Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier: Manifesto for a European Renaissance. 1999. In Tomislav Sunic: Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right. Third edition. London: Arktos Books, 2011.
“The French New Right was born in 1968,” the annus mirabilis of the French New Left, which it in some ways resembles, not the least of which being its utopianism. Unlike the New Left, however, which began as a political movement and ended up in think-tanks and universities, the New Right took the path in reverse, beginning as “a think-tank and a school of thought,” aiming at what Benoist and Champetier call “a metapolitical perspective.” By this, they mean a stance “rest[ing] solely on the premise that ideas pay a fundamental role in collective consciousness and, more generally, in human history.” Human will and action shape “History,” but “always” do so “within the framework of convictions, beliefs, and representations which provide meaning and direction.” This begins with calling their movement the French New Right, despite the call for a European renaissance; that renaissance will resist universalisms of all kinds, even any universalism limited to Europe, as seen in such notions as Jean Monnet’s “United States of Europe” or its real-world would-be precursor, the European Union.
The Manifesto‘s first half consists of a critique of the modern West. “The major crisis” of this “age” is “the end of modernity,” modernity as constituted by individualism, massification, desacralization, rationalism in the sense of instrumental reason, the cult of efficiency, and the attempted universalization of all those features or “processes.” Modernity dates from 1700. “In most respects, it represents a secularization of ideas and perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics.” That is, Christianity already encouraged individuality “in the notion of individual salvation and of an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God that surpasses any relation on earth.” Massification or egalitarianism also has a Christian origin “in the idea that redemption is equally available to all mankind, since all are endowed with an individual soul whose absolute value is shared by all humanity.” Christianity promoted desacralization in the sense that it denied the divinity of the cosmos, now relegated to the status of a mere creation of the holy God, a god entirely separate from and superior to that creation. Instrumental rationalism at the service of ‘progress’ imitates the Christian idea of Providence, “that history has an absolute beginning and a necessary end, and that it unfolds globally according to a divine plan.” And, obviously, Christianity is a universalist religion, seeking converts among Jews and Gentiles alike, worldwide. Thus, “today Christianity has unwittingly become the victim of the movement it started,,” “the religion of the way out of religion,” as “modern political life itself is founded on secularized theological concepts,” with its political-philosophic schools “agree[ing] on one issue: that there is a unique and universalizable solution for all social, moral and political problems” whereby humanity, “understood to be the sum of rational individuals,” is “called upon to realize their unity in history,” in the process overcoming unity’s “obstacle,” diversity. Modernity “attempts by every available means to uproot individuals from their individual communities, to subject them to a universal mode of association.” Although the several kinds of socialism, including fascism, communism, and social democracy, have attempted this, “the most efficient means for doing this” in practice, not in ‘theory,’ “has been the marketplace.”
Although “the imagery of modernity is dominated by desires of freedom and equality,” “these two cardinal values have been betrayed” by “the dominance of the global marketplace,” technology, and modern statism. Proclaiming human rights, modernity provides no “means to exercise them” in the face of these ruling forces, all wielded by a small elite, ‘progressing’ by means of pseudoscientific “management of global society” towards ever-increasing soft despotism, while wrecking humanly scaled communities and sucking nature dry. Still worse, “modernity has given birth to the most empty civilization mankind has ever known: the language of advertising has become the paradigm of all social discourse; the primacy of money has imposed the omnipresence of commodities; man has been transformed into an object of exchange in a context of mean hedonism; technology has ensnared the life-world in a network of rationalism,” a world “replete with delinquency, violence and incivility, in which man is at war with himself and against all,” that is, “an unreal world of drugs, virtual reality and media-hyped sports, in which the countryside is abandoned for unlikeable suburbs and monstrous megalopolises, and where the solitary individual merges into an anonymous and hostile crowd, while traditional social, political, cultural or religious mediations become increasingly uncertain and undifferentiated.” One might object that this portrait is more than a little exaggerated, but, then, the document is, after all, a manifesto. Writing in 1999, before the rise of the hypermodern Chinese state had become noticeable to many intellectuals, the authors identify liberalism as “the main enemy,” liberalism as the doctrine of the primacy of quantity over quality, of market economics, and of individualism justified by the assertion of unalienable rights drawn from the falsely claimed asociality of human nature. Market economics especially inserts Darwinism into social thought—incoherently, since Darwinism “says absolutely nothing about the value of what is chosen” by means of social competition. “But man is not satisfied with mere survival.” Marxian socialism, capitalism’s rival, “belongs to the same universe” as an heir of Enlightenment thought (rationalism, universalism, primacy of economics, the labor theory of value, faith in progress towards and imagined “end of history,” a progress won over the dead bodies of competitors). Liberalism undermines genuinely political life, self-government, by reducing representative democracy “to a market in which supply becomes increasingly limited (concentration of programs and convergence of policies) and demand less and less motivated (abstention).” “In its economic, political and moral forms, liberalism represents the central bloc of the ideas of a modernity that is finished.”
