Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

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  Even though it will be vain to oppose abstract equality with an inequality that is likewise just as abstract, it will be erroneous in my opinion to attempt to oppose nationalism or ethnocentrism to the ideology of the Same. Historically, both have actually realised, on a small scale, what the ideology of the Same has realised at large. Both of them remain predominantly locked in what Heidegger, who makes it the most essential feature of modernity, rightly calls the metaphysics of subjectivity.

  Nationalism and ethnocentrism see the people or the nation like liberalism sees the individual: as a fundamentally ‘free’ being, drawing its rights as well as its attributes from its unlimited ‘liberty’, who could only be constrained by its own will within the horizon of selfish action and the search for the best interest. The independence to which they aspire, conceived as absolute freedom of movement, as a position in which one does not depend on anything, where one could arbitrarily choose everything that one wants, is itself modelled on the liberal ideal of the autonomy of individuals. From this perspective, the universal struggle of nations and people is only a projection on a vaster scale of inter-personal competition, where the court of history plays the role of the market. The dogma of the sovereignty of the State is also tied to this metaphysic of subjectivity, tending in the final analysis towards solipsism, which places the individual, the self, at the centre of the world, and only sees in this world an object of the self’s will and representation. Here, the ‘self’ or ‘me’ is simply replaced by ‘we’. An ethnocentric people is only interested in itself. It judges events and situations only by the good or bad results that it can expect. It is obviously the negation of all justice and all truth. But it is also the opposite of organicism, for the same principle of organicism is democratic solidarity and social reciprocity, in contrast to the principle of association based solely on common interests. Just as universalism is only an ethnocentrism expanded to the limits of the universe, so too is nationalism only a collective individualism. In both cases, what is ignored is the sense of particularity and of concrete universals.

  Ethnocentrism is also founded on a faulty conception of identity. Identity is not an essence, but a substance that is constructed every day. It is not that which never changes, but that which maintains itself amidst change. It is ultimately always reflexive, which means that the constitution of the self always takes place through exchange with others. This is why the defence of identities can only truly proceed on the basis of a comprehension of alterity.

  Like universalism, ethnocentrism is wholly allergic to the Other and always has the tendency to regard it as an ‘excessive’ entity. The only difference is that ethnocentrism is more brutal. Whereas universalism tends to deny alterity by reducing the Other to the Same, ethnocentrism tends to reduce diversity by eliminating the Other or by keeping it radically separated. In both approaches, alterity is considered devoid of interest, and diversity devoid of value. Conversely, the positive conception of alterity consists in recognising difference without using it as an argument to submit the existence of some to the desires, the interests, or the reason of the others. Oppression does not only deny the liberty of the oppressed, but also that of the oppressor. This is what Marx meant to say when he wrote that ‘a nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations’.33 We know the dialectic of the master and the slave: the two roles are inevitably exchanged. Whoever has colonised should not be surprised to be invaded in turn. Whoever destroys the identity of another does not reinforce his own, but renders it more vulnerable, even more threatened in a world that has just lost a little more of its diversity.

  The principle of diversity is better suited to oppose the ideology of the Same. A principle draws its power from its very generality. The diversity of the world constitutes its only true wealth, for this diversity is foundational to the most precious good: identity. Nations are no more interchangeable than people. To say that no one inherently possesses more or less value than another is not to suggest that they are the same — the Same under various guises — but that they are all different. Tolerance, if this word has any meaning, does not consist in looking at the Other in order to see the Same in it, but to understand what constitutes it as an other, that is to say, to grasp the alterity, a reality irreducible to all ‘comprehension’ by the mere projection of self. Differentialism does not prohibit the bearing of value judgements, any more than it condemns a relativism ignorant of truth. But it forbids itself from mentally fixing on an overarching abstract position, from placing itself as the dominant instance (because “universal” or because “superior”) through which it will be possible, indeed necessary, to impose a way of being on other nations which is not theirs. When Aristotle defined the best form of government as that in which all the citizens participate both in the enacted and undergone dominion,34 he admittedly states a general principle that goes well beyond the borders of the Greek city, but which does not exclude the ability for other people to give different laws.

  It is not a matter of falling into naïve idealism.35 Identities can clash with one another; differences can assert themselves at the expense of others. In this instance, it is perfectly normal to defend the identity that one belongs to as a matter of priority. But this is a very different thing from defending its identity against an abusive self-affirmation (colonisation, immigration, etc.) perpetrated by another, and of assuming that the only identity that has value is the one to which it is attached. The principle of diversity is not disputed by the first attitude, but it is by the second.

  It is no longer a matter of passing from one excess to another by privileging what differs to the point of neglecting what is common. The difference alone is more important. It is more important firstly because it is that which specifies, which defines the identity, which makes of each person or each nation an irreplaceable being. It is more important secondly because belonging to humanity is never immediate, but on the contrary always mediated: one exists only by virtue of the fact that one belongs to one of the cultures or constituent collectives of humanity. (‘I have seen in the course of my life men of all kinds’, Joseph de Maistre once said, ‘but man as such I have never met’). It is more important, finally, because it is from the singularity that one can access the universal, and not the inverse, which would consist in deducing from a universal posited a priori an abstract idea of the singularity. All concrete existence turns out to be indissociable from a particular context, from one or many specific belongings. All belonging is certainly a limitation, but it is a limitation that releases us from others. The dream of the unconditioned is only a dream.

