«Alcuni storici asseriscono […] che il Mussolini della RSI era influenzato da Bombacci, cioè uno dei fondatori del PCI che si arruolò volontario nella RSI per difendervi la propria idea e perdervi la propria vita. Può darsi […] che Mussolini fosse influenzato da Bombacci; ciò non toglie, egregio Senatore, che è in nome di quel Mussolini che Lei ha combattuto (se mai ha veramente combattuto) nella RSI. È inutile dire che di citazioni “filocomuniste” e “filorusse” di Mussolini-maestro-di-Pisanò ne potremmo produrre ancora ben più di una, inchiodando Pisanò al palo della sua ignoranza o a quello del suo tradimento (scelga lui, giacché il suo filoamericanismo “fascista” è sinonimo o di ignoranza sull’autentica essenza del fascismo, oppure è consapevole tradimento). Ma il punto è anche un altro, giacché essendo noi per l’Eurasia non siamo affatto per il “comunismo” e, in ogni caso, il regime al potere in Russia non ha niente a che vedere con il comunismo marxista, né con quello leninista né con quello stalinista. Anzi, l’attuale premier [Michail Sergeevič Gorbačëv, dal 1985 segretario generale del PCUS e presidente dell’Unione Sovietica, n.d.a.] si sta dimostrando un burattino del potere mondialista, potere del quale già abbiamo detto e molto ancora diremo.»[4]
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Paul-Georges Sansonetti, faut-il le préciser, est un spécialiste des mythes et des symboles, titulaire d’un doctorat de lettres traitant de l’ésotérisme des romans arthuriens. Il a également écrit de nombreux articles et conférences, notamment dans l’excellente revue hélas disparue, « 
Le second, « Présence de la Tradition primordiale » (aux éditions Oeil du Sphinx), est un recueil de nombreux articles parus dans la défunte revue « Hyperborée ». Paul-Georges Sansonetti vient ici poser le doigt sur des œuvres que l’on pensait connaître, pour nous montrer toutes les traces que leurs auteurs y ont cachées plus ou moins volontairement. Nous revisitons ainsi des grands classiques. Tolkien bien sûr avec son « Seigneur des anneaux », mais aussi Howard Phillips Lovecraft, ou plus curieusement Alain Fournier et son « Grand Meaulnes ». Un grand chapitre est consacré à l’immense film de Stanley Kubrick « 2001, Odyssée de l’espace ». 
James J. O’Meara
Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus
Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020
“For me real and imagined, by the way, is just the same. Because the world is our imagination.” — Aleksandr Dugin [1] [1]
“The whole vast world is nothing more than the confused imaginations of men and women.” — Neville [2] [2]
A new book from James O’Meara is always a treat, but until that long-awaited collection of film reviews arrives, this will serve to assuage the hungry public. Astute readers here at Counter-Currents will immediately perceive that this is a new, slightly but cunningly revised edition [3] of Magick for Housewives: Essays on Alt-Gurus (Manticore, 2018). Although the title was intended as an homage to Crowley titles like Yoga for Yahoos and Yoga for Yellowbellies, I am told that the publishers found that too many potential buyers were unable to look past the thumbnail online and took it to be a work of “kitchen magic,” which is a new one on me but apparently is a real thing.
I myself miss the perky housewife of the original cover, an icon of American postwar ascendancy who not only alluded to the “ladies who lunch” that filled Neville’s audiences, [3] [4] but also connected it to the author’s End of An Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility [5] (Counter-Currents, 2017). Arguably the new cover, a moody, misty collage of the subjects, is more appropriate to the contents as a whole.
The subtitle also frees the book from any links to the late, mostly unlamented “alt-right.” Strange as it may seem to our grandchildren — or children — there was a time when anything “hip” was linked to the “alt” phenomenon; sort of like those funny haircuts in old pictures. Potential readers were left asking, along with Steve Bannon:
“But why does a guy who is that sophisticated get hooked up with Richard Spencer? [He’s] a goofball, and you can’t get in business with goofballs like that.” [4] [6]
For the new edition, the contents have been carefully revised, occasional misprints silently corrected, and an index of gurus added for the reader’s convenience.
