Showing posts with label Traditionalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Traditionalism. Show all posts

Saturday 15 October 2016

Shamanism And The Coming Of AI/Robot Culture

There is an honest question to be asked whether shamanism, as it is presented to us in the West as ideology or world view, actually exists today. What does exist are a number of shamanic practices that differ from place to culture, from culture to culture. In Europe at least, shamanic practice was destroyed as an identifiable set of techniques by the rise of monotheism amongst the elite and then, through witch-hunting, amongst the folk. Wherever the Catholic Church placed its heavy foot, shamanism was marginalised with its general categorisation of shamans as ‘devil-worshippers’ - whether in early medieval Poland or seventeenth century Peru. Puritans and missionary Buddhists were no better in their fanaticism.

We have a more tolerant view now but it is easy to go too far in the other direction and try to believe what is not any longer truly believable – that there are actual spirits (things that have life beyond the quiverings of quantum mechanics) in stones, plants and animals, things inside these things that would give them equal status to us. Perhaps we might be generous towards animals and even plants as evolutionarily capable of our level of sentience and self awareness but no one can seriously compare a cabbage or a dog with even the most intellectually weak of our own kind.

The cultural depredations of modern memetic engineers have created a dislocation between the past and the tribal shamanisms of today. Can any claimed shaman who is not a member of a tribe insulated from Western technologies and anthropological tourism possibly belong to an authentic tradition? Any contact with the Other changes the person making the contact and this cuts all ways - we are all contactees. Neo-shamanism and shamanic re-constructionisms that ape traditional forms are, however, the most deeply suspect. The record shows us no unified global shamanic culture and we can make no presumption that this is some sort of ur or noble savage state to which we can return.

Lived experience of shamanic thinking and behaviour is probably no more recoverable than the dinosaurs for Western observers. Many neo-shamanic practitioners may be sincere in their beliefs but they represent nothing but an aspiration to be something they can never be – authentically embedded in a living tradition. The desert origin soul-murderers of indigenous tribes who arrived in the backwoods of every continent on the back of empire have, probably and finally, won in that respect. There is unlikely to be a revenger from the ranks that matter - that of the indigenous peoples themselves who struggle to preserve what can be preserved but know in their hearts that even their most hallowed traditions must be made politically correct and acceptable to liberal modernity and have had to be adapted to being a mode of resistance rather than an expression of local hegemony.

This is not to deny that shamanism exists in the world. Chased out of Europe, shamanism still exists authentically, if under threat, in Russian Siberia and, with more difficulty and complexity, amongst the Inuit peoples. There are survivals in Taiwanese and Kazakh practice. The Chinese seem less sympathetic today to their own origins.  There is shamanism in Korea, in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), in corners of Japan itself and in a more debased form in India. Tantric Buddhism is a historic compromise between Buddhism and shamanistic Bo and Shinto represents an attempt at the institutionalisation of shamanism. There have been attempts, not always successful, to associate shamanic practice and African religions though there are certainly parallels amongst the San. There are also analogues amongst the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the indigenous peoples of Australia.

To call all Amerindians shamanistic without qualification all too often insults them. The differences are as significant as the similarities. There are shamanistic elements in the religions of the Chipewyan, the Cree and the Navaho and amongst those who use Ayahuasca. The Maya peoples and many of the peoples of the Amazon Basin and further South can also surely be called shamanistic. There are, in short, many remaining, if small in relative numbers, reservoirs of shamanic experience and behaviour. Unfortunately, these are now as much under threat from well-meaning New Age dim-wits as from Christian missionaries, scientific materialism and late capitalism.

Looking at this range of experiences, the idea of a fixed shamanic culture looks less and less tenable, a product of a Western obsession with categorisation and, in its current forms, no more ancient than Wicca. The appropriation of shamanism by New Age figures to solve their personal problems and dilemmas (much like the appropriation of Tantra as NeoTantra) increasingly appears like a piece of cruel or at least unthinking cultural imperialism. However, if we take away the attempt to mimic the forms of shamanism, there still remains an essence of what shamanic thought is and what it can do for our society once it is shorn of alien traditionalism and the egoistic appropriation of New Age narcissists. Let us look at what this essence may be and what it can do for us once all the mumbo-jumbo is removed and we allow indigenous peoples the dignity of the re-appropriation of their own traditions. There are four pre-conditions for a ‘shamanism’ for our times.

