Reflections on the First Russian Congress of Traditionalists
Today, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that humanity is not at all moving down the path it should be moving down, and that the promises of progress, development, and universal enlightenment have proved false or altogether unattainable. A hundred years ago a majority of people looked into the future with optimism, awaiting a transition to something better, in some sense guaranteed by the very logic of history. Today an entirely different mood prevails in societies: if it isn’t directly apocalyptic, it is at least skeptical regarding the “unrestrained burst of humanity forward into progress and enlightenment.” Although technical development continues at full speed, mechanisms are perfected, machines become “smarter,” and means of communication improve their possibilities, this does not affect human happiness directly at all, does not guarantee any moral or spiritual heights, and does not increase justice in the social order. The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka correctly remarked that “if before the first quarter of the 20th century the idea of progress prevailed in the humanities, later the theory of cyclical crises and the theory of catastrophes became more popular.”
If at the beginning of the century only a few intellectuals struggled with anxiety about the problematic future of humanity, like Spengler, who pronounced the “Decline of the West,” or Nietzsche, who pointed to the rise of nihilism and “the death of God,” then in our days the sense of catastrophe is becoming widespread in the broadest spheres. It is penetrating into mass culture and becoming the prevailing outlook. The promised eternal world, humanism, justice, the constant growth of wealth, the eradication of poverty, the impending moral ascent of humanity — these are no longer expected to ever be realized. Alienation grows alongside the improvement of technical devices, technology displaces life, and new scientific achievements are used for the perfection of the military complex of global, hegemonic states. The more the talk of peace and calm, the greater the bloody sacrifices and violence.
Now is the time to start thinking about how to explain such a turn. What are its ideational bases? After all, the obvious psychological condition should be accompanied by more systematic, structural principles that raise all of that into a system. Just as hopes for the bright future gave rise to the theory of progress, so shouldn’t the growth of skepticism and disappointment lead us to a theory of regress?
Such a theory, in fact, has long since been created and developed, although it was until very recently the property of a relatively narrow circle of intellectuals. I’m talking about traditionalism: a philosophy, worldview, ideology, style. It’s time to give it more steadfast attention.
Although traditionalism came to Russia more than twenty years ago, when the first translations of the classics of this philosophy were made (the texts of René Guénon, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, Titus Burckhardt, etc.), the first texts of properly Russian traditionalists, and the first representative conference of traditionalists, occurred altogether recently, in the fall (October 2011). Several eminent figures of the European branch of this movement — notably, a sheikh of the Sufi order ‘Abd al-Wājid, Sergio Yahya Pallavicini, Claudio Mutti, traditionalist publisher and professor, and publisher and scholar Christian Boucher — as well as Russian traditionalist philosophers participated. Although in the congress almost a hundred papers and presentations on the classical themes of this movement were discussed — Tradition against the modern world, society’s loss of the spiritual, the vertical, and the notion of sacral order, critiques of Western civilization, and studies in the domain of traditional religions (Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, etc.) — some unconventional themes were also raised: the metaphysical interpretation of postmodernity, the philosophy of chaos, and the structural-linguistic analysis of religion and spiritual philosophies. The organizers of the conference also accented the philosophy of Plato and its influence on classical religions and various philosophical systems.
Twenty years is a relatively short period of time for a difficult-to-understand doctrine to be introduced, and then disseminated by conferences for Russian assimilation. Nevertheless, as the European classics of this approach noted, the Russian school of traditionalism has not only been successful, but represents an original, living, and to a significant extent, reactive orientation, absorbing into its ranks many intellectual youths, students, graduate students, and scholars. The connection of Russian traditionalism with the academic milieu, not usual for Western representatives of this movement, were underscored by the fact that the organizers of the conference were the sociological faculty of Moscow State University together with the Center for Conservative Research, which has been very actively engaged with traditionalism in recent years. Many doctors and candidates of sciences, graduates, and students participated in the work of the conference. Academic interest in traditionalism was vividly demonstrated.
The well-known traditionalist and conference participant Claudio Mutti spoke as follows in the final plenary session about the state of contemporary Russian traditionalism:
I’m amazed by what I’ve seen here, coming to Moscow twenty years after my first visit. Twenty years ago this country was falling apart, and strange people were walking the streets. I couldn’t imagine that twenty years later questions of traditionalism would be interpreted here on such a level and with such enthusiasm. This differs significantly from all traditionalist events I’ve attended in Western Europe. I’d like to note that when we talk about the discussion of those questions of traditionalism that were raised in this conference, an altogether different atmosphere prevails in Western Europe. First, the audience there, even in large European capitals, has practically no chance of gathering as many people interested in the problematic of traditionalism as here, but most of all I’m impressed by the elaborateness and depth with which the participants expounded their arguments. Second, while in Western Europe traditionalism is mainly a conservative movement, which insists either on the preservation of what is or the reproduction of what was, or is a sort of alibi for many to do nothing, here, in Russia, I saw that traditionalism is permeated by a creative, innovative spirit. Even the very fact that this conference is dedicated to postmodernity is a sign of the creativity and originality of the approach.
