Outright opposition to modernity is often dismissed as backward-looking or “reactionary” and associated with a rigidly hierarchical or aristocratic outlook. But there is another tradition of resistance to the modern world that has very different ideals and can serve as the basis of an old-new radical philosophy of natural and cosmic belonging, inspiring humanity to step away from the nightmare transhumanist slave-world into which we are today being herded. In this important series of ten essays, our contributor W.D. James, who teaches philosophy in Kentucky, USA, explores the roots and thinking of what he terms “egalitarian anti-modernism”.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine
– REM, It’s the End of the World as We Know It
In the first essay of this series, I outlined some generic features of a style of thought I termed ‘egalitarian anti-modernism’. Over the next eight essays we explored several key thinkers in this tradition, from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries (one major figure for each century). Here, at the conclusion to the series, I would like to talk about where it fits into the contemporary political and intellectual landscape.
Aristocratic Anti-Modernism
My sense is that as our political, social, ecological, etc…, etc… crises deepen, more people are willing to look to the sort of radical critique of our current situation represented by anti-modernism. It is also my sense that the form of anti-modernism generating the most interest is of the variety I called ‘aristocratic anti-modernism.’ While I try to avoid falling back into the modernist division of ‘left’ vs. ‘right,’ most of the people I am thinking of would describe themselves as being on the political right. This would include relatively popular digital media people like ‘Mencius Goldbug’ and ‘Bronze Age Pervert.’ I will confess that I don’t really know anything about either of these folks beyond that they exist. Thinkers of more substance who seem to be having something of a revival would include Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) and even Julius Evola (1898-1974). I would also place the contemporary Russian philosopher, Alexandr Dugin (1962-) in this group. While somewhat wary of them, I find value the thought of both Jünger and Dugin.
Jünger was a highly decorated soldier in the German army during World War I. He wrote on topics ranging from the experience of war to the ‘total mobilization of labor’ in modernity. He wrote a number of novels and was one of the first people to experiment with LSD, more or less seeking spiritual experiences. As mentioned in a previous essay, Jünger associated with the Conservative Revolutionaries between the wars, was courted by the Nazis after their rise power, but sternly rejected membership in the party or speaking in support of the party.
The part of Jünger I find most interesting is his exploration of how the individual might remain free in a totalitarian regime (and he felt that all modern regimes were essentially totalitarian) in works such as The Forest Passage (1951) and Eumeswil (1977). The basic argument of the former work is that the modern state seeks to control its citizens through an array of technological and psychological means. The path to becoming a “forest rebel”, his term for seeking to slide out of view and adopt a stance of resistance, requires courage (the regime can bring carceral, economic, moral, and ideological pressure to bear). The key to courage (which he apparently had, being wounded over 20 times, depending on exactly how one counts) is to tap into a source of freedom that transcends death, since courage is ultimately the willingness to face death. This he finds only in the primordial origins of religion and spirituality. These “primal centers of power” are “concealed in every individual…so that he might understand himself, in his deepest, supra-individual power.”i You might paraphrase this by saying that people who have no ultimate purpose will be unlikely to make the ultimate sacrifice; they will remain quiescent in the womb of the security regime. He reaches the conclusion: “freedom is existence—it is above all a conscious consent to existence, and the desire, perceived as a personal destiny, to manifest it.”ii Anyway, clearly Jünger is not just some ivory tower academic distanced from the ‘real world’ and, yet, he finds the key to practical resistance to lie in spiritual awareness. That is interesting stuff.
For most of the past decade, Dugin has basically been censored by the American media. The major online book vendors do not carry his works. YouTube will only post videos about him, not featuring him. Social media—forget about it. Also, he is under individual sanction by the U.S. government for his position on Ukraine (as he likes to point out, for his ideas on Ukraine, no action he has taken). He revels in being labeled “the world’s most dangerous philosopher.” I suppose there are two things I find interesting in Dugin. First, his deep critique of technology, liberalism, capitalism, transhumanism, and globalism. He writes: “There are only two parties in the world: the globalist party of the Great Reset and the anti-globalist party of the Great Awakening.”iii That last phrase is his name for the international upsurge in both left-wing and right-wing populism, which he sees as essentially one.
Secondly, is his geopolitical theory of “multi-polarity”. He seeks to foster a world with many centers of political and military power, not one characterized by only one or two superpowers. He grounds his commitment to the sovereign legitimacy of multiple cultures (each of which should enjoy autonomy) to an innovative and controversial interpretation of the thought of Martin Heidegger. He also appeals to heterodox Brazilian and French anthropologists to argue for the inability to use the norms of one culture to criticize another. He argues this is the genuine basis for an anti-racist politics.
Where are the Egalitarian Anti-Modernists?
In this series, I have tried to show that there is a whole other anti-modernist tradition. I do not, however, see any such revival of interest going on there, not to the same extent anyway. This series could be seen as an extremely minor attempt to start changing that. I don’t see much of a revival of interest, especially in philosophical circles, of the past luminaries of this tradition. I don’t see people holding prestigious academic chairs talking about this stuff. Personally, there have been two main contemporary people I would class as egalitarian anti-modernists that are worth following.