  1. The Shaman - The first pre-condition lies in the shaman figure himself or herself. Such a person has to be ‘fit’, mentally and physically robust enough to be an ‘exemplar’, of high intelligence (or at least animal cunning) and in the prime of life. They will undoubtedly have internally generated disciplines designed to sustain fitness, including care of the body, a mode of conducting themselves in society and a care for their own nutrition. Such a person is likely to be surprisingly ‘normal’, operating in society perfectly well if only because no ‘shaman’ is likely to be able to earn a full living from his or her skills. 
  2. Difference - By contrast, such a person is also likely to be ‘different’ and psychologically alone. There may be others like him or her but this is not a clubbable state. Shamanic status arises from some inward crisis, possibly from an inherited disposition to sensitivity or crisis. Shamans generally suffer a paradigm shift in themselves involving physical illness or a psychological crisis quite early in life. A shaman may also try to effect ‘difference’ from normal sexual roles as well, perhaps by taking on some of the attributes of the opposite gender, certainly being sexually ‘fluid'.
  3. Social Need - To afford a ‘shaman’ in society, there is going to have to be some sort of pent-up demand. The community must have no other ready means of solving questions surrounding bodily and mental health. This will also have to be a culture respectful (‘trusting’) of the shaman’s abilities as a representation of a form of ‘knowledge’, a culture of people seeking mediators between their own sorrow or pain and a world they imperfectly understand. A rational individualistic society will not want such mediation but this presupposes that such a society does not suffer from psychosomatic illness, is uninterested in ecstasy or believes that the answers to questions that lie in the subconscious are of no consequence. There is no such society under the sun. 
  4. The Need For A 'Mythos'- The shaman and his culture require a ‘mythos’, one that can hold all these abilities together as a coherent whole expressed in a wide range of semiotics – behaviour, language, imagery and ritual (a ‘grammar of mind’, after Pentikainen). The shaman will have greater knowledge of social and cultural memes than the rest of society and will have an intensity of engagement in altered states of consciousness in a way that is fully accepted by the rest of society.  This is knowledge that is not known by scientific means (or is not yet proven to be fully known by scientific means) but which ‘works’. Such knowledge is beyond good and evil and the shaman figure may risk mental illness and even death by going into this unknown territory. It is also a difficult knowledge for a society that wants moral order.

On the surface, there is no place in our society for the natural shaman. Shamanism seems doomed to be degraded, like Yantra, into another form of personal development for the worried well of the West. But such people still exist in our midst at a time when the welfare state and scientific rationalism are not dealing with many of the psychological and health issues of our society - or are dealing with them expensively and ineffectively through pharmaceuticals even where the conditions are not obviously organic or limiting them through 'political correctness', risk aversion and liberal totalitarianism. The shaman is probably there because he is a type of person and a relationship to the world rather than as representative of a culture or an ideology. The need is there.

What is not there is a post-rationalist ‘mythos’ that manages to fit the liberal culture of  contemporary democracy given that there is no traditionalist solution to the use of shamanic technique that is not inauthentic. Any new ‘mythos’ must work in a direct relationship to the actual state of our society and economy – just as the ‘shamanic’ cultures of indigenous peoples are embedded in their economies, environments and traditions.  The idea that the environmental skills of a South American ‘shaman’ have anything to teach us in an advanced Western society except at a level of abstraction far removed from the day-to-day concerns of most people is absurd. What is not absurd is to consider that a world of mass leisure without completely adequate resources under conditions of radical technology change (primarily caused by the convergence of robotics and AI) is going to create new environmental conditions requiring new ways of thinking about culture.

Those with indigenous skills are only fitted for a particular society at particular times. We need new skills and new myths for our place and our time. What can be learned from shamanic experience that might be developed along Western European lines without the idiocies and fakeries of reconstructionism, fake traditionalism and narcissistic self development? I suggest five areas of exploration ...

  • How to treat some psychosomatic sickness through the placebo effect - perhaps through dream interpretation, sympathetic shamanic travelling or other means as much as through handing over fake tablets (the British cup of tea in the 1950s was probably the most perfect placebo medecine in human history)
  • How to trigger visionary ecstasy through trance (Eliade’s ‘technique of ecstasy’, perhaps initiated through drumming or other sound patterns) or drugs. Why do this? Why, for the simple fun of it, of course - as distraction from having no meaningful function in life in the age of the robot.
  • How to use trance, divination and metaphor (even animal or spirit guides) to find answers to questions lying in the sub-conscious. Such a need emerges when basic wants are met but there are no resources to offer satisfaction for all desires and needs - to travel and network, own expensive things and consume exquisite food and drink, have status in society. A person turns inward to construct self-meaning lest they go mad with boredom and despair.
  • How to tap into the unconscious through divination techniques to tell the probable future and open up the ‘true will’ to self-scrutiny.  No, this does not mean you can actually know what it is going to happen in the future (no one does) but it might clear away the cobwebs of group think and increase the chances of making the right decisions for you rather to please everyone else, allowing unconscious knowledge to manage and control the dead zone of reasoning in a world of flux and poor information.
  • How to create an attitude of mind that can use a sustained narrative (a ‘mythos’) to ensure social, economic and environmental sustainability in the conditions in which we actually find ourselves in the West today. Again, this is not to be construed as support for the fashionable Gaian magical thinking of planetary consciousness but quite the opposite - how to find values that work with the total environment in which we find ourselves of which 'nature' is just a part and not necessarily the most important one.

A modicum of creative irrationalism does not mean that that we abandon scientific method or technology. On the contrary, 'shamanic' technique is merely supplemental at the macro-cultural level. At the micro-cultural level, however, where society meets individual psychic needs (the zone of the alleged ‘spirit'), there is a place for the person who can mediate between the individual and the world through metaphor, performance and even entheogens ensuring their safety and ther resolution of their problems. The psychotherapeutic tradition that emerged out of Freud's work may be a mere half way house here, simply adapting the individual to social reality instead of transforming society through transforming the individual. The tradition's success rate has not honestly been much better than that of the shaman to date.

Perhaps, one day, a culturally enlightened Government will place social management of drugs and the troubled part of the population in the hands of creative shamans (even if the psychotherapists will want first dibs at the gravy train). Mind you, the determination to professionalise and 'train' the shamans will almost certainly make them useless - managerialism is the social disease of the bourgeoisie, based on a perpetual and perpetuating risk averse fear of failure, or rather of being seen by others to fail. No doubt shamans without a Royal Institute of Shamanic Sciences Certificate Part IIA would have to be bailed out of jail every now and then but their street skills, assuming they are not completely regulated into meaninglessness, might help give meaning to the lost and save the taxpayer a fortune in sick benefit and healthcare costs.

Conventional religious communities, the psychotherapists, risk averse nervous ninnies and the scientific positivists will find common cause against such a radical idea but none has yet found a solution to the central problem of our time – that the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ needs resolution of its psychic problems within a matrix of belief that is their own and not that of their elites and that this crooked timber is about to be faced with some very straight-laced hyper-rational machinery that will govern their existence before too long.  Blowing up the machines is not going to be the way forward. By-passing both them and the technocrats with some creative irrationality may be.


Friday 17 April 2015

Legend and Contemporary Politics

[This is a much revised version of a piece first published in March 2012 in Eyeless Owl]

Politics over the last hundred years has been relatively resistant to mythic or legendary considerations. Legend can be used tactically for propaganda in a crisis or it can enter into the perceived history of a nation out of laziness, ignorance or manipulative deliberation. Yet, despite the influence of legend on nineteenth century romantic nationalism, most modern politicians most of the time like to avoid appeals to irrationalism. A distinction between mythic and legendary narratives allows us to place to one side in this posting faith-based political ideology - notably that of the Shi'a but also the now much reduced, except in the backwoods of America, biblical fundamentalist narratives about race and providence.

