Mika Ojakangas is a professor of political theory, teaching at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He has written a succinct and fairly comprehensive overview of ancient Greek thought on population policies and eugenics, or what he terms “biopolitics.” Ojakangas says:
In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics (sexual intercourse, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, public health, education, birthrate, migration, immigration, economy, and so forth) from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. At issue is not only a politics for which “the idea of governing people” is the leading idea but also a politics for which the question how “to organize life” (tou zên paraskeuên) (Plato, Statesman, 307e) is the most important question. (6)
The idea of regulating and cultivating human life, just as one would animal and plant life, is then not a Darwinian, eugenic, or Nazi modern innovation, but, as I have argued concerning Plato’s Republic, can be found in a highly developed form at the dawn of Western civilization. As Ojakangas says:
The idea of politics as control and regulation of the living in the name of the security, well-being and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as Western political thought itself, originating in classical Greece. Greek political thought, as I will demonstrate in this book, is biopolitical to the bone. (1)
Greek thought had nothing to do with the modern obsessions with supposed “human rights” or “social contracts,” but took the good to mean the flourishing of the community, and of individuals as part of that community, as an actualization of the species’ potential: “In this biopolitical power-knowledge focusing on the living, to repeat, the point of departure is neither law, nor free will, nor a contract, or even a natural law, meaning an immutable moral rule. The point of departure is the natural life (phusis) of individuals and populations” (6). Okajangas notes: “for Plato and Aristotle politics was essentially biopolitics” (141).
In Ojakangas’ telling, Western biopolitical thought gradually declined in the ancient and medieval period. Whereas Aristotle and perhaps Plato had thought of natural law and the good as pertaining to a particular organism, the Stoics, Christians, and liberals posited a kind of a disembodied natural law:
This history is marked by several ruptures understood as obstacles preventing the adoption and diffusion of the Platonic-Aristotelian biopolitical model of politics – despite the influence these philosophers have otherwise had on Roman and Christian thought. Among these ruptures, we may include: the legalization of politics in the Roman Republic and the privatization of everyday life in the Roman Empire, but particularly the end of birth control, hostility towards the body, the sanctification of law, and the emergence of an entirely new kind of attitude to politics and earthly government in early Christianity. (7)
Ojakangas’ book has served to confirm my impression that, from an evolutionary point of view, the most relevant Western thinkers are found among the ancient Greeks, with a long sleep during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, a slow revival during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and a great climax heralded by Darwin, before being shut down again in 1945. The periods in which Western thought was eminently biopolitical — the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and 1865 to 1945 — are perhaps surprisingly short in the grand scheme of things, having been swept away by pious Europeans’ recurring penchant for egalitarian and cosmopolitan ideologies. Okajangas also admirably puts ancient biopolitics in the wider context of Western thought, citing Spinoza, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, and others, as well as recent academic literature.
At the core of the work is a critique of Michel Foucault’s claim that biopolitics is a strictly modern phenomenon growing out of “Christian pastoral power.” Ojakangas, while sympathetic to Foucault, says the latter’s argument is “vague” (33) and unsubstantiated. Indeed, historically at least, Catholic countries with strong pastoral power tended precisely to be those in which eugenics was less popular, in contrast with Protestant ones.
It must be said that postmodernist pioneer Foucault is a strange starting point on the topic of biopolitics. As Ojakangas suggests, Foucault’s 1979 and 1980 lecture courses The Birth of Biopolitics and On the Government of the Living do not deal mainly with biopolitics at all, despite their titles (34–35). Indeed, Foucault actually lost rapidly lost interest in the topic.
Okajangas also criticizes Hannah Arendt for claiming that Aristotle posited a separation between the familial/natural life of the household (oikos) and that of the polis. In fact: “The Greek city-state was, to use Carl Schmitt’s infamous formulation, a total state — a state that intervenes, if it so wishes, in all possible matters, in economy and in all the other spheres of human existence” (17). Okajangas goes into some detail citing, contra Arendt and Foucault, ancient Greek uses of household-management and shepherding as analogies for political rule.