Postmodern life, now upon us, has seen the return of social violence and the multiplication of intra- and supra-state conflicts, including religious warfare, all of which liberals expected to disappear. But postmodernism also sees an increasing concern for the quality of life, the revival of communities, growing opposition to the elites, the politic of group identities, and what to the authors is the welcome decline of established religions, especially of Christianity, modernity’s archē. The New Right would build on these latter trends.
Benoist and Champetier identify nine “foundations” of modernity. The first two amount to elements of a false anthropology. Modernity either denies the existence of human nature altogether, as seen in Rousseau but also to a more limited extent in Locke’s claim that the human mind is a tabula rasa, or makes it amount to nothing more than “abstract attributes disconnected from the real world and lived experience.” Such notions conduce to thinking of human beings as “infinitely malleable,” things to be remade into the ‘new man’ by means of “the brutal and progressive transformation” of the human social environment, living in a utopia made real by ‘totalitarian’ tyranny and its concentration camps. Liberalism is the same thing, but milder and more gradualist. These moderns are wrong. Human individuals bear the general characteristics of a natural species, along with specific hereditary dispositions which decisively influence their “attitudes and modes of behavior,” blocking the radical transformations moderns envision. Moreover, “man is not just an animal,” one species among many, but a being conscious “of his own consciousness,” capable of “abstract thought, syntactic language, the capacity for symbolism, the aptitude for objective observation and value judgment.” These capacities do “not contradict his nature” but rather extend it “by conferring on him a supplementary and unique identify” conferred upon him by is “social and historical life,” a life shaped by moral and political choices. “The New Right proposes a vision of a well-balanced individual, taking into account both inborn, personal abilities and the social environment,” rejecting “ideologies that emphasize only one of these factors,” whether biological—presumably, such a thing as Nazism—economic (liberalism, socialism) or mechanical (meaning, perhaps, utilitarianism).
Human nature is “neither good nor bad,” but capable of being either, thanks to the openness of choice available to human being and their vulnerability both to chance disaster and to the consequences of their own bad choices. “As an open and imperiled being,” man “is always able to go beyond himself or to debase himself,” and hence needs to construct social and moral rules, along with “institutions and traditions” that “provide a foundation for his existence,” physically, and “give his life meaning and references.” That is, neither human nature nor nature as a whole nor the divine provide such meaning, inasmuch as human nature has no innate moral content and any referent beyond the understanding of the limited human intellect “is by definition unthinkable.” And indeed, although human nature is discernible, it never presents itself except within a given socio-cultural “context.” “In this sense, humanity is irreducibly plural: diversity is part of its very essence,” with various social and political groups living within those contexts, which exist “prior to the way individuals and groups see the world” as “concretely rooted people.” “Man is rooted by nature in his culture,” and cultures themselves change over time, from epoch to epoch. “Thus, the idea of an absolute, universal, and eternal law that ultimately determines moral, religious, or political choices appears unfounded,” an invitation to totalitarianism. These diverse “cultures” exhibit both cooperativeness, even altruism, and competition, including aggression. What the authors call the “great historical constructions” have established “a harmony based on the recognition of the common good, the reciprocity of rights and duties, cooperation and sharing,” all in a tragic (because impermanent, mortal) “tension between these poles of attraction and repulsion.”