A legend is something based not on the will of God or God's intervention in the world but on re-interpreting what men have actually done. It also has to stand a certain reasonable time. The attempt at promoting the legends of JFK and Camelot and of Churchill's wartime record eventually fall into the hands of historians and soon cease to drive political decision-making - or, at least, they are eventually restricted to the mobilisation of factions or parties rather than whole communities. They start to die with the generations involved. The classical legends of Greece and Rome may be embedded deep within Western culture and are often used rhetorically but they cannot reasonably be said to be at the heart of modern Western political theory or practice. The exploits of Theseus and Heracles or of Horatio at the Bridge have ceased even being imperial exemplars.

The Modern World and 'Noble Lies'

The modern world might be regarded as rational with irrational characteristics whereas legends are 'noble lies', redrafts of history to instill exemplary values for largely conservative purposes. The remnants of legendism in the last century are intriguing for signs of where irrationalism may re-emerge as the basis for a trans-valuation of values in politics. We might draw a distinction between cultures where an otherwise long-since dead culture lives in the minds and values of the population and those where an event in the recent past has the potential to be recast in legendary terms.

We could also note that legend becomes distanced from politics with lessening vulnerability. Romantic nationalism owes a great deal to legends and romantic nationalism tends to appear strongest when a nation is submerged within an empire or under direct and immediate threat. Otherwise, quotidien money-making shifts legend quite quickly to the entertainment sector. This is why the most ambivalent attitudes to legend lie in nations that once relied on legend for their sense of continued existence but which now have developed into relatively wealthy late capitalist economies where legend has become the staple of the tourist and arts industries. Feeling Beowulf as part of one's identity is different to watching Ray Winstone strut his stuff in a movie.

Israel and Its Shadow

Perhaps the oddest example may be Jewish culture which has found legendism to cut both ways. The 'blood libel' guilt is no longer present in our culture but the awareness of it has created a sort of contra-legend about the ‘normality’ of anti-semitism. The legend that the founder of the Rothschild dynasty was given an inexhaustible barrel of oil by Elijah for a good deed in the eighteenth century might be seen as fraught with worrying potential in the current climate. Legendism has a long history in Jewish culture from biblical through rabbinical and hasidic cultures to modern Zionism. The living construction of legends in modern Israel and in the diaspora for contemporary purposes (no doubt mimicked in the Arab world) is a live political issue.

Its deepest and darkest enemy, national-socialism in Germany, was highly mythologised and, like Jewish culture, interested in adopting legend for nationalist purposes. This partly mythic, partly occult culture descended into bloody mayhem under such conditions that it seems unlikely that it will ever recover its political importance. Nevertheless, the Nazi mythos has to be noted as a continued inspiration for the marginalised Radical Right across the West and beyond. Its modern absurdities have moved on from Wotanism and from myths of an Aryan Atlantis to contemporary stories surrounding the origin UFOs. The legendary aspects started with the rewriting of history by strange outsiders like the Greek-French pseudo-Aryan Savitri Devi and have continued with tales of the escape of Nazis to Latin America.

Declining Western States

Three 'cases' to watch might be Eire as its 'Celtic Tiger' dream implodes, Spain - and Japan as its economic status begins to sink relative (though only relative) to that of China. A fourth may be (strangely) the most advanced of all - the US as it comes to terms with its own equally relative decline. Yet, Ireland saw no return to romantic nationalism under economic pressure - on the contrary Sinn Fein has 'degenerated' into another pragmatic fixer trying to get the best financial deal out of Dublin and London.

Traditional legends were still being created about Eamonn de Valera within the last hundred years but it seems unthinkable that such thinking can be recreated now, except that there remains a residual belief in the power of the land, national destiny and spirits that might be re-encoded into politics under extreme pressure in both Eire and Cymru - and perhaps Scotland. In the Irish case, the discrediting of the Catholic Church, as wave after wave of scandals related to past abuse of the vulnerable, leaves a cultural vaccuum that is being filled with European liberalism and not the return to traditional values.