Aristotle appears as a genuine forerunner of modern scientific biopolitics in Ojakangas’ account. Aristotle’s politics was at once highly conventional, really reflecting more widespread Greek assumptions, and his truly groundbreaking work as an empirical scientist, notably in the field of biology. For Aristotle “the aim of politics and state administration is to produce good life by developing the immanent potentialities of natural life and to bring these potentialities to fruition” (17, cf. 107). Ojakangas goes on:
Aristotle was not a legal positivist in the modern sense of the word but rather a representative of sociological naturalism, as for Aristotle there is no fundamental distinction between the natural and the social world: they are both governed by the same principles discovered by empirical research on the nature of things and living beings. (55–56)
And: “although justice is based on nature, at stake in this nature is not an immutable and eternal cosmic nature expressing itself in the law written on the hearts of men and women but nature as it unfolds in a being” (109).
This entailed a notion of justice as synonymous with natural hierarchy. Okajangas notes: “for Plato justice means inequality. Justice takes place when an individual fulfills that function or work (ergon) that is assigned to him by nature in the socio-political hierarchy of the state — and to the extent that everybody does so, the whole city-state is just” (111). Biopolitical justice is when each member of the community is fulfilling the particular role to which he is best suited to enable the species to flourish: “For Plato and Aristotle, in sum, natural justice entails hierarchy, not equality, subordination, not autonomy” (113). Both Plato and Aristotle adhered to a “geometrical” conception of equality between humans, namely, that human beings were not equal, but should be treated in accordance with their worth or merit.
Plato used the concepts of reason and nature not to comfort convention but to make radical proposals for the biological, cultural, and spiritual perfection of humanity. Okajangas rightly calls the Republic a “bio-meritocratic” utopia (19) and notes that “Platonic biopolitico-pastoral power” was highly innovative (134). I was personally also extremely struck in Plato by his unique and emphatic joining together of the biological and the spiritual. Okajangas says that National Socialist racial theoriar Hans F. K. Günther in his Plato as Protector of Life (1928) had argued that “a dualistic reading of Plato goes astray: the soul and the body are not separate entities, let alone enemies, for the spiritual purification in the Platonic state takes place only when accompanied with biological selection” (13).[1]
Okajangas succinctly summarizes the decline of biopolitics in the ancient world. Politically this was related to the decline of the intimate and “total” city-state:
It indeed seems that the decline of the classical city-state also entailed a crisis of biopolitical vision of politics. . . . Just like modern biopolitics, which is closely linked to the rise of the modern nation-state, it is quite likely that the decline of biopolitics and biopolitical vision of politics in the classical era is related to the fall of the ethnically homogeneous political organization characteristic of the classical city-states. (118)
The rise of Hellenistic and Roman empires as universal, cultural states naturally entailed a withdrawal of citizens from politics and a decline in self-conscious ethnopolitics.
While Rome had also been founded as “a biopolitical regime” and had some policies to promote fertility and eugenics (120), this was far less central to Roman than to Greek thought, and gradually declined with the Empire. Political ideology seems to have followed political realities. The Stoics and Cicero posited a “natural law” not deriving from a particular organism, but as a kind of cosmic, disembodied moral imperative, and tended to emphasize the basic commonality of human beings (e.g. Cicero, Laws, 1.30).
I believe that the apparently unchanging quality of the world and the apparent biological stability of the species led many ancient thinkers to posit an eternal and unchanging disembodied moral law. They did not have our insights on the evolutionary origins of our species and of its potential for upward change in the future. Furthermore, the relative commonality of human beings in the ancient Mediterranean — where the vast majority were Aryan or Semitic Caucasians, with some clinal variation — could lead one to think that biological differences between humans were minor (an impression which Europeans abandoned in the colonial era, when they encountered Sub-Saharan Africans, Amerindians, and East Asians). Missing, in those days before modern science and as White advocate William Pierce has observed, was a progressive vision of human history as an evolutionary process towards ever-greater consciousness and self-actualization.[2]
Many assumptions of late Hellenistic (notably Stoic) philosophy were reflected and sacralized in Christianity, which also posited a universal and timeless moral law deriving from God, rather than the state or the community. As it is said in the Book of Acts (5:29): “We must obey God rather than men.” With Christianity’s emphasis on the dignity of each soul and respect for the will of God, the idea of manipulating reproductive processes through contraception, abortion, or infanticide in order to promote the public good became “taboo” (121). Furthermore: “virginity and celibacy were as a rule regarded as more sacred states than marriage and family life . . . . The dying ascetic replaced the muscular athlete as a role model” (121). These attitudes gradually became reflected in imperial policies:
All the marriage laws of Augustus (including the system of legal rewards for married parents with children and penalties for the unwed and childless) passed from 18 BC onwards were replaced under Constantine and the later Christian emperors — and even those that were not fell into disuse. . . . To this effect, Christian emperors not only made permanent the removal of sanctions on celibates, but began to honor and reward those Christian priests who followed the rule of celibacy: instead of granting privileges to those who contracted a second marriage, Justinian granted privileges to those who did not (125)
The notion of moral imperatives deriving from a disembodied natural law and the equality of souls gradually led to the modern obsession with natural rights, free will, and social contracts. Contrast Plato and Aristotle’s eudaimonic (i.e., focusing on self-actualization) politics of aristocracy and community to that of seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
I know that in the first book of the Politics Aristotle asserts as a foundation of all political knowledge that some men have been made by nature worthy to rule, others to serve, as if Master and slave were distinguished not by agreement among men, but by natural aptitude, i.e. by their knowledge or ignorance. This basic postulate is not only against reason, but contrary to experience. For hardly anyone is so naturally stupid that he does not think it better to rule himself than to let others rule him. … If then men are equal by nature, we must recognize their equality; if they are unequal, since they will struggle for power, the pursuit of peace requires that they are regarded as equal. And therefore the eighth precept of natural law is: everyone should be considered equal to everyone. Contrary to this law is PRIDE. (De Cive, 3.13)
It does seem that, from an evolutionary point of view, the long era of medieval and early modern thought represents an enormous regression as compared with the Ancients, particularly the Greeks. As Ojakangas puts it: “there is an essential rupture in the history of Western political discourse since the decline of the Greek city-states” (134).
Western biopolitics gradually returned in the modern era and especially with Darwin, who himself had said in The Descent of Man: “The weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”[3] And: “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.”[4] Okajangas argues that “the Platonic Aristotelian art of government [was] more biopolitical than the modern one,” as they did not have to compromise with other traditions, namely “Roman and Judeo-Christian concepts and assumptions” (137).
Okajangas’ book is useful in seeing the outline of the long tradition of Western biopolitical thinking, despite the relative eclipse of the Middle Ages. He says:
Baruch Spinoza was probably the first modern metaphysician of biopolitics. While Kant’s moral and political thought is still centered on concepts such as law, free will, duty, and obligation, in Spinoza we encounter an entirely different mode of thinking: there are no other laws but causal ones, the human will is absolutely determined by these laws, freedom and happiness consist of adjusting oneself to them, and what is perhaps most essential, the law of nature is the law of a self-expressing body striving to preserve itself (conatus) by affirming itself, this affirmation, this immanent power of life, being nothing less than justice. In the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, this metaphysics of biopolitics is brought to its logical conclusion. The law of life is nothing but life’s will to power, but now this power, still identical with justice, is understood as a process in which the sick and the weak are eradicated by the vital forces of life.
I note in passing that William Pierce had a similar assessment of Spinoza’s pantheism as basically valid, despite the latter’s Jewishness.[5]
The 1930s witnessed the zenith of modern Western biopolitical thinking. The French Nobel Prize winner and biologist Alexis Carrel had argued in his best-selling Man the Unknown for the need for eugenics and the need for “philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity.” Yet, as Okajangas points out, “if we take a look at the very root of all ‘philosophical systems,’ we find a philosophy (albeit perhaps not a system) perfectly in agreement with Carrel’s message: the political philosophy of Plato” (97).
Okajangas furthermore argues that Aristotle’s biocentric naturalist ethics were taken up in 1930s Germany:
Instead of ius naturale, at stake was rather what the modern human sciences since the nineteenth century have called biological, economical, and sociological laws of life and society — or what the early twentieth-century völkisch German philosophers, theologians, jurists, and Hellenists called Lebensgesetz, the law of life expressing the unity of spirit and race immanent to life itself. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, attacked the Roman lex [law] in the name of the Greek nomos [custom/law] — whose “original” meaning, although it had started to deteriorate already in the post-Solonian democracy, can in Schmitt’s view still be detected in Aristotle’s Politics. Cicero had translated nomos as lex, but on Schmitt’s account he did not recognize that unlike the Roman lex, nomos does not denote an enacted statute (positive law) but a “concrete order of life” (eine konkrete Lebensordnung) of the Greek polis — not something that ‘ought to be’ but something that “is”. (56)
Western biopolitical thought was devastated by the outcome of the World War II and has yet to recover, although perhaps we can begin to see glimmers of renewal.
Okajangas reserves some critical comments for Foucault in his conclusion, arguing that with his erudition he could not have been ignorant of classical philosophy’s biopolitical character. He speculates on Foucault’s motivations for lying: “Was it a tactical move related to certain political ends? Was it even an attempt to blame Christianity and traditional Christian anti-Semitism for the Holocaust?” (142). I am in no position to pronounce on this, other than to point out that Foucault, apparently a gentile, was a life-long leftist, a Communist Party member in the 1950s, a homosexual who eventually died of AIDS, and a man who — from what I can make of his oeuvre — dedicated his life to “problematizing” the state’s policing and regulation of abnormality.
Okajangas’ work is scrupulously neutral in his presentation of ancient biopolitics. He keeps his cards close to his chest. I identified only two rather telling comments:
- His claim that “we know today that human races do not exist” (11).
- His assertion that “it would be childish to denounce biopolitics as a multi-headed monster to be wiped off the map of politics by every possible means (capitalism without biopolitics would be an unparalleled nightmare)” (143).
The latter’s odd phrasing strikes me as presenting an ostensibly left-wing point to actually make a taboo right-wing point (a technique Slavoj Žižek seems to specialize in).
In any event, I take Ojakangas’ work as a confirmation of the utmost relevance of ancient political philosophy for refounding European civilization on a sound biopolitical basis. The Greek philosophers, I believe, produced the highest biopolitical thought because they could combine the “barbaric” pagan-Aryan values which Greek society took for granted with the logical rigor of Socratic rationalism. The old pagan-Aryan culture, expressed above all in the Homeric poems, extolled the values of kinship, aristocracy, competitiveness, community, and manliness, this having been a culture which was produced by a long, evolutionary struggle for survival among wandering and conquering tribes in the Eurasian steppe. This highly adaptive traditional culture was then, by a uniquely Western contact with rationalist philosophy, rationalized and radicalized by the philosophers, untainted by the sentimentality of later times. Plato and Aristotle are remarkably un-contrived and straightforward in their political methods and goals: the human community must be perfected biologically and culturally; individual and sectoral interests must give way to those of the common good; and these ought to be enforced through pragmatic means, in accord with wisdom, with law where possible, and with ruthlessness when necessary.
[1]Furthermore, on a decidedly spiritual note: “ rather than being a Darwinist of sorts, in Günther’s view it is Plato’s idealism that renders him a predecessor of Nazi ideology, because race is not merely about the body but, as Plato taught, a combination of the mortal body and the immortal soul.” (13)
[2] William Pierce:
The medieval view of the world was that it is a finished creation. Since Darwin, we have come to see the world as undergoing a continuous and unfinished process of creation, of evolution. This evolutionary view of the world is only about 100 years old in terms of being generally accepted. . . . The pantheists, at least most of them, lacked an understanding of the universe as an evolving entity and so their understanding was incomplete. Their static view of the world made it much more difficult for them to arrive at the Cosmotheist truth.
William Pierce, “Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future,” speech delivered in Arlington, Virginia 1977.
[3] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton and Company, 1882), 134.
[4]Ibid., 617. Interestingly, Okajangas points out that Benjamin Isaac, a Jewish scholar writing on Greco-Roman “racism,” believed Plato (Republic 459a-b) had inspired Darwin on this point. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 128.
[5]Pierce, “Cosmotheism.”
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
L'homme est au centre de l'univers selon Charbonneau, qui ouvre son texte de bien belle façon en affirmant qu'avant «l'acte divin, avant la pensée, il n'y a ni temps, ni espace : comme ils disparaîtront quand l'homme aura disparu dans le néant, ou en Dieu» (1). Si l'homme se trouve au centre d'une dramaturgie unissant l'espace et le temps, c'est qu'il a donc le pouvoir non seulement d'organiser ces derniers mais aussi, bien évidemment, de les déstructurer, comme l'illustre l'accélération du temps et le rapetissement de l'espace dont est victime notre époque car, «si nous savons faire silence en nous, nous pouvons sentir le sol qui nous a jusqu'ici portés vibrer sous le galop accéléré d'un temps qui se précipite», et comprendre que nous nous condamnons à vivre entassés dans un «univers concentrationnaire surpeuplé et surorganisé» (le terme concentrationnaire est de nouveau employé à la page 31, puis à la page 50), où l'espace à l'évidence mais aussi le temps nous manqueront, alors que nous nous disperserons «dans un vide illimité, dépourvu de bornes matérielles, autant que spirituelles». 
Hélas, l'homme moderne ne semble avoir de goût, comme le pensait Max Picard, que pour la fuite et, fuyant sans cesse, il semble précipiter la création entière dans sa propre vitesse s'accroissant davantage, la fuite appelant la fuite, bien qu'il ne faille pas confondre cette accélération avec le «rythme d'une existence humaine [qui] est celui d'une tragédie dont le dénouement se précipite». Ainsi, la «nuit d'amour dont l'aube semblait ne jamais devoir se lever n'est plus qu'un bref instant de rêve entre le jour et le jour; du printemps au printemps, les saisons sont plus courtes que ne l'étaient les heures. Vient même un âge qui réalise la disparition du présent, qui ne peut plus dire : je vis, mais : j'ai vécu; où rien n'est sûr, sinon que tout est déjà fini» (p. 22).
Porque a fines del siglo XX España podía presumir de poseer su propia tradición filosófica. Y no lo queríamos ver. Desde sus aulas de Oviedo yo tuve el privilegio de aprender de don Gustavo Bueno que la lengua castellana era tan buena como la que más, buena para el cultivo de la filosofía. De mi maestro aprendí que había que rebajar ínfulas al predominio editorial y académico del inglés, del francés o del alemán. 
En el caso de Trías, y su "filosofía del límite" también contamos con una expresión del quehacer filosófico español de gran calidad, de enorme altura, aunque muy distinta de la obra buenista en formato, lenguaje y preocupaciones si la comparamos con la obra de Bueno. Triunfa el Arte y la Metáfora como recursos y temas en el pensador barcelonés, mientras que la Lógica y la Ciencia son ineludibles en el ovetense. Pero, como no hay espacio ni ocasión para analizar a estos dos gigantes, no quiero cerrar mi reflexión, sin conducir la mirada del lector hacia el tercer sistema filosófico que ahora, muy acallado por los medios, viene lanzando a la palestra hispana el profesor Fernández Lorenzo. 
Acheter 
Évidemment, tout, absolument tout étant lié, surtout lorsqu'il s'agit des affinités électives existant entre les grands esprits qui appréhendent le monde en établissant des arches, parfois fragiles mais stupéfiantes de hardiesse, entre des réalités qu'en apparence rien ne relie (cf. p. 38), je ne pouvais, poursuivant la lecture de cet excellent petit livre qui m'a fait découvrir le fulgurant (et, apparemment, horripilant) Jacob Taubes, que finalement tomber sur le nom qui, selon ce dernier, reliait Maritain à Schmitt, qualifié de «profond penseur catholique» : Léon Bloy, autrement dit le porteur, le garnt ou, pourquoi pas, le «signe secret» (p. 96) lui-même. Après Kafka saluant le génie de l'imprécation bloyenne, c'est au tour du surprenant Taubes, au détour de quelques mots laissés sans la moindre explication, comme l'une de ces saillies propres aux interventions orales, qui stupéfièrent ou scandalisèrent et pourquoi pas stupéfièrent et scandalisèrent) celles et ceux qui, dans le public, écoutèrent ces maîtres de la parole que furent Taubes et Kojève (cf. p. 47). Il n'aura évidemment échappé à personne que l'un et l'autre, Kafka et le grand commentateur de la Lettre aux Romains de l'apôtre Paul, sont juifs, Jacob Taubes se déclarant même «Erzjude» «archijuif», traduction préférable à celle de «juif au plus profond» (p. 67) que donne notre petit livre : «l'ombre de l'antisémitisme actif se profilait sur notre relation, fragile comme toujours» (p. 47), écrit ainsi l'auteur en évoquant la figure de Carl Schmitt qui, comme Martin Heidegger mais aussi Adolf Hitler, est un «catholique éventé» dont le «génie du ressentiment» lui a permis de lire «les sources à neuf» (p. 112).
C'est l'importance, capitale, de cette thématique que Jacob Taubes évoque lorsqu'il affirme que les écailles lui sont tombées des yeux quand il a lu «la courbe tracée par Löwith de Hegel à Nietzsche en passant par Marx et Kierkegaard» (p. 27), auteurs (Hegel, Marx et Kierkegaard) qu'il ne manquera pas d'évoquer dans son Eschatologie occidentale (Nietzsche l'étant dans sa Théologie politique de Paul) en expliquant leur philosophie par l'apocalyptique souterraine qui n'a à vrai dire jamais cessé d'irriguer le monde (4) dans ses multiples transformations, et paraît même s'être orientée, avec le régime nazi, vers une furie de destruction du peuple juif, soit ce peuple élu jalousé par le catholiques (et même les chrétiens) conséquents. Lisons l'explication de Taubes, qui pourra paraître une réduction aux yeux de ses adversaires ou une fulgurance dans l'esprit de ses admirateurs : «Carl Schmitt était membre du Reich allemand avec ses prétentions au Salut», tandis que lui, Taubes, était «fils du peuple véritablement élu par Dieu, suscitant donc l'envie des nations apocalyptiques, une envie qui donne naissance à des fantasmagories et conteste le droit de vivre au peuple réellement élu» (pp. 48-9, le passage plus haut cité suit immédiatement ces lignes). 
Cette complexité se retrouve dans le jugement de Jacob Taubes sur Carl Schmitt qui, ce point au moins est évident, avait une réelle importance intellectuelle à ses yeux, était peut-être même l'un des seuls contemporains pour lequel il témoigna de l'estime, au-delà même du fossé qui les séparait : «On vous fait réciter un alphabet démocratique, et tout privat-docent en politologie est évidemment obligé, dans sa leçon inaugurale, de flanquer un coup de pied au cul à Carl Schmitt en disant que la catégorie ami / ennemi n'est pas la bonne. Toute une science s'est édifiée là pour étouffer le problème» (p. 115), problème qui seul compte, et qui, toujours selon Jacob Taubes, a été correctement posé par le seul Carl Schmitt, problème qui n'est autre que l'existence d'une «guerre civile en cours à l'échelle mondiale» (p. 109). Dans sa belle préface, Elettra Stimilli a du reste parfaitement raison de rapprocher, de façon intime, les pensées de Schmitt et de Taubes, écrivant : «Révolution et contre-révolution ont toujours évolué sur le plan linéaire du temps, l'une du point de vue du progrès, l'autre de celui de la tradition. Toutes deux sont liées par l'idée d'un commencement qui, depuis l'époque romaine, est essentiellement une «fondation». Si du côté de la tradition cela ne peut qu'être évident, étant donné que déjà le noyau central de la politique romaine est la foi dans la sacralité de la fondation, entendue comme ce qui maintient un lien entre toutes les générations futures et doit pour cette raison être transmise, par ailleurs, nous ne parviendrons pas à comprendre les révolutions de l'Occident moderne dans leur grandeur et leur tragédie si, comme le dit Hannah Arendt, nous ne le concevons pas comme «autant d'efforts titanesques accomplis pour reconstruire les bases, renouer le fil interrompu de la tradition et restaurer, avec la fondation de nouveaux systèmes politiques, ce qui pendant tant de siècles a conféré dignité et grandeur aux affaires humaines» (pp. 15-6).
« Tout le monde redoute d’être contrôlé et épié ; les grands le sont jusque dans leurs comportements et leurs pensées, le peuple estimant avoir le droit d’en juger et intérêt à le faire. »
Matthew Crawford is a new but powerful intellectual. His debut in the public sphere began in 2009 with his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which was affectionately dubbed “Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by 
Such a design philosophy does not make people more free. By placing their “free will” beyond the reach of their material environment, we make room for all sorts of impositions on people’s ability to act in their own interests, and we may even make them vulnerable to exploitation. In the casino, this can include exploitation “to extinction.”
N.A. - 
- 4 - Là était la beauté de l'ancien ordre aristocratique : chacun était pleinement respecté dans son caractère spécifique, à son rang reconnu, et chacun se comportait sincèrement selon ce rang, de sorte qu'il ne pouvait y avoir de conflits nés de la jalousie ou de l'envie.
- 11 - Pour moi, dès ma prime jeunesse, je n'étais jamais tombé amoureux ; en tout cas je ne m'étais jamais avoué qu'un amour germait en moi, car mon inconscient très puritain n'admettait pas la simple possibilité d'une chute dans la sensualité, condamnée comme une faiblesse. En outre la conscience des hommes baltes de ma génération qui furent plus ou moins mes contemporains, était encore entièrement déterminée par la tension : sanctuaire inviolable - vice […] ce qui les conduisait d'une part à idéaliser démesurément la femme dite "comme il faut", d'autre part à traîner dans la boue, avec autant d'exagération, toute femme qui menait une vie contraire à l'idéal, ce qui excluait une vie amoureuse libre sous la forme de la beauté.