Moving to the aspects of ‘culture’—social, political, economic—the authors deny the existence of any original ‘state of nature’ in which individuals joined to form a social contract. With Aristotle, they regard human societies as resulting from extended families. Societies are indeed consented to, but as ‘givens,’ not as inventions. “Membership in the collective does not destroy individual identity; rather, it is the basis for it,” the way in which individuals think of, feel about, themselves. In such family-derived communities, a “vertical reciprocity of rights and duties, contributions and distributions, obedience and assistance” prevails (as in the family, with its husbands and wives, parents and children), along with “a horizontal reciprocity of gifts, fraternity, friendship, and love.” Diversity thus exists not only from one society to another but within each society, a diversity “constantly threatened either by shortcomings (conformity, lack of differentiation) or excesses (secession, atomization).” In a society, “the whole exceeds the sum of its pats and possesses qualities none of its individual parts have,” a fact now “defeated by modern universalism and individualism, which have associate community with the ideas of submission to hierarchy, entanglement, or parochialism.” Modernity thereby hasn’t “liberated man form his original familial belonging or from local, tribal, corporative or religious attachment” so much as subordinating him with “harsher” and more remote “constraints,” “impersonal and more demanding,” most notably its “statist bureaucracies.” This makes of human societies collections of “individuals who experience each other as strangers,” lacking the “mutual confidence” that would enable them to live without subjection to the supposedly neutral “regulatory authority” of the administrative state, with its market exchanges, habit of submission to “the all-powerful state,” and the “abstract juridical rules” which govern both the market and that submission. “Only a return to communities and to a politics of human dimensions can remedy exclusion or dissolution of the social bond, its reification, and its juridification.”
Genuine politics “cannot be reduced to economics, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, or the sacred.” The moral orientation of politics aims at “a common good…inspired by the collectivity’s values and customs,” not the “individual morality” of one or some of the polity’s members. Political communities have regimes, ways of ruling and of being ruled, but “regimes which refuse to recognize the essence of politics, which deny the plurality of goals or favor depoliticization, are by definition ‘unpolitical.'” That is, they deny Aristotle’s principle, that politics consists of ruling and of being ruled, in turn. Modernity propounds “the illusion of politics as ‘neutral,’ reducing power to managerial efficiency in ruling, and therefore reducing most residents of the polity to the status of being ruled, efficiently. This reduces the government of men to the administration of things, pretending that the public sphere has no “particular vision of the ‘good life.'” But politics is no science, a vehicle for supposedly value-free rationalism and its technologies, but “an art, calling for prudence before everything else,” acknowledging the perennial “uncertainty,” the “plurality of choices” and “decision[s] about goals” that must be arbitrated by rulers wielding ruling offices or institutions with powers understood to be means serving the ends set by the political community. Tellingly, however, the New Rightists endorse the claim of that arch-modern Thomas Hobbes, that “the first aim of all political action is civil peace,” that is, “security and harmony between all members of society” and “protection from foreign danger.” (In this, they follow the thinking of one of their intellectual heroes, Carl Schmitt.) Subordinate to civil peace, such “values” as liberty, equality, unity, diversity, and solidarity” are not self-evident but arbitrary. But New Rightists do not endorse Hobbes’s solution to the political problem, the regime of monarchy for a centralized, if economically liberal, state, the mighty Leviathan whose blood is money.
They prefer democracy, “the only form of government that offers [the individual] participation in public discussions and decisions, as well as the ability to make something of himself and to excel through education.” The democratic regime must exist within a federal state, or a loosely organized empire of the ‘ancient’ sort, consisting of “organized communities and multiple allegiances” which can resist the tyranny of centralization. In such a democratic and variegated state, animated by “the spirit of subsidiarity,” the rulers “are above each citizen individually, but they are always subordinate to the general will expressed by the body of citizens,” the will of the nation. In this regime and state, “politics is not reduced to the level of the state” because “the public person is defined as a complex of groups, families and associations, of local, regional, national or supranational collectivities” existing in “organic continuity.”
