Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  This wakeup call has triggered an unprecedented wave of catastrophism. Some have laid the blame on man’s ‘pride’, ‘arrogance’ and ‘spirit of conquest’, reproaching humans for wanting to be the subject, and not the object, of their own history.

  Mr Gordon Rattray Taylor has made the following declaration: ‘It is certain that we must abandon our militaristically aggressive attitude towards nature, with its triumphs and breakthroughs, and learn to be humbler’.

  Mr Claude-Marie Vadrot519 exclaims: ‘To change everything: is it not in this very folly that wisdom, lucidity and triumphant reason are to be found, a folly that would lead us towards a more human world, namely one where human values, whose sole custodians are none other but our various nations, would reign supreme?’

  For a long time, the religion of ‘progress’ drew its main argument from the profound transformation experienced by our ecological environment, particularly over the past century. One thus only perceived a series of exhilarating details, remaining blind to the phenomenon’s global meaning. Nowadays, however, we seem to have surrendered to the opposite excess. Our ecosystem’s transformation is a source of fear. The devastation and pollution suffered by ‘nature’ are being denounced everywhere, with various apocalyptic tones. The ‘ecological problem’ thus finds itself at the very top of the concerns voiced by political parties, popularity-seeking governments, international institutions and scientific clubs. Dissenters express their concern for the survival of a world that is said to have become ‘inviable’. In the most extreme cases, some even preach the cessation of progress, as the end of history (equated with progress itself) is felt to be inevitable; a necessity, so to speak.

  Despite pointing to a certain schizophrenia that has afflicted our societies, this state of mind also relates to an obvious sense of self-blame, an underlying mental trait that has always plagued the Western mind: it is the objective repercussion and logical conclusion that stem from a bimillennial discourse whose latest developments are embodied by Marcuse, Lévy-Strauss, Horkheimer and the like.

  Ideological Criss-Crossing

  The principial rejection of modernity in all its forms is, of course, as questionable as its principial endorsement (regardless of what shape it may take). On the political level, however, these two attitudes surface alternately on both the Right and the Left, and in a very significant manner.

  In the time leading up to the last war, the glorification of both ‘natural life’ and ‘peasant values’ was one of the favourite topics among the sociological Right. According to Lenin, Communism was represented by ‘the Soviets and electricity’. In major cities, the working class-proletariat was naturally oriented towards the Left, and the syndicates demonstrated exclusively in support of the quantitative improvement of our means of existence.

  The second industrial revolution, that of ‘popular capitalism’, computers and white-collar workers, seemed to drastically change everything. A certain part of the Right consolidated its hold on the economy and technology. At the same time, a part of the Left breathed new life into the myth of the ‘good-natured savage’, over-interpreting Marx’s thoughts whenever necessary, with decolonisation implemented at the most convenient time to allow some hope for a change in the intelligentsia. Mao Zedong spoke of ‘using the countryside to encircle the cities’, and some Leftists proceeded to create rural ‘communities’ in an attempt to establish a new lifestyle there.

  This has led to a highly remarkable ideological criss-crossing. The latter has been duly highlighted by Mr Thierry Maulnier in Le Figaro and Mr Georges Liébert, Raymond Ruyer, Louis de Villefosse and Jean Plumyène in Contrepoint.520

  Mr Maulnier writes: ‘We have witnessed the relocation of reaction (AN: A term used rather inappropriately) from the Right to the Left. At a time when a progressive Right has emerged in the countries that stand at the very head of the industrial society, a Right that is readily criticised for leaning towards technocracy, the Left, once fascinated by limitless and virtually problem-free progress, is now looking back to the past in an increasingly nostalgic fashion. […] This entire ideology and anti-modernistic emotionality, along with neo-naturism and perhaps even the communitarian dream of a new medieval period, were all typical of reactionary Rightist youths back in the 1930s, a trend that had both its good and bad sides. Nowadays, however, they have been adopted by the pseudo-Maoist and Marcusian dissenter camp’ (in Le Figaro, 1st July, 1974).

