There is a spiritual malady that lacks diagnosis...

Materialism is the product of a Late civilisation in decay. Materialist doctrines whether on economics, sociology, or history can only interpret according to the gross visions of the “last man” of a dying culture, albeit undertaken in the name of “progress”. “Progress” is an illusion. History is organic and therefore cyclic. What is called “progress” today has been seen many times before. Yet our Late Western historians assure us that we are in the best of times, at the “end of history,” where Utopia is finally achieved as the crescendo of five thousand years of civilisation. All of history has been marching in a straight line inexorably towards the present. Any who resist are “reactionaries”.

Any destructive, depraved or pathogenic fad, ideology or policy can be called “progress”. Those who express a more “conservative” approach to current contrived “issues” such as feminism, “reproductive rights”, multiculturalism or the current fads of “transgender choice”, and “refugee migration”, are ridiculed as “fossils” with anachronistic views within modern society. “Such a view in this day and age…”, we hear continually, to ridicule anyone who objects to what is called “progress”. Yet, what we are told is “progressive” and “modern” is a replay of pathogenic symptoms that have been seen during the Late epoch of civilisations over millennia. If a sage from Egypt, India, Israel, China, Greece, Rome, Persia, were to return today and survey the trends and ideologies that are called “progressive” and “modern” he would smirk, frown, laugh or sneer, and cry out “been there, done that”. Today’s fads and fancies are as “progressive” as a cancer that changes the cells of an organism. Both, after all, are agents of “change”.

Those who do realise that the Late West is in a terminal state, rather than at the dawn of a universal era of peace and plenty, often also do so from materialistic assumptions. Like Karl Marx attempting to formulate an anti-capitalist ideology within the materialistic Zeitgeist of 19th century England, but instead formulating another version of the same; zoological theories about “race”, where a “race” is defined by statistical analyses of skulls, bones, gene clusters, and I.Q.; are as materialistic as defining the worth of a culture by calculating its gross national product. The 19th century Zeitgeist, part of a centuries’ long process starting in the West about the time of the Renaissance, saw the birth of “modern” race theories alongside the rise of Darwinism, Marxism and Free Trade.

Race-materialism is like any other form of materialism. As with Marxism, it is a symptom of decline; not an answer to it. Assumptions are made about civilisations dying due to miscegenation, which discount the organic rhythms of life and death. The outlook of the race-materialist is the same as that of the Marxist materialist or the Liberal: that if certain laws are followed utopia awaits. The reality of death is called “pessimism”, hence the rejection or ignorance of Spengler among much of the “Right”. Yet the optimism of the materialist obscures the possibilities of new life, like someone who refuses to prune a tree of dead matter because the dead matter was once colourful and vibrant. The materialistic Zeitgeist that now hangs over the entire world thanks to globalisation, obliterates the metaphysical and spiritual connexion that a culture must maintain if it is live.

Race-materialism is part of this process. Enamoured with the new materialistic sciences of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics, the spiritual meanings of race and culture that had been previously in vogue, especially among the German Idealists, were lost. Ironically, Hitlerism adopted English science at the expense of German metaphysics. The wider application of Darwinian evolution to history, sociology and economics enhanced materialistic conceptions. Again, England was the birthplace of this, concomitant with the industrial revolution and the Manchester School of Free Market economics’. Hebert Spencer, the most influential, widely read philosopher of his day, combined Darwinism with Liberal economics. Darwin saw man an animal; Freud saw man as a penis, and Marx saw man as a stomach. All contributed to the existential problems of the Late Westerner.

Those who resist the “spirit of the age” of decay, yet who are caught within it, like Karl Marx, cannot see from the perspective of detachment. Paradoxically, we Westerners might profit by turning to traditional texts from the East, such as the Bhagavad Gita. Evola certainly recommended such study. We Westerners are bogged down in a quagmire of decadence that does not allow one to see with detachment.

The severing of our connexion with the divine and the fracturing of our collective psyche started centuries ago. The collapse of the West has been imperceptible over the gradual course of centuries. Our course of death is likely to be that of a whimper rather than a bang, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. Hence what we see as causes are symptoms and often secondary symptoms at that. There is a spiritual malady that lacks diagnosis because the diagnostic tools have been replaced by materialistic methods to examine materialistic pathogens, that are symptoms rather than causes. What is required is a return to the spiritual essence in defining race and history.

There have arisen new developments in science that have reconnected the nature of man with what was once called the metaphysical and the spiritual, which are renewing our traditional perceptions of man’s place in the cosmos. Epigenetics and morphic resonance both provide empirical insights into how races and ethnoi are formed through history and landscape, and how Jungian race archetypes of the collective unconscious can be passed along, without discounting genetic laws, as per Lysenko.

Once the unpalatable realisation of the inexorability of the West’s death is realised and accepted, consideration might be given as to what can follow. The question is whether the Late Westerner enters a phase of what might forever be that of the fellaheen, existing outside history, or whether there are elements of the West that might contribute to another culture cycle. After the fall of the Roman Empire the Italic peoples did not become fellaheen, they became part of a synthesis with the Gothic and Frankish peoples, enabled by the catalyst of a metamorphosed Christianity, and became a vital part of the new culture cycle: that of the West.

Kerry Bolton
The Decline and Fall of Civilisations