Another cultural artefact of older films that relates more directly to traditionalism is found in the formerly esteemed genre of the cowboy film, my personal favourites being generally those of Randolph Scott. What I notice and enjoy about these films is that the older ones (pre-1980) appear to be the last official record of lived solar tradition or chivalry; of paternal honour codes, the inherited conduct of men following a strict morality, unswayed by death or destiny.
Depicted in these films are the fascinating rules of honour, of how to conduct yourself with a willingness to fight and die, and warlike fastidiousness to truth. Herein rest the final remnants of the knights-errant chivalry and blood honour of the Normans and early medieval Germans.
Randolph Scott in Comanche Station, 1960, American CinemaScope.
The hero in these Westerns flinches neither at personal danger nor violence. Not only does he not flinch, he does not register the slightest change in emotion and speaks little but plainly and justly, maybe with humour or charm. But he never speaks with fear, regret or pleading. No occasion or adventure is so important or delicate that he would fail to fight for his honour when affronted, even on random whim. His fate has been measured out for him and he is accepting of where it takes him. His prime concern lies in not breaking his personal code of honour. The bad guys, who take the wrong route in life, and invariably get caught or killed, also to their credit do not waste time whining and crying with regret. They never seek sympathy, they simply march calmly to the gallows. In these films, the main difference between protagonist and antagonist is that the bad guys are concerned with cultivating wealth and the good guys with honour. Though either may die along the way, it is of no consequence. Even more interestingly, the good guy (usually Randolph Scott or Lee Marvin) may fall victim to the popular plot twist of finding himself set up or falsely accused of murder or wrongdoing but he does not waste his breath whining, seeking sympathy or even bothering to say anything in his defence. He knows himself to be innocent and that is all that counts — he retains his stoic quietude, giving the same simple one-word answers to questions. He has accepted fate, from top to bottom, and wears the righteous mantle of truth, caring not for what happens because he knows, inside, that he is right.
He makes no outward signs of appeal because pleading is unmanly, so he waits to be vindicated by some honourable means. He does not indicate any reticence in his willingness to fight despite everyone now thinking he is the villain. His honour as a man is more important to him, but in a humble, Arthurian way — because his name can be disgraced and he can swing from the rope unjustly, but it does not affect the truth he knows himself. Internally, his honour is intact and that is where it matters. There is no cause for fear and no cause for doubt.
This bestowed code of conduct cannot be taken from a man, even in death. This is the Ghibelline chivalry, the Roman pietas. Watch these films and you can sense that the old way is the true way, not just in the sense of transcendent honour codes but in a purely natural and practical sense. The eternal inside us is what is important.
PART 3: The path back to a healthy art
Action versus work in a technological age
Working in the modern corporate world is about labouring long hours to make worthless things under the guidance of complete idiots. It is total moral and intellectual slavery under a system orchestrated around grinding down the dwindling margins of profit to be made on exploitative merchandising and crowd manipulation. The daily routine is a politically correct race to the bottom while maneuvering the insane egos of entitled feminists and conformist zombies. With extremely few exceptions, nothing of any value is being done. Even companies with moral objectivity are either trapped in the broader nonsensical victim culture maze or forced to work for globalist clients. The product and the work are a shadow of a shadow, the idea that work should have objective tribal purpose (optimistic lebensraum11), or even so much as basic functional meaning or creativity, fades more rapidly every day.
As a cog in such a machine, the main trick is to pretend you are not aware that you are completely wasting your time.
There is an association between Modernism and globalism in that each devalues both art and work itself. When the product of your labour is meaningless and the labour and the monetary cost affected are the only prime factors (the mindset of the globalist, which is an extension of the capitalist), then art, national pride, race, gender, family values and other vital human qualities need to be rendered meaningless as they are a barrier to continued business, to money power. This is the wasteland we find ourselves in, a rootless world of free trade and disposable plastics.
But beneath the surface, life retains root meanings that money power fears, causing it to fight with increasing intensity, the forbidden ideas reasserting themselves on the internet and in quiet pub corners, the forbidden voices that speak frankly. Those voices express the reality you will never see on a TV advert.
The Western world is not only dying from within due to these constraints on our artistic and spiritual momentum, it is also being buried under a landslide of environmental ruin. Our daily objects are made in overseas sweatshops by people that have no interest in their purpose. True diversity of locality and individualism (culture) is absolutely lost in a global vacuum of generic chain-store mass-production. This is perpetuated by a managerial class of accountants, economists and council workers who are now utterly materialist and devoid of any sense of tradition beyond social signalling of their ‘tolerance’. Their goal is the furtherance of the middling IQ consumer zombie horde, which is a population of castrated walking barcodes. Our food cycle is unsustainable (soil erosion, tasteless and dangerous GMO crops, pesticides) in a nonsensical system under which goods are imported and exported around the globe, as opposed to grown and consumed locally and seasonally – as is natural. At every strata of this system people are doing unthinking, mechanical work, obeying the edicts of corporatist culture and globalism. It is a merchant’s dream world.