Since all but the title essay — a synoptic look at the Hermetic tradition from Plotinus to Evola to Neville, demonstrating the author’s easy mastery of the field, which first appeared in Aristokratia IV — appeared in some form here on Counter-Currents, the high level of scholarship and presentation can be taken for granted. But what is the principle of selection for this motley crew, ranging from the infamous Crowley and the underground magic of Evola, to the misunderstood “popularizer” Alan Watts, then to modern chaos magic and Colin Wilson’s Outsider, finally back to the barely remembered midcentury phenomenon who called himself Neville? As O’Meara explains it,
In the wake of the populist revolt against globalist tyranny, and its controversial tribunes like Trump, it’s time for a look at what can now be discerned as an equally new development, on the fringes of Western civilization, among what came to be known as “popular culture,” during the so-called pre- and post-war eras: a new kind of spiritual teacher or “guru,” one more interested in methods, techniques and results than in dogmas, institutions, or — especially — followers.
In the wake of even more recent developments, what O’Meara previously styled “alt-gurus” he now calls “populist gurus.” An equally good term, if we extend our temporal limits back into the 19th century, and acknowledge how geographically American this phenomenon is, [5] [8] might be what Arthur Versluis has dubbed “American gurus,” who espouse what he calls “immediatism.”
[Immediatism is] the assertion of immediate spiritual illumination without much if any preparatory practice within a particular religious tradition. Some call this “instant enlightenment.” [Its] origins precede American Transcendentalism, [6] [9] and whose exemplars include a whole array of historical figures, right up to contemporary New Age exponents. In this line, a figure like Timothy Leary, and other erstwhile psychedelic evangelists, play a significant role because what could be more immediate than the result of taking a pill? [7] [10]
Immediatism is based, in turn, on “an underlying metaphysics” which Versluis calls “primordialism”: “We as human beings have access to blissful awareness that is not subject to temporal or spatial restriction [and] is always present to us.” [8] [11] Since it is always present, it pops up from time to time in history, only to be occulted again by mainstream dogmatism, until rediscovered once more; it endures in time not by institutions but by texts and gurus, [9] [12] and above all by techniques: from Crowley’s convoluted and obscurantist rituals and doctrines to Wilson’s “pencil trick” and, perhaps most archetypally, Neville’s “simple method to change the future”; as Neville says repeatedly, “Go home and try it tonight — prove me wrong!”
So it’s no surprise that immediatism should be so prevalent today, and especially in the United States: in the Kali Yuga, where institutions are in decay, or, as in America, they never really existed.
Immediatism is sort of the Dark Twin of Traditionalism; or rather, seeing it from our Yankee perspective, it’s the Bright Twin. To Traditionalism’s innate pessimism — “You must submit to an orthodox tradition to have even a glimmer of a change, after arduous labor, to achieve enlightenment or even a fully human life; oops, looks there aren’t any around these days, too bad, better luck in the next kalpa” — Emerson, the original American Guru, asks bluntly:
The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? [10] [13] Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. [11] [14]
This may all seem too airy-fairy, but if you want a practical application, consider, as O’Meara does here, the role played by “meme magick” in the Trump phenomenon; it can also provide the key to understanding Steve Bannon’s surprising and complex relationship with Traditionalism.
Benjamin Teitelbaum, in his War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers, devotes considerable attention to Bannon’s idiosyncratic reading of Guénon and Evola. He never discusses Bannon’s American intellectual heritage, which is a pity, since it would help explain what he calls Bannon’s “horizontal Traditionalism”: rather than bemoaning the confusion of the castes in the modern world, and futilely wishing for a “return of kings” (with oneself, of course, as a king, or at least on the general staff), Bannon tips the hierarchy on its side, and puts his faith in the ordinary working-class Joe Schmoe (Bannon calls them “serfs”) as a perennial source of traditional values to counterbalance the elite’s secular globalism. It’s basically Jeffersonian “natural aristocracy” and a political application of Emerson’s primordialism. [12] [15]
But how does Evola fit in here, with all these mystical Yankee peddlers, these Melvillian confidence men, and lightning-rod salesmen? Was Evola not the proponent of capital-T Tradition with its hierarchies and fatalism?
