In recent weeks, largely due to a New
York Times article, the name of
Julius Evola has been circulating around the world of political
magazines and blogs, a name that I would have thought would mostly be
forgotten, at least outside of a handful of far-right groups and
vaguely new age spiritual sects. And yet, it seems that the
mostly-forgotten Evola has now gotten something of a reboot, thanks
to his influence on the policies and thought of current reichsleiter
Steve Bannon.
I shouldn't be too
surprised. Apparently, Bannon is quite the fellow bookworm, not
surprising, given his generally haggard and unkempt appearance. He
bears a remarkable similarity to the monastically bearded,
anti-Western propagandist of Putin's Russia, the sociologist
Aleksandr Dugin.
But given the
remoteness of Evola's ideas from the folksy anti-elitism, evangelical
Christianity, and free-market enthusiasm that act as the main
lodestones for the American right, it makes for quite the
contradiction in terms. Rather, Evola is the sort of thinker that has
long been popular among members of the European right, who
have a tendency to express things in terms of peoples that have
existed since time immemorial. If you look to the neo-fascists that
currently plague France, Hungary, Greece, and Russia, it's not too
hard to find Evola and his fellow travelers.
You may quite
likely have never heard of him, but this philosopher (if you can call
him that, he'd likely have shunned the term) and ideologue was one of
the handful of post-Nietzschean thinkers whose stars rose brightly in
the early years of fascism, only to come crashing down almost
immediately after World War II. Strongly favoring tradition over
progress, elitism over egalitarianism, mystical immediacy over
analysis, organic over historical notions of culture, and myth over
theory, Evola was one of those rare thinkers who actually put his
concepts into practice, in both a vaguely pagan esotericism as well
as providing an intellectual basis for Mussolini's rise to power.
Like
many of his fellow right-wing intellectuals in the early 20th
Century, he couldn't escape lingering associations with fascism, and
his last major work, Ride the Tiger,
published in 1961, implored those with “noble souls” to survive
what he believed to be the destructive onslaught of a modern society
in which the traditional formations had largely been obliterated.
Most of those
far-right thinkers who did survive World War II with their
reputations tattered but intact framed their arguments in terms of
poetic and literary writing. Emil Cioran, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun,
the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, all were outspoken fascists for whom
analyses of their work would inevitably have to include a
reconciliation of their thought and their artistic production. And
yet, despite their violent distaste for modern society, all four used
the most intense of modernist techniques to convey their desire for a
more traditional existence. As in the poems of T.S. Eliot, as in the
novels of Yukio Mishima, modernist experiment is used to illuminate
the nature of modernity, in the hopes of pushing people back into the
primordial.
The ideas of a
handful of more philosophically inclined thinkers managed to
continue, albeit in a reduced form. Oswald Spengler continued to have
a lingering if largely negative influence, largely due to his
discontent with the Nazis who claimed him as a prophet. Carl Schmitt,
by casting politics in terms of theology, managed to lecture and
write for years after the war, providing a tool for political
analysis across the spectrum. And of course Martin Heidegger, while
he disavowed his Nazi past and his tendency to give lectures in full
brown uniform, still carries an obsession with immediacy, intuition,
and authenticity that makes it remarkably easy to see why he drew his
profoundly anti-modern conclusions.
There's an
undeniable allure here.
If I go back to my
late teens, I'd heretofore received my intellectual development on a
steady diet of positive science and liberal democratic theory, which
went together in John Locke-step. When I idolized rebels against the
system, it was because the system itself was behaving in a corrupt
and irrational fashion. My punk icons hated the simpering
middle-class, Protestant politics of the Reagan era, my
lost-generation icons revolted against the loneliness and phoniness
of the newly moneyed America in the years following World War I. The
good things were science, social democracy, the natural world. The
bad things were organized religion, capitalism, artifice.
But when I began to
examine more ardently anti-Enlightenment perspectives, they were
bracing. I read Nietzsche, of course, as every snotty, smart teenage
boy with an authority problem does, and loved the sheer flippancy of
a “philosophy” delivered entirely through aphoristic zingers.
Then out into Emil Cioran, Rimbaud, Mishima, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky,
none of whom much cared for the systematic qualities of the modern
world. And then onward to Heidegger. At his most brilliant, in the
Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger was like a hairy black spider
crawling up my neck, telling me my reality was false. Following
Heidegger, I read Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian Marxist who
wrote on how concepts like “common sense” and “common
knowledge” disguised the political agenda of the bourgeoisie.
For a brief moment,
it became easy to swallow all of this whole. The rejection of the
individual subject as an invention of Western metaphysics, the
full-throttle rejection of Enlightenment ideals, the primacy of
subjective experience over any supposedly objective experience, and
the all-encompassing power of mythic narrative.
The ideas are so
much sexier than their rivals, more radical, somehow more
dangerous than the staid alternative.
Yet, at the end of
the day, I couldn't shake the fact that these were an equally rigid
system, and one which led the mind to some awfully dark places.
Without any kind of reconstructive technique, these critiques – and
they were primarily designed as and should be interpreted as
critiques, not signposts – lead to a particularly dull
helplessness. The way that so many of these romantically inclined,
more intuitively driven writers and thinkers tried to find out was
through a supposed transcendental authenticity. And that is the road
that leads to fascism.
Throughout all my
hemming and hawing, the “authenticity” factor always seemed to me
to be total bullshit. Sure, modern America was a disingenuous,
holographic state held together by false hopes and run by a
loose-knit assemblage of squabbling financial elites via mass
surveillance, but the horror seems to be everywhere, across time and
space. Unlike the fascists, I see no nobility in Medieval or
Confucian hierarchy, or in a figurehead representing the popular
will, or in a world in which scientific method is subordinated to a
unified and symbolically rich semiosphere under a beneficent godhead.
That yearning for
some kind of anti-modern transcendence remains among the general
populace, whether the ideologically committed or the terrified, and I
suppose it's largely because the modern world can be an awfully scary
place.
And so,
periodically, people are tempted to return to a womb of supposedly
eternal truths, to follow primeval myth or nationalist flag-waving
rather than undertake the challenge of analysis. And I shouldn't be
too surprised when I find that the leading scholars of the fascists
have been reading the same books as me.
