I. Notes

PART I THE CULT OF SAMENESS

I

IDENTITY VERSUS DIVERSITY

This tallies with a curious confession based upon the confusion of liberalism and democracy. Denis de Rougemont and Charlotte Muret in their book The Heart of Europe (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1941) write on p. 114: “It must be admitted that if Switzerland is a land of liberty it is also a land of intolerance towards the best and the worst — the head and the tail of the class. Perhaps democratic liberty must be paid for at this price.”

“. . . Not having known how to read the history of this world which demonstrates that everywhere democracy has degenerated into despotism, it [the French Revolution] undertook to found democracy in France . . . it dared to condemn itself to fight against the two basic principles of society in whatever form they might express themselves, authority and inequality: I say inequality, which is the obvious condition for all activity and fertility in social life; which is at the same time the mother and the daughter of liberty, whereas equality is only conceivable through despotism. This certainly does not apply to Christian equality, the proper name for which is equity, but to that democratic and social equality which is only the exaltation of envy, the mirage of jealous incapacity, which was never anything but a mask and which could become a reality only after the destruction of all merit, of all virtue.”

“Another error, due to the confusion of the concepts of human being and individual, is democratic equality. This dogma is now breaking down under the blows of the experience of nations. It is, therefore, unnecessary to insist upon its falseness. But its success has been astonishingly long. How could humanity accept such a faith for so many years? The democratic creed does not take account of the constitution of our body and of our consciousness. It does not apply to the concrete fact which the individual is. Indeed, human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their right is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals. Sexes are not equal. To disregard all their inequalities is dangerous. The democratic principle has contributed to the collapse of civilization in opposing the development of an elite.” — Man the Unknown (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 271.

“In fact the signers of the Declaration of Independence can hardly have meant what they said to be taken literally. Most of them were aristocrats, many of them were slave-holders, some of them defended human slavery on principle. They were simply stating a theory of democratic government as it was understood in their time and as it had been expounded by the great prophet of modern democracy — Rousseau. In this theory great stress was laid on the contrast between the natural status of man as God had created him and the legal status which other men had imposed upon him. . . . Whether such a state of nature had ever actually existed was a question about which neither Rousseau nor Jefferson nor Franklin greatly troubled themselves. The emphasis on historic fact as distinct from historic fiction is something quite modern.”

“We live in a universe without final ends, forms or assignable limits, either internally or externally, of which continuous evolutionary change is all that can be predicted.

“Man is as much a product of this process as are all other visible things, and is strictly continuous with nature. There is nothing transcendent to the visible universe and man’s home is within it. His thinking is a pure product of experience and cannot transcend it. There is no such thing as metaphysics, which is merely a collection of empty dreams and idle fancies. Man has no soul, mind or reason as metaphysicians understand those words. Ideas are merely plans of operations to be performed, not statements of what is or has been. They are merely hypotheses. Experience evolves new standards and values. All human affairs whether personal or associative are merely projections, continuations or complications of the nature which exists in the physical and pre-human world.

“God as a being does not exist; He is merely that unification of Ideal values that is essentially imaginative in origin when the imagination supervenes in conduct. There is no such thing as religion in any sense of relation to God. Faith in the sense in which the Western civilization understood it is impossible for the ‘cultivated mind’ of the Western world today.

“There is no enduring moral law of fixed principles. Morals are purely social. The question of ‘ought’ is merely one of better or worse in social affairs. The only moral end is an abundant life shared by all, achieved by growth itself. There are no absolute moral standards; the moral and the social quality of conduct are identical. There is no abiding truth; truths change in experience and can become false. There is absolutely nothing absolutely and unchangingly good.”

This relativistic spirit is, in the United States, not something entirely new. Professor Louis Mercier of Harvard leads it partially back to Unitarian agnosticism and relativism. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of its protagonists. On the southern walls of Hunter College in New York City we find the following “immortal words” chiseled in stone: “We are of different opinions at different hours but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.” Only Nazis have completed successfully with such a contempt for the laws of logic.

“It is not in egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is only the counterfeit of justice; it can be the exact opposite, we have seen that. Neither are all inequalities injust. Which means that equality or inequality are one thing and justice is another. Justice consists in giving everybody his due.” — Agénor de Gasparin, L’Égalité, Paris.