Indeed; but before he became the darling of alt-rightists seeking “our Marcuse, only better,” before reading a word of Guénon, he was a magician; that is, neither a dogmatic theologian or a materialistic scientist, but an esotericist. That Evola is quoted as the epigraph of the work under review:
One can expect that one day religion, as well as theology itself, will become an experimental science, certainly an upheaval, not lacking interest, that leads us back to a proper view of mystical and traditional esotericism. [13] [16]
This was the “good” Evola. The “bad” Evola arose from what Pierlo Fenili, in an eye-opening article in Politica Romana — “The Errors of Evola” — calls the “wrong choice of traditions;” as Jocelyn Godwin explicates: [14] [17]
Fenili points out that of the four protagonists who were left at the end of the Western Empire in 476, only the Roman Senate and the Eastern Empire had authentic Roman roots. The other two players were the Church, whose origin was in the Near East, and the Germanic peoples of the north, and it was with these enemies of Romanity that Evola chose to align himself.
You can buy James O’Meara’s End of an Era here [5].
From this followed another error, “alienation from the ancestral tradition.” [15] [18] The true Western Tradition was
[Carried] onward by such figures, ignored by Evola [and loathed by Guénon], as. . . Boethius. . . who worked under a Gothic emperor to preserve all he could of Greco-Latin learning; Michael Psellus. . . the Byzantine Platonist; the early Humanists from Petrarch onwards, whom Evola dismisses as merely safeguarding the “decadent forms” of Antiquity; Ficino, who continued Boethius’s project by translating the works of Hermes, Plato, and the Neoplatonists; Pico della Mirandola with his defense of the dignity of man [which Evola] censured for its “rhetorical exaltation of individuality.”
The choice is not between secular science and “Tradition” in the form of dogmatic religion. [16] [19] The true “Roman” tradition is the one that gave birth to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the bug-bears of both Traditionalists and Neo-Reactionaries. Needless to say, this is the Platonic tradition — pro-science but anti-scientism, pro-spirituality but anti-“churchianity” — to which Emerson and the “American Gurus” belong.
And this is why Evola belongs here; Fenili insists that “the most important part of Evola’s creative oeuvre consist[s] of the works of esoteric, orientalist and philosophic character,” which include The Doctrine of Awakening, The Hermetic Tradition, and The Yoga of Power, which, together with Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, are the works constantly cited by O’Meara to explicate and justify what he calls “America’s homegrown Hermeticism, native Neoplatonism, and two-fisted Traditionalism” — a more authentic Tradition than anything dreamed up in Guénon’s cork-lined bedroom.
Bringing these figures together illuminates a uniquely American and Modernist phenomenon, excavates a third stream — esotericism — between science and religion, and de-occultates the hidden passage from Evola’s magic to post-Trump populism.
There is another thread of continuity in the studies presented here. Starting from reminiscences of teenage years listening to early Sunday morning radio broadcasts of Alan Watts, through the dense accumulation of names and references, surfacing in the clear, easy mastery of his presentation of Neville as the greatest voice of hermetic tradition in the 20th century, we have here, intended or not, an intellectual biography, a more modest version of Evola’s Path of Cinnabar.
And so we can say, as Teitelbaum says of the Brazilian Traditionalist and populist Olavo de Carvalho:
Thinking in these terms. . . made his ostensible journey seem like no journey at all: his activities since discovering Traditionalism in the 1970s would instead appear variations on a theme rather than a dilettantish succession of gimmicks and reinventions. [17] [20]
Whitman, one of the great voices of American immediatism, comes to mind. “This is no book, cammerade [sic]. Who touches this touches a man. . .”
If you want to support our work, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page [21] and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every Friday.
Notes
[1] [22] Quoted in Benjamin Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), p. 153
[2] [23] “Neville’s Purpose Revealed,” in Let Us Go Into the Silence: The Lectures of Neville Goddard, compiled by David Allen (Kindle, 2016)
[3] [24] Described in the title essay, “Magick for Housewives: The (Not So) New (and Really Rather Traditional) Thought of Neville Goddard.” Neville, by his own admission, was known as “The Mad Mystic of 48th Street.” The haute bourgeois ladies Tom Wolfe later called “Social X-Rays,” looking for a new thrill, would say to each other: “Oh, do come along and hear him, it’s free and he’s terribly funny!”
[4] [25] Teitelbaum, op. cit., p.267.
[5] [26] Watts were British, but Watts emigrated to the US and gained fame there, while Wilson always felt like an “outsider” in British culture and openly preferred Americans. Neville was from Barbados, emigrated to New York at seventeen, and was given citizenship after being drafted in World War Two. The outlier is Crowley, but he would be an outlier anywhere, and at least spent some time in the US.
[6] [27] Versluis traces it back to Plato, via Emerson: see American Gurus, Chapter 2, “Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle.” Camille Paglia also delineates a “North American Literary Tradition” that originates in the collision of American Puritanism with European Romanticism; see my review “The Native American Nietzsche: Camille Paglia, Frontier Philosopher [28].”
[7] [29] See his interview here [30].
[8] [31] American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion (Oxford, 2014), p 248.
[9] [32] Like Zen, a “special transmission outside the scriptures” – Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History. Volume 1: India and China, World (Wisdom Books, 2005), pp. 85-94.
[10] [33] Neville: “Religious progress is a gradual transition from a god of tradition to a God of experience.” (“Control Your Inner Conversations [34],” 4-26-1971.
[11] [35] “Nature” (1844).
[12] [36] “When I was drafted, called, and sent, it was with the command, ‘Down with the bluebloods.’ In other words, down with all church protocol, with anything that would interfere with the individual’s direct access to God. There is only one foundation upon which to build. That foundation is I AM, and there is no other.” Neville, “No Other Foundation [37],” 11-04-1968.
[13] [38] Julius Evola, “The New Spirit Movement”; originally published in Bilychnis, June, 1928.
[14] [39] See Jocelyn Godwin, “Politica Romana Pro and Contra Evola,” in Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, and Melinda Phillips (eds.), Esotericism, Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis, MI: New Cultures Press 2012). I don’t read Italian and haven’t read the article itself, so I am relying on Godwin’s presentation.
[15] [40] Guénon, for his part, never even pretended to be “Roman” and in fact despised the Classical world, no doubt a reaction to a typical French education; after years of trying to interest the Catholic Church in his ideas, he eventually converted to Islam. Why rightists think he has anything to contribute to their struggle is a mystery.
[16] [41] Commenting on 1 Corinthians, Robert Price notes that in the “Catholic anti-wisdom section” of Chapter 3 we find “once again, the opposite of [worldly] wisdom is not esotericism but simplicity. The pious attitude is that which regrets the sampling of the knowledge tree in Eden, the erection of the Babel tower. Such a one is happy to mortgage his faith to the Grand Inquisitor.” The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2012); compare Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), especially the “Introduction to Part One: The Tree, the Serpent, and the Titans.”
[17] [42] Teitelbaum, op. cit., p.260.
Historien de formation, l’auteur plonge le lecteur à la fin de l’année 1941 dans une Angleterre vaincue et occupée par l’Allemagne. Si le roi George VI est prisonnier dans la Tour de Londres, son épouse et leurs filles, la princesse héritière Elizabeth et sa sœur Margaret, vivent en exil en Nouvelle-Zélande. Winston Churchill est pendu haut et court. À l’instar de l’éphémère « France libre » de Charles de Gaulle qui « s’est promu général et [qui] a déclaré qu’il était la voix de la France. Ça n’a jamais abouti à rien (p. 174) », la « Grande-Bretagne libre » s’incarne depuis l’Amérique du Nord dans un certain contre-amiral Conolly. Cette résistance extérieure complète une résistance intérieure plus ou moins balbutiante.
Agitprop in America
The book opens with the contention that “since the 1960s Marxists and their sympathizers in America have been using agitprop (an integration of intense agitation and propaganda invented by Lenin) to destroy America’s culture and build Cultural Marxism. To do this, agitprop has changed American speech and manipulated cultural values and beliefs.” American history has been rewritten “to make it into a Marxian tale of unmitigated oppression.” American contemporary society has been reinterpreted as the story of “one biologically defined ruling class (straight White males) “victimizing” all other biologically defined classes.” These Marxist dogmas “are causing the destruction of America’s exceptional culture.”
The final section of the book consists of five short chapters on differing subjects. The first is a commentary on “The Failure of Marxism in the USSR and Successes of PC Marxism in America” which combines an interesting historical overview with a quite strident attack on the Obama years. The next chapter is a brief but lucid essay on how agitprop and PC Marxism has influenced U.S. government spending. The third, and shortest chapter in this section is an attempted rebuttal of the idea that America has become an imperialist nation. I tend to disagree with McElroy somewhat here, not because I believe America has an empire in the conventional sense, but because I believe it’s self-evident that elements of the U.S. government, most notably the neocons, have increasingly steered the country into a foreign interventionist position built around the idea of sustaining global finance capitalism and the state of Israel. Since McElroy’s musings on this topic are limited to a few pages, I was, however, spared any lasting distaste.
Celui qui émettait cette opinion, le faisait en toute honnêteté, et il n’a pas attendu bien longtemps pour démontrer, dans la zone russe de la Pologne, la véracité de ses dires, mais sa façon malhabile et emportée de proférer inopinément et souvent à contretemps de grandes phrases, lui valait souvent, en dépit de sa probité, de n’être que la cible d’innocentes plaisanteries. 
Ebenfalls hart ins Gericht geht Krall mit den Medien, die ihrer Rolle als »vierte Gewalt« zur Kontrolle der Mächtigen nicht mehr gerecht würden. Stattdessen fungierten sie als ein Erziehungsinstrument im Interesse der herrschenden Eliten, was besonders im Haltungsjournalismus zum Ausdruck komme, der nicht mehr zwischen Nachricht und Meinung unterscheide. Ziel sei es, das Publikum im politisch korrekten Sinn umzuerziehen. Dazu gehöre es auch, die Sprache zu manipulieren, indem bestimmte Begriffe als »Unworte« aus dem Diskurs verbannt oder usurpiert und mit neuen Bedeutungen aufgeladen werden. Krall nennt dafür einige Beispiele im Buch. Darüber hinaus würden ganze Themenkomplexe und unliebsame Meinungen in der öffentlichen und medialen Diskussion verunglimpft. Eine besonders unrühmliche Rolle bei dem Versuch, die destruktive Politik der Regierenden zu rechtfertigen, spiele der öffentlich-rechtliche Rundfunk, den der Bürger als Opfer der Indoktrination auch noch mit Zwangsgebühren finanzieren müsse. Gleichzeitig werde das Internet als freier Informations- und Diskussionskanal für kritische Bürger durch immer schärfere Gesetze und Zensurmaßnahmen beschränkt. Als Beispiele führt Krall das Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz und den auf EU-Ebene beschlossenen Upload-Filter an.