Spain is interesting because the Legend of El Cid was played to great political effect by both the republicans and nationalists in the Civil War. Franco not only built an imposing new tomb for the legendary hero in Burgos Cathedral but organised national celebrations in 1943 both for the 900th anniversary of his birth and 1,000 years of Castilian independence. At the moment. Spain is very troubled but the corrupt old Right is not playing the legendary nationalist card but embedding itself deeper into Europe.

In Japan, the cult of the samurai, much of it quite recent in origin but with more ancient legendary roots, maintains a powerful role in modern Japanese history, reaching its post war epitome in Yukio Mishima's attempted coup in the 1960s, but this too has diverted itself into manga and anime and thence into the global games industry. Mishima himself is seen rightly by the Japanese as closer to the Western decadent tradition than as exemplar of traditional values. The modernisation of the Meiji period has allowed a persistent interest in ancient heroes but they do not drive an essentially pragmatic politics.

Bandits

The fourth case, the United States, brings us to a theme that is more germane to outlier and semi-developed cultures - banditry. Much of American legend is now made redundant out of regard for the American Indian (General Custer) or because an age of resource exploitation (Paul Bunyan) has passed. But the country of Jesse James and a tradition of murderous robbery from the American Civil War through to Dillinger have also created the standard 'Robin Hood' myth that we see in all frontier societies. But while the frontier has closed, the legend could yet have lived on against presumed rapacious bankers but it did not - protest remained law-abiding.

In the Balkans and the Turkic area, bandits and outlaws can still be politically relevant. The myth of the bandit became inspirational in the partisan ballads of the last century in Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (and elsewhere) while Kuroghli is the Turkic Robin Hood, a romantic, noble and generous rebel, challenging all authority. Kuroghli, a seventeenth century brigand, remains a 'living' legend, protector of the poor and enemy of the rich, perhaps available as an Islamist iconic figure, given the claims that he has the special protection of the Islamic pre-Mohammedan culture hero of Khidr or that he is the reincarnation of the significant Shia figure Ali, son-in-law to the Prophet.

The Caucasus

There are two nations (Armenia and Georgia) and many ethnic groups in the Caucasus with a strong sense of their own heroic past, mostly of resistance to authority derived from larger powers. This has expressed itself both as legends of banditry in the pre-revolutionary Soviet cause and as anti-Soviet risings after the Revolution. In Armenia, the saga of King Arshak II has been central to the story of struggle for freedom. It was a factor in the exile and death of the poet Osip Mandelstam in 1938 after he published a symbolic treatment in which the oppressor King Shapur was too easily seen as Josef Stalin, an association implied more than once in his poetry.

Stalin was a Georgian but the nationalist poet whose work he admired, Mikheil Javakhishvili, nevertheless died at the hands of the NKVD despite Stalin's appreciation of his novel about the romantic legendary early nineteenth century bandit Arsena. On the other side of the coin, perhaps fortunate to die in Tiflis in an accident in 1921 before Stalin started cleaning up behind him, was the revolutionary bandit Kamo (Ter Petrossian) who raised funds for Lenin in much the same way and not long after Stalin was doing the same in Georgia - through organised crime as a bank robber.

The link between past American resentments of bankers and our Caucasian revolutionaries is simply that crime becomes a political issue where the population no longer trust the State and where warlordism becomes an alternative to democracy. The alleged individualism and manliness of the cowboy offers another legendary model for libertarian resistance. It may seem extreme to suggest that the US is at risk from such a scenario but its legends of approval for free-booting criminals, maintained through its popular culture, show that the extension of the current chaos in Northern Mexico into the South West of the United States may well rely on a 'legendary attitude' hidden within American values. As we have noted, this did not result in rediscovery of Hobsbawm's 'social bandit' in the post-2008 economic crisis so we must conclude that the American people basically trust their system and prefer it to the rule, even theoretical, of warlords.

Asian and African Models

In Iran, the Shahname or 'The Book of Kings' remains a live legendary text for many Iranians who oppose the dominance of the Shia theocracy. This is not an immediate issue but, as we saw in the Arab Spring, it is not to be assumed that democratic liberals will be the beneficiaries of revolutionary changes.