“Ah, Lord! Why should we boast of our free will as if we were able to do anything, ever so small, in divine and spiritual matters.” CCLXII. Table Talks of Martin Luther, trans, and ed. by William Hazlitt, Esq., London, 1857.

“The Roman Pontiff can, and ought, to reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” These words are here understood in the wrongful meaning which modern secular society gives to them. Similarly, in Quanta Cura, the following teaching was branded as an error: “Popular will expressed in so-called public opinion or any other manner constitutes the supreme law independent of either divine or human authority.” And the Syllabus, issued in the same year and added to the encyclical, condemns the following teaching: “Authority is nothing but the sum of numbers and material forces.” On “Majoritism,” see Max Adler, Démocratic Politique et Démocratic Sociale, Bruxelles, 1930, p. 117.

N.B. But is the totalitarian state really a “contrary”?

Further reference material:

On the nature of sex:

E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds, London, 1931, p. 108.

On uniformism and social differentiation:

George Santayana, The Life of Reason (Reason in Society), New York, 1932, pp. 91, 127–128.

About political-racial-ethnic herdism:

A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, Munich, 1939, p. 433.

(Hostility toward the learning of foreign languages), pp. 465 ff.

(Authority and “Popularity”), p. 579.

Donoso Cortés, Oeuvres, published by his family, Paris, 1858, pp. 520 ff.

About the spirit of average man:

Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization, New York, 1933, specially pp. 223 ff.

II

OCHLOCRACY AND DEMOCRATISM

“To secure action from him the mass must be moved; he can be depended on to follow. It is more important to show him that he is with the larger number than to prove to him that he is right. He avoids forlorn hopes; they excite his derision. In the political world he desires more to be with the winning side than to stand firmly by a principle, and every fresh attempt to attract him has this as a fundamental handicap.” — James N. Wood, Democracy and the Will to Power, New York, 1921, pp. 82, 83.

“In his famous address delivered in 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ Let us observe, in this formula, that the words by the people need comment in order to avoid all ambiguities and to prevent Rousseauist interpretations. Taken in their genuinely concrete sense, I do not think, that these words mean a government exercised by the people, whose elected representatives would then serve as a pure instrument, but rather a government exercised by the representatives of the people, or by the people in the person of its representatives.”

“. . . The popular elite, be it a cultural, a social or an economic one does not want, under ordinary, normal circumstances to recognize a master or at least only the semblance of one, a fact which is forgotten again and again or which is purposely kept quiet. Only in extreme danger and distress this elite suffers a master and king, should one be at hand. But for the masses a king standing above all classes and parties is under all circumstances necessary and desirable.” — Dr. Schmidt-Gibichenfels, Die demokratische Lüge und der Krieg. Berlin, 1915.

III

THE BOURGEOIS AND CAPITALISM

“We can study the working of this system best in America and Scotland.” — Dean Inge, Protestantism.

“Sir — There have been some very interesting criticisms of the electorate. The most profound was that of Miss Naomi Mitchison, who points out how unfitted are nuns for the onerous responsibilities of voting. People should certainly be disqualified from voting, if they hold any form of religious belief; since this necessarily implies that they are not giving their whole minds to politics. To give anything less is to make a farce of Democracy.

“There is another type of voter, who should also be disqualified, he who persistently votes perversely. Miss Naomi Mitchison has shown very clearly that nuns are among the worst offenders in this voting for the Right. They should certainly be disqualified; also colonels, public-house-keepers and music-hall comedians, all of whom are notoriously Right-minded. I apologize for this unfortunate phrase. The electorate should be pruned still further. Indeed, democracy cannot really be said to have triumphed until voting is confined to the readers of your paper. Herr Hitler has been working along these lines, and very clearly, we live in a new age of democracy, of which he is the New Statesman.

I am, sir, your obedient servant,

James Oliver.

“2. The characteristic creation of the nineteenth century was precisely collectivism. It was the first idea invented by that century, almost at birth, and it grew throughout its hundred years to the point of flooding the entire horizon.” — José Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History, New York, 1941.

The leftist leanings of the teacher is also to be found in such countries where the level of secondary and “college” education as well is traditionally low. American high school teachers show most of the characteristics of Continental grade school teachers and it must be said in all candor that their colleagues in colleges show frequently very similar inclinations. — The author. As to Nazism among teachers cf. Franz Neumann, Behemoth, New York, 1942, pp. 377 and 379.

