that one can discern in history some all-encompassing purpose or pattern.
They are not ingenuous to believe that civilizations, including their own, are not immune against the ravages of famine, war, pestilence, and destruction. From such ill-usage, the belief in an overall pattern is abandoned where one acquiesces that the historical process is no more than an arbitrary succession of occurrences, a mere agglomeration or patchwork of random incidents and episodes.
If accepted, it conflicts with human rationality—the attempt to understand by a process of inquiry and hypothesizing, through imposing system and order on multivariant phenomena that underlie all thought. Otherwise, history, in the final analysis, would be unintelligible, condemning mankind to a skepticism that discountenances any value to human striving for existential meaning. This view is not uncommon among historians. A comparable attitude was discernible beneath Arnold Toynbee’s repudiation of the idea that history is “a chaotic, disorderly, fortuitous flux, in which there is no pattern or rhythm of any kind to be discerned.” How, then, can historians justify their craft as rational, practical, and ethically sustainable?
In the West, speculation about the meaning of history begins from the premise that history conforms to a linear development in which the influence of divine wisdom can be discerned, rather than to a recurrent cyclical movement implicit in much Greco-Roman thought. The “divine” view was already prevalent early in the Common Era. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) discerned, in the City of God and his other writings, that sacred history (unlike secular history), consists of connecting occasions in a “great melody of some ineffable composer,” the elements of the melody being “dispensations suitable to each different period.” Thus, to understand the rise and fall of empires by the Spenglerian mistake of anthropomorphizing civilizations as if each and every one “mature, flourish, grow old, and die” is to make the category mistake of conflating sacred history and secular history. Sacred history reflects on restoration and renewal in the course of human events. Likewise, civilizations have come back from the abyss of near-perishing. One thing can be said concerning sacred and secular history: only the individual man or woman is certain to die. Civilizations choose to die. Europe must wake up and face its peril with hearts of courage, in which the actions of a few nations or peoples may restore the hope of a continent.
CIVILIZATIONAL NIGHT
Ever since the post WWII international organization of nations into blocs, we have been warned against the uniformity of globalization of the world’s peoples into a single civilization. As 80 years have passed since the present international order unfolded, a global shift is taking place in which sovereign states no longer look to the United Nations and its international bodies for their secular salvation. Europeans, especially, are looking elsewhere. At the eleventh hour, salvation may not come in time to save the peoples of Europe, helping them to retain—and regain—their cultures and sovereignty, for the reasons discussed below.
A final struggle is now taking place: the world will be governed either by a single hegemonic power; or a single universalist ideology based on Western liberal democratic values getting imposed on an unwilling world; or a world of international governing bureaucracies regulating national policies by intruding on national sovereignties; or a world articulated between several poles of power and civilization, “great spaces” corresponding to the great regions of the world, each directed by the country most able to exert its influence in the civilizational area to which it belongs. It is sovereignty, practiced by nations with the power to exert its will over “less sovereign” nations, or over its “vassal states.” But no kind of sovereignty can be possible as long as Westerners persist in believing that the world is primarily populated by individuals; rather, the world is primarily shared between different peoples, languages, nations, and civilizational areas, each with their own ambitions and principles. The new international order requires that these great civilizational areas take into account their identity as a priority, that is, their history, and refrain from intervening in other areas to apply pseudo-universal, neoconservative values that are in reality their own. That has been the rationale for the establishment of BRICS outside the Western bloc. In a post-globalist, multipolar world, the future will be shaped by “Civilizational States” ‘exporting’ values and viewpoints in which international relations will be governed by bilateral treaties, not bloodless bureaucracies.
AMERICA DEMANDS A RECKONING
As America rebuilds its power to face challenges in a multipolar world of continental power centers, Eottom of Form
urope continues to become less and less relevant. Their societies are ghostly apparitions standing before the decaying architecture of the collective self-delusion of a European superstate. Americans, and increasingly other nations, that have had the good common sense to throw off the shackles of globalism to retrieve their sovereignty, see no need for the polite fictions of international cooperation in honoring alliances under conditions that have long ceased to be relevant. This brutality of “unqualified” realism, loud and clear, is spoken without the diplomatic niceties that have for years masked the decaying corpse of Western liberalism. Seeking to make a silk purse of liberal globalism out of a sow’s ear full of the anti-liberal toleration of censorship, grooming of young girls, and elite silence in the face of widespread terror is misguided at best, and at its worst—criminal. The war on peoples is an unholy alliance of global organizations funneling and laundering funds to finance migrant trafficking with the intention to unravel stable societies. Nations are unwilling to surrender their sovereignty, values, and identity to traffickers in human flesh, akin to the Babylon of harlots, that push agendas antithetical to, and detested by, the enslaved peoples of the earth.
Subversion of the democratic will of the people is a maintenance stopgap for managed decline, trembling against a populism surging for heroes, tradition, deeply-rooted identity and spiritual values. Falsehoods will no longer be brokered. This is a new crusade—for meaning, not to be found in the secular emphasis on human rights, but in human families; not in communities but in congregations; not in activism, but in altruism. The new Europe rising wants its sovereignty back, its history back, and the restoration of its heroes and saints. Fear and trembling in the face of the new crusade? We’ll see.
The Americans are no longer gutting out their industrial centers to unreliable supply chains and unfavorable trade practices. Nor does America wish to subsidize Europe’s bloated social welfare states with their chintzy unwillingness to pay the price to defend its member states and its values.
Some historians, such as Francis Fukuyama, who thought they were in the end-times of history, will not accept this. They continue to cling to the progressive myth of ever-growing GDP, refusing to see that the tide has already turned. In their efforts to “cancel culture,” they failed. All is not lost: The ghosts of faded glory linger on in the West’s collective memories, through daily reminders to be found in its Baroque cathedrals, arrondissements, and great charters.
Even though NATO expands, and the EU at Brussels is tightening its grip on wayward European nations, new rounds of sanctions against the Russian Federation stack higher and higher, but to little effect. These nonelected EU officials, in a fit of spite, still impose more and more sanctions, not only for the proxy war involving Ukraine, but also because Russia refuses to surrender its own sovereignty, while Western societies increasingly crumble and unravel.
The military arm of the EU, NATO, is a cult lurking deep beneath the polished marble facades of European capitals, believing in its own power and relevance in a world that increasingly rejects its “rights” agenda. Europe, decadent and listless, sleeps dreamlessly under America’s protective gaze, its rulers unconcerned by the rot beneath their gleaming veneer.
Europe needs to wake up from its slumber. America will no longer fund bloated welfare services and ingratitude for access to the world’s largest domestic market. America is demanding a reckoning. Europe must put its own house in order. Europe is being told to stop the virtue signaling; halt the migration tide, recognize their responsibility for the uprising among their own people, and admit that the peoples of Europe — the real people, the Volk — are not to be feared, but heeded.
Mass migration is a weapon; progressiveness is a death cult; censorship is the final gasp of a ruling class that knows it has lost the war for legitimacy. The European elites, those bloodless technocrats who wield words like “disinformation” as a cudgel against the awakening masses, are afraid of the real Europe — the Europe of sovereignty, of ethnocultural vitality, of an unbroken lineage stretching back to Charlemagne — is catching on among the young Europeans. The people see through the sham—and they are waking up. They reject the death spiral of mass immigration and the imposed morality of an exhausted liberalism. The order of the past is crumbling, and in its place, something truer, something tangible, is emerging. The age of illusions is over. The days are over searching for consensus and common ground. The fight for the nation’s soul has begun. America has become a new hope for the world, as it regains its civilizational values, undistorted, unafraid, and unsurpassed, leaving in its wake a twisted woke universe, trapped in a hall of distorted mirrors.
RESTORATION AND RENEWAL
“Democracy” and “human rights” are political and philosophic concepts with consequences or ends-in-view (a materialistic worldview, the erosion of state sovereignty) that constitute modernity, post-modernism, and a secular outlook. They all ignore and discount peoples’ destinies, purposes, and missions that answer a deeper, inner calling to something more than markets, procedures, and the rule of law.
There is a feeling among young Europeans that the promises of equality and egalitarianism have failed to deliver “the goods.” Rather, they yearn for something grander, rejecting both equality and egalitarianism. By rejecting equality and egalitarianism, they also reject liberalism as subversion. Instead, the young Europeans are increasingly embracing their mythical and moral past, in the everlasting quest for meaning in a disenchanted world. They look to Odinism, the Brehonic Druidism of the Celtic peoples, and the mystery cults of the Greek Eleusinian and Eastern Semitic ‘imports’. They reject liberalism as subversion because of its focuses on quantifying individuals as statistical averages, rather than as “qualified” persons of meritorious achievement. Under liberalism, individuals are an undifferentiated abstraction, tending to uniformity. Under egalitarian principles, equality means all are identical. Egalitarianism [many being equal] in rights means they are identical, not equal. Equality, as it relates to qualified persons of merit, is injustice.
As an ‘antidote’ to equality, Dark Enlightenment manifestos posit an alternate theory they call “Human Biodiversity” (HBD), in which they believe that individuals and human groups are quite diverse in talents, abilities, psychological dispositions, intelligence, and other traits for genetic reasons in combination with environmental factors. The relatively new discipline of Sociobiology studies entire gene pools of delimited populations, noting characteristics that manifest themselves under environments of changing conditions. Genetics can explain much not only among human populations, but also among “social animals” such as herds of elephants and flocks of birds. The range of outcomes are sufficiently large to preclude attempts to order outcomes in human society according to some levelling criteria. Biology and genetics endow populations with behavioral traits and personal proclivities toward a range of activities that predisposes individuals and groups towards certain ends-in-view, guided by a metaphorical inner compass that result from biological and environmental factors.
Other Dark Enlightenment proponents have asserted that in order to accelerate and incentivize new and creative approaches to the use of technology, human societies must discard the fetish for egalitarianism and reject a philosophical secularism that suffocates the human spirit. This new “spirit of the future” is known as Archeofuturism. It looks to the past in historical memory by rethinking traditional institutions like monarchy, guilds, castes, and other “closed” systems, which, in an environment of endless choices with “500 channels and nothing to watch”, may provide more focus in a world full of unlimited distractions in order to stay “informed” in a “progressive” environment.
Overcoming the timebound entrapment of all that is progressive, requires we think anew and act anew, to disenthrall ourselves from the limited options within liberalism’s false dichotomies, double binds, and Hobson’s choices. A “way out” arises from the eternal realm – the vertical aspirations to God and truth, in a hierarchy that prioritizes the common good over individual self-interest. Its primacy is spiritual, to which material serves.
In the West, even in its decay, there are, still, moments of beauty and heroic virtue. The last warriors of the old order — citizens, soldiers, saints – those who remember, those who still have fire in their blood, those who embrace chivalric virtue — are watching, waiting for the hour. Bloodless bureaucrats, even in their downfall, will rage and weaponize every outlet against citizens’ resistance to Brussel’s crushing rule. In its survival, its ability to fight, the EU will lash out even as its mess of pottage disguised as the comfort of the welfare state can no longer be sustained. European peoples increasingly look not to comfort, but instead listen to the distant echo of the Gothic spires, the battle hymns, the roar of something primal and forgotten in its hall of exemplars, its daring adventurers.
Multipolarity is forcing the issue. The age of one western civilization ruling all others is over. Faustian man wanted the whole world, but the world no longer needs him. This is not a world for universal values, for one’s own notion of human rights, for democracy. This is a world of civilizations, of destiny, of will, of peoples. The West is now just another actor on the world stage, and no longer its sole director.
Europe’s leaders are not mere sleepwalkers. They are ruled by agents of global institutions that seek to cancel native cultures and overwhelm the native peoples by importing cultures at variance with European ideals. The world they want to govern is rootless individualism. Their world has no people nor institutions in continuity with the past. Spengler saw in his lifetime the coming of nationalism and of ideology, with their bureaucratic paper-pushers, making rules for remote, national governments, and for international institutions setting rules according to the “scientific laws” of their own ideologies. These are the clerks in charge of a dying civilization. They mistake their position for power. Real power is elsewhere, shifting out of Europe, downward to families, and inward towards God. Those who still believe in something greater than economic growth and legal frameworks, are taking up the torch, holding it high, and not breaking its faith to seize its birthright, which is culture, custom, and continuity.