Non, le fond du problème est ailleurs et nos sociétés libérales souffrent de la même faiblesse que le système soviétique, à savoir celle à laquelle toute société complexe, au sens que Joseph Tainter donne à ce terme dans L’Effondrement des sociétés complexes, doit faire face lorsqu’elle se retrouve confrontée à une crise de grande ampleur. De ce point de vue, les sociétés complexes sont vues comme des organisations de résolution de problèmes qui sont toutes invitées à trouver une solution à une équation insoluble : ces problèmes appellent des solutions de plus en plus coûteuses à mesure que la société se complexifie. Il s’agit là de la décroissance du rendement marginal, soit la diminution du rendement par unité supplémentaire d’investissement. C’est la loi d’airain du déclin civilisationnel…
Douwe Kalma opposait l’idée d’une Grande Frise à celle d’une Grande Néerlande, en exprimant de la sorte les liens, qu’il ressentait comme réels et charnels, entre les Frisons des Pays-Bas et ceux de Frise septentrionale et de Frise orientale qui vivaient sous les administrations allemande et danoise. Simultanément, il plaidait pour une Grande Frise qui aurait eu pour fonction de faire pont entre la Scandinavie et l’Angleterre, afin de lier des peuples qui, selon lui, étaient très proches depuis longtemps et qui présentaient certaines affinités mentales. Pour pouvoir donner forme à cette fonction de pont, la Frise, selon Kalma, devait réclamer une plus grande autonomie ; il fallait, pour cela, que ses compatriotes soient culturellement structurés.
Jeune lieutenant à la fin du conflit, Hirô Onoda rejoint l’île occidentale de Lubang aux Philippines. Instruit auparavant dans une école de guérilla à Futamata, il reçoit des ordres explicites : 1) ne jamais se donner la mort, 2) désorganiser au mieux l’arrière des lignes ennemies une fois que l’armée impériale se sera retirée, 3) tout observer dans l’attente d’un prochain débarquement japonais.
Modèle d’abnégation patriotique totale, bel exemple d’impersonnalité active, Hirô Onoda est alors certain qu’en cas d’invasion du Japon, « les femmes et les enfants se battraient avec des bâtons en bambou, tuant un maximum de soldats avant de mourir. En temps de guerre, les journaux martelaient cette résolution avec les mots les plus forts possibles : “ Combattez jusqu’au dernier souffle ! ”, “ Il faut protéger l’Empire à tout prix ! ”, “ Cent millions de morts pour le Japon ! ” (pp. 177 – 178) ». Ce n’est que le 9 mars 1974 que le lieutenant Onoda arrête sa guerre dans des circonstances qu’il reviendra au lecteur de découvrir.
Matthew Carr
La parution de L'Ere du vide, en 1983, fit grand bruit. Gilles Lipovetsky apparaissait comme un observateur de la société postmoderne, celle qui voyait simultanément l'écroulement des grandes idéologies et le développement de l'individualisme. Ce livre marquait l'entrée en scène tonitruante d'un « Narcisse cool et affranchi ».
L’existence dans l’hypermodernité expose un versant refoulé dans excès et une dualité, où la frivolité masque une profonde anxiété existentielle collective. De là naît un rapport crispé sur le présent, lequel triomphe dans le règne de l'émotivité angoissée. L'effondrement des traditions est alors vécu sur le mode de l'inquiétude et non sur la conquête de libertés individuelles et collectives. L'hypermodernité, pour Lipovetsky, tient également lieu de chance à saisir, celle d'une responsabilisation renouvelée du sujet.
La Chine accuse les États-Unis ! Nous avions déjà la crise sanitaire et la crise économique, voici peut-être une nouvelle crise diplomatique majeure puisqu’un porte-parole du ministère chinois des Affaires étrangères suggère que l’épidémie n’est pas nécessairement accidentelle…et qu’elle provient d’Amérique !
