Julius Evola

 Evola’s political, philosophical and historical teachings were motivated by his traditionalism as a manifestation of what he termed the “revolt against the modern world”. While adhering to the cyclic conception of history Evola added to this the concept of a duality of civilisations categorised as traditional and modern. Evola saw the end cycle of Western civilisation, the beginning of which he ascribed to the Late Medieval period, as the start of the super-cycle of the modern. All those civilisations that had come and gone before were still within the context of the traditional. Evola wrote of the cycles of decline:

“Recently in contrast to the notion of progress and the idea that history has been represented by more or less continuous upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms of civilisation and of a relative incommunicality between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, history breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles. … A civilisation springs up, gradually reaches a culminating point, and falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has ended….” 118Evola considered this revived cyclic approach to history as “a healthy reaction to the superstition of history as progress”, which was a product of Western materialism. He offered this added dualist dimension however, and cautioned that Spenglerian cyclicism did not offer the entire story. In addition to “a plurality of civilisations”, an historical “duality” should be recognised. “Modern civilisation stands on one side and on the other the entirety of all the civilisations that have preceded it.” For the Western civilisation he put the end of the traditional phase and the beginning of the modern super-cycle as the “late Middle Ages”, when the point of rapture with tradition was complete. Since that time, “modern civilisation” has completely cut itself off from the past. “For the great majority of moderns, that means any possibility of understanding the traditional world has been completely lost”.119In 1938 Evola wrote a synopsis on the traditional approach to history, where he defined traditional and modern civilisations:

“On the one hand there are the traditional cultures… The axis of these cultures and the summit of their hierarchical order consist of metaphysical, supra-individual powers and actions, which serve to inform and justify all that which is merely human, temporal, subject to becoming and to ‘history’. On the other hand there is ‘modern culture’, which is actually anti-tradition and which exhausts itself in a construction of purely human and earthly conditions and in the total development of these, in pursuit of a life entirely detached from the ‘higher world’”.120

While Evola joined the debate over the meaning of “race” in Fascist Italy, when racial zoology suddenly gained momentum as official policy with the publication of the “Manifesto of Race” in 1938, ironically the same year he wrote in a German (that is, “Nazi”) publication an article explaining the traditionalist approach to the question of why civilisations decay. He contended that the “degeneration” of civilisation is not caused by race-crossings, which Hitlerism regards as axiomatic, but rather through the spiritual corruption of the culture-hierarchy from the top down.121Evola begins by repudiating the modernist idea of “progress”, stating that man is not ascending (evolution) but descending from a primordial higher state. One does not go from lower to higher forms. Hence, as we have seen, the widespread belief – or memory - across times, places, and cultures, in the “fall” of man from a mythic “Golden Age”, ascribed to the arrogance of man in defying the Godhead.

“Anyone who has come to reject the rationalist myth of ‘progress’ and the interpretation of history as an unbroken positive development of mankind will find himself gradually drawn towards the world-view that was common to all the great traditional cultures, and which had at its centre the memory of a process of degeneration, slow obscuration, or collapse of a higher preceding world. As we penetrate deeper into this new (and old) interpretation, we encounter various problems, foremost among which is the question of the secret of degeneration”.122Of the theories that have been considered Evola, writing for the Germans, alludes to the classic work of Comte Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races, pioneering the doctrine that civilisations collapse through race-mixing. Evola quickly disposes of this by giving a passing nod to the theory, proceeding with a consideration of “a higher order of things” than blood admixture. Evola in reality does more than “expand” de Gobineau’s race-theory with “a few observations”; he disposes of it by pointing out that race-impurity does not explain the unremarkable state of present day Nordic states that have retained their race-purity:

“We can thank the Comte de Gobineau for the best and best-known summary of this problem, and also for a masterly criticism of the main hypotheses about it. His solution on the basis of racial thought and racial purity also has much truth in it, but it needs to be expanded by a few observations concerning a higher order of things. For there have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands. An example quite close at hand is the case of the Swedes and the Dutch. These people are in the same racial condition today as they were two centuries ago, but there is little to be found now of the heroic disposition and the racial awareness that they once possessed. Other great cultures seem merely to have remained standing in the condition of mummies: they have long been inwardly dead, so that it takes only the slightest push to knock them down. This was the case, for example, with ancient Peru, that giant solar empire which was annihilated by a few adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe”.123On the other hand there are cultures that Evola refers to as being outwardly motivated by modernism, yet retaining their inner traditional substance. Japan remains the prime example of such a state. One might also say that of Israel. There are also certain Buddhist states in South-east Asia that have materially prospered through the adaptation of modern techniques but have maintained a traditional nexus, as has India, despite these cultures having gone through the full cycles of rise and fall. A remnant lives, and might yet re-enter history in symbiosis with a post-Western civilisation.

