Between Asgard and the Western Paradise

In today’s world, we are surrounded by what is called ’music’.  Such ‘music’ has spread to such an extent that nobody is free from it.  Whether one is shopping, sitting in a taxi, or even making a phone call, it seems that music pervades all spaces in life and is unavoidable. 

Thinking back to my days as an amateur classical violinist, I enjoyed solely classical music, and found most other music to be mere noise.  I regarded his as a given fact, and did not consider the reasons behind this.

To answer this question, one may look to history.  Let it suffice here, for the purposes of this discussion, to say that there are certain degenerative forces within the discourse, as there are with all arts.  At first, when music (note here that a recitation of the Qur’an sounds melodic, but is not strictly musical) was used in ceremony, it created order from disorder based on a strict mathematical precision, and thus gave mankind a connection to a order higher than oneself.  Thus, the preceeding world of the musical arts grew from the tradition that expressed the Volkish soul in such a manner to imbue man with the power to commune with the raw force of nature; such was ritual music of our earliest rites.  Early music, once it had progressed from its primitive stages, therefore posessed an intrinsic value which was sacred and spiritual on one hand, and but also, as Wagner points out, organic on the other.  Music continued to progress, and in the Western world, florid compositions were created for use in the Church.  Beyond this, secular music still represented order and the creative genius which God had imbued with into man.

There can be no doubt that the rise of America as a power and the world’s subsequent acculturation to the cultureless state had an effect on every aspect of culture, music included.  America is a society which, as oppose to Europe, and because of its particular racial situation, never developed a sense of Volkishness.  The closest approximation was a society in which minds were open to indoctrination and where, to quote Evola, “everything has the characteristic of being fabricated”.  From the inexpressionless music in which we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, there arose a new form.  This replaced the old themes of mankind’s noble struggle and replaced them with banal subjects.  Gradually, even these ideas waned, in favor of glorification of unculture, in particular violence and promiscuous sexuality.

I think we are all familiar with today’s ‘popular’ music and the way in which it aims to creates arousal, passion and excitement, and also leads to various physiological changes in the person. It is a psychological proven fact that two things are instrumental in arousing the human sexual desire, one being the voice of a female (for males) and the other music.  The aversion to so-called “popular” music is therefore well-understood by the Sages; were the intent of today’s music noble, containing pure speech, then there should be no problem with it.  Whereas music once held our noblest ideas in the age of Kings, Emperors and Sultans, it now has become an arm of the tyranny of what the Americans consider “multiculturalism”.  Tyranny, of course, referrs to that same sort of cultural imperialism, which is not limited to music, but all facets of American culture.  But as for music itself, like all other American “art”, it appeals only to those who do not think, but are and is best avoided, especially when it involves content which is contrary to ethical and moral life.

During the 10th Islamic Summit in October 2003, Mahathir Mohamad, then-Prime Minister of Malaysia declared that human rights was created as a concept to help keep the elite in power.  When I heard this news, I certainly agreed with the this his statement, especially with regard to the concept of human rights.  Even though the context in wich Dr. Mohamad said them is not considered to be politically correct, I think there is a reason why this statement on human rights is correct.

From a political standpoint, many “progressive” nations use the idea of “human rights” to demoralize and delegitimize nations which they see as their ideological or cultural enemies.  Whenever a power in opposition exists to today’s powers that be, they are decried as being “undemocratic” or “abusers of human rights”.  Moreover, there is no universal standard of human rights.  Even Amnesty International, often considered to be an international human rights advocacy group, often wavers back and forth on its principles.  For example, they may criticize “sexist” laws in Saudi Arabia,  but remain mysteriously silent on the excesses of feminism in the West; they may criticize the lack of free speech in China, but then go on to promote the addition of “hate speech” to the list of offenses in a nation’s criminal code, and then turn yet again and defend the authors of anti-Islamic cartoons in Denmark.  Based on such happenings in today’s world, it is easy to see what Dr. Mohamad meant when he said that human rights are a “created” concept.

According to Confucius, the appearance of laws is the sign of a declining stages of a civilization.  In a superior society, a ruler is able to keep order merely by ”facing south,” and embodies the principle of ”acting without acting” (無為).  Since he embodies the same essence of Regality and virtue as the cakra-vartin, his manner of instructing the people is only to lead by example, and allow all other things to fall into place.  When rulers become decadent, what follows is the loss of virtue and the loss of the ruler’s Polar connection to the heavens.  Being detached from this higher principle, it is only then that he must then enact laws that keep men in place and maintain any semblance of order.  Along with the laws, he also must enact harsh punishments, making people obey out of fear.  Confucius summarizes:

Govern the people by edicts, keep the people them in line with punishments,
and the common people will stay out of trouble, but will have no sense of shame.
Govern them with virtue, keep them in line with rites,
and they will have a sense of shame and reform themsleves as well.