Les raisons de ce relatif abandon intellectuel sont multiples : mondialisme, faiblesses intellectuelles et historiques chez la grande majorité du personnel politique et l’inventaire de la Révolution est de plus en plus connu… Cela étant, un homme situé à l’extrême gauche de l’échiquier politique républicain n’a pas hésité, tout récemment, à commettre une œuvre dans laquelle il assume se reconnaître dans l’héritage jacobin.(1)
Robert Malthus’s essay on population growth is widely known and widely refuted, mostly by commentators who have not read it. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that population growth undermined the achievements which technology had brought and was bringing to human society and ironically had first made that population growth possible. Populations, he wrote, increased faster than the rate of increase in food production necessary to keep pace with the demand for more food. According to Malthus, this discrepancy between supply and demand would lead inevitably to a decline in living standards and to famine. That Malthus’s prediction proved (broadly) not to be the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is largely due to the fact that human societies have vastly improved agricultural efficiency and available agricultural land far in excess of the slow growth in food production which Malthus had projected. This improvement in food production to meet the demands of growing populations could only be achieved, and was only achieved, by improved logistics, improved science, and exploiting nature — not only more efficiently, but also more extensively. The fear of famine and outbreaks of famine have continued down to the present day, however, and although Malthus is officially repudiated, his ghost has not been lain to rest. The burden put upon nature incurred by meeting the challenge of the appetites of the human population increase continues to this day. Has Malthus been proved entirely wrong, and is his thesis applicable in relation to challenges other than that of famine?
Another highly interesting factor highlighted in this book is the notion of the sanctity of life. From the end of the Roman Empire to the sixteenth century, Europe did not experience a dramatic increase in population nor did it experience a birth rate anything like as high as that which began suddenly at the end of the fifteenth century and continued down to the twentieth century. What had happened? According to Heinsohn, the notion of the “sanctity of life” and hostility towards contraception, infanticide, and abortion of an intensity not seen since the days of Rome (but highly characteristic of Islamic society) began at the end of the fifteenth century — and it is at the end of the fifteenth century that Europe set out on a course of world conquest. The writer refers to well-documented evidence from several English counties. On the basis of this evidence, between 1441 and 1465, 100 fathers were leaving 110 surviving sons. Between 1491 and 1505 a dramatic change had taken place: 100 fathers were leaving behind them 202 surviving sons. By the nineteenth century, between 5 and 6.5 children per mother were being raised in Europe, a rate only reached in the last century by twenty-four states in Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan.
It is worth noting the paradox that only does the white race have far fewer children per capita than other races, but those who are most conscious of the demographic decline and most readily deplore it themselves usually have few or no children at all.
It is fourteen years since the renowned philosopher Peter Sloterdijk opined enthusiastically in the pages of the Kölner Stadt Anzeiger that Söhne und Weltmacht would become required reading for politicians and journalists. His prediction has not been fulfilled, and this new and updated edition has been published by a small Swiss imprint. The fact is that books like Söhne und Weltmacht cannot expect to receive much attention from journalists or politicians. They point to truths which the presently-dominating ideology is loathe to review or discuss.
Son nouvel ouvrage, Devant l’effondrement, ne peut que déplaire aux hiérarques d’Europe Écologie – Les Verts (EE-LV) et à leurs potentiels électeurs bo-bo prêt à tout pour sombrer une nouvelle fois dans l’hédonisme « éthique ». Avec cet « essai de collapsologie », Yves Cochet « avoue avoir rédigé cet ouvrage d’une main tremblante (p. 120) ». Son propos sciemment pessimiste contrarie les desseins merveilleux d’EE – LV au moment où leurs homologues autrichiens et bientôt allemands gouvernent et vont gouverner en partenariat avec les conservateurs chrétiens-démocrates. Il s’agace du réformisme radieux qui émane de son parti. « Collés à l’actualité, obsédés par la rivalité pour les places – comme dans les autres partis, en somme -, la quasi-totalité des animateurs Verts se bornent à décliner les clichés rassurants du développement durable, aujourd’hui renommé “ Green New Deal ” ou “ transition écologique ” (p. 221). »