So, what is traditionalism? It is a school [of thought] associated with the works and ideas of the French philosopher René Guénon (1886–1951). If we look at Guénon from a sociological point of view, he will not seem to be quite the complex and confused mystic he is sometimes made to be. Moreover, while being an extreme conservative, Guénon in many respects anticipated the philosophical methodology of postmodernity, though in a very peculiar sense.
The essence of Guénon’s theories consisted in the following. There are two types of society, traditional and modern, entirely different in their basic arrangements, value systems, and socio-political modes (any humanities scholar or sociologist would agree), but the majority of people today automatically identify with modern society and uncritically absorb, through suggestion, the arrangements of the modern world. Thus modern man also forms an impression about the world of Tradition, about traditional society, starting from a completely pre-given basis: traditional society is seen by default as something under-developed, dark, based on superstition and irrational assumptions, as something unscientific, uncivilized, and technologically backward. In other words, traditional society is thought of as the first step of a program, preceding “real society,” the society of modernity. This approach is based on axiomatic acceptance of the claim that the world develops in the direction of perfection (from small to large, from worse to better, from simple to complex) and that progress governs the course of world history.
René Guénon proposed looking at things from an opposite perspective. He showed that progress is nothing but an ideology, a social model for explaining complex processes around us, and so it cannot be taken as an axiom. It is a hypothesis, nothing more, which won for itself the right to be a dogma during the course of what Guénon thought was not an altogether fair fight, hence the lack of understanding about Tradition and its values, the idolatry of material, time, technique, individualism, and the series of ever newer automatons. We need only discard the prejudices of progress, however, and the world will reveal itself in a new light. Traditional society will prove to be not “insufficiently modern” but simply radically other, based on eternity, sacrality, hierarchy, appeal to God and the spirit, and not to matter and sense experience. We need only tear our gaze away from the earth towards the sky to understand that precisely Tradition, including religious tradition, says what our soul requires from itself, about spirit, about being, about the world, and about God, while modern society serves only corporeal needs. At the same time, the value of the body and lower psychic impressions are not only taken into account but begin to prevail and displace spiritual values. With modernization comes a total break with the world of being, the Primordial. Man is distanced from his archetype. Society loses order and is scattered into fragments, atoms, parts, and individuals. Tradition is integrity [wholeness]. Modernity is entropy, dispersion, and dissipation elevated into the rank of a value and actively spread everywhere.
Thus, in his work Crisis of the Modern World Guénon provides a devastating critique of the basis of all of Western civilization, predicting its impending and inevitable end. At the same time, he advances an alternative system of values found in traditional society, established on the foundations of religion, spirit, faith in hierarchy, and metaphysics. In this way, the proportions are reversed: instead of the idea of progress, customary for modern people, and the placement of modern society above traditional society, Guénon advances the directly opposite idea that modernity is not progress but regress, decline, the fall of humanity into the abyss of matter, sensuality, corporeality, and mechanicalness. Modernity is the degradation of Tradition; progress is the collapse of values, and a path into the abyss. Accordingly, those forces, philosophies, and socio-political tendencies that are oriented toward the modernization of traditional society are, according to Guénon, bearers of evil perversion leading humanity to its death. For Guénon everything modern is depraved, everything traditional deserves respect and veneration. Religion, hierarchy, sacrality, and metaphysics are true; democracy, profanism, and rationalism are false. We get a radically new perspective on the essence of the historical process: it is not a path upwards, but a slide down, not a drawing near to the truth, but a falling away from it, not a movement to spiritual horizons, but immersion into the material abysses of nothing.
Can this last long, Guénon asks? And he answers: no, it can’t. We stand face to face with a fateful feature of Western civilization that carries the rest of the world with it. In his fundamental book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon depicts the material world as a “great parody” that must come to the final limit of materialism and atheism. In this parody we recognize the figures of traditional religious eschatology, the figure of the anti-Christ, for Christians, the Dajjal, for Muslims, and the “erev rav,” the great confusion of the Kabbalists.
What should we do? Guénon suggests that it is too late to do anything; nothing can stop the West in its expansions, in its globalization. It is a matter for unique personalities capable of recognizing the entire drama of the historical situation to exert heroic efforts to tear themselves from the captivity of modernity’s hypnosis, to unite into a sacral elite of the end times, and to raise the flag of traditionalism as the final custodian of the holy before the face of hell arises. The community of traditionalists, those professing traditional religions and able to recognize the true character of the surrounding world, becomes, in his theory, the “ark of salvation.”
In the end, though, Guénon’s philosophy is optimistic. After describing the horrors of the modern world and its inevitable collapse, he declares that all cosmic manifestations are nothing but illusions, and beyond the end of this world another begins. The truth always remains eternal and hidden behind the veil of a mirror game, but the spirit of metaphysics is capable of penetrating into it even in the most difficult circumstances.
Guénon himself converted to Islam, moved to Cairo, became a Sufi sheikh, and broke for good with the West and with Western society, which he regarded as the source of the global infection of the spirit. By his example he showed how it is possible to leave the modern world of the West and find a spiritual homeland in the East which is, as of now, less permeated by the devilish structures of modernity.
Guénon’s followers drew various conclusions from his worldview. Some followed their teacher into Islam. Others tried to apply his ideas to Christianity and Judaism. Significant, too, is the case of his follower, the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola (1898–1974), who can rightfully be regarded as the second most eminent figure after Guénon in this school. By temperament a warrior and soldier, Evola did not agree with the passive rejection of modernity but proposed to put up a fight, to join with the European Conservative Revolution movement in order to challenge it, and to try to revive society on principles of Tradition, despite the difficult circumstances of modernity. Evola asserted that the West was first to descend into the phase of perversion, decline, and degradation, having adopted the decadent values of democracy, liberalism, humanism, and materialism, but that it is also destined to be the first to exit the crisis. Evola called not only for the recognition of the “crisis of the modern world,” but for revolt against it, too. Thus, his major work is called Revolt Against the Modern World. In it he describes the structure of traditional society, shows the trajectory of its degeneracy and collapse, and outlines a plan for the restoration of Tradition in the course of an active and full-blooded metaphysical and spiritual, but also political and existential struggle. Evola was convinced that it was necessary to destroy the root of European decline and return to Europe’s spiritual foundations, reestablishing a sort of “New Middle Ages.”
Evola tried to embody his ideas by the most diverse means and despite the failure of some political efforts connected one way or another with the Conservative Revolution in the 20th century, he remained true to his initial plans of giving traditionalism a practical, operational dimension, of changing both the outside world and the subject himself. At the end of his life Evola concentrated on the strategy of “riding the Tiger” (as one of his later works is called), which is to say not simply to oppose the tendencies of modernity, but to stand on the side of certain revolutionary tendencies directed against the modern world, though not for conservative reasons, and later to shift them into another direction. Thus, he advanced the thesis of the “differentiated man,” who is able to preserve a vertical posture among the collapsing, disintegrating world of modern liberal degradation. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, another conservative revolutionary, also advanced the idea that: “Formerly, conservatives strove to oppose revolutions, but we must join them, and be at the head of them, and lead them into a different direction.” Evola’s late ideas fit this logic perfectly.
Guénon and Evola had a tremendous influence on certain circles of Western intellectuals. They inspired many philosophers, in particular, René Daumal, Georges Bataille, and Gilbert Durand; André Gide, Antonin Artaud, Ezra Pound, Jean Parvulesco, and Éric Rohmer were under their influence. Of course, on account of their radical critique of modernity and its foundations, they could not count on broad dissemination or a deserving place in the general context of modern philosophy. All those who were interested in non-conformism, however, those who strove to get out from under the oppressive frames of liberal political correctness, could not pass them by indifferently. They either filled such people with hatred, or, on the contrary, seized them.
Regardless, in the course of a century, the philosophy of traditionalism took shape as a kind of independent ideational movement [i.e. school of thought]. It was discovered in Russia by members of the so-called Yuzhinsky Circle (Mamleev, Golovin, Dzhemal) in the 1960s, but the works of traditionalists started to be published at the end of the 1980s.
