What follows are selections from “Persian Traditions in Spain” by Michael McClain

People who know me very well say that I have a mentality which is medieval and not modern, rural and not urban, that I am an “incurable romantic and idealist”, and that I have a “peasant mindset”. To all of the above I plead guilty, and as the Spanish say, y a mucha honra, in other words, I am proud of it.

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The virtual world of computer technology is exactly the kind of environment in which tradition cannot flourish. The virtual world has no value in itself; it is merely a second-hand world that is used, in Kant’s language, as a regulative paradigm, in terms of instrumental reason. The virtual world exhibits rationality without life; without the organic component that provides the background for the special relationship between man and the Sacred. Tradition, is treated as something authentic in Nasr’s work and not as something that is considered historic, ancient, or of merely anthropological interest. Tradition, in that sense, is not merely treated as belonging in a museum or as a tourist attraction. It is understood as something living, unitary, and organic. It provides space for man and God to meet. The traditional landscape cannot, of course, be recovered. But authentic tradition can be rejuvenated in such a way that tradition is, once again, placed in the center of man’s action. Tradition, at this point, is not the old-fashioned sentimental Biedermeier Romantik that tried to negate the oncoming industrial development, especially in Germany [and also, in North America, the antebellum South of the U.S.A.]. Tradition in Nasr’s terms means those aspects, elements, and practices that have preserved eternal values, in the face of hard won historical experience. And that includes the transcendent Unity of Being in the context of the Divine. Some of the masters of tradition, such as Rene Guenon, A.K. Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon, or Martin Lings, have influenced Nasr’s work on tradition.

I am not an egalitarian; there are those who proclaim themselves to be egalitarians, but they always end by setting up a hierarchy more odious than the one they clamored against and replaced; the hierarchy of wealth was far more odious than the aristocracy which it replaced, and was utterly detestable, while the socialist totalitarian techno-bureaucracy which replaced the hierarchy of wealth was even more odious and detestable than the bourgeois-plutocratic hierarchy which, in some places, it replaced. Both “the odious hierarchy of wealth” and the totalitarian, socialist techno-bureaucracy which in some places replaced it are manifestations of what Rene Guenon called “the reign of quantity”. In Spanish the word for “bureaucrat” is burocrata while the word for “jackass” is burro. Thus, Spaniards often add an extra “R” to the word burocrata, giving burrocrata.

How I loathe and detest this “reign of quantity”!

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I never adhered to such a vulgar, naïve, counterintuitive, pernicious, malignant and dangerous superstition as “Progress with a capital “P”. Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, Robert Burns, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Rene Guenon, The Spanish Carlists, William Butler Yeats, Lord Northbourne, Frithjof Schuon, Alain Danielou, Feodor Dostoyevsky and the Russian Slavophils, Alexis Carrel, Corneliu Codreanu, Mircea Eliade, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Martin Heidegger, Leonid Ouspensky, Vladimir Lossky, Fr. Seraphim Rose, Arthur Machen, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, T.S. Eliot, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Kathleen Raine, the Southern Agrarians, Charles A. Coulombe, Henry Corbin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Pope John Paul II, Allamah Tabataba’i, Swami Ramdas, and, perhaps most recently, Christopher I. Beckwith, among many others, have thoroughly skewered the vulgar superstition of “Progress with a capital “P”. For someone to refer to himself as a “Progressive” is as absurd as to refer to oneself as a “Unicornist”. Though I do not believe in unicorns, I find it easier to believe in them than to believe in “Progress with a capital “P”. As I said above, how anyone familiar with the history of the Western World in the two centuries spanning the period between the French Revolution and the downfall of the Soviet Union can believe in the vulgar, counterintuitive and pernicious superstition known as “Progress” is beyond me.

I utterly reject the godless Kali Yuga, the dehumanized, techno-bureaucratic, totalitarian nightmare, a cultural desert and moral sewer to which “Progress with a capital P” leads and aspires.