Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "western"

The Problem of Democracy by Alain de Benoist

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book seeks to cut through the quasi-religious tone surrounding ‘democracy’ and examine what the word actually means.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, everyone has wanted to be seen as ‘democratic’. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 even proclaimed the USSR a ‘democracy’.

This wasn’t always the case, though, even among leftists. None of the major French revolutionaries used the term, except Robespierre towards the end of the terror (when it didn’t do him much good!).

‘Democracy’ wasn’t a household word until Toqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (1830s). Before that, writers who believed in ‘equality’, such as Rousseau, were admirers of Sparta rather than democratic Athens (ironically, the man who made Athenian democracy famous through the centuries, Pericles, exercised a quasi-royal authority over his city…)

Athenian democracy, in any case, was very different to the modern beast. It was linked to tribe and to place, and thus was very much a blood and soil ideology. Also, the Athenians saw equality (before the law) as a means to democracy, not as something valuable in its own right.

Some thinkers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, have seen democracy as ‘primitive’, and monarchy as more highly evolved. Alain de Benoist thinks both views, and ‘linear’ views in general, are wrong. In ancient Europe, kings themselves were often elected by popular assembly. Only in the 1100s were most European monarchies hereditary. The vast majority of historical regimes had mixed systems of government.

The working classes were often anti-democratic, as in Medici Florence - because the middle class who favoured democracy would give them less rights than the princes did.

Alain de Benoist thinks the best state is the one that gives the best form to the values of a specific people. (By ‘people’ he means something closer to the French word ‘peuple’ or the German word ‘Volk’, i.e. an ethnic group).

The modern liberal democracy actually distrusts the folk, but de Benoist on the contrary thinks that where there is no folk and only individuals, there can be no democracy.

In chapter IV, de Benoist gives reasons why ‘liberal democracy’ or ‘formal democracy’ (our current system) is indeed a farce.

Among other reasons:

- People elect representatives, but these must delegate their tasks to unelected officials (as portrayed in the classic 1980s satire ‘Yes Minister’).

- Party ‘brands’ mean that candidates aren’t elected for their personal qualities.

- Lukewarm voters are given the same weight as resolute ones.

And so on…

De Benoist’s solution is something he calls ‘Organic Democracy’, involving lots of referenda and plebiscites. This would be folkish, based on fraternity rather than liberty and equality, and thus more similar to the ancient Athenian democracy (something he doesn’t mention, however, is that the democratic faction in Athens fanatically pursued a ruinous fratricidal war with Sparta, whereas the artistocratic faction wanted peace).

His book was written in 1985, and I think things are too far gone now for de Benoist’s folkish democracy to put things right. It could never be implemented under the currect system, anyway. The closest equivalent, populism, has had little real success against the entrenched deep state.

Something more drastic will be required…

But if the crisis Western Man now faces is overcome, a future system of government will evolve organically, and will doubtless contain mixed elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, just as it has throughout our history.





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Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life by Oswald Spengler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The problem of man’s destiny

In this book Spengler examines technics, which he defines as the tactics of living, i.e. what one does with tools, rather than the tools themselves.

Spengler traces the history of technics in three phases:

Stage 1
The Hand

The genesis of man is the hand (see Animal Farm), which Spengler believes occurred as a sudden mutation.

It made man creative.

Stage 2
Speech (and Enterprise)

Speech then arose for needs of conversation or command (not thought or judgement). It is the means to collective doing (enterprise). It emancipated the intellect from the hand.

Man then separated into commanders and obeyers; individual lives mattered little at this time according to Spengler; what mattered was the whole, the tribe, the sea voyage or building project.

But the obeyers (hands) increased, and thus personality developed, as a protest against man in the mass.

Last Stage
Terminator: Rise of the Machines

The city then developed, and thought/intellect became rootless (although the city still drew its material sustenance from the land).

Roger Bacon’s ’Scientia experimentalis’ (1200s) was ‘the interrogation of nature with the rack, screw and lever’. God became an ‘infinite force’ rather than a personified Lord on a throne. Monks tried to find ‘perpetual motion’, which some saw as devilish.

Eventually machines grew so complex that leaders and led no longer understood each other. A spiritual barrenness set in, and leaders became divorced from the people. Nordic Man became spiritually enslaved to the machine.

European, Faustian culture is the most tragic culture, due to the conflict between its comprehensive intellectuality and its profound spiritual disharmony.

So the Faustian mind became weary of machines, and returned to contemplating nature (the green movement, the new age movement etc.). Man took refuge from civilisation. We can see this currently, with Nordics pursuing worthless degrees in ‘womyns studies’, while STEM positions in Western unis are occupied mainly by Chinese and Indian students.

Spengler thinks the export of white technics to the non-white world spelled the former’s doom, as the latter have no spiritual attachment to technics (except, maybe, the Japanese?). For non-whites, Spengler claims, technology is merely a weapon to be used against the Faustians who invented it (and he wrote this before mass immigration!).

But he then goes on to give his famous pronouncement that ‘optimism is cowardice’, that we must all die like the Roman soldier at his post.

With this pronouncement, Spengler reveals himself to be part of the problem.

Why didn’t he anticipate space travel, the ultimate technics? It can still serve as a point of revival for Faustians! What could appeal to their romantic impulses more than wanting to stand on the moons of Neptune?

Although Spengler claims the struggle between man and nature ‘ends’ with the Faustian culture, at one point he tentatively suggests a successor culture may arise ‘on the plains between the Vistula and the Amur’ (i.e. a Slavic-centred culture).

Given the current suicidal path Western Europe is following, this may turn out to be one of his more accurate predictions.





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Ion by Plato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The first half of this dialogue is good,
Dealing as it does with inspiration,
Magnetic power beyond the conscious ‘should’.
But then it makes erroneous equations,
Equating conscious knowledge with the pearl
Of true rhapsodic passion in a whirl.
Directed inspiration is a thing:
A mean, between blind groping on the wing
And uninspired and hollow artifice;
But Plato never says a word of this.



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