Plague-Sight. — If deadly germs were capable of conscious retrospection, they would be able to look back upon the advance of their own kind throughout a decaying body and see nothing amiss in that regard, but would indeed find much cause for satisfaction at the progress they had made. It is much the same with blighters in human form, as Alasdair MacIntyre suggests:

“History by now in our culture means academic history, and academic history is less than two centuries old. Suppose it were the case that the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before, or largely before, the founding of academic history, so that the moral and other evaluative presuppositions of academic history derived from the forms of the disorder which it brought about. Suppose, that is, that the standpoint of academic history is such that from its value-neutral viewpoint moral disorder must remain largely invisible. All that the historian — and what is true of the historian is characteristically true also of the social scientist — will be allowed to perceive by the canons and categories of his discipline will be one morality succeeding another: seventeenth-century Puritanism, eighteenth-century hedonism, the Victorian work-ethic and so on, but the very language of order and disorder will not be available to him. If this were to be so, it would at least explain why what I take to be the real world and its fate has remained unrecognized by the academic curriculum. For the forms of the academic curriculum would turn out to be among the symptoms of the disaster whose occurrence the curriculum does not acknowledge.” [1]

Friedrich Nietzsche made a similar point: 

“My objection against the whole of sociology in England and France remains that it knows from experience only the forms of social decay, and in all innocence takes its own instincts of decay as the norm of sociological value-judgements.” [2]

It is good to see a latter-day Aristotelian and the original Nietzschean in some agreement. It is not always a case of Aristotle or Nietzsche, particularly when the latter, by his still good instincts, forgot his own doctrine and spoke as though there were an actual and essential standard of goodness wherefrom it would not be mere personal whim or world-trivial opinion to speak of decay.

[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 2007), p.4.

[2] [“Mein Einwand gegen die ganze Sociologie in England und Frankreich bleibt, dass sie nur die Verfalls-Gebilde der Societät aus Erfahrung kennt und vollkommen unschuldig die eigenen Verfalls-Instinkte als Norm des sociologischen Werthurteils nimmt.”] Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd.6 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen”, §.37, p.138.

Forfeit. — “A genuine social organism can no longer be linked up with this ageing Europe; such has been forfeit since 1789.”

[“Einen wahren gesellschaftlichen Organismus knüpft man in dieses alternde Europa nicht mehr hinein; desgleichen ist seit Anno 1789 verscherzt worden.”] Jacob Burckhardt, Brief an Hermann Schauenburg, [vor dem 14.] September 1849, Briefe (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1929), p. 175.

Great Littleness. — There is no growth of culture without rest and settlement, and every culture worthy of the name begins in the little fields and gardens of social life, wherein the soils are tended with particular care, and wherein deep roots are allowed to form; and even though each little patch might begin delightfully simple and unsophisticated, out of each, and between them all, something grander may arise, which itself provides the grounds for still more cultivation and wild growth, and so it might go on until in each place there arises something sublime and immeasurable. Yet:—

“Present folly seeks the unity of nations and not the creation of a single man from the entire species, so be it; but in acquiring general capabilities, will not a whole set of private sentiments perish? Farewell the tenderness of the fireside; farewell delight in family; among all the beings white, yellow or black, claimed as your compatriots, you will be unable to throw yourself on a brother's breast. Was there nothing in that life of other days, nothing in that narrow space you gazed at from your ivy-framed window? Beyond your horizon you suspected unknown countries of which the bird of passage, the only voyager you saw in autumn, barely told you. It was happiness to think that the hills enclosing you would not vanish before your eyes; that they would surround your loves and friendships; that the sighing of night around your sanctuary would be the only sound to accompany your sleep; that the solitude of your soul would never be troubled, that you would always find your thoughts there, waiting for you, to take up again their familiar conversation. You knew where you were born; you knew where your grave would be; penetrating the forests you could say:

‘Fair trees that once saw my beginning,
Soon you will witness my end.’

“Man has no need to travel to become greater; he bears immensity within. The accents escaping from your breast are immeasurable and find an echo in thousands of other souls: those who lack the melody within themselves will demand it of the universe in vain. Sit on the trunk of a fallen tree in the depths of the woods; if in profound forgetfulness of yourself, in immobility, in silence, you fail to find the infinite, it is useless to wander the shores of the Ganges seeking it.” [1]

If men stay still awhile, they put down roots and draw into themselves the nourishment required for their flourishing; but a constant movement and an unceasing fuss is demanded of them, and they are led hither and thither in pursuit of — what: their own tails? Even those at odds with this restless industry and movement must on account of it become wanderers; but, for them, it is a search for something so simple as home.

[1] François de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-tombe, tr. A.S. Kline, BkXLII:14:1, published online by A.S. Kline.

Something in Return. — It is a happy requital for those who play their part in scoffing at the idea of human importance that they can feel so important in doing so.