Evola sees history unfolding within the great cosmic ages or yugas over vast expanses of time, and all the civilisations known to modern man as only decaying remnants of a long lost primordial civilisation. Hence, the history we know today is that of the fall of man over cycles of decline, interrupted by civilisations that have sought to maintain the cosmos connexion, but still subject to cyclic decay. Hence there are cycles of rise and fall within a great cosmic cycle; wheels within a great cosmic wheel. This outlook differs from the historical morphology of Spengler and others who work within more ordinary time-frames, yet both have broad features in common.

Evola sees “the whole of history as degeneration”, repudiating the notion of both historical and biological evolution, and the chimera of “progress”. Rather, the course of history is one of “involution”:

“From the standpoint of the latter, the whole of history is degeneration, because it shows the universal decline of earlier cultures of the traditional type, and the decisive and violent rise of a new universal civilization of the ‘modern’ type. A double question arises from this.”

“First, how was it ever possible for this to come to pass? There is a logical error underlying the whole doctrine of evolution: it is impossible that the higher can emerge from the lower, and the greater from the less. But doesn’t a similar difficulty face us in the solution of the doctrine of involution? How is it ever possible for the higher to fall? If we could make do with simple analogies, it would be easy to deal with this question. A healthy man can become sick; a virtuous one can turn to vice. There is a natural law that everyone takes for granted: that every living being starts with birth, growth, and strength, then come old age, weakening, and disintegration. And so forth. But this is just making statements, not explaining, even if we allow that such analogies actually relate to the question posed here.”

“Secondly, it is not only a matter of explaining the possibility of the degeneration of a particular cultural world, but also the possibility that the degeneration of one cultural cycle may pass to other peoples and take them down with it. For example, we have not only to explain how the ancient Western reality collapsed, but also have to show the reason why it was possible for ‘modern’ culture to conquer practically the whole world, and why it possessed the power to divert so many peoples from any other type of culture, and to hold sway even where states of a traditional kind seemed to be alive (one need only recall the Aryan East).”

“In this respect, it is not enough to say that we are dealing with a purely material and economic conquest. That view seems very superficial, for two reasons. In the first place, a land that is conquered on the material level also experiences, in the long run, influences of a higher kind corresponding to the cultural type of its conqueror. We can state, in fact, that European conquest almost everywhere sows the seeds of ‘Europeanization,’ i.e., the ‘modern’ rationalist, tradition-hostile, individualistic way of thinking. Secondly, the traditional conception of culture and the state is hierarchical, not dualistic. Its bearers could never subscribe, without severe reservations, to the principles of ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ and ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ For us, ‘Tradition’ is the victorious and creative presence in the world of that which is ‘not of this world,’ i.e., of the Spirit, understood as a power that is mightier than any merely human or material one”.124Although Evola was writing in 1938, this “modern world” is now a global hegemony, reaching every corner of the globe. The World War which came a year later resulted in the triumph of decadence over the remnants of tradition. Now we see the present “clash of civilisations”, as it has been called by American geopolitical theorists, where the remnants of a long fellaheen – historically passé - Islam trying to resist encroachments on what remains of their cultures. As we shall see near our conclusion, American policy-makers are overt in seeing America as having a world-mission in destroying all vestiges of tradition in the name of “progress”.

“This is a basic idea of the authentically traditional view of life, which does not permit us to speak with contempt of merely material conquests. On the contrary, the material conquest is the sign, if not of a spiritual victory, at least of a spiritual weakness or a kind of spiritual ‘retreat’ in the cultures that are conquered and lose their independence. Everywhere that the Spirit, regarded as the stronger power, was truly present, it never lacked for means - visible or otherwise - to enable all the opponent’s technical and material superiority to be resisted. But this has not happened. It must be concluded, then, that degeneracy was lurking behind the traditional facade of every people that the ‘modern’ world has been able to conquer. The West must then have been the culture in which a crisis that was already universal assumed its acutest form. There the degeneration amounted, so to speak, to a knockout blow, and as it took effect, it brought down with more or less ease other peoples in whom the involution had certainly not ‘progressed’ as far, but whose tradition had already lost its original power, so that these peoples were no longer able to protect themselves from an outside assault.”125The Late Western perspective of history is that of a line of evolution from primitive to modern, culminating in the “end of history” when the world adopts liberal-democracy and free trade. The traditional perspective sees history as the waxing and waning of civilisations, each self-contained, going through analogous life-cycles of rise and fall. The two outlooks are reflections of differences in perceptions of time; the “modern” linear, the traditional cyclic. Traditional societies are premised on maintaining a connexion with the divine. The modern outlook sees this as superstition, but “progress” has become as much a religion as any form of mysticism. The “modern” road to “utopia” is through universal happiness achieved by material prosperity, and man need look for no higher purpose, state apologists such as Fukuyama. The traditional society saw human purpose not as the achieving of an elusive “happiness” based on fads but the fulfilment of one’s cosmic duty (dharma) as an integral part of a holistic order.

Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton