Culture - Barbarism

Europe's weariness

“Europe’s greatest danger is weariness. If we struggle against this greatest of all dangers as “good Europeans” with the sort of courage that does not fear even an infinite struggle, then out of the destructive blaze of lack of faith, the smoldering fire of despair over the West’s mission for humanity, the ashes of great weariness, will rise up the phoenix of a new life-inwardness and spiritualization as the pledge of a great and distant future for man: for the spirit alone is immortal.”

Edmund Husserl

I do not usually use this platform to talk about contemporary events, at least not in a direct way. That is simply not my purpose. I do hope that by reading my texts, you can occasionaly look at contemporary events in a new way. Trapped in watching the ever-new unfold, we lose sight of what really matters. And thereby, of the power to interpret what is happening before our eyes, to actually see what is going on. This is part of “the problem.”

Heidegger mentions how the notion of the ‘interesting’ comes from inter-esse, literally being in the midst of what is. It has nothing to do with being fascinated by something ‘new’, as the interesting is often taken to mean today. You can never get to the bottom of something, you can never be inter-esse, if you are only looking at what is happening before your eyes, different everyday, constantly ‘interested’ by whatever is happening. You have to focus, be done with the distractions, and really delve into what really matters, this is what it means to be ‘interested.’ The latest tabloid fact can not possibly be interesting, for it doesn’t teach us anything whatsoever about the essence of things. 

Yet still, the facts of everyday invite thought and action. They can ignite interest, making you want to dig for the essence of things. The merely interesting is only interesting in so far as it points to something beyond itself. To the degree that the interesting only distracts you from the essence of things, to this degree it should be kept at bay.  

Being aware of the present, relating it to thought and making thought relatable to it is not entirely without interest. Often, reading a book of old, we can only truly grasp the idea by relating it to our own experience. And likewise, our experiences can only be understood by relating them to the past, fundamental ideas, and so on. In this light, some words relating to the chaos engulfing Europe.

I

Since at least Greek thought, but definitely earlier, knowing has always been characterized as a type of seeing. And as the existence of philosophy itself shows, truly seeing is not a given at all. All look, but few see. All have eyes, but most are blind.

“Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if they have barbarian souls.” -Heraclitus, XBI. (D. 107, M.13)

Before the eye can see clearly, the soul that sees through it must be capable of seeing. It is this vision of the soul to which philosophy pertains. 

French philosopher Michel Henry claims that because Western-Greek philosophy took its model in sight, it became incapable of grasping a different way of knowing: feeling. Western-Greek thought can analyze, look at the phenomena of the world through the cold eye of reason, from a distance. But, looking in this way, one eventually turns blind, in the sense that one’s capacities for intuition and feeling atrophy. The eyes and the thoughts might get sharper, but overly reliant on them, a different capacity diminishes: feeling, or, intuition. One forgets that, before all this theory, one already felt what was most important. For Henry this was most principally the matter of ‘subjectivity.’ Finding himself in a 20th century climate in which philosophers were getting off on denying the reality of the self, or subjectivity even, accompanied by the Marxist denial of the individual in favour of some abstract class-identity, Henry is very clear: before all your theory denying the reality of your own self, you already existed, you already felt yourself existing, because you are alive, because you felt yourself alive, and this feeling yourself alive, this is subjectivity.

Losing themselves in theory, philosophers forget what is most evident of all. In fact, the function of thought itself is to move away from itself and grasp what is out there in the world. In a sense, classical phenomenology is right, thought is always marked by intentionality, always pointed at something other than itself. And so it is said that we are always already open to the world. But, thinking too much, one drifts away from oneself and loses oneself in petty theorizing about the most irrelevant phenomena of the world. In doing so, one loses the intuition needed to grasp what was prior to any intentional grasping whatsoever: your feeling yourself feeling, the mere fact that you are living, and that you knew yourself to be alive through the bare fact of you feeling yourself alive. Just like the quality of one’s training degrades by overtraining, so the quality of thought degrades if one overthinks. And, overthinking, thought becomes unhinged, flying free, away from its ground in the individual. In the end, thought ceases acting in the service of life, and, it turns against life. 

To those philosophers who deny Descartes’ proof, ‘I think I am’, because what ‘being’ or ‘thinking’ is is not defined by a clear definition, Descartes says: “you idiot, I have never met someone so stupid that they had to be told what thinking or being is before they could conclude that they exist and that they are thinking.” Henry sees the entire history of Western philosophy as characterized by a proclivity for this type of stupidity. We think ourselves into oblivion. Distracted by the newest theory, we forget what was self-evident and certain before we started thinking. One could say that this is also why Platonism grasps true thinking as a type of remembering. There is a type of thinking that drags you away from the truth, substituting facts known through opinion for what is true by intuition. And to protect against man being dragged into the typhonic cloud of opinion, he has to think in reverse. He has to remember what was true before opinion, he has to remember what insists and subsists beneath all opinion and fancy words. Like it is of the nature of the One to flow out of itself, so it is also of its nature to revert back into itself. Proodos and epistrophe. This is not to say that one should refrain from knowing the world, and spend the rest of one’s days in silent contemplation. Far from it. Rather, it is to realize that a balance is needed. It is to see that, if thought is not undertaken by a strong soul in remembrance of what really matters, thought does not bring us closer to the world, it only drags us further away from ourselves. Thought is a poor witness for those who have barbarian souls. Most of all, this idiocy of excessive thought, this ‘disease of the learned’, makes any honest action impossible. Like the underground man, no truth is worth acting on, for there is no truth, but only an endless questioning, an endless deconstruction. No clear truths on the basis of which one can act, and no intuition to guide us in the absence of indubitable certainty.    

For Henry, more than anything else, the Christian world-view can protect men from this overly rational way of thinking that drags him away from the essence of things. For him, the message of Christ is precisely the message of the most radical phenomenology of life: before man thinks, even before his consciousness is pointed outward toward noema or the world in intentionality, man feels himself feeling, man has a direct awareness of his own life through the mere fact that he is living, and he is nothing but this living. This transcendental life is the pre-condition for all that is, no action or thought, or world even, could exist without it. Eternal life, at the root of all. Before we are “in the world”, we are with ourselves. Before we know the world, we live. I am the way, the truth, and the life, says Christ. Henry reads this as the basic statement of any phenomenology of life: I live, —this is the truth. For the perennialy inclined, it is also the message of the founder of modern French philosophy, Descartes. Even if the world is a lie, I am the truth. This indubitable thinking substance considered without limitation is the idea of God. Considered with limitation, it is the idea of ego cogito. For Henry: life considered without limitations is eternal Life, God. Life in the flesh, this is the true life of you.  

In Henry’s philosophy, this life immediately grasped through the experience of living forms the basis for all culture, and the basis of all community. Finding himself in an intellectual climate in which every notion of community or a people was being uprooted, Henry sought to ground the idea of community in his phenomenology. As characteristic for all of his thought, he sought to do this in the most basic, simple, and direct way possible. Before a community is founded by a sharing in law, there is a community of life. That is, the modes of life of the living resonate with each other. A certain way in which life feels itself feeling in which a group of living people share. This is how communities form, naturally. Later, we can try to explain this harmony by pointing to shared values, rights, laws, customs, and so on. But in the end, it is that we share in the same mode of life.

You can think all you want about how it is exactly that your sense of connectedness to your friends, nation, family, and so on is due to this or that. But before this, you were already a community. And you can be subjected to all sorts of reasonings for how you feeling connected to your specific people is only arbitrary. But it doesn’t matter, the mere fact of community is still there. This fact of feeling oneself in community can not be put into thought, it can not be seen, it can only be felt. As such, the living, disconnected from their intuition through a mad rationalism, today in the form of scientist-materialism, are led to deny that which connects them to themselves — their immediate intuition of life—, and that which connects them to others —the immediate intuition of a shared pathos. You are told this shared pathos is only an illusion, a fiction, supposedly created by ideologues to pit the races of man against each other. But you still feel yourself connected to a community. And so, being a good boy and playing by the scientist’s rules, you decide to come up with all sorts of scientific reasons for why your community is what it is. A losing game. 

If only we would have been allowed to be ourselves, and others to be themselves, on the basis of the mere fact that we are who we are, we would not have to separate ourselves in reaction, utilizing the cold knife of scientific analysis, cutting ourselves up into oh so many individual differences with the enemy’s weapon.

II

By essence, Henry thinks that life strives towards ‘culture’, that is, towards a greater expression and refinement of its own powers. In its most basic sense, culture is nothing but this self-expression of life itself. Life is this power of self-affectivity that seeks nothing but the greater expression of its own powers, that seeks ways of life that allow it to express itself to greater degrees, to live more intensely. Culture is this process of expression through which life gives form to itself. The arts and so on, these are only the fruits of this deeper culture, which is nothing but life’s process of self-expression and self-cultivation. However, Henry says, not all life goes towards culture. There are modes of life that are like an ontological mistake and that have turned against themselves. They are driven not by this deepest desire for culture, for higher life, for a higher expression of themselves. Rather, they are driven by the desire to destroy, to deny, to get rid of life, to be done with all its highest expression. This anti-cultural instinct, Henry calls it barbarism. It is not so much that this barbarism wants death, suicide would be the way to go. Rather, it wants to keep life tamed, to keep it from expressing itself to its fullest degree, it wants to live a life of the lowest possible vibration, its ‘cultural’ expressions are of the lowest and most vulgar character, and it wants to infect others with this hunger for life in decline. 

You see this instinct in the progressive downgrading of education brought forth by a terrible equalization, a terrible desire to make all equal, out of an absurd hatred for all higher life —culture—,  a hatred for the natural distinctions between peoples and their unique cultural expressions. Everywhere, you see a love for the depraved, unrefined, and barbaric. For Henry, Western life has become a life of barbarism. Which is also why it has no scruples at all with accepting hordes of foreign barbarians with open arms, the worst of the worst, those who their original nations would not even accept. Like seeks like. 

Driven on by one and the same mode of life, the leftist denial of reality shakes hands with illiterate foreigners. When you see libraries being burned down, do not be surprised. Our “culture”, and the “cultures” it invites are fundamentally the same: anti-culture, anti-truth, and anti-life. Everything you see is the result of one and the same drift —barbarism. 

Even though Henry posits himself as a Christian and anti-Greek thinker, his unique conception of ‘culture’ seems close to what could be said of the Greek conception of culture, and how perhaps everyone thought about culture before we started praising the virtues of “multiculturalism.” For Henry as for the Greeks, ‘culture’ is not some universal property to be attributed to any and all modes of life, as we say today when we speak of ‘multiculturalism.’ No, for not all “cultures” strive towards higher life. And this striving is all that culture means. “It is just a different culture” is the first admittance, symptom of the ideology of universal equality. For Henry, culture is what life naturally does, the process of life growing and expanding is life, and this process is culture. But, not every life is really living, not every life seeks to develop its natural gifts, to actualize its natural form. Not every life cares about developing itself to the highest degree.

Such an anti-egalitarian conception of culture is also what allowed ancient Greek man to refer to foreign peoples as barbarians, even though it was evident that these foreigners had languages, customs, civilisations, and so on. Yet for all this, they did not share in the singular Greek vision for higher life, a vision maintained by an unbreakable pathos between men, a shared instinct for a life of freedom and power, to live in their own distinct way, with their own ideal of high life. ‘Paideia.’

Foreign peoples could have had everything we would today call “culture” or “civilisation”, but it didn’t matter, they were still barbarians. Because, from the perspective of the Greek, their entire mode of life was not truly in accordance with life, that is, with higher life as they envisioned it. And then there is also the question of foreigners speaking a different language, which is to say that they grasp and express reality in an entirely different way. At best, this civilisation these foreigners have, seen from one’s own culture, it is a stuttering, a blind stumbling in the dark. In short, a different life. 

You need not share this same vision. Still, there is wisdom in seeing that ‘culture’ can not be attributed to any and all modes of life. Culture is specifically that way of life that leads to higher life, that leads to the greatest and most powerful expression of life. It is life made into art. Or rather, life, when truly lived, is art. Henry says that life abides by the laws of aesthetics, or that life is aesthetic by nature. That is, life is never neutral, but always either beautiful or ugly, either lived with a desire for more of life, or lived with a repulsion and hatred for life, either inspiring or depressing.

Only when this striving, when this instinct for culture and the will to impose it is present, only then can we speak of culture. All else is barbarism. The presence of institutions, government, ‘art’, and so on, none of this means anything. You could have the most “advanced” civilisation imaginable, and it could still be void of culture. Man’s capacities for self-destruction and the mutilation of life can get quite refined. We ourselves have become technologically advanced beyond belief, but, says Henry, there will never be a culture of computers. For the simple fact that computers don’t live, and that computers can not become great men. 

III

Do we really need to see what is going on, do we really need a great theory of world history, to feel that the West is burning? This is most of all what Henry says to me through his phenomenology of Life. Losing ourselves in petty speculation, we intellectually castrate ourselves, we become incapable of intuition, we lose sight of what really matters. High and low culture collapse onto each-other, and it all leads to a blind acceptance of barbarian hordes destroying our lands and ways of life, impeding and destroying our process of self-expression, making any true generosity towards a stranger impossible. Why even protect our culture? When we see no difference between culture and barbarism? 

There is an interesting dialectic between an excess of thought and a lack of thought. The West has always had a peculiar taste for self-criticism, a taste mostly foreign to other peoples, who still have an unapologetic pride and desire to grow. It can not be underestimated how much the Socratic moment has defined us. And so, when self-criticism is seen as a virtue, foreign people wrecking our countries are seen as the greatest gift. 

Concerning those in the West blind to the state of affairs, I have little hope that events like in France, or anything else, will do anything. There are people so stupid that they would even question their own existence, says Descartes.

What makes you think they will change if their monuments are destroyed, when their libraries are burning, when their daughters are raped? Everything you hold dear could be destroyed, and many will not even see it. 

Some time ago, walking through a certain neighbourhood in a city in Western Europe, I was amused that I only saw one white person there. Surrounded by Arabs and Africans, the 50 year something man looked like a typical contemporary art enjoyer, purple glasses in geometric shape, a light scarf worn in hot weather, walking his dog. I imagined he was the perfect example of a successful victim to our regime’s propaganda; he truly did not see colour. His entire way of life being replaced by a foreign way of life, and he seemed not to care, he seemed not even to notice. The neighbourhood unrecognizable, but I guess progress is good. I imagined he could be the type of man who, when asked what he thought of the so-called  ‘great replacement’, would dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. 

Women are harassed on the daily by foreigners, yet will still speak about the virtues of multiculturalism, voting for open borders with every election. There are people who become debilitated days after having a vaccine, yet they do not even stop to question for a moment if the two things could be related. 

Experience and thought do not teach anything, if the soul is not open to learn. Eyes and ears are useless, if the soul looking through them lacks culture. Culture, which has most of all to do with the cultivation of that sensibility of feeling and spirit that allows one to see and intuit what is most important, along with the will to act on it. It has most of all to do with the cultivation of judgement, the ability to distinguish high from low, life-affirming from life-degrading.

You can imagine living in a walled city, surrounded by peoples among which there are groups seeking to steal your gold, crush your monuments, burn your books, rape your women, and make you a slave. Your ruler systematically poisons you and your fellow citizens “in the name of health”, he orders you to open the city walls, and retarded as you have become, you do so with joy. This is what is happening, except for some added complexity making you incapable of seeing what is truly going on. 

It is often remarked that Descartes has no political philosophy, and that this in itself makes him an inferior and incomplete thinker. It is a valid criticism. But he did leave us some things. He showed how there is no sense in even doing anything, with men who are not even capable of thought, let alone of true generosity. He showed how there is no sense debating, when you do not even have the common sense to recognize truth when it stands before you. Know which problems are most important at any given time. This loss of ‘common sense’, this is Descartes’ problem. And it is ours. 

It is a problem that pertains to every aspect of man’s formation, to every aspect of ‘culture.’ You can not even see what is going on, if the biological basis for keen senses and a working intuition is not there, let alone judge as to what is right. And mass-democratic education has only led to a widespread disease of the learned. Except this time it is not scholasticism that has made us mad, but an overconsumption of political-science, feminism, and critical race theory. While their parents’ stores are brutally looted, the children protest alongside the barbarians and go home to read Frantz Fanon. 

And so, as our faculties degrade through an increasingly refined mental and physiological self-destruction, those still strong make use of our weakened state. 

For years, elites have systematically created the conditions for ethnic conflict, and those youth who should be vital enough to resist have been neutered by medicine and chemical pollution, while simultaneously being blinded by education and media. This climate of carefully bred stupidity, this loss of culture and all  instinct for higher life, this is the only real climate problem. 

IV

Concerning the European immigration problem, something has to be said about the “culture” that is being imported, a question intimately linked to the question of Islam. There is a problem of fundamentalist Islam, a way of life entirely foreign, incompatible, and often hostile to the West. Many claim that the vast majority of Muslims however, are nothing to worry about. Which is, however much true it might be, entirely besides the point. A Western host country should care most of all for its own well-being and the protection and strengthening of its own way of life, a way of life which is threatened if entire peoples with a way of life different and opposed to the host culture are coming over. Whether it be Islam or some African jungle shamanism, it is irrelevant. Although Islam has its own specific problems. 

Now, even if fundamentalist Islam is a perversion of ‘the real Islam’, it is still within the Muslim population that radical Islamism grows and is sustained. So it really doesn’t matter.

When Paris was struck by terrorist attacks in November 2015, killing more than 100 people and injuring some 500, one of the terrorists, Salam Abdeslam, went into hiding in Molenbeek, a district of Brussels which Trump referred to as a “hellhole.” Abdeslam was able to hide in Molenbeek for multiple months, being helped by family, friends, and neighbours. Some say he even went to bars, stores, and so on, even though his picture was spread everywhere. A lone wolf operation, government says, yet supported by the entire neighbourhood. Of course, most of these people are not considered to be radical Islamists by the Belgians and their rulers, and they probably aren’t. But the point is clear: when push comes to shove, the foreigner chooses his own people and the ideology most natural to him. Why would we expect anything else from him? Would you do anything else? It is the same lack of realism that expects 10-year old traumatized refugees to abandon their familiar ideas for Woke. There is nothing ‘bad’ or ‘morally wrong’ here, it is the same natural drift of the living to resonate with those modes of life closest to them. However you frame it, radical fundamentalist Islam is closer to the ‘moderate Islam’ of most Muslims living in Europe than it is to whatever the West has to offer. And if you want to talk about what the real underlying problem is in this matter, it is always immigration. People sustain ideologies. 

It is irrelevant if most foreigners are not out for the destruction of Western civilization in the name of Islam. What is relevant is that the fact of their being here in large numbers, as peoples, effectively destroys the host country. This allows the emergence and sustainment of anti-Western sentiments and actions, anti-Western sentiments which are mostly expressed in the form of Islam, because Islam in all its various forms is the cultural-religious entity that nourishes these people. Moreover, these sentiments are welcomed and sustained by Westerners, because in their very souls they have already turned against themselves.

A lot of different things could be said about Islam, all the bad about it, the presence of extremism, how certain doctrinal matters are incompatible with a West marked by Christianity and liberalism, the misogyny that far surpasses the natural recognition of differences between man and woman into a neurotic denial of sexuality, and so on. But to go on a rant about all of this, I think it is already admitting defeat. You should be able to say: the lives coming here are different and incompatible, I don’t want it here, the mere presence of a different people in such large numbers is wrecking our own way of life. You should be able to say this on the pure basis of self-evidence, and this should be enough. In a certain sense, speaking about the dangers of Islam, or anything else, is already seeking a rationalization for a perfectly healthy belief. 

To be sure, religions do give form to a people, and the specifics of Islam make it uniquely incompatible and hostile, but it is mostly only a problem on top of the underlying problem of different peoples living together. In the end, it is very simple, and ideologies do not even have to be discussed. You either live in harmony, fight, or part ways. Experience shows us these modes of life are incompatible, and that forcing them together leads to conflict. Ethnic conflict is a natural feature of our multicultural societies, not a bug. And so is all racism of the frustrated and vile type, the type of racism that lashes out and never achieves anything but street violence. Only a point of view that recognises natural differences prevents this. 

V

Many conservative authors, amazed by the wonderful traditionalism upheld by Islam have proposed some version of an Ottoman ‘millet’ system, allowing each cultural group to live in its own sphere with its own laws and jurisdiction, yet in the end subject to a greater state, the government of which would be led by the host culture. In this way an alternative is formed to both the right-wing message of total cultural homogeneity and expulsion of migrants, and to the left-wing message of ‘integration.’ I do not endorse this. For one, because the conquering and converting drift of the Islamic peoples is to be taken seriously. No religion on earth still caries forth the message of conversion like Islam. And even the most Western-minded Muslims will never let ‘integration’ or ‘respect for all traditions’ become more important than “da’wah.” 

Second, from a demographic point of view, the balance sought through such a system would be impossible to maintain, and would slide more and more towards Islamic dominance through the greater growth of the African and Arab peoples, even if all borders were to be closed tomorrow. And if a millet system would be established in France say, it will be the French people that end up becoming minorities, not the Arabs. Moreover, even though there is no millet system formally established in European nations, de facto it is already what is happening. Arabs and Africans live in their own communities, educate their own children, have their own stores, street justice reigns, and so on. Even though government is still European, it doesn’t have the cultural hegemony of the native population in mind, save for a few exceptions. The imposition of such a system, if even possible, is a slow yet ordered suicide. 

There is no need to oppose integration as the traditionalists do, it is impossible, it will never happen, it is an illusion. So you need not worry that trying to integrate people is an assault on their tradition. It is an assault, but a hopeless and harmless one that, if anything, only strengthens the conviction to stay as one is. Perhaps a soulless homo economicus can integrate himself in a foreign culture, but these people are not immigrating en masse. 

There is also a more pervasive and dangerous idea that accompanies the blind acceptance of peoples under the cultural influence of Islam. The traditionalist, Muslim or otherwise, says: in fact, the Western right in all its forms and Islam have nothing to fear from each-other. We are united in our desire to return to tradition, they say, and we are united by our common enemy: globo-homo left liberalism. It is a useless idea, and I wouldn’t even be speaking about it if I didn’t see so much non-Muslim Westerners actually entertain it. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Islam might be incompatible with the liberal left, but it is equally incompatible with the Western spirit and tradition. It is not even a question of denying the possible power and beauty of Islam, this has nothing to do with it. What it is about is recognizing that the Western way of life is in danger by the growth of a large group of people who are under the cultural influence of Islam. A religion, but most of all a spirit. And this spirit is fundamentally incompatible with the West. Some elements are that it lacks any and all Promethean element, is less favourably disposed to the accumulation of a wide variety of different types of non-religious knowledge, and that it hates the human figure, as seen in the neurotic attitude towards sexuality and the body. You can not imagine a Michelangelo growing out of Islam.

These are, to be sure, precisely its strengths. The will to stay close to God and never stray from him in the slightest, the priority of the heart over the understanding, the acknowledgment of the weakness of the flesh, and a deep understanding of the importance of masculinity. A vision of a concentrated power expanding over empty space, as seen in the unique geometric art of the Islamic world. 

But seen from the West, these are only weaknesses and obstacles to higher life, incompatible with the West’s sense of identity, its spirit, its joy, and its mission. One can have great respect for one’s enemies, but they are still your enemies. And maybe, one even needs to have great respect for one’s enemies to be able to treat them as such. 

VI

A culture is a way of life, and no life allows a way of life that threatens its existence and growth. Except, our peculiar modern “Western” way of life: neutered, retarded, living to deny, mutilate, and eventually kill itself. Only a life that has already turned against itself allows a hostile way of life to push it underground. All crying about equality, ‘human rights’ and so on. It is only self-hatred in disguise. 

Western metaphysics has always been a metaphysics centred around the self, its divine and biological lineage, and the great friendship of shared purpose. If not in the triad of Soul - Spirit - God, than at least in the pure ideal of the great human being, the man of culture, the man who carries life’s possibilities forth to their ideal and natural form. What you see today however is an inversion and distortion of this scheme, away from the centrality of the person and his biological and divine lineage, and towards a worship of the ‘Other.’ The stranger and less compatible the better, until you have the absurd scenario where the most other-worshipping people are most loving towards the most theocratic and traditional foreigners. It is a self-destructive absurdity, but it flows “logically” from the unconscious metaphysics of today: World -> Other -> “I.”

It is very simple: your own way of life is being replaced by a different way of life. Do you accept this, or do you not?

The fact is that hordes of young men from African and Middle-Eastern descent are ravaging cities. This is an attack on your way of life by people who hate you with every fibre of their being. An attack, the conditions for which have been systematically created by elites who hate you, and allowed by generations bred to hate themselves.

That is all there is to it, and for earlier generations, this was enough to take the evident course of action: stop the violence, make sure it can’t possibly happen again. Today however, we can’t just look at the facts. No, supposedly we are smarter. We know that it isn’t as simple as looking at what’s happening and doing something about it, no, didn’t you know about the wide-spread racism? The socio-economic circumstances? Haven’t you heard about Algeria? The moment someone starts talking about context when anything like this happens, I shut off. It is only another excuse to keep talking for another 50 years, or to question the problem into oblivion. “This is not the real problem.” Except it is. And all who think that the supposed racism of a country which has emptied itself for the benefit of others is a bigger problem than the burning down of cities, well, they are enemies. Return to real problems. Which begins by seeing things for what they are. 

On the traditionalist right, there is a similar theory-drunk way of talking. In fact, they say, all these troubles in France and elsewhere, it has nothing to do with a certain type of people or, god forbid, with Islam, no, it are just the consequences of a lack of order and tradition. “If only these rioters were real Muslims!” In all, it is always a denial of the very real fact of life as lived by real peoples living in ways which are either destructive or life-affirming, either compatible or not. 

So in all, it is a culture war. But one much more pernicious and misleading than the war between the left and the right. It is a much more ancient one, which we have perhaps forgotten how to fight. A war between ways of life.

VII

What is needed most of all is an overcoming of this great weariness, the nihilism, the life-less eyes that look on as Europe burns, without caring at all. Part of this overcoming is a work of vision. In the West, one can doubt if there is a powerful enough vision of where we want culture to go. Although you see things emerging, growing, ever more powerful. Nothing too defined, but a certain energy. For now, part of our problem is that we can only point to the negative. But what do we want? And do enough people have the courage to admit it when they do know?

Whatever it might be, a deep reflection is needed on what culture is, and what we want it to be. To stop with the lie of ‘multiculturalism’, and to realize that there is only culture when people are growing together towards a higher vision of life, uninterrupted by bought media and pernicious actors sowing division. 

When we speak about “culture” in normal speech, by which we mean the arts and so on, these are only the specific ways in which life decides to give shape to itself and the expressions thereof. Art, to be sure, is perhaps the highest possible expression of life. But in the end, it all concerns life itself, lived in a certain spirit, an ethos, the self-expression of which is culture. If you take pleasure in burning down our libraries, you have nothing to do with culture. You are a barbarian and nothing else. Not a stranger to which hospitality is due, not a man part of a different ‘culture’ from which anything can be learned. Similarly, if your vision of ‘culture’ is the incessant breaking down of all values, the poisoning of man on a deep physiological level, the restriction of man’s freedom to give form to himself, keeping only that freedom necessary to pursue your most wicked fantasies, you are not the harbinger of culture. If life chooses to deform itself, there is no culture.