Postmortem Report

by Tomislav Sunic

  Today there are no more utopias in stock. Mass democracy has taken their place. Without democracy life makes little sense; yet democracy has no life of its own. After all, argues Cioran, had it not been for a young lunatic from the Galilee, the world would be today a very boring place. Alas, how many such lunatics are hatching today their self-styled theological and ideological derivatives! “Society is badly organized,” writes Cioran, “it does nothing against lunatics who die so young.”13 Probably all prophets and political soothsayers should immediately be put to death, “because when the mob accepts a myth — get ready for massacres or better yet for a new religion.”14

  Unmistakable as Cioran’s resentments against utopia may appear, he is far from deriding its creative importance. Nothing could be more loathsome to him than the vague cliché of modernity that associates the quest for happiness with a peaceful pleasure-seeking society. Demystified, disenchanted, castrated, and unable to weather the upcoming storm, modern society is doomed to spiritual exhaustion and slow death. It is incapable of believing in anything except in the purported humanity of its future bloodsuckers. If a society truly wishes to preserve its biological well-being, argues Cioran, its paramount task is to harness and nurture its “substantial calamity”; it must keep a tally of its own capacity for destruction. After all, have not his native Balkans, in which secular vampires are today again dancing to the tune of butchery, also generated a pool of sturdy specimens ready for tomorrow’s cataclysms? In this area of Europe, which is endlessly marred by political tremors and real earthquakes, a new history is today in the making — a history that will probably reward its populace for the past suffering.

  Whatever their past was, and irrespective of their civilization, these countries possess a biological stock that one cannot find in the West. Maltreated, disinherited, precipitated in the anonymous martyrdom, torn apart between wretchedness and sedition, they will perhaps know in the future a reward for so many ordeals, so much humiliation and for so much cowardice.15

  Is this not the best portrayal of that anonymous “eastern” Europe that according to Cioran is ready today to speed up the world history? The death of communism in Eastern Europe might probably inaugurate the return of history for all of Europe. Conversely, the “better half” of Europe, the one that wallows in air-conditioned and aseptic salons, that Europe is depleted of robust ideas. It is incapable of hating and suffering, and therefore of leading. For Cioran, society becomes consolidated in danger and it atrophies in peace: “In those places where peace, hygiene and leisure ravage, psychoses also multiply... I come from a country that, while never learning to know the meaning of happiness, has also never produced a single psychoanalyst.”16 The raw manners of new East European cannibals, not “peace and love” will determine the course of tomorrow’s history. Those who have passed through hell are more likely to outlive those who have only known the cozy climate of a secular paradise.

  These words of Cioran are aimed at the decadent France la Doulce in which afternoon chats about someone’s obesity or sexual impotence have become major preoccupations on the hit parade of daily concerns. Unable to put up resistance against tomorrow’s conquerors, this Western Europe, according to Cioran, deserves to be punished in the same manner as the noblesse of the ancien régime, which, on the eve of the French Revolution, laughed at its own image, while praising the image of the bon sauvage. How many among those good-natured French aristocrats were aware that the same bon sauvage was about to roll their heads down the streets of Paris? “In the future,” writes Cioran, “if mankind is to start all over again, it will be with the outcasts, with the mongols from all parts, with the dregs of the continents.”17 Europe is hiding in its own imbecility in front of an approaching catastrophe. Europe? “The rots that smell nice, a perfumed corpse.”18

  Despite gathering storms Cioran is comforted by the notion that he at least is the last heir to the vanishing “end of history”. Tomorrow, when the real apocalypse begins, and as the dangers of titanic proportions take final shape on the horizon, then, even the word “regret” will disappear from our vocabulary. “My vision of the future,” continues Cioran is so clear, “that if I had children I would strangle them immediately.”19

  After a good reading of Cioran’s opus one must conclude that Cioran is essentially a satirist who ridicules the stupid existential shiver of modern masses. One may be tempted to argue that Cioran offers an elegant vade mecum for suicide designed for those, who like him, have thoroughly delegitimized the value of life. But as Cioran says, suicide is committed by those who are no longer capable of acting out optimism, e.g. those whose thread of joy and happiness breaks into pieces. Those like him, the cautious pessimists, “given that they have no reason to live, why would they have a reason to die?”20 The striking ambivalence of Cioran’s literary work consists of the apocalyptic forebodings on the one hand, and enthusiastic evocations of horrors on the other. He believes that violence and destruction are the main ingredients of history, because the world without violence is bound to collapse. Yet, one wonders why is Cioran so opposed to the world of peace if, according to his logic, this peaceful world could help accelerate his own much-craved demise, and thus facilitate his immersion into nothingness? Of course, Cioran never moralizes about the necessity of violence; rather, in accordance with the canons of his beloved reactionary predecessors Josephe de Maistre and Nicolo Machiavelli, he asserts that “authority, not verity, makes the law”, and that consequently, the credibility of a political lie will also determine the magnitude of political justice. Granted that this is correct, how does he explain the fact that authority, at least the way he sees it, only perpetuates this odious being from which he so dearly wishes to absolve himself? This mystery will never be known other than to him. Cioran admits however, that despite his abhorrence of violence, every man, including himself is an integral part of it, and that every man has at least once in his life contemplated how to roast somebody alive, or how to chop off someone’s head:

  Convinced that troubles in our society come from old people, I conceived the plan of liquidating all citizens past their forties — the beginning of sclerosis and mummification. I came to believe that this was the turning point when each human becomes an insult to his nation and a burden to his community... Those who listened to this did not appreciate this discourse and they considered me a cannibal... Must this intent of mine be condemned? It only expresses something that each man, who is attached to his country, desires in the bottom of his heart: liquidation of one half of his compatriots.21

  Cioran’s literary elitism is unparalleled in modern literature, and for that reason he often appears as a nuisance for modern and sentimental ears poised for the lullaby words of eternal earthly or spiritual bliss. Cioran’s hatred of the present and the future, his disrespect for life, will certainly continue to antagonize the apostles of modernity who never tire of chanting vague promises about the “better here-and-now.”

  His paradoxical humor is so devastating that one cannot take it at face value, especially when Cioran describes his own self. His formalism in language, his impeccable choice of words, despite some similarities with modern authors of the same elitist caliber, make him sometimes difficult to follow. One wonders whether Cioran’s arsenal of words such as “abulia”, “schizophrenia”, “apathy”, etc., truly depict a nevrosé, which he claims to be.

  If one could reduce the portrayal of Cioran to one short paragraph, then one must depict him as an author who sees in the modern veneration of the intellect a blueprint for spiritual gulags and the uglification of the world. Indeed, for Cioran, man’s task is to wash himself in the school of existential futility, for futility is not hopelessness; futility is a reward for those wishing to rid themselves of the epidemic of life and the virus of hope. Probably, this picture best befits the man who describes himself as a fanatic without any convictions — a stranded accident in the cosmos who casts nostalgic looks towards his quick disappearance.

&nbs
p; “To be free is to rid oneself forever from the notion of reward; to expect nothing from people or gods; to renounce not only this world and all worlds, but salvation itself; to break up even the idea of this chain among chains.” (Le mauvais démiurge)

  The Right Stuff(Drugs and Democracy)

  Morphine is said to be good for people subject to severe depressions, or even pessimism. Although the drug first surfaced in a laboratory at the end of the last century, its basis, opium, had been used earlier by many aristocratic and reactionary thinkers. A young and secretive German romantic, Novalis, enjoyed eating and smoking opium juice, probably because he had always yearned to alleviate his nostalgia for death. Probably in order to write his poem Sehnsucht nach dem Tode. Early poets of Romanticism rejected the philosophy of rationalism and historical optimism. They turned inward to their irrational feelings, shrouding themselves in the pensive loneliness that opiates endlessly offer.

  Once upon a distant time we met Homer’s Odysseus, who was frequently nagged by the childish behavior of his pesky sailors. Somewhere along the shores of northern Africa, Odysseus and his sailors had strayed away into the mythical land of the lotus flower. As soon as his sailors began to eat the lotus plant, they sank into forgetfulness, and immediately forgot their history and their homeland. It was with great pain that Odysseus succeeded in extracting them from artificial paradises. What can be worse for a nation than to erase its past and lose its collective memory?

  Unlike many modern wannabe conservatives and televangelists, Greeks and Romans were not hypocrites. They frankly acknowledged the pleasures of wine and women. Sine Cerere et Bacco friget Venus — without food and wine sexual life withers away, too.

  The escape from industrial reality and the maddening crowd was one of the main motives for drug use among some reactionary poets and thinkers, who could not face the onset of mass society. The advent of early liberalism and socialism was accompanied not only by factory chimneys, but also by loneliness, decay, and decadence. If one could, therefore, not escape to the sunny Mediterranean, then one had to craft one’s own artificial paradise in rainy and foggy London. The young English Tory Thomas De Quincey, in his essay Confessions of an English Opium Eater, relates his Soho escapades with a poor prostitute Anna, as well as his spiritual journeys in the aftertaste of opium. De Quincey has a feeling that one life-minute lasts a century, finally putting an end to the reckless flow of time.

  The mystique of opium was also grasped by the mid-19th century French symbolist and poet Charles Baudelaire. He continued the aristo-nihilistic-revolutionary-conservative tradition of dope indulgence via the water pipe, i.e., the Pakistani hookah. Similar to the lonely albatross, Baudelaire observes the decaying France in which the steamroller of coming liberalism and democratism mercilessly crushes all aesthetics and all poetics.

