European Neo-Futurism

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye contends that for Europe to escape the sterile grip of Western progressivism and reclaim its future, it must revive its sacred traditions and embrace the tragic spirit, rejecting the soulless march towards a homogenised globalism dictated by contemporary futurology.

This is the thirteenth part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.

Under this condition, the European future will persist and gain meaning: only conservatives can preserve history and prepare a destiny — thus, only they are truly ‘futurists’. Heraclitus meant nothing else in his famous river metaphor: to be able to bathe in different waters each time (i.e. to follow the course of destiny and remain within history), it is necessary for the river (i.e. history as memory) to exist. Utopia, as a ‘longing’ for a destiny and a future that depends solely on our will and imagination, is therefore sterile and deadly unless it is tied to a myth. The liberal and Marxist utopia, which aims to unify the earth according to the model of egalitarianism and materialism, does not rest on a historical myth but on an illusion, the delusion of a ‘state of nature’ of the social contract. Such an illusion has nothing to do with the historical past, as the state of nature is a modern invention improperly projected onto a prehistoric past, and the reference point of these progressive utopias is non-history.

A utopia can, however, prove fundamental once it relies on a myth, i.e. on something real, because the myth is a narrative that grows into history and is meant to ensure the continuation of history. In this sense, the utopia of a contemporary conservative revolution can, for example, rely on the European imperial myth (the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, etc.), which represents a much more real force than all the futurological projections of progressive utopias. The ideologies of today’s West stand out for their inability to establish a future and shape destiny. Without foundational and mobilising myths (under the pretext of ‘realism’...), built on the sand of simplistic ‘drafts’ of the universalist-egalitarian doctrine and not on the solid ground of history and tradition, they have little chance of realisation and thus leave events to the blind will of the technomorphic world system. These ideologies appear unrealistic in their brash rationalism. They overlook the resurgence of the religious and the political, i.e. the myth, as we observed in the events that shook the Arab-Muslim world. We should no longer take seriously all these discourses marked by false wisdom, which want and predict a communist society as much as an Americanised, standardised world market: all these cold prophecies about the imminent emergence of a global model of ‘global communication’, a ‘post-industrial society’, which aims to extend the current state of California to the entire planet.

Instead, let us consider the political drafts and utopias that are based on the reactivation of a historical myth (e.g. the ‘Great Arab Homeland’). This approach seems much more comprehensive, organic, and realistic because it takes into account all aspects of humanity, especially the religious and the irrational, and does not simply rely on the illusion of mathematical and economic rationalism to build the future. It is simply regrettable that the peoples of the Third World (Mexico, the Arab world, India, Africa) resort to such myths to a much greater extent and are therefore more conservative, futurist, and realistic than we are!

Only when Europe rediscovers the sense of the sacred and the community of destiny will it regenerate. In this respect, we are paradoxically better off than the Americans and the Soviet Russians, whose societies are founded only on a rationalist and materialist hope and have completely abandoned any mythical spirituality (i.e. what carries history within) in favour of the purely technological and mathematical construction of their future. As Henry James once said, “I had to come to Europe to learn the value of the tragic note.”

It is precisely this sense of the tragic that is missing from the Western and optimistic model of the USA and the Soviet Union. Only the tragic is history-founding. The optimism of Western progressivism leads to death, as revealed by the demographic implosion; the latter, Pierre Chaunu noted, occurs in countries where the presence of death is no longer perceived, where funeral rites have disappeared, where the optimism of immediate consumption, the bourgeois assurance of everyday life, and the superficial cult of laughing youth replace the ancestor cult and the familiar presence of death in the collective consciousness. Without a living memory, without a cult of the dead and the ancestors, there are no children, no history, no future; without tragedy, no will to survive; without a past lineage, no future lineage.

The old continent of Europe — inhabited by the tragic, the dead, and memory — paradoxically has more chances of survival than the American-Western society — inhabited by atheism (behind the prosaic mask of the false religion of human rights) and the optimistic and absolutely ephemeral pseudo-youthfulness of ‘technological civilisation’. Despite the collapse of Christianity (which has become an ideological vulgate) as a religion, Europe remains attracted to the sacred. It will rediscover its cultural and demographic fertility when it once again embraces myths and funeral rites. We would not know where else it could draw the necessary energy except from its pagan memory...

Since the USA has abandoned any sense of memory, since it wanted to be ‘without a past’, we do not know where it could find the myths, the memory, and the sense of the sacred, which are necessary for long-term survival. Elsewhere, we have explained that Europe is merely ‘in decline’ (and can therefore recover), whereas the American-Western civilisation is heading towards complete collapse.

The Faustian soul that resides in Europe is tragic, and in this respect, the current ‘Euro-pessimism’ might be more fruitful than the shallow, complacent optimism of the Americans, which will disappear at the first storm and turn into despondency, as seen during the Vietnam War. The awareness of the dead-end situation (in which European identity currently finds itself) can lead to an unexpected awakening. In this context, we must reflect on the historical experience of the medieval man, who, at least as much as the ancient Greek, shows us the way back to what we might need to start again. The medieval man, in his political, religious, and architectural forms, initiated an extraordinary metamorphosis. He freed himself from what was burdensome in tradition and viewed it with an entirely new perspective. As a builder or politician, he created radically new forms and made them traditions: for example, the pointed arch cathedral or the feudal system. The pre-Faustian medieval man was immanent, creative. He discovered a new polytheism, a new aesthetic, a new politics, without needing to resort to the category of ‘modernity’ or ‘progress’ or to rebel against the past. Such a Dionysian power is the attitude we should adopt in our current situation.

