Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  Not a single detail is forgotten. In Cyrano de Bergerac’s utopia, there is even a law that governs spousal sexual relations. ‘Every night, the neighbourhood doctor sets out to examine local couples and determines, in accordance with their state of health, the number of intimate embraces that they are allowed to indulge in’!

  For one does not establish a perfect society through the presence of imperfect men. And Thomas Molnar has no difficulty in demonstrating that the only construction that could ultimately result from the disharmonious rubble-stones embodied by individuals is a most wretched one.

  Indeed, utopian endeavours always come up against a variety of inevitable facts: ‘natural’ laws, instincts, one’s will to power, individual differences, etc. Due to these, the establishment of an ideal city is always delayed. It is with great difficulty that the collective ‘super-consciousness’ emerges. Instead of withering away, the ruling state ends up growing and prospering. Ever indifferent to the facts, the utopians themselves then proceed to declare the necessity of a purificatory phase, a phase that is dubbed ‘transitional’ and whose purpose is to bring about the quelling of this ‘rebellious’ reality. During this time period, the new masters of society grant themselves the right to resort to any and all totalitarian means.

  All means are acceptable in the efforts to shatter the natural obstacles that impede the march towards ‘absolute progress’: all this in order to make everyone equal from below. Well-behaved socialism then vanishes and makes way for delirious logic. One moves on from the ‘right to happiness’ to the duty of being happy (in harmony with the imposed norms). The dream thus turns into a nightmare.

  This entire messianic eschatology ends up leading to a sort of theocracy (whether religious or secular) ‘in which divine punishment — divine and therefore sheltered from any and all discussion — authorises the most brutal reintroduction of the political principle, a reintroduction that is implemented by leaders who interpret the divine commandment in question’. Labour camps emerge, as does the Inquisition.

  This is where hypocrisy comes to the rescue. As noticed in the case of Cabet,392 ‘the utopian might adopt a double-standard system. Once his guide has explained to him that in the kingdom of Icaria, the population is utterly press-ganged from dawn to curfew, a visitor asks whether such a law is not, in fact, somewhat tyrannical. The guide then proceeds to explain, in a most hypocritical fashion, that although such a law would indeed be intolerable when promulgated by a tyrant, it surpasses all others in its reasonability and usefulness as soon as it is adopted by the entire people in accordance with its own interest’.

  This constitutes a clear allusion to the Marxist doctrine. Admittedly, Marx was reluctant to ‘formulate recipes… for the future’s cooking pots’. Utopia, he said, is ‘foolish, bland and essentially reactionary’ (in a letter to Sorge dated 19th October, 1877). Nonetheless, he did acknowledge his indebtment to utopian thinkers and affirmed that it was no longer necessary for one to understand the world, but to undertake to transform it.

  A Vivid Imagination

  In their Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx and Engels393 do not hesitate to anticipate two whole centuries of socialism. They declare ‘ineluctable’ the perishing of the state, the end of class-related antagonisms and the vanishing of the familial institution.

  Nicolai Bukharin writes: ‘Within the communist regime, there are no permanent managers that run factories where people spend their entire lives doing the same work… In it, all men shall enjoy a vast knowledge and be familiar with all production branches: one day, you are involved in administrational tasks and calculate the number of slippers and bread rolls required during the coming month; the next, you are employed in the soap-making sphere; a week later, perhaps, you will be find yourself working in the field of urban agriculture, and three days later, at an electric plant. […] All products shall thus be abundantly available, all wounds healed, and everyone able to take as much as required. […] In the communist regime, there are no proletarians, no capitalists and no wage-earning workers: there are only simple people; comrades. There are no classes, and class struggle and class organisation are both absent. As a result, there is no state, either: the latter is useless in the absence of class struggle, now that there is no one to keep a rein on and no one to take charge of such a task…’ (in ABC du communisme,394 Librairie de l’Humanité, 1925).