A cult of Genghiz Khan was tolerated and even supported in Chinese Inner Mongolia to placate Mongol nationalism. A cult centre with battle standards was permitted on the steppes. But the old pro-Soviet Mongolian People's Republic took the opposite view, terming Genghiz Khan as a destructive tyrant (somewhat cheeky given the dominance of Stalin) and sought to suppress his cult at every opportunity.

In Africa, both the Zulus and the Afrikaners, who might yet combine politically in mutual defence against the poor and black urban majority, share opposite sides of the same historic event that has achieved legendary status to both peoples - the Battle of Blood River (1838) when General Pretorius defeated Dinganam, heir to Chaka's Zulu Empire.

The Americas and Pacific

We noted above the risks of warlord chaos spilling over into the South West of US and the drugs community is one of the few zones where legendary figures and tropes are being created in the contemporary world (outside the capitalist-financed media). This directs our attention to Mexico and other parts of Middle America where Indian resistance has always had a legendary aspect, ranging from 'Aztec nationalism' through the legendary appropriation of European themes (the Virgin of Gaudelupe) to support legends of victory over and resistance to predatory tribes backed by the invaders. Lower register forms of Aztlan nationalism extend into Chicano territory within South West Mexico and there are some reports of it appearing within the ranks of the crime lords whose bloodthirstiness may be seen within a longer traditionalist framework of hatred towards the gringos - and may yet be turned on the gringos more directly.

Finally, a very different sort of legend, the cargo cult, offers a form of resistance through emulation and manipulation in the Pacific that may well throw up the odd cult leader but the type hero of both the Aborigines and working-class whites remains - yes, you guessed it - the bandit. White Australians have a slew of legends of courageous legendary resistance to authority encompassing Ned Kelly, the Eureka Stockade and the historical events surrounding Gallipoli but it is the aborigines who can call on genuinely ambiguous criminals who were also cast as freedom fighters, men such as Tucklar, Yagan and Pigeon. It may be that Australia represents the last country in the world whose entire political culture is built on the sustained triumph of legend over historical reality. It may only be the undoubted dominance of the incomers over the indigenes that ensures that it is does not become a brutal clash of banditries.

Lost Leaders

The disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the anti-imperialist Indian National Army is an unresolved issue. He boarded a Japanese plane for an unknown destination and was never seen again. (The analogy with the disappearance of various Nazi leaders is noted, notably Hitler himself). The story of Bose suggests the many lost leaders who have disappeared. Many of them are still believed (not by modern men but as mythic ideas) to be ready to return when a nation is troubled. Their spirit may be seen as recoverable on the traditionalist Right. Amongst these are King Arthur, Charlemagne, Owen Glendwyr, Robert the Bruce, Frederick Barbarossa, Siegfried, Sir Francis Drake, King Sebastian of Portugal and Tsar Alexander I. The Romanov blood line was once believed to have survived in at least the genes of Princess Anastasia.

There are also the tales of the flying Dutchman and of the wandering Jew - who was seen in Salt Lake City in 1868, in Glamorgan in the early last century and said to have been a New York stockbroker in the 1940s. Not politically important perhaps but implying mysteries that continue to fascinate the media, the public and the internet.

Concluding Thoughts

Nor should we forget the magicians - there may be Rasputins yet to come at the courts of declining dictators and dynasts ... nor the Freemasons. Some like to cast Alexandre Dugin in that role at the court of Putin - Peter Mandelson developed a sinister (and probably unfair) 'legendary' role as Prince of Darkness within the Labour Party. We have not even touched the surface of legends of secret societies, Illuminati and other groupings seen as either agent of light or sinister manipulators in the contemporary legends of men under stress.