Similarly, the economic character of both liberalism and Marxism, and indeed the ‘economism’ they share, cannot sustain “the infrastructure of society.” Economic life rightly understood is useful, but “only that.” Under aristocratic conditions, “one was rich because one was powerful, and not the reverse, power being thus matched by a duty to share and to protect those under one’s care”—by noblesse oblige. “The market is not an ideal model whose abstraction allows universalization,” nor is socialism; on the contrary, “in all pre-modern societies, the economic was embedded and contextualized within other orders of human activity.” Market exchange must always be balanced with reciprocity and redistribution, and vice-versa, avoiding the limitless consumerism of capitalism and the iron cage of socialism. Properly understand, ‘economy’ means oikos-nomos, the law or rule of the household; political economy should reflect that understanding, particularly with respect to, and for, “the harmony and beauty of nature.” That is, the New Right propounds political democracy on an aristocratic civil-social and economic foundation, with the reciprocity of political life pervading all dimensions of the nation.
The reason for this may be seen in the way the authors conceive of ethics (with seeming ‘modernism’) as “the construction of oneself.” But this construction turns out to be no existentialist project but rather an acknowledgement that “the fundamental categories of ethics are universal” (noble and ignoble, good and bad, admirable and despicable, just and unjust, distinctions that “can be found everywhere) are “an anthropological consequence” of human freedom. However, these categories universally develop in non-universal, specific and concrete circumstances of one’s own place and time. “The adage ‘my country, right or wrong’ does not mean that my country is always right, but that it remains my country even when it is wrong,” my home, however misguided it may be. The good citizen “always tries to strive for excellence in each of [the] virtues,” which are universal—generosity, honor, courage, cowardice, moderation, duty, rectitude, unselfishness—and “this will to excellence does not in any way exclude the existence of several modes of life” that find “their place in the city’s hierarchy”—the life of contemplation or philosophy, the life of activity or politics, the life of production or economics. The New Right prefers Aristotelian ethics to such individualist moralities as utilitarianism (Bentham) or ‘deontology’ (Kant), much less the nihilism of Nietzsche. While it is true that “all men have rights,” they “would not know how to be entitled to them as isolated beings; a right expresses a relation of equity, which implies the social,” which gives definition to the right.
Unlike Thomas Aquinas, the Christian Aristotelian, New Rightists utterly reject the Bible. The modern scientists’ ambition to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate and the consequent “technological explosion of modernity,” bespeaks “the disappearance of ethical, symbolic or religious codes,” but this project finds its origins in “the Biblical imperative” to “replenish and subdue the earth,” which, according to the Manifesto, eventually issued in the Cartesian imperative to master and own nature. But mastery for what? “Technology has given humanity new means of existence, but at the same time it has led to a loss of the reason for living, since the future seems to depend not only on the indefinite extension of the rational mastering of the world” but on the extension of that mastery to human nature itself. “Man is becoming the simple extension of the tools he has created.” This must “reduce men to what they have in common,” a leveling that will bring not self-mastery, but the sniveling Last Man Nietzsche warned against. Politically and militarily, this may be seen in modern Western imperialism, “the Westernization of the planet” animated “by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably presented as ‘progress.'” This has backfired, as “new civilizations are gradually acquiring modern means of power and knowledge without renouncing their historical and cultural heritage for the benefit of Western ideologies and values.”
The New Rightists hope that this will lead to “a multipolar world of emerging civilizations, civilizations that “will not supplant the ancient local, tribal, provincial or national roots” while nonetheless recognizing “their common humanity.” This may strike one as utopian. One cannot simply acquire modern means of power and knowledge while maintaining tradition in any fundamental sense. Modern technology rests on modern science, modern science on modern philosophy, anti-traditional to the core. “The ‘paganism’ of the New Right articulates nothing more than sympathy for [the] ancient conception of the world” that prevailed in Europe before Christianity and indeed before Socrates—before dualisms religious and philosophic. Sympathy is one thing, practice another.
Accordingly, the authors turn to policies, identifying thirteen points of resistance to modernization and its sham egalitarianism. The first is the opposition of “clear and strong identities” to “indifferentiation and uprooting.” Globalization, they claim, has caused overreactions (“bloody irredentisms, convulsive and chauvinistic nationalism, savage tribalizations”), as the thin universality of a proffered, spurious ‘citizenship of the world’ offends, irritates, and threatens without offering the satisfactions of a real community. “Modernity has not been able to satisfy this need for identity.” Accordingly, the French New Right “affirms the primacy of differences, which are neither transitory features leading to some higher form of unity, nor incidental aspects of private life” but are rather “the very substance of social life.” Politically, this means federalism or subsidiarity within France, which will include the exercise of native ethnic, linguistic, and religious practices—no enclaves for observance of Islamic law in France, therefore. In foreign relations, “the French New Right supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism,” although their principles would seem to require support of peoples struggling against any imperialism (on the basis of “the right to difference”), including those nations which have a tradition of imperialism (China, Russia). Not all traditions support traditionalism.
The French New Right opposes racism, “a theory which postulates that there are qualitative differences between the races, such that, on the whole, one can distinguish races as either ‘superior’ or ‘inferior; that an individual’s value is deduced entirely from the race to which he belongs; or, that race constitutes the central determining factor in human history.” That is, just as the New Left rejected Marxism-Leninism’s scientific socialism, preferring a softer-edged ‘cultural’ Marxism, the New Right rejects the ‘race science’ of the older Nazi Right (and of the early ‘Progressive’ Left). The authors correctly identify the source of ‘scientific’ racism as “scientific positivism”—the very doctrine that has also produced the technologies that menace humanness, worldwide. They also oppose, however, “a universalist” anti-racism in defense of their own “differentialist” anti-racism. “Universalist anti-racism only acknowledges in peoples their common belonging to a particular species,” tending “to consider their specific identities as transitory or of secondary importance,” thus pursuing policies aimed at overcoming, assimilating particular human identities into one mass of ‘humanity.’ Differentialist anti-racism holds to the contrary, “that the irreducible plurality of the human species constitutes a veritable treasure,” refusing “both exclusion and assimilation,” both “apartheid and the melting pot” but instead accepting “the other as Other through a dialogic perspective of mutual enrichment.” This raises the question of the criteria for “enrichment,” which can only mean the enhancement of the universally held virtues already enumerated.
This enrichment will occur over and via a certain distance, as the New Right opposes immigration “such as one sees today in Europe,” an “undeniably negative phenomenon” consisting of “forced uprooting” by economic necessity, as poor and overpopulated countries send their people to rich countries; there is also a corrupt attraction, as “the attraction of Western civilization and the concomitant depreciation of indigenous cultures” wax “in light of the growing consumer-oriented way of life” that impoverished peoples see from afar and want for themselves. That is, the claim of capitalism’s defenders—that everyone wants more stuff—is at least partially correct. To meet this crisis, the New Right proposes restrictive immigration policies “coupled with increased cooperation with Third World Countries where organic interdependence and traditional ways of life still survive.” The authors do not specify what forms this cooperation will take—presumably, some form of foreign aid that will induce foreigners to stay where they are. They acknowledge that existing foreign populations cannot be deported, and so they offer “a communitarian model,” consistent with subsidiarity, “which would permit them to keep the structures of their collective cultural lives” while “observ[ing] necessary general and common laws”—thereby dissociating “citizenship from nationality.” Obviously, this would not work with serious Muslims, for whom the Sharia law is comprehensive, all other laws abhorrent.
The New Right also opposes ‘sexism,’ albeit not in the way of contemporary feminists. “The distinction of the sexes is the first and most fundamental of natural differences, for the human race only ensures its continuation through this distinction”; “humanity is not one, but rather two.” And “beyond mere biology, difference inscribes itself in gender—masculine and feminine. The authors maintain that “the modern concept of abstract individuals, detached from their sexual identity, stemming from an ‘indifferentialist’ ideology which neutralizes sexual differences, is just as prejudicial against women as traditional sexism which, for centuries, considered women as incomplete men.” (It should be noticed that there are limits to their traditionalism.) The belief that gender differences derive from “a social construct” only reproduces the masculinist-modern adherence to allegedly universal and actually abstract “values.” The New Right accordingly “upholds specifically feminine rights,” including “the right to virginity to maternity, to abortion.” (Why the right to virginity is a specifically feminine right is not clear.) They evidently prefer the specifically feminine “right” to abortion to the universal right to life. [1] Not for them the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.