  Lenin, a practitioner like no other, highlights the ‘necessity of dreaming’: ‘It may sustain and reinforce the worker’s energy’, he writes in What Is to Be Done.

  Endowed with a more vivid imagination, Trotsky believed that tomorrow’s communist would find himself free of the sad contingencies of ‘necessity’ and the ‘obscure laws of heredity’. ‘Society shall be rid of the hurtful and humiliating preoccupation with one’s daily bread; community restaurants shall prepare good, healthy and delicious food for everyone; community laundries shall launder everyone’s clothes; all children, to the very last one, shall be well-fed, strong and cheerful’. Man shall ‘take on the task of achieving beauty by granting his gestures the highest possible precision, introducing technique and economy into his work, his progress, and his games. He shall first strive to master his organism’s semi-conscious processes, then its unconscious ones. […] The average man shall rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx’. (in Literature and Revolution, 1924).

  Mr Thomas Molnar believes (not without reason, I might add) that, instead of refuting Marxism solely on the economic and political level, it is preferable to expose its ‘utopian roots’ and ‘thus demonstrate that it is no more than an enclave in the immense empire of utopianism’.

  Mircea Eliade395 makes the following observation: ‘The most accurate precedent to Marx’s classless society and the resulting disappearance of historical tensions can be found in the Golden Age myth which, in accordance with multiple traditions, characterises the beginning and end of history’ (in Aspects du mythe,396 Gallimard, 1963).

  The Tridimensionality of Historical Time

  What we are witnessing, in fact, is a clash between two conceptions of history. The first is a cyclical or rather spherical one: it was previously that of European Antiquity, before being embraced by the superhumanist movement inaugurated by Wagner and Nietzsche. The second conception is a linear one that is particularly espoused by egalitarian doctrines.

  Within the first system, time has neither a beginning nor an end: it is an infinite succession and, more often than not, repetition of certain events and periods (nihil sub sole novi);397 there is no internal necessity to historical becoming, and neither is there any compulsory or predictable outcome. In the perspective established by Nietzsche, time is a genuine ‘sphere’, whose centre is located everywhere. In no way does the past correspond to something that has been determined once and for all, and neither could the present be reduced to its sole current essence. On the contrary, the past, present and future coexist at every moment and are given simultaneously as different dimensions of this perspective, in every ‘present’ of human consciousness.

  As explained by Mr Giorgio Locchi398 (L’idée de la musique et le temps de l’histoire,399 published in Nouvelle école, issue number 30, winter 1976–77), such a vision restores the tridimensionality of time: to be more specific, every (historical) event is characterised by temporal tridimensionality and spatial unidimensionality, just as every (macro-physical) element is defined by temporal unidimensionality and spatial tridimensionality. With regard to historical time, the past, present and future correspond to what height, width and depth represent in the traditional conception of macro-physical space. We are not located at a specific ‘point’ of a line, of an irreversible succession of moments, one that stretches from the beginning to the end of history, but, indeed, at the intersection of three perspectives that converge without actually being on the same plane. Hence the reason for which every man and every era ‘views’ the past and future in their own way and, by doing so, establishes a novel perspective
on historical becoming (whilst acknowledging the fact that each person and each epoch also represent a possible perspective, among an infinity of others). This is also the reason why a regeneration of history remains possible: nothing is ever final; the best and worst outcomes may still come about.

  Within the second system, by contrast, the world does have both a beginning and an end, and (human) history represents a mere segment of it. The past has been determined once and for all. The future necessarily leads to an outcome, one that corresponds to a definitive end. History thus becomes a kind of ‘bracket’, moving about in an immobile world-Dasein. Generally speaking, this ‘bracket’ is devalued to the benefit of a ‘back-world’400 and it is specifically the end of history that is meant to deliver us from it.

  This worldview goes hand in hand with a novel sort of anthropology (of the egalitarian kind — since there is but one God and all men have been created in His image, they must thus all be essentially equal), as well as with an economy of Redemption and Salvation. Initially (in prehistory), everything complied with ‘nature’ or the will of God: such was the Garden of Eden (inhabited by a ‘good-natured savage’ named Adam) and the primitive version of communism. However, man gave in to sinful ways: he committed the original sin that condemned him to a life of labour and then proceeded to divide work, which resulted in alienation and the exploitation of men at the hands of their fellows. Man thus entered the ‘valley of tears’, embodied by history and characterised by tensions, events, and acts of ‘injustice’. This fall is not, however, final. Mankind (or, at least, those who deserve it) may yet be saved. An agent of redemption (the Israel of the messianic prophecies, Jesus and his church, the proletariat and its party, and so on) intervenes. The struggle of the ‘just’, the ‘good’ and the ‘exploited’ shall be a long and difficult one. Following the ultimate Armageddon or ‘final struggle’, however, the ‘wicked’ shall be defeated, cast into hell or sent to Siberia; we shall witness the Revolution, the Final Judgement, the establishment of the kingdom of God or a class-free society. As for history, meaning the timespan that resulted from man’s original sin, it shall be erased: the ensuing post-historical conditions shall restore, in a most sublimated fashion, a prehistoric state of affairs, as the just regain the Garden of Eden and communism reclaims its governance of the world.

  Secularised Theodicy and ‘Primitive Religion’

  It is at this stage that the structural kinship of the Marxist and Jude0-Christian doctrines becomes obvious. The two thus revert to the common denominator of egalitarian and messianic thought, regardless of whether the latter is considered from a spiritual and superior angle (equality in the eyes of God) or on a materialistic and inferior level, through a simple substitution of a below or future for a beyond.

  This analogy has been noticed by numerous authors. Although I could mention others, it was Mr René Sédillot401 who, in L’histoire n’a pas de sens402 (Fayard, 1965), remarked that ‘in the Marxist scheme of things, the proletariat plays the part of the chosen people and the bourgeoisie that of the Malicious ones. Likewise, capitalistic society corresponds to the kingdom of darkness, class struggle to a clash of Empires, social revolution to messianic birth, and the coming communist society to the kingdom of God’.

  Mr Pierre Fougeyrollas403 has labelled this doctrine a ‘secularised theodicy’ (in Le marxisme en question,404 Seuil, 1959). Mr Jules Monnerot also perceives it as a ‘primitive religion’ (in Sociologie du communisme,405 Gallimard, 1963).

  Mr Gilles Lapouge is thus not mistaken at all when considering utopia to be the most extreme form of ‘historical nausea’. Indeed, the notion of time vanishes at this level. By rejecting the tensions that give rise to events, utopianism rejects life itself, or, at the very least, the (historical) human conception of life. It leads to the ‘cold society’ which Mr Lévi-Strauss speaks of,406 this non-historical society where every generation contents itself with repeating what the previous one has done and where tradition acts as a straightjacket and is no longer the mere basic structure upon which all innovations are founded.

  Mr Molnar concludes that ‘utopia is the refuge of anonymous individuals, that of an anxious and lawless herd’.

  Luckily enough, whatever does not bear within it any realistic possibilities does not, by definition, ever come to pass and thus remains unrealised. By contrast, as written by Montherlant,407 it does sometimes happen that, in a fitting reversal, ‘the lions end up devouring anyone who has proceeded to set them free; which can also be phrased in the following manner: anyone who unleashes the sewers shall die by the sewers’.

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  L’utopie, éternelle hérésie,408 an essay by Thomas Molnar, Beauchesne, 268 pages.

  Utopie et civilisations, an essay by Gilles Lapouge, Weber, 252 pages.

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  On the topic of the contrast between the linear and spherical conceptions of history, see the articles written by Mr Giorgio Locchi (‘L’histoire’,409 published in Nouvelle école issues number 27–28, autumn–winter 1975), Mr Armin Mohler (‘Devant l’histoire. Quelques remarques non-systématiques’,410 ibid.), and Alain de Benoist (‘Contre la fin de l’histoire, ou comment ne pas en sortir’,411 published in Question de, issue number 16, January–February 1977).

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  Teilhard de Chardin

  ‘Once I have been surpassed, I will have been understood’, Teilhard de Chardin used to say.

  After a few years of silence, people are once again beginning to talk about him. At Seuil, Robert Speaight has published a biographical book entitled Vie de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.412 Francisco Bravo has released La vision historique chez Teilhard de Chardin;413 René d’Oince — who was a friend of Teilhard’s, as well as his superior and confidant — has brought out a work entitled Un prophète en procès.414 It is Bravo’s work that is the most scholarly and d’Oince’s the most enlightening.

  In 1902, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was twenty-two-years-old. Born of a Picardian mother in Auvergne, he had light-coloured eyes and the long, narrow figure of a Swedish pastor. He had just taken his vows to be ordained into priesthood in the order of Jesuits and held a professorship in geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris. A few months later, a pedagogical imprudence on his part and several slips of the tongue had already managed to have him included in the ‘list of suspects’. ‘The accusation that he was targeted with was nothing less than the actual denial of the dogma of original sin’.

  With his scientific education, father Teilhard attempted to reconcile palaeontology with theology. He insisted on the impossibility of taking the creation dogma literally. How can one claim that evil initially surfaced in the very first man when ‘the cosmos itself, no matter how far back we go, has always been as callously dominated by physical evil as it is today’? He then added: ‘An earthly paradise can only be comprehended as a cosmically different way of being. And yet, no matter how far back into the past we look, we are unable to catch as little as a glimpse of anything that would resemble this marvellous state’.

  Instead, Teilhard proposes that we view original sin as ‘the moral crisis that has, in all likelihood, accompanied the very first appearance of human intelligence’. However, all such an explanation does is shift the problem, without managing to truly resolve it. In 1945, at the end of a conference held at the Richelieu centre, he would be asked:

  ‘And what do you make of original sin?’

  To which he responded:

  ‘I have not ventured that far in my synthesis’.415

  Soon afterwards, a ‘file’ on Teilhard is compiled in Rome. In 1924, he is reprimanded for the first time. He is then sent to China in April 1926. He spends some time in Tianjin and at an excavation site in Chou Kou Tien. He makes the most of this distancing and indulges in largescale geological and paleontological works. It is during this time that Johan Gunnar Anderson discovers the Peking man, the famous sinanthropus. Interested yet sceptical, Teilhard ends up authenticating the discovery.

 
He returns to Paris in 1935. Father d’Oince, who had just been appointed manager of Etudes, the Jesuit magazine, manages to make the necessary arrangements for the ‘suspect’ to join his editorial group.

  Although Teilhard does not publish anything during this whole period, he never ceases to write, focusing on philosophy, palaeontology, theology, and even politics. He finds himself seduced by the Mussolinian experience. In 1936, he affirms: ‘Fascism may represent a rather successful model of tomorrow’s world’.

  In 1948, however, he writes the following: ‘Is a good basking in the waters of Marxism, in the Marxist faith, not all the human soul requires in order to be ultra-christified’?

  The criticisms abound. Theologians reproach him for exiting the scientific domain, and some scientists, including Jean Rostand,416 for attempting to enter it. In March 1941, the Phénomène humain manuscript reaches Rome inside a diplomatic suitcase. It is sent back three years later for being an inappropriate publication. In August 1947, Teilhard is simply banned from publishing anything at all in matters of philosophy and theology. It is hierarchy that prevents him from joining the Collège de France thereafter, and particularly him that the neo-Thomists would persecute. In reference to his work, Etienne Gilson417 would say: ‘A feeling; not even a thought’.

  Aged seventy-four and in exile, Father Teilhard de Chardin passes away in New York on 10th April, 1955, without ever having desisted in his scruples or been broken.