In the superior society, people are only bound by virtue (德) and ritual (禮), and not by laws.  In the ideal situation mentioned above, the Ruler can afford to be benevolent (仁), because people under his auspices do right without being forced to “on pain” of any punishment.

Therefore, to answer the question of whether “human rights” are constructed, the answer is both yesand no. On the one hand, when a ruler is benevolent, his people are free from tyranny and society orients itself in a harmonious fashion.  I think that what we might call “human rights” do seemingly exist, but it is only because the people carry themselves with dignity. This way, a society is ordered, because people are motivated by loyalty to their King or Ruler and have a sense of shame.  Human rights do not really exist by name in a superior society.  But as soon as laws come into place, the ruler must impose punishments, and invariably some people who are obsessed with having “freedom at any cost” will regard punishments as being harsh.  In the last era of society, people will only be concerned with the hedonistic notion “freedom,” and the idea of human rights will then surpass laws.  So, the idea of human rights is indeed a created one, created during a degenerate time in which the ideas of “virtue” and “benevolence” are dead, and where even “laws” are on the decline.

The Parable of the Poisonous Weeds

“Behold, once a man knowledgable in the healing powers of all manner of plants, trees, and wild herbs, and his apprentice, went forth from their abode to search for herbs in the forest, so that they might give them to an ailing man.  Being skillful in his art, the senior man was able to identify all the herbs beneficial to one’s health, and gather them.  But the apprentice, being inexperienced, gathered the poisonous weeds among the good herbs.

Upon seeing the poisonous weeds, the elder said to the younger, “Look!  These weeds are poisonous, and surely any man who consumes it shall fall ill and die.  You must take care to learn the difference, lest you not mix the poisonous weeds with the good herbs.”

The younger man, having seen the poison and heard his elder’s words vowed to recognize the poisonous weeds, so that he might do a good deed in the future.  Hearing this, the elder was pleased.

The meaning of the Parable:  The herbalist represents the leader of the Nation, and the apprentice represents the ministers of the Government.  The leader is constantly trying to keep his patient, the Nation and the People from falling ill; else he is trying to cure it.  Sometimes, the ministers make laws which are beneficial to the Nation and keep the Nation from falling ill, but sometimes, in their ignorance they embrace ideas and thoughts which are detrimental.  It is the leader’s duty to then point out those errors so that they do not harm the People and the Nation.

The Parable of the Painter

Once, a scholar spoke to King Renzong of Tangut saying, “Your Majesty is fond of art.  Shall I make an allusion?

‘In the time of Xia, there lived a painter who was a servant in the court of the Emperor Zhongkang.  Every morning, he made four paints, and he poured them in four separate vessels, that there they should keep their luster. With these paints, he created paintings unrivaled throughout the entire realm.

Now it came to pass in the seventh month of the year Gen-Wu that Zhongkang passed away, and was succeeded by Lord Xiang.  On the second day of the third month of Emperor Xiang’s rule, a lower official from Luohe prefecture sought out the artist and told him that he needed a painting done within three days.  This official also recommended that, if the artist were to mix all colors in one vessel, the artist could paint quickly and even better than before.  Thus the artist blended all paints into one vessel.’

O King, what do you think?  If four dyes are mixed in a vessel, and the artist stirred them, when would they become unmixed?”

King Renzong said: “Not even if one were to stir them for a number of kalpas equal to the number of sands on the banks of the Ganges or Yangtze, could they ever become unmixed.”

The Scholar spoke again, saying, “Indeed, O King!

‘For indeed in this single vessel he found that he had only one shade, of which he had seen nothing alike.  And he was unable to separate the light and the shadows.’”

The meaning of the Parable: All cultures and peoples have their own peculiar properties that make them unique, just as the particular appearance of colors make them unique.  It is possible for peoples to work together for the creative benefit of man.  It is also physically possible for peoples to mix together, and to some degree this can even have a pleasant appearance.  However, when the leader should exert so much effort in “mixing” peoples each with their unique qualities (such as through social engineering), identities become lost, just as the colors are indistinguishable from one another when they are all mixed into one vessel.

The Parable of Well

A young man inherited from his father a patch of land in which he grew vegetables and raised livestock.  Now, this farm was eight li distant from the source of water, and soon the young man grew tired of travelling to the well day after day to gather water to water his crops.  Yet he persevered, being concerned with his own sustenance and the welfare of the farm.  And by so doing, his farm was lush and green, and his animals were fat.