All in all, legendary tales and their role as irrationalism in politics may not have disappeared quite so much as we may believe even if we see little sign of active political importance. A 'legendary attitude' (acceptance of crime lords or a call for the spirit of lost leaders) may reappear and some nations may still be susceptible under pressure. Any real resurgence of traditionalist irrationalism is unlikely, partly because the world is interconnected enough that no leader of such a revolt can be wholly isolated from reality or get away with excessive departure from the facts - faith-based mythic irrationalism is a far greater danger. Note how Subcomandante Marcos, consciously created as a mythic figure to support the aspirations of the Mexican peasantry, is now seen as precisely what he was - a hyper real contemporary creation - rather than a creation of the 'volk'.  But the phenomenon shows us that a legend-based mobilisation of a population, handled with skill by an ambitious politician, prepared to develop an educated post-modern appropriation of its imagery, is still more than possible under conditions of extreme stress.

Saturday 13 September 2014

Critiquing Traditionalism ...

[This note assumes a very basic understanding of traditionalism and the perennial philosophy and of the work, in particular, of Rene Guenon, on the part of the reader]

Where traditionalism is right ...

1. ... in its suspicion of democracy because the working components of a democracy [individuals] are never equal in information or power. The skills of manipulation by those with information or power will always tend to disconnect a democracy from what it is to be a human being in the world. Traditionalism rightly questions whether deliberate modernising socialisation is ever compatible with 'gnosis' (that is, self awareness and self development) even if it falls into its own trap by proposing a socialisation derived from the past.

2. ... in its suspicion of the liberal insofar as liberalism is an ideology of rights, an absurd essentialist philosophical invention which too easily becomes a tool of the private oppression of some in the cause of the liberation of specific others. However, democratic neo-traditionalists make traditionalism even more wrong where it might have been right when they adopt the language of the Enlightenment against post-modernity.

3. ... in its particular suspicion of the bourgeois constitutional State which is the exemplification of both the false friend that is democracy in our current condition and of the equally unsound language and ideology of rights (and, as its associated liberal-communitarian heresy, of duties).

Where traditionalism is wrong ...

1. ... in its suspicion of modernity and the illusion that things known can be unlearned. Worse, that it would be good if some things had never been learned or that learning new things should now stop or be considered of lesser importance than endlessly regurgitating old things. The current situation of humanity is the highest truth of the moment and it supercedes all past moments of truth just as new truths will emerge from the process of existing in the world in time - and time is not reversible.

2. ... in its suspicion of the liberal insofar as liberalism is a practice of freedom. A person cannot exist as a person of spirit without making choices and choices require full freedom to make those choices whether with full information (the ideal) or best efforts at acquiring full information.

3. ... in its claim of a primordial essence of wisdom based on faith in a wise divinity that is embedded in the founders of each new faith in turn ... for if the founders of the great faiths were sparks of this primordial wisdom, why not the scientific materialist Karl Marx. How can traditionalists not know if Marx and Engels, whose movement was essentially religious, were not capturing some of this alleged divine essence? The claims of traditionalists in respect to religion as wisdom are absurd.

However ...

... what traditionalism, a false acquaintance seductive to simple minds, might have an insight into is a truth that is neglected in our time - that there is something primordial in us and in our society with which we must contend.

It is not that there is some absurd divine primordial truth out there but that there is a real evolved animal substrate to what it is to be human that is embedded in all human ideological forms and from which we will evolve further but over immense tracts of time.

There is no perennial philosophy here but there is a permanent foundation to humanity with which those who would bend humanity to perfectability or to the dictates of the ideal contend. The cruelties of the world often arise from the inability of humanity to be what either traditionalists or progressives wish it to be.

This is also not to say that Rene Guenon was not insightful in drawing a distinction between the exoteric (what we might call the various forms of socialised 'spiritual' reality) and the esoteric but he was mistaken in his understanding of the latter.

The esoteric is an individual reality that might be very various in form and need have no history beyond the person's creation of himself or herself against their immediate experience of the world.

There can be no union between an individual and some over-arching 'principle' because any such principle is either the creation of the person themselves in a state of illusion or is the creation of the social i.e. is, by definition, a form of illusion at the individual level.

The individual represents its own union with itself and this union is simply a coming to terms of the individual with his situation in the world, a process of individuation.

To claim to be part of a tradition that belongs or answers to to the Absolute is to fail to understand that the Absolute has no knowable existence under any circumstances and that the only coming to terms with the Absolute that is possible is its creation in his own image by the individual.

It is a crafting of the Absolute for personal use-value. Each individual is thus his own God and he creates his own redeeming 'Christ' by appropriating the Absolute for his own internal salvation. An analogy might be torn from any of the world religions which are all misleading in this respect as far as true 'salvation' is to be found.

Again, there is insight in Guenon when he identifies, gnostically, the spark of the Absolute within the person yet he then misdefines it. The spark of the Absolute is not there to be discovered but is to be created out of nothing by the individual looking into themselves and relating to the world.

The Asian religions (to which Guenon looked in this respect) are the falsest friends of all because they edge so closely to the reality of the situation. They recognise the closeness of the Absolute to ourselves but then give privilege of place to that Absolute over the person, whereas this Absolute-thing is, in fact, the illusion and it is the person in the world that is real.


Traditionalism as Hysteria and Fear

Traditionalism descends into hysteria when it becomes 'millenarial' with its myth of our living in the Kali Yuga as if the past was ever more golden. We are, in fact, not descending, we are rising. It is the sense of the Kali Yuga that drags traditionalism into the arms of the Far Right by means of its appropriation by (say) Evola, a half-baked theorist seeking liberation through evasive strategies.

The pessimism of the traditionalists drives them ever downwards in their alienation from the process of being in this world and in this time. It is wiser to be always ready for the next 'this world' in the next 'this time'.

The Kali Yuga for these radical traditionalists is apparently determined ontologically by matter whereas earlier times were not. This is truly absurd - it is not that we are distanced from spirit and increasingly embedded in matter but that we are rising out of matter slowly but surely through the exercise of our increasingly developed minds into something for which the word spirit or soul might be used analogically but which is neither ... simply enhanced being.

Minds are constantly exhibiting new qualities (or discovering how to make use of untapped capabilities) on the basis of the increasing sophistication of matter in constructing minds, triggered in part by our own human determination on technology. The word 'spirit' may become redundant but perhaps 'soul' might be recovered here to describe what is being created.

As for traditionalist initiation, one can have no objection to it as a free choice for free persons but it is a choice in favour of limitation and constraint. Initiation in particular exhibits a fear and anxiety about the terrors of self-creation that will embed a person more, not less, deeply in their own psychic matter. It is an attempt to close off mental 'inputs' and become micro-socialised against the world.

The Politics of Traditionalism

The traditionalist critique of modernity in a religious or 'spiritual' sense must be differentiated sharply from the use to which such ideas are put by the far right in particular. A true traditionalist is an a-political or a conservative pessimist but is rarely a right-wing extremist because right-wing extremism, in countering some forms of the modern, becomes severely modernist in its actuality.

The a-political traditionalist is wise - all ideologies that counter democracy, bourgeois constitutionalism and rights theory to date have been attempts to shift power from the beneficiaries of liberalism to those who have not had a slice of the cake. The ideas are mere excuse.

In this, they are no better and no worse than liberals ... but a radical idealist's lack of respect for the bargaining and the negotiation that is explicit in liberal democracy means that, when they seize power, they are accordingly more cruel and less basically competent in the long run, cruel and incompetent though liberalism often is itself.

There is an experiment in this being carried out in the Middle East as we write. ISIS, a radical traditionalist operation, has managed to make the cruelties of the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria seem benign but only because it has offered levels of apparently causeless (though we merely refuse to recognise the cause) violence and cruelty without apparent purpose far beyond the cruelties of modernising statecraft - or so we like to believe.

Traditionalism's conservative pessimism about politics or rather about the struggles for advantage within any socialised reality is probably correct - its extension to the human condition in the very long term may not be. There is no need to be pessimistic about humanity and its condition or to pull up a drawbridge against the modern world.

Traditionalism is a dead end in our culture - an attitude held by a type of mind, the product of gloom and anxiety, a means of withdrawing from complexity - but it does raise questions about the intellectual viability of liberal Western culture that remain unanswered and which will come to haunt us in the coming decades as the enlightenment is forced to return to its mission of applying critical thought to the issue of what it is to be human.