”America ... has created a ‘civilization’ that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity...’
“...The Roman never would have thought of making labor a sort of virtue and social ideal. And Roman civilization was no civilization of slackers, loafers, and ‘idlers’. The truth is that at that time, one had a sense of distance. To ‘work’, one opposed agere, action in its higher meaning. ‘Work’ corresponded to the dark, servile, material, indifferent forms of human activity, with reference to those for whom activity was determined only by need, necessity or an unfortunate fate (the ancient world knew a metaphysics of slavery).
Opposed to such people were those who act in the proper sense of the term, those who devote themselves to free, non-physical, conscious, deliberate and to some extent disinterested forms of action. Even to those who exercised material activities, but with a certain qualitative character, and on the basis of an authentic and free vocation, the term ‘work’ was not applied...”
– Julius Evola
Evola is, as ever, astute. This ancient concept is hard for us to fully grasp but is important. This is not to say work as a concept is not important. It remains of paramount importance and to be valuable individuals we must each of us maintain a strong work ethic. But the actual end product of your labour is even more important. The end result of work has become a kind of alien concept, of little concern, which we have become divorced from and apparently see as being of no consequence. We see only the paycheque. For work to have real value, it must transcend and be in itself ennobling, in the very least directly resulting
in sustenance or a personal, tangible result (farming, hunting) beyond the immediate monetary. It should be committed honestly and with purpose beyond satisfying the blind whims of the money-leader. This work we must call action, as it is resourcefulness and apart from wage or direct slavery. It does not matter how hard it is, overcoming the obstacles to reach a lofty goal is what is important.
This action, which as Evola insinuates is work towards noble individual goals, can indeed be far more heavily taxing and exhausting than work. It can also come at a much higher price (military action or physical self-defence must be considered action) but at every stage the end result is purposeful and ennobling, both individually and tribally. Feeding yourself and family without outside help, imbuing creative artefacts with a sense of tradition and mythology, securing libraries and teaching proper knowledge to the young and making things as you need them with readily available resources – all must be considered action.
Restorative traditional work on historic buildings is often undertaken now by low-paid experts or unpaid volunteers, seeking any kind of escape from the artless mechanized toil of Modernist construction – which is essentially various ways to form cement as economically and blandly as imaginable. The end product of Modernist construction is invariably uplifting neither spirituality nor æsthetically and does not inspire a feeling of optimism for the future. Often, modern materials are also not enduring and tend to be environmentally toxic. Hence, all the effort required is, despite its intensity of invested labour and capital, ultimately a waste of time, no matter how superficially functional. We create the highway so that the car can move from home to the workplace to plan the next highway. And the men working on these meaningless utilities often crave nothing more than the chance to work on traditional constructions, which require both mechanical ingenuity and creative craftsmanship, and have historic tribal relevance. This enriching and future affirming option is not available to them and there is nothing to be proud of in their efforts.
I will reiterate that none of this means we should abandon work and take the route of sloth and leisure, by any means. Indeed, this realization dictates that we should redouble our efforts, as it is doubly hard to work for oneself and simultaneously against a system that wants to see us all as herded cattle in a controlled suburban grid.
It could be said the classical liberal American and French Revolutionary idea of work as the vehicle by which a man essentially frees himself is the counterpoint to the Roman idea mentioned by Evola (which included a metaphysic for both slavery and voluntary action). Not to say the classical liberal idea was wholly wrong or bad, just that every idea or way of life has its counterpoint or trade-off. For the classical world, it was more overt slavery and cruelty, whereas we have a (no doubt short-lived) suicidal universalism. Like it or not, our way is temporal, unnatural and fragile. It will change by necessity. There is no effortlessly compassionate or even bloodless way to do anything. Whatever comforts and homogeneity of opinion the past few centuries have afforded have reached their autumn and are now the agents of our poisoning. The American view of work and labour is the result of the freeing of the common man, to each be treated as a kind of sovereign nation unto himself. The character of the man at large, however, does not generally allow for a full grasp of those higher principles that tradition formerly protected. Now more than ever, those who occupy the lowest strata of ability or acumen shape our civilization. In this sense our modern concept of work, or the cult of work (encapsulating industrialization, free trade, distribution, money lending, mass-production) means this work or labour has lost any higher value, or any trace of the pursuit of creative tribal or individual self-betterment or elevation — attributes even slaves of the classical world could at least claim in their daily chores.
This world of false freedom exists without higher meaning, work is performed without purpose in the blind generation of wealth for hidden, unaccountable oligarchs.