One day, after telling of his ordeal, some men in the marketplace mocked him, saying “Thou fool!  There is a well only two li from your farm.  Why not draw water from there?”  Having heard his, he thought to himself, “How excellent!  Now I shall not have to walk such a distance!”.  And upon reaching the well, he discovered that its water was dirty and putrid, unlike the clean water of the distant well.  But the lazy farmer, not wishing to walk, gathered the putrid water from the well, and used it to water his crops and animals.  Within a week, his crops withered and the animals fell ill.

The meaning of the Parable: In the world, there are many types of ideas and methods of governance.  The farmer is like the righeous ruler, who mindfully tends to the cultivation of his people’s mind and well-being, and the clean water is like the true and noble Tradition that unites the people.  However, in the age of the Five Evils, or the Kali Yuga, this is a difficult thing to achieve.  Thus, the lesser ruler will attempt the easy path towards the “putrid well”.  Hence, the putrid well represents the faults of the unenlightened modern world.  Upon consuming this, cultivation ceases, and the ruler’s society is ruined.  Therefore, the parable states that a righteous ruler uses all his power to bring pure ideas and cultivate his nation.

Fifty-two years ago, the anthropologist Horace Miner gave us some insight into the nature of the Nacirema in a ground-breaking article Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. This was the first extant observation of the culture from an anthropological perspective.  Then, about thirty years ago, Neil B. Thompson continued that work by writing on the Elibomotua cult and environmental modification in the magazine Natural History.  In describing the fall of this mysterious culture, the latter also described the ‘ritual’ architecture of these people in the following passage:

“Trees, if in large enough numbers and size to influence the appearance of the landscape, were removed. In treeless regions, hills were leveled and large holes were dug and partially filled with water. In a few areas the Nacirema imported structural steel with which they erected tall, sculpturesque towers. Some of these towers were arranged in series, making long lines that extended beyond the horizon, and were linked by several cables running through the air. Others, particularly in the northern fringe area, were erected in no discernible geometric pattern and were connected by hollow pipes laid on the surface of the earth.”

Today, many students of anthropology are familiar with the Nacirema through such work.  For those who are unfamiliar with Nacirema culture, I strongly encourage them to peruse the links provided above.

After reading, it is obvious that the “Nacirema” articles satirize American culture.  In any case, satire or not, the “Nacirema” articles can be considered a window into the status of modern culture in the West.  While, in technlogical terms, the West is no longer primitive, we can use the insight of Miner and Thompson as a valuable critique of modernity.  Overall, one can extend the framework already in existance to explaining the cult symbols of “democracy” and “liberalism”, as well as other social phenomena of popular culture.  By doing this, we obtain a valuable ideological yardstick for generating an accurate picture of modern America.

Thompson’s work on enviornmental modification is also interesting given the nature of post-modern industrial society.  While industrialized nations allow people to live in relative comfort, those nations are also suffering from true environmental problems.  Solutions to such problems have been discussed by such theorists as Pentti Linkola.

While one should always frown upon certain relativisms in cultural and racial anthropology, such satire also begs the question of what far more advanced civilizations, or perhaps even Ancient civilizations might view the American culture as.  Certainly, the ancients, who valued spiritual virility, superior moral order, and ritual propriety could regard today’s society as obstinate and barely civilized by such standards.

Not a week goes by in today’s news without hearing of China’s rise.  Whether China is capable of becoming a hegemony or not is still debatable, but the nation of China will certainly play an important role in the 21st century and beyond.

While China had attained its status in part by adopting certain concepts in economy and technology from the West, we can also observe that in the past, China was a dominant civilization without utilizing these very same influences.  At the same time, as Western scholars such as Patrick Buchanan point out, the Western, Atlantocentric world is crumbling.  America is embroiled in hopeless wars overseas on behalf of special interest groups; and unable to maintain the dollar; continental Europe is succumbing to decades of liberal immigration policy and struggling with ethnic conflict on a daily basis.  The only thing certain in the West’s present course of debauched liberalism is the “melting pot” phenomenon and imminent failure.

Thus, if China is so eager to imitate the West, and the West in its current state is crumbling, it begs the question of how great civilizations fall.  From a historical perspective, one might examine how the solar Inca Empire, was destroyed by the invasions of bands of adventurers drawn from the worst rabble of Europe, or how Rome succumbed to the barely literate barbarians to the north.  Although centuries apart, these ultimately link to the problem with Western civilization as it exists today.

The obvious answer is to point to military invasions and war as the end of civilization.  While this is applicable in the case of the Incas, as the Spaniards posessed superior weaponry, this becomes problematic when attempting to apply the same analogy to the Roman Empire.  Thus, there are both internal and external forces that can lead to the destruction of society.