  ‘Men fear the Same, and there lies the source of racism’, Jean-Pierre Dupuy has noted. ‘That which men fear’, he adds, ‘is non-differentiation, and this because non-differentiation is always the sign and the product of social disintegration […] Equality, negator in principle of differences, is cause for mutual fear’.36 In effect, men fear the Same at least if not more than the Other. The dominant ideologies peacefully believe that the homogenisation of the world could only have a pacifying function because it allows a better ‘understanding’. On the contrary we see how, everywhere, it evokes in turn identitarian tensions, the reawakening of secular irredentisms,37 and the creation of convulsive nationalisms. Even within societies, the ideology of the Same further generalises the imitative rivalry so well described by René Girard, exacerbating the desire to distinguish itself with all the more force that it forbids distinction. The Same thus proves to be profoundly polemogenic.38 At best it generalises indifference and boredom. At worst, it leads to violent reactions and unleashes the passions.

  The incommensurability of individuals or cultures is not synonymous with incommunicability. It simply entails the recognition of what irreducibly distinguishes them. The ideology of the Same aspires to total transparency, but the social always implies an opaque part. Opacity lies in the incommensurable. Some think that the affirmation of differences can only make m
en radically estranged from each other (these are generally the ones who automatically interpret identity as a confinement), but the opposite is true. Exchange presupposes the Other. It only makes sense in so far as it is placed in the presence of an Other. An exchange of the Same with the Same can only be a monologue. Dialogue, dialogism (Martin Buber), requires alterity. Not only does the upholding of differences fail to prevent dialogue or exchange, it is the primary condition for it. It would be wrong in this regard to oppose difference, supposedly aggressive and elitist, to diversity. Diversity entails harmonised differences.

  A society in which there would only be people who are ‘like each other’ would be a society in which individuals would become interchangeable to the point where the disappearance or elimination of any one of them would only assume a thoroughly relative importance from the viewpoint of global society. It is completely the opposite in a differentiated society. Difference, furthermore, is a factor of resistance, and therefore of liberty. If individuals and nations were fundamentally the same, or if they were completely malleable, they would be all the more vulnerable to propaganda and conditioning. That their diversity reappears without cease, that the human species will also be strongly polymorphic, shows that they are anthropologically resistant to homogenising models. Difference, ultimately, is a factor of tolerance and harmony. Societies that recognise the reality and the value of differences are also the ones that are the most capable of integrating those who are bearers of these differences. Societies which do not recognise differences, or which hold them to be insignificant, are on the contrary destined either to exclude everyone that does not correspond to the particular model chosen, or to undermine the social bond by voiding it of its organic, composite, and differentiated character.

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  The history of modernity can be comprehended, at least in part, as one of a gigantic process of uniformisation. Induced by philosophico-moral or political universalism, and by the diffusion of more effective techniques for modelling attitudes than the most centralised of dictators, it is translated in the west by the progressive eradication of differentiated modes of life, and in the third world by the acculturation and imposition of the western myth of ‘development’. This process seems to reach its apogee with globalisation. The ideology of the Same today becomes ‘globality’ (Paul Virilio) to the degree that it tends to give birth to a world without exterior, where fluxes circulate in every sense in ‘time zero’. ‘Pluralism’ and even ‘multiculturalism’, which such a great deal is made about these days, are no more than the shadow and the caricature of former particularisms, coated today by tendencies and attitudes that are more and more homogenous. Already in western countries we dress, we eat, we speak, we dwell, we distract ourselves, we live, and ultimately we think more and more in the same way. We consume the same products, we see the same shows, we listen to the same programmes. Specific cultures, linked to a professional political or religious membership, have practically disappeared. Regional cultures and languages are threatened. Modes of life inherited from the past are only conserved as spectacles for tourists, generators of gain. These are frozen memories, artificially maintained traditions, souvenirs relegated to folklore or museum displays. The only differences that subsist are connected to the level of revenue: they play upon quantities, but change little in the nature of choices and aspirations. Alongside this, uniform thought disqualifies any project that avoids the dominant norm as a dangerous utopia or a harmful form of thinking. The entire media system is itself designed to celebrate the existing reality, implicitly presented as the best (or least bad) of possible worlds, indeed as the only possible world. Its principal function being to justify adaptation to the norms of unlimited consumption, it strives to ‘homogenise needs, demands, expectations, and desires’.39 Despite the economic and social disparities, which continue to increase, the planet is united under the economic and moral horizon: on one side, the ideology of the ‘rights of man’, on the other, the monotheism of the market.

