Eye of the World Shifts Towards Russia and the Old Right

According to Erich Khuenhelt-Ledhin (Baron, actually), a figure a Leftist acquaintance of mine denounced as a velveteen dandy-fop simply because of his privilege and rank (never mind the guy worked 60+ hour weeks in literary pursuits), the Right has never succeeded in providing an alternative Utopia of their own over against the proposed Utopia of the Left. If I understand this rightly, what he is proposing is actually a form of Ideology for the Right. At first hearing, this sounds horrific. Counter-intuitively, it is not, because Ideas are not simple, nor should they be. He is not prescribing a huge dose of Nazi Totalitarianism, but pointing out the Right never coherently unified their worldview during the Monarchical struggles against the "Spirit of 1848". We run into lots of counter-intuitive things in Nature, things like Countable versus Uncountable Infinity, the hypoxic versus hypercarbic drive for respiration, curved space and time, etc., etc. Why would the realm of Ideas work any differently? Because what looks like Ideology to the darkened Nous and Intellect of man is actually a stabilizing platform from which higher perceptions of Reality are possible (but not necessarily inevitable). This is the missing "ingredient" or twist that the Right keeps stumbling over - they don't want to be Nazis, so they reject "ideology" (never mind that ANY intellectual system is to some extent an ideology, a fact the Left is much more smugly aware of, and does their best to exploit ruthlessly - they push for "freedom" when the ideology is against them, and for conformity, when it is not). John Romanides addresses this extensively in his theological work (not all of which is fair to the West, but whose basic point is very well-taken): Man needs a cure, and is not "right" to begin with. This, the necessity for clearing the ground of bad ideology by laying a framework where some form of order and stability can be taken for some degree of "grantedness". In medical terms, this would be called "stabilizing" a patient - it doesn't cure them, but then, it isn't intended to cure, but to make a cure possible. And this is where the Right simply won't exercise either honesty (witness Benoist's repeated rejection of Cortes or Maurras' worldviews) or clarity (the traditional "Right" of the Lord Acton variety actually operates from liberal premises and categories). The New Right is dishonest, and wants to play fast and loose (like the enemy), the traditional Right (Pat Buchanan, Russell Kirk, etc.) won't recognize that the Anglo world desperately needs a traditional ideology to begin anything at all. Hence, the West's default slide into more and more chaos.

Russia is in much better position to understand this - they've seen what "liberalization" and "democratization" leads to, and still possess an intellectual heritage which doesn't accept dialectical and abstract Reason as the sole, supreme arbiter of Man. If the Slavic world is intelligent and devoted and firm enough, she (and she alone, at this point) can extricate herself from the downward spiral and offer an alternative to Asiatic forms and Western debauchery. This makes her the sole possible champion of Christendom, and a possible re-awakener of such in the West.

Man is not, by nature free - it is his task to become so. But it can only be done by an integral spiritual vision which is Rightist, Utopian, coherent, complete, etc. Which is the launching pad for (then) what is possible (see Guenon, R.). Gornahoor is trying to do this. Who wants to help?

It looks dangerous and scary - Good. It looks that way anyway, and any real answer would fall foul of that rhetorical charge. In any case, this has to do with Truth and clarity, not what we wish were true. We wish the West hadn't fallen afoul of Enlightenment, Democracy, etc, but this isn't true. We wish the West had retained its spiritual character, but it didn't happen. The only way out is back: the Opposite of a Revolution. Only this can consistently, coherently oppose the Eternal Revolution (Degeneration) that the Left offers in its Utopia of Lies and Illusions.

Plato Maligned Again

"Back in 1984, Culianu defined himself as one of the rising stars of the academic firmament with a book titled Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. The academic study of Renaissance magic had been a hot field since the Sixties, when Frances Yates finally blew the lid off a generations-old habit of scholarly disdain for occultism, but even by the standards of the Eighties Culianu’s book was startling. It took magic seriously as a system of psychological manipulation that used the cravings and desires of its target—the “eros” of the title—to shape human behavior. It suggested on that basis that modern advertising, which does exactly this, is simply the current form of magic, and that contemporary Western nations are “magician states” governed by the magical manipulation of public consensus...."

Even the archdruid isn't getting it quite right.

"In the dialogue Meno, to note only one example, Plato has Socrates demonstrate a point about the deep structure of the human mind by walking an illiterate servant boy through a geometrical proof. The boy doesn’t know a thing about geometry, but he is able to follow Socrates’ logic, and by the end of the process has understood what at that time was cutting-edge mathematics. Socrates’ point is that anyone, anywhere, could be taught the same thing—and that’s a point for which Plato’s Republic has no room at all. In the Republic, reason is for the few; honor and social commitments are for another minority, separate from the first; the majority has nothing but appetite. It’s therefore fair to say that in the Republic, nobody is allowed to be more than one-third of a complete human being.

That’s always the problem with utopian schemes; the inhabitants are never allowed to be fully human, though the restrictions are rarely handled with the geometric precision Plato displayed. When a utopian scheme is put into practice, in turn, what inevitably happens is that whatever dimension of the human is supposedly abolished happens anyway, and defines the fault line along which the scheme breaks down. Marxism is a great example; in theory, people in Marxist societies are motivated solely by noble ideals; in practice, getting people to go through the motions of being motivated solely by noble ideals required an ever-expanding system of apparatchiks, secret police and prison camps, and even that ultimately failed to do the job. One way or another, trying to create heaven on earth reliably yields the opposite; whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper turns into Pluto’s Republic in practice."

The problem with this analysis (and I heartily recommend his distinction between theurgy and thaumaturgy, Culianu and Ficino!) is that it assumes that societies can be run on "geometry" - that what is true in mathematics is true in the social sphere, legal sphere, etc. Certainly, anyone can learn mathematics - most men (for instance) are fairly good at it, as opposed to women.

While I heartily recommend his theurgy/thaumaturgy distinction (later in article), note that mathematics isn't governed by the same laws as the sphere of human action. This is a pervasive problem with all critiques of caste orders or traditionalism - they simply don't accept the fact that very, very, very few people have the aptitude or ability to govern themselves, let alone other people.