In our time all the conditions are present to give this philosophy heightened attention. This is important to do for the following reasons:
1. The crisis of modern civilization, the inner contradiction of Western ideology, clearly obvious dual standards of international politics, and the moral crisis of technological society are evident. These things are no longer possible to deny. In order to correctly comprehend and describe what we are dealing with, to accurately comprehend the crisis of the modern world, theoretical philosophical instruments are necessary to help us find the right formulas. Formerly this function was served in part by Marxist criticism, which strictly criticized liberal capitalism, concealing even more painful contradictions, but in our time the ideational potential of Marxism as a critical theory has been exhausted. It lacks the correct means to describe the processes unfolding in the modern world, and it received a very difficult, or even fatal, blow in the collapse of the socialist system. As a result, critique from the left is becoming unpopular. The time of critique from the right is arriving. The French traditionalist René Alleau foresaw this when he wrote his highly astute article “Guénon and Marx,” which showed the similarity of these thinkers in their relentless critique of the Western bourgeois world. Indeed, this criticism is even more total in Guénon.
2. Alongside disappointment in progress, the influence of conservative ideas is increasing, but conservatism will remain vapid if it insists on only the presently existing state of affairs, the status quo. What exists now will change, which means that the conservative ideology will also change, so it is necessary to turn toward deeper values, unchanging and related to eternity. That is precisely what traditionalism proposes to do in its fundamental critique of historical time, rejection of progress, and apologia for the invariable vertical spiritual order. With traditionalism’s uncompromising faith in, and summons to a return to, the roots, customs, and religion and its invariable truths, traditionalism is the core of consistent conservatism.
3. Russia must choose its path in a rapidly deteriorating world. This deterioration presents itself as technical and social improvement, but in fact it leads the situation to an ever greater dead-end. The creation of a speculative financial economy drove the global economy into a deep crisis. The American model of controlling the world through the control of finances and the reserve currency brought many countries, including the US itself, to the brink of bankruptcy. In this situation, what is necessary are not technical measures, but some kind of radical decision, a certain decisive turnabout. Traditionalism offers the entire necessary philosophical, ideational, conceptual, and sociological apparatus for that.
That is the relevance of traditionalism, and that is why the first congress of traditionalists in Russia took place at the right time, precisely when the right historical circumstances were there.
In the world of ideas and philosophical concepts, time flows differently than it does in ordinary life. A minor change in the structure of one or another theory, or an original formation of concepts or philosophical speculations, can bring about very serious changes, so it would be too naïve to await ready-made decisions from the traditionalist congress; but nevertheless, there were such results.
First, many presenters set themselves the task of showing that the philosophical background of Guénon and his followers’ traditionalism is extremely close to the Platonic tradition and its full-fledged, and radical, idealism, as well as its assertion of the invariability of the world of principles, ideas, models, and the circulation of reflections in the world of phenomena and material bodies. The further a copy moves from the original, the more it loses its similarity to it and the more isolated it becomes from it. Thereby it loses its meaning, essence, being, beauty, and verity.
In other words, traditionalism can be taken as radical Platonism, and, consequently, it can qualitatively enrich its language through broad appeal to Platonic sources in the most diverse traditions, from the Christian dogmatics of the Cappadocian Fathers to the mysticism of Dionysius the Areopagite or to the Hesychasts. In Islam, besides the philosophers proper, al-Farabi or Ibn Sina, Platonism permeates the Sufi tradition, Shiite gnosis, and the philosophy of Ishraq. In Judaism, Platonism is the basic map for the Kabbala and its theories of emanation. Thus, Platonism provides a serious philosophical basis for the development of dialogue of traditional confessions to the extent that they strive to defend their identity and withstand the pressure of secular globalization. On a dogmatic basis, inter-confessional dialogue beyond a certain point is not possible because of the fear of losing identity and falling into syncretism. A properly traditionalistic language is too extravagant and sophisticated to be applied universally, but read through the eyes of traditionalists who have first digested Guénon and Evola, precisely Platonic philosophy provides the basis for the elaboration of a consolidated position of all those forces in the world that stand on the side of the sacral.
Moreover, armed with Platonism, traditionalism can easily enter the academic sphere and present its perspectives in a language considered appropriate in that domain.
This conclusion will still need to be defended and secured, but the direction has been set. In the most extreme and radical case we can speak of political Platonism and even of Platonic revolution.
Another highly significant conclusion from the traditionalist congress concerned the understanding of the phenomenon of postmodernity. Guénon describes the historical process as three states of the “Cosmic Egg,” a figure adopted from the Orphic and Hindu traditions; there are echoes of this symbolism in the tradition of painting eggs during Easter. In the normal case (traditional society), the “World Egg” is open from the top, and rays of the primordial (God) penetrate into the world directly, making each thing a symbol, a reflection, a manifestation of higher being. That is the sacral world, the Universe [Vselennaya] awash in the sacred light. The second condition corresponds to the modern world: the “World Egg” is closed at top. Rays no longer reach things. Each thing begins to signify only itself. That is the profane (non-sacral) order, the epoch of materialism, rationalism, and humanism, but in his book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon describes another condition, which he locates in the future (he died in 1951). That is the opening of the “World Egg” from below, when things begin to serve as support not for divine [nebesnykh] influences, but for the direct invasion of democratic essences. Things become not only non-sacral (profane), but “possessed,” “demoniac.” Guénon calls this last phase of history “the great parody.” In Christianity, it is described as the epoch of the Antichrist. The Antichrist parodies Christ.
