{"id":6756,"date":"2013-08-08T00:54:29","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T04:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gornahoor.net\/?p=6756"},"modified":"2020-12-08T19:33:41","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T00:33:41","slug":"evola-viewed-from-the-right-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/?p=6756","title":{"rendered":"Evola Viewed from the Right (III)"},"content":{"rendered":"

⇐  Part II<\/a>    Part IV ⇒<\/a><\/p>\n

\nEvola concludes that in principle, the Fascist doctrine of the state is traditional. Evola\u2019s next task is twofold: (1) to draw out the full implications of that doctrine and (2) to point out its deviations. To recap, the state, in his view, is preeminent to both the people and the nation. He then contrasts the idea of the state to \u201csociety\u201d, which represents the physical and vegetative side of the community. Doctrines based on society as such include theories of natural rights, contract theory, and democracy, including the people\u2019s democracies of the communists.<\/p>\n

Opposed to this social ideal, there is the political ideal which involves transcendence, rather than the materialistic and hedonistic concerns of the society. The problem of transcendence was never satisfactorily solved by Fascism.<\/p>\n

The Bovine State<\/h2>\n

Evola points out that the \u201cimpulse to self-transcendence can be repressed and silenced, but never completely eliminated, except in the extreme case of systematically degrading people into a bovine state.\u201d I don\u2019t think he realized how close that bovine state was. He pointed to the \u201cblind, anarchic, and destructive\u201d revolts of the youth as a sign of the ennui induced by the prosperity and comfort of the consumer society. But those days are long gone as these same youths are now the possessors of power. Yet, they have maintained the revolt as their ideal and have persisted in overturning one by one every previous customary and traditional notion of order.<\/p>\n

The destructive aspects of the constant revolt are not immediately apparent, or else they are hidden and kept out of public discourse. Furthermore, it coopts that impulse among the young, since there is nothing left for the young, since revolt is public policy. When post-menopausal women are getting tattoos, nipple rings, and bikini waxes, the youth are forced to take things to absurd levels. Blind, anarchic, and destructive revolts are left to the proletariat who have been shut out of the bourgeois consumer culture and resent it. By the logic of revolt, such public behavior is beyond criticism.<\/p>\n

The Mystique of Power<\/h2>\n

Similar to Guido De Giorgio, Evola points out that \u201cin traditional societies, there has always existed a certain liturgy or mystique of power and sovereignty that was an integral part of the system and which furnished a solution to the problem we have been addressing [i.e., the urge for transcendence],\u201d but here a divergence appears. The natural objection is that the system takes on a religious significance, so that a secular state replaces religion, the normal object of transcendence. Evola denies the dualist notion that the state is secular; we can point out that idea is a modern notion. However, Evola traces its source to Jesus\u2019 command to render unto Caesar, but would preclude the existence of any such idea of the state in Europe since Constantine.<\/p>\n

So, the state depends on a spiritual charism and is thus more than a merely administrative and social system. This brings Evola to the relationship between Catholicism, the majority religion of the Italian people, and the Fascist state. Unfortunately, Evola\u2019s distorted understanding of the proper roles of the Priests and the Warriors colors his analysis. He praises Mussolini\u2019s occasional references to the Roman ideal, which was necessarily vague. De Giorgio\u2019s larger view does not have such a problem since it has a place for the Priests in the traditional system, as the upholders of that tradition and the source of the charism of the state.<\/p>\n

Clearly, if the existence of the Fascist state had depended on the replacement of the common religion with one that could only be partial, incomplete, and mostly forgotten, it would have been stillborn. The state, despite his claim, is not ultimate and does not have infinite capacity to form the people. Even by his logic, for the state to have a charism, then the religion necessarily precedes the state, ontologically and temporally. Nevertheless, Evola somehow has to demonstrate the spiritual foundation of the state as opposed to the secular and desacralized interpretations.<\/p>\n

Nationalism<\/h2>\n

One of the shortcomings, Evola says, is that the Fascist doctrine did not distinguish fully between nationalism and Tradition in the higher sense. He described the former as \u201cmediocre conservatism\u201d, bourgeois, priggish, superficially Catholic, and conformist. As the nationalist elements were absorbed into Fascism, its ideals became blurred, and \u201cnationalism\u201d became identified as the \u201cRight\u201d. Evola traces the idea of nationalism to the principles of 1789, which were opposed to the traditional structures of the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

Curiously, this syncretism of nationalism, with a lip-service commitment to tradition, has become the hallmark of the so-called right in the USA. Neo-conservatism is often associated with the Jewish element, but that ignores the even stronger Catholic influence, or actually neo-Catholic, since their tradition does not reach beyond Vatican II. This nationalism accepts a large part of the modern liberal state, although it promotes the roles of the bourgeois money powers over the state\u2019s more socialist tendencies. Beyond that, the nationalist right supports a vigorous foreign policy, even to the point of being jingoist. Nevertheless, nationalism is not an exclusively rightist tendency, since even the liberal state is nationalist. Although the USA has a federal rather than a national government, there has been an increasing tendency towards the latter. At its inception, a person regarded himself as the citizen of one of the states and owed his allegiance to it, but now schoolchildren pledge their allegiance to the federal government. This nationalist feeling is demonstrated in its holidays, which are mostly associated with wars and political figures; in pre-nationalist Europe, holidays used to be associated with religious celebrations.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the emphasis on nationalism was unacceptable to Evola, since he regarded the state as superior to the nation. I\u2019ll leave it to readers how this may apply to such contemporary movements like \u201cwhite nationalism\u201d and various \u201cidentitarian\u201d initiatives, which often claim some sort of affiliation with Evola. The latter are really nationalist movements since their source of identity is a common nation, in a zoological sense. Their fault is not the desire for a unity, but the belief that that unity will arise from below, democratically as it were, rather than from above, as a spiritual ideal and the state as the organizing principle. As for \u201cwhite nationalism\u201d, it is simply an oxymoron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

⇐  Part II    Part IV ⇒ Evola concludes that in principle, the Fascist doctrine of the state is traditional. Evola\u2019s next task is twofold: (1) to draw out the full implications of that doctrine and (2) to point out its deviations. To recap, the state, in his view, is preeminent to both … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evola"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6756"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13518,"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6756\/revisions\/13518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}