It goes almost without saying that the New Right opposes rule by the ‘New Class,’ the class of professional managers identified and described by James Burnham in the United States and Miloslav Djilas in the communist regimes. “This New Class produces and reproduces everywhere the same type of person: cold-blooded specialists, rationality detached from day-to-day realities,” guided by “abstract individualism, utilitarian beliefs, a superficial humanitarianism, indifference to history, and obvious lack of culture, isolation from the real world, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual, an inclination to corruption, nepotism and to buying votes,” all aimed at “the globalization of world-wide domination by themselves. This results in the depersonalization of rulers, lessening “their sense of responsibility” for those they rule even as it widens the scope of that rule and augments the power of it. Meanwhile, “the public feels indifferent toward or angry at a managerial elite which does not even speak the same language as they do,” preferring a technical jargon to ordinary words. The solution, again (as it was for the New Left), communitarianism. Local communities should “make decisions by and for themselves in all those matters which concern them directly, and all members would have to participate at every stage of the deliberations and of the democratic decision-making,” refusing to “cede to State power to intervene except in those matters for which [those communities] are not able or competent to make decisions.” Because that would obviously lead to a finally irreconcilable tug-of-war between localities and states, the result would likely be either the reimposition of statism or the breakup of modern states—the latter being the presumed goal of New Rightists.
Like all Rightists, the authors look with disfavor at “Jacobinism,” by which they mean the modern nation-state. They observe that the nation-state predated the Jacobins themselves, originating in the Treaty of Westphalia, which settled “the first Thirty Years’ War,” the great European war (sparked by the Protestant rebellions against Roman Catholicism) and “marked the establishment of the nation-state,” and specifically of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of European states, “as the dominant mode of political organization.” The second Thirty Years’ War, consisting of the twentieth century’s world wars, “signaled, to the contrary, the start of the disintegration of the nation-state,” demonstrating that “the nation-state is now too big to manage little problems and too small to address big ones.” Human beings must therefore not only maintain their human identities in small communities, but those communities must be protected politically by associating in “large cultures and civilizations capable of organizing themselves into autonomous entities and of acquiring enough power to resist outside interference”—a civilization-based Westphalianism. Thus, European civilization “can remake itself, not by the negation, but by the recognition of historical cultures,” within and without. This new, federal Europe should ally itself with Russia, presumably in order to resist the United States on the one side, China on the other. (The rulers of Russia and China evidently have other ideas.) “The existing states must federalize themselves from within, in order to better federalize with each other.” The federal government would govern diplomacy, military affairs, “big economic issues” (assisted by a central bank managing a single currency), “fundamental legal questions,” and environmental matters. That is, the New Right aims at Gaullism without the nation-state: a European federation consisting not of modern states but of largely self-governing localities and allied with Russia (although De Gaulle’s message to Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin: “Come, let us build Europe together,” implied that Russia would separate into a European sector and an Asia sector, the former part of the envisioned European federation, the latter abandoned to Asians).
This leaves the regime question as the seventh, central policy consideration. The authors reiterate their support for “democracy” or popular sovereignty on the grounds that democracy is “the system best suited to take care of a society’s pluralism” by peacefully resolving conflicts. Democracy inclines to resolve conflicts peacefully because every citizen knows that today’s minority may be tomorrow’s majority. New Rightists caution that democratic equality “is not an anthropological principle (it tells us nothing about the nature of man) but rather the true principle of civic equality, “the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people.” Their presumed objection to America’s “all men are created equal” (apart from the suggestion of a Creator-God) must be its abstract character, as distinguished from the “substantial equality” of democratic citizenship. “The essential idea of democracy is neither that of the individual nor of humanity, but rather the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people,” governing itself “through its representatives” with “the opportunity to be politically present through its action and participation in public life.”
Further, political revolution or regime change is now “obsolete,” inasmuch as “political parties are almost all reformists,” not revolutionaries, and “most governments are more or less impotent,” anyway, scarcely worth the effort it would take to seize control of them. “In a world of networks,” of globalization, “revolt may be possible, but not revolution.” And so, as with the New Left, the New Right advocates “participatory democracy” beneath the modern state, undermining the modern state—a “radically decentralized form of democracy, beginning from the bottom, thereby giving to each citizens a role in the choice and control of his destiny.” This decentralized democracy must “impose” the “widest separation possible between wealth and political power.” This sounds like a rather formidable task, and the authors therefore turn to policies governing the conditions of work, which is the basis of wealth.