The Renaissance, and with it the artificial memory of an ancient world, had scarcely appeared, and already the ‘model’, this eternal fad, was sterilising everything. A literary and dead paganism replaced a Catholicism that was on the verge of becoming neo-pagan. And soon, Calvin, Luther, the Counter-Reformation, and the re-Christianisation cast their shadows ahead. This is normal: the plagiarism of the artificially recalled antiquity sterilised the creative magic of the medieval man. They wanted to imitate the Roman state, the order of columns of the ancient temples. Ultimately, they destroyed the feudal system and abandoned the affirmative architecture of the Ogival style, without ever regaining the harmony of the Greeks and Romans, of course. They only found the modern state, Christianity, and individualism. Paganism left the lived unconscious, social immanence, the political, sacred, or aesthetic everyday life, to flee, now under control, into so-called ‘profane art’. The medieval man was on the right path: the path leading to the return of the glorified gods.

The neo-European spirit must take the creative soul of the Middle Ages as its model. It took on the immense challenge of following the collapse of the gigantic Roman world, which, given the scale of the catastrophe, could have meant the end of all European civilisation. Despite the upheaval that brought about the transition from the Roman to the medieval world, European identity was transformed and identical at the same time. We must now accomplish the same transition, the same break: transform ourselves to preserve our identity; break with the progressive ‘tradition’ to preserve our essence.

To be uninstalled and Faustian; to be able to combine traditionalism with what might be called ‘futurism’; to simultaneously have in mind the European rootedness and the continuation of our lineage in future history, i.e. to reject any ossifying reactionary traditionalism and any sterilising cult of the present; this above all requires the rejection of progressivism and its abhorrent form, the idolatry of the ‘future’. European futurism — European neo-futurism, one might say — now paradoxically requires a distrust of the concept of the future.

We cannot have any experience of the future; we can only have experience of the past. Contemporary futurology, by confining our future to deterministic attributes, makes us idolise a sense of history and neutralises our ability to choose historical paths and create our own future. Instead, it imposes a future that is merely a quantitative expansion of the global consumer civilisation. If we do not believe in the futurologists, our future will remain open and free, and we will create the ‘shock of the past’ that the humanitarian mindset so greatly fears.

In the tradition we choose, we may possibly find the face and inspiration of our future: a future unimaginable to contemporary mentality, an unacceptable future for the ‘beautiful soul’ of humanitarianism, which Gérald Hervé castigates; it is the same soul that imagines itself on the ascending line of progress, but most likely is only the temporarily triumphant figure of the Western interregnum.

This interregnum we are living through can be described as the period initiated by Nietzsche, where egalitarianism reaches its critical phase and accelerates, where Europe sheds the last remnants of its identity, where ‘humanity’ is concretely realised according to the accomplished Judaeo-Christian project, but where at the same time, the will to regenerate history re-emerges among new elites. The entire 20th century essentially constitutes this interregnum. It could well culminate in nothing other than the ongoing process of the total triumph of egalitarianism, massification, and the ultimate decline of European civilisation. However, it is also possible that, after a period of disillusionment, it will lead to the end of egalitarianism. This end is hard to imagine for most contemporaries because it does not mean the ‘negation’ of equality or the advent of an ‘inegalitarian’ era, but rather an era where the distinction between egalitarianism and inegalitarianism becomes irrelevant, where the choice between ‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’, between cosmopolitanism and rootedness, will no longer make sense, where the conflict between reactionary traditionalists and progressives, between left and right sensibilities, will no longer occur because these fundamental issues will have been definitively resolved. Something else will be at stake, as the order of history will be restored, in Homer’s words, ‘by lightning or by persuasion’.

‘It is essential’, writes Pierre Vial, ‘to have the longest historical memory in order to build a greater future… A people is a living entity. It can die; it can die a physical death, but also a spiritual death: a people that has lost its soul is a people condemned to death… A people is a community that is conscious of itself and inscribed in history precisely through its will to make history… What establishes a people? A common heritage and the will to live together. But this will is absent if there is no consensus on its historical, cultural, and, above all, mythical reference points. The founding myths are essential for the life of a people, for its awareness of destiny, for its will-to-become.’ The Faustian soul finds both its strength and its uniqueness in this ambivalence: a call to myths, insight into decadence, abandonment. As a damned soul, it defies this damnation by turning to myths, which are the only things that can regenerate history against the determination of destiny. The civilisation condemned today must desire to be dominated by the ‘Faustian soul’. Julien Freund rightly demonstrated that decadence is a founding idea, that the awareness of real or perceived decadence could lead to historical regeneration. Did not the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation establish itself on the idea of the decadence of the Roman Empire, which haunted all minds like a dark nostalgia?

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)