A Vibrant Corpse. — No aim strikes the latter-day European as more sinister, or is likely to fill him with more loathing, than that of the preservation of his own race, or just of its particular homelands and peoples. It seems to him the greatest taboo and the most forbidden sin — to him who revels in the breaking of taboos, so long as they are healthy; to him who scoffs at the forbiddance of sins, so long as they are to his pleasure! — and the pious observance of the defilement of his own race makes him feel washed of sin. At the passing, or the threat to the survival, of Bantu tribes, Tibetan customs, snow leopards, rare butterflies, elm-trees, and so forth, he can become justly regretful, and even spurred to action; but to the plight of his own race, customs, societies, and so forth, he is quite indifferent, and to any counter-measure, quite hostile. Has anything ever been observed that compares to it? Does it not show at least the withering of a survival-instinct, and perhaps even a diseased will to self-destruction, wherewith he is afflicted? Could it have been guessed even a hundred years ago that Europe would face its defilement and death in the most shameful and ignoble way? Certainly, great upheavals were felt to be coming, fire, blood, destruction; and come they did — but the pious acquiescence to the passing of Europe: could this have been imagined in quite the way that it is occurring? The latter-day European is even too weak to confront his sickness face-to-face. Just that itself would be a sign of healthiness in him. He must meet it as though it were a hopeful opportunity. The sickness of Europe is taken by its deadly microbes, its celebrants, to be a sign of health and a promise of a thriving — nay, “vibrant” — future; and so it is for them. Every sickness is a sign of health, that is to say, of the disease itself, and every corpse teems with life.

Safeguard. — “The heredity of the throne is the guarantee of all heredity and the safeguard of all inheritances.” [1] What hereditary lord would dare to scold the very ideas of hereditary right and inheritance as our public governors have done? If any were to do so by low words or high taxes, he would unwisely put himself in a precarious spot.

[1] Louis-Gabriel-Amboise de Bonald, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (1817), in Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition, tr. & ed., C.O. Blum (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003), p.74.

A Self-Stuffing Animal. — “Fortune spoils, coddles, lulls, and isolates men, and peoples too; whereas misfortune keeps them awake, stirs, binds, and uplifts them.” [1] A life at odds with deadening conveniences and securities would have to be upheld to keep men on their toes, true blood in their veins, and thoughts in their heads, but it would never sell, not where so-called lifestyle is a commodity like everything else, glamour-packaged and deceit-promoted; and what does not sell makes no difference in our threepenny merchant-culture. A modernist could not choose to live a more noble or reasonable life. He has forgone the belief in reason and freewill. He has desire and utility instead. He desires to be fed and watered like a rare beast, history’s own prize-winning specimen and greatest exhibit, though he never thinks he might end up stuffed, and he sees no worth in anything that does not promise to bring still more fruits to his trough. Under the dominion of comfort-seeking, pleasure-questing, and thoroughgoing liberal drowsiness, man invents misfortunes wherefrom he might never recover, misfortunes which do not uplift but might ruin him utterly. One day he might beg for the old sufferings and misfortunes, if only he still had the mind for it. But, before then, would he have the strength of mind and will to refuse, even just once, yet another bite of poisoned fruit? It is strongly to be doubted. What is the nay-saying whisper of reason against the aye-saying roar of desire? — “To-day the bells and the bonfires express the violent passions of an overjoyed people, when to-morrow their own reeking blood must extinguish their flaming buildings. That thing for which we do most labour and pray, and for the happening whereof we are even transported with joy, is not seldom our utter destruction, and that speedily.” [2]

[1] [“Das Glück verzieht, verwöhnt, schläfert ein und isolirt die Menschen, wie die Völker; da hingegen das Unglück wach erhält, reitzt, bindet und erhebt.”] Adam Heinrich Müller, Die Elemente der Staatskunst, Erster Theil (Berlin: J.D. Sander, 1809), p.8.
[2] William Blundell, Crosby Records: A Cavalier’s Note Book, being Notes, Anecdotes, & Observations of William Blundell, of Crosby, Lancashire, Esquire, ed., T.E. Gibson (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1880), pp.130-1.

Other Powers. — “Of the various powers and faculties we possess, there are some which nature seems both to have planted and reared, so as to have left nothing to human industry. Such are the powers which we have in common with the brutes, and which are necessary to the preservation of the individual, or the continuance of the kind. There are other powers, of which nature hath only planted the seeds in our minds, but hath left the rearing of them to human culture. It is by the proper culture of these, that we are capable of all those improvements in intellectuals, in taste, and in morals, which exalt and dignify human nature; while, on the other hand, the neglect or perversion of them makes its degeneracy and corruption.”

Thomas Reid, An Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. D.R. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), I:II:21-30, p.13.