The French word for work, travail, derives from the Medieval Latin trepalium, torture. It “never occupied a central position in ancient or traditional societies, including those which never practiced slavery”; “it is modernity which, through its productivist goal of totally mobilizing all resources, has made of work a value in itself, the principal mode of socialization, an illusory for of emancipation and of the autonomy of the individual.” Work has been commodified, its measure now being money. “The possibility of receiving certain services freely and then reciprocating in some way has totally disappeared in a world where nothing has any value, but everything has a price,” a “salaried society” in which technological advances cut workers off from their frayed lifeline. The Biblical punishment of laboring by the sweat of your brow will no longer hold, however, if technology is used to release workers from the daily grind, “to gradually dissociate work from income” by establishing a fixed minimum income “for every citizen from birth until death and without asking anything in return.” One might ask, why is this not the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate? But evidently, this repurposing of technology is intended by the New Rightists to open people to the active political life that in antiquity was largely reserved for the aristocracy. They do not envision a society of couch potatoes, although (absent strict penalties for non-participation in civic affairs) that is the likely result.
Following Aristotle’s distinction between economics, the management of material goods for “the satisfaction of man’s needs,” and chrematistics, production for the sake of money-making, the New Rightists reject the prevailing chrematistic model for political economy, as it gives over such economies “uncertain and even precarious” financial markets. Moreover, “economic thought is couched in mathematical formulas which claim to be scientific by excluding any factor that cannot be quantified,” thereby telling us “nothing about the actual condition of a society.” To reverse this, they would tax all international financial transactions, cancel the debt of Third World countries, and end the international system of the division of labor whereby some countries produce raw materials to be sold for refinement or use elsewhere. International environmental laws should be strengthened. If this would lead to the ruin of capitalism, that is the point. In its place, partnerships, mutual societies, and cooperatives “based on shared responsibility, voluntary membership,” and a spirit of non-profit should be encouraged.
Lest their communitarianism seem implausible, the authors point to “the existence today of a whole web of organizations supportive of deliberative and well-functioning communities which are forming every level of social life: the family, the neighborhood, the village, the city, the professions and in leisure pursuits,” apart from the “gigantism” of globalization. “Only responsible individuals in responsible communities can establish a social justice which is not synonymous with welfare.” Families and local communities that seek to revitalize “the popular traditions that modernity has largely caused to decline,” traditions “inculat[ing] a sense of life’s cycles,” can “nourish symbolic imagination” and “create a social bond.” Such traditions will not be identical to those of the past, but those of the past themselves metamorphosed over time, constantly renewed. Such a renewed humanism, linking morality, society, politics, and a sense of beauty will resist “the aesthetic of the ugly” that pervades the modern “megalopolis,” the “urban environment” now “spoiled by the law of maximum financial return on investment and cold practicality.” And human structures would be integrated into a respect for nature animated by the principle of “immanent transcendence” that “reveals nature as a partner and not as an adversary or object,” denying the Christian and classical-humanist claim that man enjoys “unique importance” in the cosmos, a claim that opened the dystopic vista of the “economic hubris and Promethean technology” which ruined any “sense of balance and harmony” of man in nature. The same principle of human social diversity should be extended to all of nature, to a respect for “biodiversity.”
The New Right concludes with a call for a concomitant intellectual diversity against those “whose purpose is to excommunicate all those who diverge in any way from the currently dominant ideological dogmas,” a “new form of treachery” relying upon “the tyranny of public opinion, as fashioned by the media,” taking “the form of cleansing hysteria, enervating mawkishness or selective indignation” aimed at ‘exclud[ing] the possibility of radically changing society or even the possibility of an open discussion of the ultimate goals of collective action,” reducing “democratic debate” to nothing: “One no longer discusses, one denounces. One no longer reasons, one accuses. One no longer proves, one imposes.” “The traditional rules of civilized debate” disappear, along with civility generally. “The New Right advocates a return to critical thinking and strongly supports total freedom of expression.”
It is then fair to say that the New Right wants the benefits of ‘closed’ or traditional political societies with the benefits of ‘open’ or modern liberal societies. It is also fair to call this utopian, as it was fair to call the New Left utopian, decades ago.
Note
- For a discussion of abortion, see “Abortion Wrongs” on this website under “Bible Notes.”
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