  When studying the escapism of postmodernity, it is impossible to circumvent the leftist subculture and its pseudo-intellectual sycophants of 1968. The so-called sixty-eighters hollered out not only for liberty from all political authority, but also for free sex and drugs. Are these leftist claims not part of the modern religion of human rights? At the beginning of the 60’s, the musical alter egos of the Western left, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, called out to millions of young people throughout America and Europe, telling intruders to “get off of my cloud” and concluding that “everybody must get stoned.”

  Predictably, the right-wing answer to the decadence of liberal democracy was nihilistic counter-decadence. The main difference, however, between these two is that reactionary and rightist addicts do drugs for elitist and esoteric purposes. By their temperament and literary style they reject all democracy — whether it is of a socialist or liberal brand. When in the 20th century the flow of history switched from first gear into fifth gear, many rightist poets and thinkers posed a question: What to do after the orgy? The French right-leaning author Jean Cocteau answered the question this way: “Everything that we do in our life, even when we love, we perform in a rapid train running to its death. Smoking opium means getting off the train.”

  Hashish and marijuana change the body language and enhance social philanthropy. Smoking joints triggers abnormal laughter. Therefore, hashish may be described as a collectivistic drug custom-designed for individuals who by their lifestyle loathe solitude and who, like Dickens’ proverbial Ms. Jellyby, indulge in vicarious humanism and unrepentant globalism. In today’s age of promiscuous democracy, small wonder that marijuana is inhaled by countless young people all over liberalized Europe and America. In the permissive society of today, one is allowed to do everything — provided one does not rock the boat, i.e., “bogart” political correctness. Just as wine, over the last 2,000 years, has completely changed the political profile of the West, so has marijuana, over the last 30 years, completely ruined the future of Western youth. If Stalin had been a bit more intelligent he would have solemnly opened marijuana fields in his native Transcaucasia. Instead, communist tyrants resorted to the killing fields of the Gulag. The advantage of liberalism and social democracy is that via sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, by means of consumerism and hedonism, they function perfectly well; what Communism was not able to achieve by means of the solid truncheon, liberalism has achieved by means of the solid joint. Indisputably, Western youth can be politically and correctly controlled when herded in techno-rap concerts and when welcomed in cafés in Holland, where one can freely buy marijuana as well as under-the-table “crack”, “speedball”, and “horse”. Are these items not logical ingredients of the liberal theology of human rights?

  Cocaine reportedly induces eroticism and enhances the sex act. The late French fascist dandy and novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle liked coke, desiring all possible drugs and all impossible women. The problem, however, is that the coke intaker often feels invisible bugs creeping from his ankles up to his knees, so that he may imagine himself sleeping not with a beautiful woman but with scary reptiles. In his autobiographical novels Le feu follet and L’homme couvert de femmes, La Rochelle’s hero is constantly covered by women and veiled by opium and heroin sit-ins. In his long intellectual monologues, La Rochelle’s hero says: “A French-woman, be she a whore or not, likes to be held and taken care of; an American woman, unless she hunts for a husband, prefers a passing relationship... Drug users are mystics in a materialistic age. Given that they can no longer animate and embellish this world, they do it in a reverse manner on themselves.” Indeed, La Rochelle’s hero ends up in suicide — with heroin and revolver. In 1945, with the approaching victory of the Allies, and in the capacity of the intellectual leader of the defunct Eurofascist international, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle also opted for suicide.

  The English conservative and aristocrat Aldous Huxley is unavoidable in studying communist pathology (Brave New World Revisited) and Marxist subintellectual schizophrenia (Grey Eminence). As a novelist and essayist his lifelong wish had been to break loose from the flow of time. Mexican mescaline and the artificial drug L.S.D. enabled him new intellectual horizons for observing the end of his world and the beginning of a new, decadent one. Apparently, mescaline is ideal for sensing the colors of late impressionist and pointillist painters. Every drop on Seurat’s silent water, every touch on Dufy’s leaf, or every stone on the still nature of old Vermeer, pours away into thousands of billions of new colors. In the essay The Doors of Perception, Huxley notes that “mescaline raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind.” His intellectual experiments with hallucinogenic drugs continued for years, and even on his deathbed in California in 1963, he asked for and was given L.S.D. Probably to depart more picturesquely into timeless infinity.

  And what to say about the German centenarian, enigmatic essayist and novelist Ernst Jünger, whom the young Adolf Hitler in Weimar Germany also liked to read, and whom Dr. Joseph Goebbels wanted to lure into pro-Nazi collaboration? Yet Jünger, the ar
istocratic loner, refused all deals with the Nazis, preferring instead his martial travelogues. In his essay Annäherungen: Drogen and Rausch, Jünger describes his close encounters with drugs. He was also able to cut through the merciless wall of time and sneak into floating eternity. “Time slows down … The river of life flows more gently... The banks are disappearing.” While both the French president François Mitterrand and the German chancellor Helmut Kohl, in the interest of Franco-German reconciliation, liked meeting and reading the old Jünger, they shied away from his contacts with drugs.