Nobody but the aloof money-power elite is afforded release from the ethical commitment to this insolent cult of work, which increasingly consumes available man-hours that could be spent on action. Additionally, we have the further anti-slavery posturing of the modern welfare state, where the truly idle are treated as nobility and handed money to merely exist and commit rampant dysgenic breeding.
Before mass industrialization, if you needed a basket you wove it or got one from your local weaver. It was woven from natural materials, it was not lifeless, temporal or toxic, made in China and bought from a globalist franchise. The system that existed supported the creation and trade of locally made goods and this is the secret to creating culture. The merchant class does not understand or care for the underpinnings of culture, beyond how to exploit it. The linkages are clear between usury, loss of local crafts and exploitation of free trade by corporatists — which equates to the loss of community and local jobs, anti-nationalism and the degradation of our living environment. Today, to be a traditional boat-builder or cooper is to be a craft hobbyist of sorts, of dwindling specialized patronage. When everything you use and see is foreign and purely utilitarian, there is this terrible cultural price. Despite the immediate desire for a bargain (the globalist objects are always cheaper), there is a hidden long-term cost of immeasurable rootlessness. Every single one of these daily transactions is a losing, microcosmic replay of traditional transcendent values against the nihilist consumerism of the merchant class. People of taste now have to seek, often at greater expense, environments where they can be surrounded by their own traditional and natural handicrafts. Inflation in the cost of living ensures the locally crafted cannot compete monetarily with the cheap mass-produced toxic plastic items. What Modernism does not swallow up, squalor does.
Working with your hands, to make things you need yourself from natural local materials, is an example of action versus work (in the Modern slavery sense). Simple stone walls evolve into cathedral spires. Celtic knots evolve into a religious æsthetic tradition. None of these things require or have anything at all to do with middlemen, marketers or economy profiteers. Action requires all the same effort as slave labour towards a currency, even more so. Idleness is always an evil and the end product of your labours should never be out of sight, or anything less than of the highest consequence. If a purposeful end goal is out of sight of your daily grind, then you are truly a slave. Worse, you might be, as most of us are today, a slave to a machine that is intentionally and slowly putting your people through a meat grinder.
Just to survive, many of us are trapped in these meaningless make-work jobs, creating crass desideratum of all varieties. Armies of marketers speculate the profit points on one product or another, divorced completely from its ultimate value or cultural worth. Confused and manipulated, we squeeze what last drop of enjoyment can be had from the dying embers of a formerly blazing creative fire.
Our technology has made us slaves to this machine. The non-living entities known as corporations have a more bloodthirsty will to live than living men. Our ongoing trends and revolutions are perpetually bottom-up disasters, with an ever-lowering standard of allowably expressible intelligence. The modern man sits in his cubicle and should he need something, he has lost the art of making it himself. He has made a cage of his own supposed freedoms, reliant on a system that now turns against him.
Work is life and will always be necessary but if those who understand action control the end result of work, the labour will have an optimistic goal that benefits all concerned. Shared goals are nearly impossible in multicultural societies, which further complicates these difficulties. Multiculturalism itself is an offshoot of the same materialist, industrialized forces of faux-egalitarian exploitation that created our contemporary malaise.
If your daily activity has no active value, beyond the money earned, your life itself is wasted. Whether you live or die tomorrow is less important than that you do not waste your time while here on Earth.
The power of myth
As we can we can see from the influence of
The Iliad, you can judge the richness of culture by the measure of its myths. The poet and bard were for many centuries considered the supreme artist.
While Westerners as a people remain brainwashed into viewing our past as barbaric, undesirable and done away with, we will nonetheless never find solace in the empty consumerist present. Distanced from our myths, we are like newborns, adult babies that spring fully formed from the mid-twentieth century — without inherited virtues, objective values or the metaphysical grounding that totemic myth provides. Reference to anything before the 1940s seems too distant to comprehend. Nowadays, it is extremely rare to see a classic opera portrayed in the time period and setting they were intended for, such as Shakespearean England or Imperial Rome. Usually they are ‘re-imagined’ in a Second World War setting, with the ruling authority (Romans, Elizabethan monarchs, etc) represented as imaginary proto-fascists. Everything is adjusted to fit with the post-Nuremberg values of authoritarianism, displacing Satan as the ultimate evil. For the progressive Modernist, the universe began shortly before the Second World War. The average person apparently cannot register historic themes predating that — certainly, not the average stage producer. Modernists can only ignore or deride foundational myths, disregard them as immaterial fiction. The tribal realities hidden in myth do not fit in with the egalitarian fairytale. Foundational myths, rooted in the truth of nature, are by their definition simply too unabashedly self-confident for our altruistic age. It is too cuttingly real for the delusions of the luxuriously over-civilized.
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 15