Si Yves Cochet oppose trois modèles : le productiviste, l’augustinien et le modèle discontinuiste qui « pourrait être compatible avec l’un et l’autre, puisqu’il se focalise surtout sur la forme de l’évolution du monde, et non sur sa substance (p. 55) », on remarque qu’il se réfère à un sermon de Saint-Augustin de décembre 410 qui aurait inspiré Oswald Spengler et le vitalisme civilisationnel… Suite aux travaux précurseurs de Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen et à la prise en compte de la non-linéarité des systèmes complexes, il distingue l’économie biophysique de l’économie écologique qui « tente d’évaluer le prix des services des écosystèmes en intégrant la finitude des ressources et la pollution dans le cadre de l’économie néo-classique (p. 73) ». À l’économie néo-classique, il propose l’« économie biophysique [qui] se concentre explicitement sur les relations de puissance, à la fois dans le sens physique d’énergie par unité de temps et dans le sens social de contrôle sur les autres (p. 71) ». À la jonction des sciences exactes et des sciences humaines, l’économie biophysique se base « sur les stocks et les flux de matière et d’énergie plutôt que sur les comportements individuels (les “ préférences des consommateurs ”). L’accent est mis sur la qualité de l’énergie, ainsi que sur la quantité d’énergie disponible (p. 71) ». Il parie que « l’économie biophysique, qui envisage un monde au climat déréglé et à l’énergie rare, est une meilleure base d’orientation pour la construction d’une société soutenable que les formes individualiste et croissanciste de la théorie économique néo-classique (p. 91) » parce que « plutôt que de prendre la rareté relative comme point de départ, [elle] se concentre sur le surplus économique et la pénurie absolue (p. 86) ».
Yves Cochet évacue bien trop rapidement la violence humaine. La grève contre la réforme des retraites déclenchée le 5 décembre 2019 a déjà démontré la sauvagerie sous-jacente des Franciliens et des Parisiens qui essayaient de monter dans le seul train de banlieue ou dans l’unique rame de métro. Certains n’hésitèrent pas à se battre. Et ne parlons pas des rapports conflictuels en ville entre piétons, automobilistes, cyclistes, patineurs à roulettes et « trottinettistes ». Cette agressivité propre à la nature humaine, accentuée par la modernité tardive pourrait atteindre rapidement son paroxysme au moment de l’effondrement social. La vie en zone urbaine après la « Grande Déflagration » sera certainement plus difficile que dans la France périphérique déjà habituée aux privations. « Il faudra réapprendre à maîtriser une agro-écologie alimentaire, énergétique et productrice de fibres pour les vêtements, cordes et papiers, la production de matériaux de construction indigènes, voire la fabrication de quelques substances secondaires, mais utiles, telles que l’alcool, l’ammoniac, la soude, la chaux… Tous ces domaines étant équipés en outils low tech aptes à êtres fabriqués, entretenus et réparés par des ouvriers locaux (p. 118). » En pratique, on utilisera le bois de chauffage, le charbon de bois et les biogaz dont le méthane.
La fourmilière est peuplée par des reines, des femelles fécondées, vivant une douzaine d’années, d’innombrables cohortes d’ouvriers (ou ouvrières ) asexués vivant trois ou quatre ans et de quelques centaines de mâles qui disparaissent au bout de cinq à six semaines. Dans une fourmilière peuvent cohabiter plusieurs colonies avec plusieurs reines et même parfois différentes espèces en plus ou moins bonne harmonie. La fourmilière héberge aussi une quantité de parasites, l’auteur écrit qu’on en comptait, au moment de la rédaction de son ouvrage, « plus de deux milles espèces, et d’incessantes découvertes accroissent journellement ce nombre ». Je n’ai pas eu la curiosité de vérifier cette donnée auprès d’autres sources, la vie et l’histoire de ce monde en miniature sont pourtant fascinantes et permettent de formuler moult élucubrations plus ou moins fantaisistes mais, pour certaines, tout à fait plausibles. L’auteur s’est penché sur cette vie grouillante et pourtant très organisée qui peut évoquer l’humanité à une échelle réduite et peut-être même dotée d’une intelligence au moins comparable. C’est là un vaste champ d’investigation, de réflexion, d’imagination et de recherche qui ne sera sans doute jamais exploré jusqu’à ses ultimes limites.