On the concept of “progress” see also René Guénon, East and West, London, 1941, pp. 23 ff., 44–45.

And in morals regresses

One step forward makes

And two backward takes.”

Nevaira, Gazetta Ladina, July 21, 1939.

“This distrust of the bourgeois is no modern phenomenon. It has its roots in a much older tradition than that of socialism. It is equally typical of the mediaeval noble and peasant, the romantic Bohemian and the modern Proletarian. The fact is that the bourgeoisie has always stood somewhat apart from the main structure of European society, save in Italy and in the Low Countries. While the temporal power was in the hands of the kings and the nobles and the spiritual power was in the hands of the Church, the bourgeois, the Third Estate, occupied a position of privileged inferiority which allowed them to amass wealth and to develop considerable intellectual culture and freedom of thought without acquiring direct responsibility or power. Consequently, when the French Revolution and the fall of the old regime made the bourgeoisie the ruling class in the West, it retained its inherited characteristics, its attitude of hostile criticism towards the traditional order and its enlightened selfishness in the pursuit of its interest. But although the bourgeois now possessed the substance of power he never really accepted social responsibility as the old rulers had done. He remained a private individual — an idiot in the Greek sense — with a strong sense of social conventions and personal rights, but with little sense of social solidarity and no recognition of his responsibility as the servant and representative of a super-personal order. In fact, he did not realize the necessity of such an order, since it had always been provided for him by others, and he had taken it for granted.

“This, I think, is the fundamental reason for the unpopularity and lack of prestige of the bourgeois civilization. It lacks the vital human relationship which the older order with all its faults never denied. To the bourgeois politician the electorate is an accidental collection of voters; to the bourgeois industrialist his employees are an accidental collection of wage earners. The king and the priest, on the other hand, were united to their people by a bond of organic solidarity. They were not individuals standing against other individuals but parts of a common social organism and representatives of a common spiritual order.

“The bourgeois upset the throne and the altar, but they put in their place nothing but themselves. Hence their regime cannot appeal to any higher sanction than that of self-interest. It is continually in a state of disintegration and flux. It is not a permanent form of social organism, but a transitional phase between two orders.” — Christopher Dawson, Enquiries Into Religion and Culture.

IV

OCHLOCRATIC CULTURE

A similar outcry could be heard from Coventry Patmore, Catholic convert and poet, who wrote: “Democracy is only a continually shifting aristocracy of money, impudence, animal energy and cunning, in which the best grub gets the best of the carrion; and the level to which it tends to bring all things is not a mountain tableland, as its promoters would have their victims think, but the unwholesome platitude of the fen and the morass, of which black envy would enjoy the malaria as long as all others share it.”

Says Lucien Romier in his Explication de notre temps: “Finally democratic ideology was and remains encumbered by a primary dogma, which affects the intelligence like opium: it is the beatifically optimistic and falsely scientific illusion of an indefinite progress of humanity.”

“To England:

“With rapturous enthusiasm in your eyes you rave of liberty in countries without factories.”

An England:

Ihr schwärmt entzückt mit begeisterten Blicken
Für die Freiheit der Länder, die ohne Fabriken.

James Bryce in his Holy Roman Empire wrote seventy years ago: “The racial or commercial antagonisms of democracies are as fertile in menaces to peace as were ever the dynastic interests of princes.”

Bernard Wall wrote in Colosseum: “The persecution of Christianity is the lasting threat in those countries where the tension between Christianity and the established disorder has been greater owing to its persistence of a more living form of Christianity. Christianity has had a safe conduct in the bourgeois world of England and America because it has compromised with the commercial ethos and sanctified it; and has substituted ‘decent business dealing’ for the folly of the cross.”

V

WOMAN

Said Mr. Paul Garrett, Executive of General Motors speaking at the Congress of American Industry in 1940: “Democracy rests not on supermen, but on the good sense of many. Our American democracy’s success is the sum total of millions of individual achievements. Ours is a business civilization. Ours is a hundred-year plan.”

Further reference material:

On genius in women:

Sylvia Kopald, “Where Are the Female Geniuses” in Our Changing Morality, ed. by Freda Kirchwey, New York, 1930. See the “Statistics” on p. 107.

The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

I