  This novel reaction is essentially based on an utterly erroneous understanding of both ‘nature’ and man’s relation to his own environment.

  Man and Culture

  What follows is an observation made by sociologist Helmut Schelsky: ‘In this rationalistic era of ours, characterised by the glorification of “nature”, one is all too often oblivious to the fact that the latter is not always, and in its most fundamental shapes, what mankind has made of it or has been compelled to make of it’ (in Soziologie der Sexualität,521 Gallimard, 1966).

  On his part, Oswald Spengler demonstrated that man’s history was entirely founded upon his opposition to ‘nature’, an opposition from which the affirmation of his own being stems. Spengler wrote that since the very beginning, man’s soul has ‘been confined to an attitude of intransigent opposition to the whole world, from which it has been excluded as a result of its own creative power. […] And this soul is constantly moving forward, as part of an ever more pronounced separation from all of nature. The weapons of all beasts of prey are natural, but man’s weapon-wielding fist, gripping his artificially produced weapon, is not’ (in Man and Technology, Gallimard, 1970).

  Although the advocates of environmentalism never cease to speak of the ecosystem and the interdependence of living systems, they behave, in fact, as if ‘nature’ existed in an immutable state for all eternity and we had reached a point where it could no longer bear mankind’s ‘aggressions’. Such a nature, however, does not exist. The world that surrounds us is none other than the one that man has granted himself by constantly leaving his own mark upon it.

  All specifically human behaviour is of a cultural essence (man is, of course, characterised by certain natural traits, but it is those very traits that do not genuinely belong to him). Mankind’s emergence is a ‘cultural’ event in itself, for culture is intrinsically involved in defining man as human. When understood as the source of various possible choices, consciousness is a cultural fact. Hominisation itself is synonymous with our breaking with ‘nature’: the notion of a ‘natural man’ is as delusional as that of a ‘good-natured savage’. The moment man’s hand touches nature, and his eyes perceive it and simultaneously conceive of it, nature turns into culture.

  Not only has man always defined himself as nature’s subject, transforming it and taking advantage of its resources, but it is by this very means that he has established his own humanity. One could state that culture is the nature which man has granted himself (among other possible ones) and through which he has formed himself.

  Culture can thus be defined as anything added to nature. ‘Nature’, however, is a necessity: it acts upon all those who stem from it. Culture, by contrast, is coincidental: it depends on choices that are only potentially predetermined. To define culture is to define man and to establish the coincidental existence of reality as the sole actuality.

  Unlike animals, whose actions are determined by their belonging to a specific species, man enjoys a freedom of choice (within the predispositions of his own constitution). He is not a being subject to repetition. He innovates constantly within the bounds of his own traditions, and the resulting innovations are, likewise, perpetually called into question. Man cannot endow himself with capacities that he does not possess. What he can do, however, is use these abilities as he sees fit, so as to forge himself — or, alternatively, not to do so — in accordance with his own choices.

  To be more specific, man is only creative because he is free of the constraints that apply to living species. And it is due to this fact that he enjoy
s further freedom. To manifest one’s ‘liberty’ is to manifest self-autonomy: only those men that express themselves through creation can be free. And yet, there is no such thing as ‘pure’ creation. One always creates at the expense of an object (be it ‘nature’ or ‘a fellow man perceived as nature’); as a result, the alienation which Marxists and Freudians constantly speak of turns out to be nothing but the necessary quid pro quo that stems from the action performed by free and creative man when organising and thus appropriating the (material or human) objects upon which his action is exerted, objects which do not solely act as his tools and instruments, but also as ‘extensions’ and ‘parts’ of his own body.

  It is therefore important to ‘denature’ the notion of nature. What we nowadays term ‘nature’ is something that has never ceased to be culturalised and humanised for millennia on end. Whether man wants to cut down a tree or chooses to let it grow in a forest, it is always a matter of will, for it is he who imposes his own perspective upon the tree, regardless of whether the latter is cut or not. In this regard, the Versailles park is no more ‘natural’ than the chateau itself, just as the flint and the spear are as ‘natural’ as the computer or the power hammer.