From the internal perspective, there are clear signs for the end of traditional societies.  First, the notion of progress is taken to a reductio ad absurdum, annihilating the impetus to create genuine civilization.  Rather than creating civilization and culture, people in these societies concentrate on destroying it through replacing it with new ideas, becoming obsessed by the material and abandon the spiritual and biological.  This creates a society with “trendy” people who adorn themselves excessively and are neurotically obsessed with appearance.  To gain power in such a society, one entertains and flatters, and this requires a decadent but “different” lifestyle in order to distinguish oneself in any way. 

From the loss of impetus follows the loss of consensus.  Because culture and civilization becomes splintered by “progressives” who are destroying the foundations of civilization, people accustomed to appreciating the benefits of society no longer have the singular focus on maintaining it.  Once consensus is lost, decadence arises; what we commonly call “values” cannot exist, since there is no agreement on what is valued.  After this, the symptoms of decay set in, namely the loss of culture, decay of the aristocracy, and destruction of ethnic identities.

To “coexist” in this society requires dedicating themselves in the largest part toward earning money. After earning money, one might be able to afford vast amounts of consumer goods; however, ultimately, such a lifestyle requires increasing amounts of money as the rest of the economy collapses and thus such finer things become aberrations in a consumer environment rewarding goods that above all are cheap - quality becomes second to quantity.  In effect, this destroys the middle class, because it raises the bar on the cost of living outside of the undifferentiated mass.  One either lives in the wealthy class or with the “grey mass” in a technological third-world environment.  With the loss of the middle class comes a loss of the ordinary, hardworking decent people in the world, because they are turned into either whores for money or semi-impoverished scatterbrains like the rest.  When that occurs, the base of support for the finer things in life - the arts, culture, and learning - falls entirely into the hands of the “artificial aristocracy”, who above all are concerned with money. As a result, culture dies; art dies; learning dies.

Needless to say, there are remnants of the past. “Art” still exists, but is now little more than “unique” patterns and styles designed to shock or amuse — a crucifix immersed in Urine, a Quran defaced by a homosexual fanatic, and so on. There will be “music,” but it will consist of the wretched screamings and confused ramblings of the malcontented punks. There will be culture, but it will be the culture of the dollar bill and credit card. The institutes of higher learning will continue but will devote most of their time to teaching the ways of the new society, re-interpreting the older knowledge to fit the new rubric and, consequently, destroying it as a system of thought. It, too, will become aesthetics, and although it will exist in reference books (if not burned by the “progressive” newcomers) there will be on a handful who understand it, and none who can add to it.

Most Westerners have already transitioned to the idea of living among the ruins in a more “primitive” state, and lacking most qualities of discernment in themselves, aren’t much concerned about how all finer things are crumbling around them, because they still have their fast food, popular music and television and are content with that.

So then, what can be done?

The first and most important task is to begin to define the world in concrete terms; i.e. this is “right”, that is “wrong”; this is “native”, that is “foreign”, etc. For example, one might say that theiving is wrong and that generosity is right; one might say that Daoism is native and Christanity (or at least the liberal Protestant form of it) is foreign.

Both Nietzche and Guenon (the latter more than the former), and later Evola, asserted the existance of “Tradition”. This “Tradition” consists of all that we saw in the ancients that was functional is part of a set of values that are true in any age because of their fundamental recognition of the problems of reality for those who desire higher civilization. Tradition opposes Modernity, and the “progressive” society that believes we can reach some Utopic ideal through egalitarian and utilitarian government. Guenon was correct in dividing current history into these two threads, as Modernity takes many forms, including both Capitalism and Communism, conservatism and liberalism. There is no escape from Modernity once you begin using its divisions.

One aspect of Traditional civilization worldwide, regardless of race, is ethnoculture, which is the idea that no culture can exist without its traditional ethnicity to uphold it, because the tens of thousands of generations that produced that culture also shaped the population through selection for those who tended toward upholding its ideal values. Ethnoculture does not designate an Absolute “superior” or “inferior” race. Instead, it asserts an “I prefer”: for each culture to exist, it must prefer to have its own ethnic group which peacefully coexists with others, but is capable of forming an independent unite. This is not inbreeding; there’s enough variation in even a small population to avoid inbreeding. It’s not “racism,” in the sense of wanting to keep others down, but it’s an honest statement of need and will to keep them out so that the culture can develop without becoming a mixed-race society like so many remnants of collapsed ancient civilizations.

If China is to prosper in the next century, it must re-awaken its rich and glorious past.  “Democracy” and mob rule are not enough to ensure a future for any nation, and personal freedoms must be supplemented with real cultural values such as filial piety and loyalty.  In short, China must not succumb to the external forces of liberalism and multiculturalism if she wishes to succeed.