The first is Paul Kingsnorth. He is an English novelist and former environmental activist now living and farming in rural Ireland. He states the fundamental awareness that has shaped his thinking in recent years along these lines:
I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every living culture in history, from the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.iv
He terms our current global system “the Machine” and seeks to analyze it historically and metaphysically. He works to envision ways we might avoid the social and individual catastrophes (or, more likely, survive through them) that “the Machine” is bringing upon us.
The second is Paul Cudenec. What first drew me to Cudenec was a friend tried to persuade me to read The Withway (2022). The friend said he was an anarchist. I knew that my friend, though I respect him in almost every other way, was susceptible to liking some anarchist thinkers. I thought “’nough said, what else do you want to talk about?” “Who is also into the Traditionalists,” my friend went on. That got my attention. OK, maybe something interesting there. “He’s a sort of a natural law thinker,” my friend said, he knew the hook was in good and strong now. Sneaky.
In The Stifled Soul of Humankind (2014), he seeks to show how the human longing and quest for freedom is a story of the Spirit (or “collective community if you prefer”v he notes). Cudenec seeks to undergird his anarchist politics with a substantive metaphysics of cohesion. The representatives of this spiritual tradition include “shamans, Greek philosophers, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, neoplatonists, medieval magicians, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Ranters, alchemists, Naturphilosophen, perennialists or contemporary neopagans”vi and, I think we could safely add, Sufis and some Christian heretics along the lines of the Cathars. It is the ‘soul of humankind’ that manifests itself in these religious movements and in political movements of liberation. Interesting stuff. The main culprits in this story are (1) modernity, (2) political Authority, and (3) the Christian Church.
A ‘common front’ of anti-modernists?
In the 1930s and 1940s, those on the political left formed a ‘common front’ to oppose fascism. The idea was to set aside in-fighting and unite the left behind a common cause. Surely the differences which separated Communists, Social Democrats, and even Anarchists, were less significant than what separated them from the Fascists! Can there be, and should there be, a similar alliance among Anti-Modernists (Aristocratic and Egalitarian) in the face of the globalist post-humanist regime, the Machine, or whatever you choose to call it?
Probably, not really. The ‘enemy’ is surely imposing enough. And there is something to be said for ‘the enemy of my enemy, is my friend.’ Common fronts don’t really work though (witness the Communists, literally, stabbing the Anarchists in the back in Spain during the civil war of the 1930s). On the intellectual plane, I refuse the proposition that there are people too evil to read. There are evil people and evil ideas; all the more reason to study them. And I will not just put serious thinkers into simplistic ideological categories of ‘the approved’ and ‘the forbidden’. For instance, I fundamentally disagree with Nietzsche, but also think there is no more profound analyst of ‘the death of God’. Carl Schmitt was a flat out Nazi and disreputable human being, but if you want to understand our current political situation, you should read him (see my previous essay). But that does not mean you ignore the differences or call black, white. Though, in a complicated world, there might be grounds for tactical alliances.
I have heard right-wing podcasters advocate that the right adopt the supposedly leftist maxim of ‘no enemies to the right’ to the point of including outright racists in their alliance. When I read people like Evola, I can appreciate and even learn from some of his ideas, like his development of Guénon’s discussion of the Kali Yuga.vii Nevertheless, it is usually only a few short pages before I sense real spiritual darkness. There may be a time when an Evolaian and I have a common enemy and make some sort of common cause, but there will not be a time when I say there is no real difference between our positions. That is, I think there can be cross pollination (as Morris drew inspiration from Carlisle), but not unity.
The sameness and the difference
As I indicated in the first essay, anti-modernists are those who feel the modern turn was a fundamental mistake. Any critique that does not go that deep, in my opinion, does not go deep enough. What is the unique contribution made by egalitarian anti-modernists that makes it matter? In my assessment, while the aristocratic anti-modernists might make a point of defending ‘the human,’ they do not necessarily remain humane. Dugin would be a case in point.
I would like to defend ‘the human’ from its myriad enemies, while also remaining humane. At a very practical level, that means valuing each person as a unique manifestation of ‘the human.’ No trodding over the herd or the mass for me. I’m a folk music and good beer kind of guy (see essay 8). This is what the egalitarian in ‘egalitarian anti-modernism’ stands for.
We need a revival of egalitarian anti-modernism. That voice needs to be heard above the din.
Post scriptum: In my considered judgment, the egalitarian strand of our thinking in the ‘West’ comes to us primarily (though not exclusively) from the Christian tradition. If it weren’t clear already, I’ll put my cards on the table, I’m “on the side of the rebel Jesus.”viii Long live Rousseau! Resistance, then creation.
i Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, translated by Thomas Friese and edited by Russell A. Berman, Telos, 2013, pp. 46-47.
ii Ibid, p. 86.
iii Alexandr Dugin, The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset, Arktos, 2021, p. 63.
iv Paul Kingsnorth, “The Cross and the Machine,” First Things, June 2021, The Cross and the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth | Articles | First Things
v Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind, Winter Oak, 2014, p. 2.
vi Ibid, p. 117.
vii Apparently, the idea that in the Hindu view of the cycles of time, the last and lowest stage, in which humanity is fully divorced from the divine. Eventually the gods reappear.
viii The Rebel Jesus – Jackson Browne – YouTube
Editor’s note: see here for a critical view of Aleksandr Dugin.
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