Dans une enquête de grande ampleur, qui évoque notamment le radicalisme chrétien d’Orestes Brownson (1803-1876), le transcendantalisme de Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), le mouvement de résistance non violente de Martin Luther King (1929-1968), en passant par le socialisme de guilde de George Douglas Howard Cole (1889-1959), Lasch met en évidence tout un gisement de valeurs relatives à l’humanisme civique, dont les Etats-Unis et plus largement le monde anglo-saxon ont été porteurs en résistance à l’idéologie libérale du progrès. Il retrouve, par-delà les divergences entre ces œuvres, certains constances : l’habitude de la responsabilité associée à la possession de la propriété ; l’oubli volontaire de soi dans un travail astreignant ; l’idéal de la vie bonne, enracinée dans une communauté d’appartenance, face à la promesse de l’abondance matérielle ; l’idée que le bonheur réside avant tout dans la reconnaissance que les hommes ne sont pas faits pour le bonheur. Le regard historique de Lasch, en revenant vers cette tradition, n’incite pas à la nostalgie passéiste pour un temps révolu. A la nostalgie, Lasch va ainsi opposer la mémoire. La nostalgie n’est que l’autre face de l’idéologie progressiste, vers laquelle on se tourne lorsque cette dernière n’assure plus ses promesses. La mémoire quant à elle vivifie le lien entre le passé et le présent en préparant à faire face avec courage à ce qui arrive. Au terme du parcours qu’il raconte dans Le Seul et Vrai Paradis, le lecteur garde donc en mémoire le fait historique suivant : il a existé un courant radical très fortement opposé à l’aliénation capitaliste, au délabrement des conditions de travail, ainsi qu’à l’idée selon laquelle la productivité doit augmenter à la mesure des désirs potentiellement illimités de la nature humaine, mais pourtant tout aussi méfiant à l’égard de la conception marxiste du progrès historique. Volontiers raillée par la doxa marxiste pour sa défense « petite bourgeoise » de la petite propriété, tenue pour un bastion de l’indépendance et du contrôle sur le travail et les conditions de vie, la pensée populiste visait surtout l’idole commune des libéraux et des marxistes, révélant par là même l’obsolescence du clivage droite/gauche : le progrès technique et économique, ainsi que l’optimisme historique qu’il recommande. Selon Lasch qui, dans le débat entre Marx et Proudhon, opte pour les analyses du second, l’éthique populiste des petits producteurs était « anticapitaliste, mais ni socialiste, ni social-démocrate, à la fois radicale, révolutionnaire même, et profondément conservatrice ». 
However, the Frankfurt School suggested a different road to the communist paradise than that chosen by Lenin and Stalin in Soviet Russia. The direct intellectual precursors of the Frankfurt School, the Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) and the Hungarian Georg Lukács (1885 – 1971) (photo), had recognized that further west in Europe there was an obstacle on this path which could not be eliminated by physical violence and terror: the private, middle class, classical liberal bourgeois culture based on Christian values. These, they concluded, needed to be destroyed by infiltration of the institutions. Their followers have succeeded in doing so. The sorcerer's apprentices of the Frankfurt School conjured up an army of hobgoblins who empty their buckets over us every day. Instead of water, the buckets are filled with what Lukács had approvingly labelled ‘cultural terrorism.’
The sorcerer's apprentices of the Frankfurt School dreamt of a communist paradise on earth. Initially, among the hard left they were the only ones aware of the fact that this brutal path to paradise would fail. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, however, this failure was obvious to all. This was the New Left’s moment. It was only then that they got any traction and noticeable response. At least in Western Europe. In the US, this moment of truth may have come a little later. Gary North contends in his book ‘Unholy Spirits’ that John F. Kennedy’s death was “the death rattle of the older rationalism.” A few weeks later, Beatlemania came to America. However, the appearance of the book ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson in September 1962, which heralded the start of environmentalism, points to the Berlin Wall as the more fundamental game changer in the West. A few years later, the spellbound hobgoblins began their long march through the institutions.
Bell’s masterwork, 
Rage against bourgeois order and embrace of Dionysian expression, said Bell, furthers the “loss of coherence in culture, particularly in the spread of an antinomian attitude to moral norms and even to the idea of cultural judgment itself.” What Bell called a consumption ethic, grafted to a life unregulated by church, family, or school, and a fun morality, were blooming into a new zeitgeist. Bell could not perfectly foresee universal smartphones, multiculturalism, or Beyoncé, for example, but he surely glimpsed the appeal of their antecedents.
“Despite the shambles of modern culture, some religious answer surely will be forthcoming,” Bell asserted. Religion is a “constitutive part of man’s consciousness.” It grows out of the “primordial need” for “a set of meanings that will establish a transcendent response to self; and the existential need to confront the finalities of suffering and death.” What that religion might be or become going forward cannot yet be known. The grand Western traditions were Antiquity and Church, both of them now compromised and slandered. In the contemporary 
Franck Buleux: Écrire une biographie sur Savitri Devi, c’est surtout avoir la capacité préalable, et nécessaire, d’éloigner de son propre esprit la reductio ad hitlerum dont elle a fait – et fait toujours – l’objet et, il faut bien le dire, dans laquelle elle a baigné de son plein gré. Toutefois, refuser de réduire une personne à un mythe même convenu – et accepté -est l’essence même du respect de la nature humaine, par définition complexe.
There is a lot of wisdom here. At the very least, it leads one to ask questions: What is the role of a young man with regard to the fitness and well-being of the species? What is the role of a young woman? What is the role of a European in a context of decline? And so on. Stoicism represents one powerful way in which postmodern Westerners, conquered by liberalism, can learn to stop being so frivolous, narcissistic, and selfish, and begin living our lives in a mindful and communitarian fashion.
« Ce monde est dérisoire, mais il a mis fin à la possibilité de dire à quel point il est dérisoire ; du moins s’y efforce-t-il, et de bons apôtres se demandent aujourd’hui si l’humour n’a pas tout simplement fait son temps, si on a encore besoin de lui, etc. Ce qui n’est d’ailleurs pas si bête, car le rire, le rire en tant qu’art, n’a en Europe que quelques siècles d’existence derrière lui (il commence avec Rabelais), et il est fort possible que le conformisme tout à fait neuf mais d’une puissance inégalée qui lui mène la guerre (tout en semblant le favoriser sous les diverses formes bidons du fun, du déjanté, etc.) ait en fin de compte raison de lui. En attendant, mon objet étant les civilisations occidentales, et particulièrement la française, qui me semble exemplaire par son marasme extrême, par les contradictions qui l’écrasent, et en même temps par cette bonne volonté qu’elle manifeste, cette bonne volonté typiquement et globalement provinciale de s’enfoncer encore plus vite et plus irrémédiablement que les autres dans le suicide moderne, je crois que le rire peut lui apporter un éclairage fracassant. »
« Festivus festivus, qui vient après Homo festivus comme Sapiens sapiens succède à Homo sapiens, est l’individu qui festive qu’il festive : c’est le moderne de la nouvelle génération, dont la métamorphose est presque totalement achevée, qui a presque tout oublié du passé (de toute façon criminel à ses yeux) de l’humanité, qui est déjà pour ainsi dire génétiquement modifié sans même besoin de faire appel à des bricolages techniques comme on nous en promet, qui est tellement poli, épuré jusqu’à l’os, qu’il en est translucide, déjà clone de lui-même sans avoir besoin de clonage, nettoyé sous toutes les coutures, débarrassé de toute extériorité comme de toute transcendance, jumeau de lui-même jusque dans son nom. »
« Dans le nouveau monde, on ne retrouve plus trace du Mal qu’à travers l’interminable procès qui lui est intenté, à la fois en tant que Mal historique (le passé est un chapelet de crimes qu’il convient de ré-instruire sans cesse pour se faire mousser sans risque) et en tant que Mal actuel postiche. »
« …pour en revenir à cette solitude sexuelle d’Homo festivus, qui contient tous les autres traits que vous énumérez, elle ne peut être comprise que comme l’aboutissement de la prétendue libération sexuelle d’il y a trente ans, laquelle n’a servi qu’à faire monter en puissance le pouvoir féminin et à révéler ce que personne au fond n’ignorait (notamment grâce aux romans du passé), à savoir que les femmes ne voulaient pas du sexuel, n’en avaient jamais voulu, mais qu’elles en voulaient dès lors que le sexuel devenait objet d’exhibition, donc de social, donc d’anti-sexuel. »
“Show, don’t tell,” besides being good writing advice, is then an important Stoic principle concerning philosophy. One will always be tempted to make a philosophical and political point in order to show off or best another in argument, which of course defeats the whole purpose. Epictetus reiterates the point:
The message is clear: the low spiritual and intellectual condition of “normies” is highly contagious, one must exercise the utmost caution. No doubt this bad condition has been severely aggravated and magnified by television and pop culture.