  Among dissenting ecologists, one notices a twofold process whose ambition is, on the one hand, to overestimate ‘the goodness of nature’ in relation to the humans that corrupt it, and, on the other, to drain man of all his more-than-natural aspects, meaning of all that is specifically human.

  The most urgent task would thus be to simultaneously recapture an ideal ‘nature’ and a human nature inclined to merge with the former. The subsequent ‘revolution’ would then have to be taken literally: a return to a nature that is defined as the essence of things.

  This is, for instance, what Herbert Marcuse wrote in his Philosophy and Revolution: ‘It is an intransigent conception of the human essence that establishes the radical revolution and becomes the latter’s engine’. In One-Dimensional Man (Minuit, 1968), he demands ‘the radical abolition of affectation’ (meaning culture), adding that ‘the sole valid objective is to replace false needs with true ones’; as if all human needs were not connected to our breaking with a nature that would, on its own, be completely incapable of fulfilling them.

  Political Dissent

  This theory has been adopted by ‘ecological’ publications (including Le Sauvage,522 La Gueule ouverte,523 and Mieux vivre),524 whose number has grown over the past years, simultaneously increasing the negative impact of tree-cutting and pulp mills.

  Launched in November 1972, La Gueule ouverte claims to be ‘the magazine that heralds the end of days’. While the Church Fathers targeted the libido sciendi, what it denounces is ‘electronuclear fascism’ and the ‘insanely steep hill of frenzied research’, declaring that ‘just like the German Jews, ecologists represent a threat to the cohesion of the nuclear society’ (9th April, 1975). Its founder, Pierre Fournier, chose to retire to the countryside in order to lead ‘a healthier life’. Unfortunately, he died of heart failure on 15th February, 1973, at the age of thirty-five.

  Further abusive comparisons were made by François Mitterrand’s advisor, economist Jacques Attali. In La parole et l’outil525 (PUF, 1975), he writes that ‘one must not forget that both fascism and Nazism owed their fleeting and terrible victory to science. Nowadays, it is the nuclear threat and pollution that are caused by science’.

  Some extremists go as far as to state that hunters are akin to the ‘S.S.’ They kiss tree leaves and proclaim the ‘rights’ of potatoes. In their eyes, man embodies nature’s ‘doom’.

  On their part, psychoanalysts are not to be outdone. Commenting on the work of Georg Groddeck526 (The Book of the It, Gallimard, 1974), Mr Roland Jaccard527 perceives it as ‘a hymn to the mother-matrix, understood as the embodiment of the lost paradise’. He adds (in Le Monde, 6th December, 1974): ‘If you do not revert to a child-like state, you shall not enter the kingdom of God — it is an evangelical message that can also be understood psychoanalytically’.

  The same nostalgias are encountered with Mr Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock (Denoël, 1971); Mr René Dumont, the former presidential candidate who was granted the title of ‘honorary shepherd’ on the Larzac plateau (September 1974); and Mr Edgar Morin (author of Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine,528 Seuil, 1973).

  In some people’s eyes, however, this changeover has come too late. A few years ago, for instance, Mr Roger Garaudy529 wrote: ‘Thanks to atomic power, it was in the USA that one produced the very first atomic bomb. And thanks to the power of the atom, it was in the USSR that the first nuclear power plant was built. Two worlds, two moralities!’ (in Qu’est-ce que la morale marxiste?,530 Ed. Sociales, 1963).

  Ecological dissent thus appears to have a direct connection to its political counterpart. Whereas, globally speaking, one calls into question the relation established in various societies between man and groups (or ‘classes’) of men, as well as between societies themselves, the other targets the set relations between man and his environment. This twofold questioning follows the very same angle: it is always a matter of eliminating the dominant-dominated relationship, since governed men are necessarily the ‘object’ of their rulers.