  At the same time, in a world marked by the generalised crisis of institutions and of great systems of social integration, the collapse of the model of the Nation-State, and the increasing insignificance of territorial borders, we see the reemergence, in the form of communities and networks, of an impressive thirst for returning to one’s roots. Civil society restructures itself spontaneously by recreating groups and ‘tribes’ which seek remedies to the increasing non-differentiation of roles, to widespread circulation, to the systematic flattening of basic sociabilities, by reintroducing alterity into daily and local life, by resorting to direct democracy and to the principle of subsidiarity. This very phenomenon, by its rapid ‘viral’ expansion, shows that we have already departed from modernity. The desire for equality, superseding the desire for liberty, was the great passion of modern times. Those of postmodern times will be the desire for identity.

  This postmodern preoccupation takes the form of a will to see recognised in the public sphere — and no longer merely in the private sphere, where modernity had restricted them in the name of republican universalism or of an ideal of axiological ‘neutrality’ — one or more aspects of collective belonging that are considered constituents of identity. This reclamation bears upon forms of belonging (cultural, ethnic, linguistic, regional, religious, sexual, etc.) that are inherited or chosen, enduring or transient; yet in all cases it is no longer primarily tolerance that is sought, but recognition and respect. Whereas the Nation-State fixed itself tendentiously on the object of abolishing all distinctions, all intermediary bodies which prevented it from being the exclusive incarnation of the social whole and the guarantor of its unity, it now recognises associations and communities and allows them to permanently develop themselves on their own, either because they are by nature irreducible to any political handling, or because their principal purpose is their very self-existence. This type of aspiration shows well that communities, far from aiming to confine themselves, want to become constituents in full right of the global society. At the same time, it contradicts a political model that only conceives of the social contract as something concluded among individuals who were not previously united by anything. The growing place of the identitarian question in postmodern democracies thus pushes to open up the space of political democracy to the collective identities themselves. Identity becomes (again) one of the conditions of the practical application of citizenship.

  Modernity has been the era of the total mobilisation of the masses, a substitute for the evangelisation of the crowds. The postmodern era pushes for the affirmation of dispersed identities, as much on the individual plane as on the collective. But this tendency is not lacking in ambiguity. Independently of the fact that it develops on the basis of unprecedented social homogenisation (end of peasantry, disappearance of domesticity, reassimilation of working conditions, growing alignment of masculine-feminine social roles), it sometimes recovers a ‘pluralism’ which has scarcely any connection to genuine diversity. A typical example of this false pluralism is the multiplication of different brands to market the same product. More generally, false pluralism is what brings the democratic game back to the competitive action of established pressure groups. The multiplication of micro-differences, of artificial or superficial differences, can give the illusion of pluralism while losing sight of the deeper meaning of the notion of difference. The idea that a particular people can possess a vision of the world, a way of experiencing its presence in the world in a manner radically distinct from our own, then becomes increasingly unintelligible.

  Postmodern identities, on the other hand, differ significantly enough from traditional identities. They have lost their ‘naturalness’ or ‘objectivity’. ‘A genuinely accustomed order, an order lived as wholly received’, observes Marcel Gauchet, ‘is an a-subjective order from the point of view of the identity of those who inhabit and implement it. [Today] it is rigorously to the contrary: the appropriation of collective characteristics is the vehicle of a personal singularisat
ion. Belonging is subjectifying because it is reclaimed and vindicated, and it is cultivated for the subjectification that it produces’.40 In other words, identities are now based less on objective data than they are on the result of a subjective decision. In the past, belongings, by the very fact of their anteriority/authority, prohibited the ability to truly choose them. Today, even inherited belongings are also chosen belongings to the degree that they only become effective when we decide to recognise them. They have no other power than that which we agree to attribute to them.

  However, the general problematic has not changed. It is always a matter of knowing whether the ideology of the Same will eventually prevail. And it is here that I add what I wrote in 1977 in the introduction to View from the Right: ‘What is the principal menace today? It is the progressive demise of the world’s diversity’. Today we rightly emphasise the importance of biodiversity. But biodiversity cannot only concern the animal and vegetable species. It is also valid for cultures and peoples.

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  I have not changed a word of the text of View from the Right. This book, which already speaks a lot about ‘cultural power’ and the necessary battle of ideas, remains essential for current events. But it also represents a step in a personal itinerary, and honesty obliges me to say that today I would write some of the chapters completely differently. My feelings on subjects such as technology, the city, or ecology, for example, have profoundly evolved. I also think I have been unfair to authors such as Herbert Marcuse, Ivan Illich, or Edgar Morin. Such as it is, the work nevertheless remains a sort of panoramic guide consecrated to the men and debates of the seventies. Ten years later, the historian of ideas that I became would have obviously made reference to other names. Twenty years later, even more would have been cited. In consulting these pages, I am reminded that at the time that View from the Right appeared, what one then called the ‘thought of the right’ was still represented in France by the true intellectual masters: Thierry Maulnier, Louis Rougier, Jules Monnerot, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, Pierre Gaxotte, Georges Dumézil, François Perroux, Julien Freund, Stéphane Lupasco, Raymond Ruyer, Raymond Abellio. I have the impression that none of them have been replaced.