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.