  Under the pseudonym ‘Professor Mollo-Mollo’, Mr Lebreton, an ornithologist from the city of Lyons, has authored a book entitled ‘L’énergie, c’est vous’531 (Stock, 1975), in which he declares: ‘We must, above all, put an end to this technocratic, plan-based, “colonialist” and, in short, masculine attitude that characterises the Occident’s relations with others, including our environment’.

  All these theories are based on a dream-like sort of anthropology, which derives, to a great extent, from the philosophy of the 18th century, a philosophy that strived to come across as being ‘enlightened’, but which was, on numerous levels, purely reactionary as a result of its desire to ‘return to nature’, its criticism of institutions, etc. (During the Revolution, it was claimed that the Republic had no need of scientists. Nowadays, one proceeds to denounce all ‘white-clad fascists’.)

  In the 10th note included in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau states that he would rather consider the great apes to be men of a yet unknown race than run the risk of questioning the ‘human nature’ of beings that may be endowed with it’.

  He writes: ‘The more one ponders things, the more one discovers that this state (that of nature) was least subject to revolutions and the most beneficial to man, and that the latter must have departed it through some disastrously unfortunate coincidence, one which, for the sake of our common interest, should never have come to pass. The example of the savages that we have almost always managed to locate thus far seems to confirm that mankind was meant to remain in such a state forever, that the latter represents our world’s genuine youthfulness and that all subsequent progress has apparently been as much of a march towards individual perfection as, indeed, towards our species’ decrepitude’.

  In a display of humour, Mr Georges Liébert532 writes that we live in an era when ‘the Incas, the Huron people or the Hottentot, and Mr Savage remind the corrupt citizens of our troubled cities about the joyous days when man was still a child in the bosom of an intact nature, a nature that was both transparent and generous. All that man had to satisfy back then were his sole physical needs, beyond which everything is a source of evil. He had not yet been afflicted by the contagion of vain knowledge. There was no such thing as family, no property ownership, and therefore no power. Neither was there any language (and thus no linguistic reflection) that would have betrayed the truth of our unambiguous feelings and simple and direct impulses. All that existed were inarticulate cries, numerous gestures, and some simulating noises expressing, without any adjustments whatsoever, the immediacy of desire’ (Dialogue sur la pensée sauvage,533 published in Contrepoint number 12, November 1973).

  Exoticism has taken over from the ‘good-natured savage’, fuelling, through Third-World interposition
, a new nostalgia for primitivism that hints at some people’s eschatological and reductionist hopes for a return to the species, a return to the ancient paradise where there was no risk of anything ever happening because everything was provided for.

  With Mr Claude Lévi-Strauss, the ecologists proceed to contrast the virtues of ‘cold societies’, which so-called primitive peoples (more appropriately termed Naturvölker by the German school, as opposed to Kulturvölker) fall under and which we would stand to learn so much from, with the ‘pride’ and the ‘immoderation’ of Western man. Such contrasting is akin to the comparisons one heard in 18th-century lounges, opposing the pure habits of the ‘savages’ to the refined vices of the ‘civilised’. This is because none are as guilty of ‘violating’ nature as Europeans are. The European man is the archetypal man of ‘hot societies’, i.e historical and specifically human societies that undergo perpetual transformation and renewal.

  Speaking on television on 15th December, 1976, Mr Philippe Diolé (author of L’Okapi,534 Gallimard, 1963) first denounced the construction of roads in Brazil as a ‘traumatic experience for the forest’ before proposing that Western culture regenerate itself through the ‘humanism of savagery’.

  As for architect Yona Friedmann, he calls for ‘necessary poverty’ and recommends that we revert to an ‘animal economy’ defined by the following principle: ‘To eat whatever your stomach can handle’. He then adds: ‘Such a transformation may well be difficult for the white man to bear: in a world founded upon an animal economy, his hopes of survival would be inferior to those enjoyed by most people inhabiting non-industrialised countries. There is something, however, that we must ultimately acknowledge: should this ever happen, the white man would have deserved it in some respects’ (as stated in Gulliver, during the summer of 1974).