This corresponds to the traditionalist interpretation of postmodernity. Instead of the ideal traditionalistic caste republic [gosudarstvo, state], described also by Plato, instead of Platonopolis we are witnesses of the appearance of the anti-republic, and the anti-polis, the Devilopolis. This is a type of socio-political system in which all threads lead not to the unified source [edinoe nachalo] (“symbol,” in Greek, means “uniting”) but to division, corruption, decomposition, entropy, and dispersion (and in Greek this is “devil,” from “diabol-,” i.e. “dividing,” “disuniting.”)
Thus, traditionalists should reconsider somewhat the classical critique of modernity, which the founders of this philosophy formulated, and move towards a critique of postmodernity, which means that not profanism, but parody, simulacrum, and counterfeit become the main enemies of traditionalism and the main features of Devilopolis.
Not the profane, but the pseudo-sacral, not atheism, but pseudo-religion, not the strict dictates of materialistic dogmas, but the soft “permissiveness” of an indifferent open society — this is what represents the main challenge for traditionalism.
The Devil is described in Tradition as a mocker and as an ape of God. Today’s cult of humorists, whose jokes are gradually becoming less funny, more stupid and base, and from that more ominous, is highly significant in this regard.
One presentation suggested the idea that in the structure of Devilopolis things acquire a common quantitative equivalent, a price. The reduction of things to money, and money to collections of numbers or to a barcode, is the expression of their integration in Devilopolis, a mechanism of their penetration by a ray from “beyond,” breaking forth from under the bottom of the “World Egg.” A thing loses its real value the moment when it acquires a price and, accordingly, a price tag, but our civilization is built wholly and completely on money. It is the civilization of Mammon. It is not possible to serve God and Mammon simultaneously.
Thus, the traditionalist and conservative approach leads us to the field of social criticism, the calcification of capitalism, and opposition to the modern economic system.
Surprisingly, little was said at the conference about Russia (compared to similar events where Russian intellectuals gather). This is significant. Russia is a part of the modern and post-modern world. Whether we like it or not, the processes occurring in the West exert a strong influence on us. Whether we strive to imitate the West openly (modernization, liberalization, Westernization) or think about adapting Western technologies to national interests, we are captive to Western concepts, Western sciences, Western theories, and Western language. Since that is so, we are on the periphery of Devilopolis, not an alternative to it, but one of its remote provinces preserving, by inertia, some ties with traditional society, not through our own will, resolve, or choice, but because the tendencies and directives from the “center” reach us with difficulty and haphazardly. Russia is not the anti-West, but the not-quite-West [nedo-Zapad, nedo, under, as in under-developed, on its way towards, but falling short of]. Elites would like to see it as “the West,” but they understand it very poorly, while the masses, it seems, don’t understand anything at all.
Postmodernity comes to us through mass media, styles, habits, modes, computer networks, and youth culture but at the same time it is far from being understood or sounded out. What is more, society on the whole is in a state of indecision: it no longer strives “beyond the border,” as it did in the 90s, nor does it yearn to imitate the West in everything, but it also cannot consolidate itself around some sort of alternative, cannot insist on its unique identity [samobytnost’, self-being; originality, identity], since this unique Russian identity is elusive and distinct.
Yes, we have not proceeded as far along the path of collapse as Western society has done, but that does not mean that we are full of resolve to avoid that path, or to consciously choose Tradition. Of course not, and that is wrong.
If Russia wants to survive spiritually, it must stand under a different banner, under the banner of Tradition, radical conservatism, Orthodox faith in union with other traditional confessions, and, if you like, under the banner of “Revolution against the post-modern world.” Those who have discovered for themselves the traditionalist worldview have made such a choice.
Ahead are a crisis and the quick end of the known order. Guénon asserted with full justification that this wretchedness cannot last long. All the signs of the times are present. The people of Platonopolis have made their choice. The powers of Devilopolis have chosen a different fate for all the others.
Does Russia have a chance to turn to another path? This chance always exists where there is will, intellect, and resolve. We need only transform our apparent deficiency (lag) into our merit and take the decisive step, not forward (the abyss is there), but… into eternity (you thought backwards, but not backwards).