Biblical plagues
Physical aspects
Late and Postmodern ‘signs’
1. blood
water plague
Amoco Cadiz Oil Spill (1978)
2. frogs
amphibian plague
Bird Flu (2015)
3. lice
earth plague
Southeast Asian Haze (1997)
4. infestation
aerial plague
Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (2006)
5. livestock disease
animal sickness
Mad Cow Disease (1992)
6. sores
human sickness
AIDS (1981)
7. hail
weather disaster
Hurricane Katrina (2005)
8. locusts
famine
Great Ethiopian Famine (1983)
9. darkness
occultation
Paris Solar Eclipse (1999)
death of first-born
human sacrifice
Eastern Christian Genocide (2014)
wāw hā’ ’alif
Chapter Six
The Living Dead
The Theme of Social Implosion in Alexander Wolfheze, The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018)
What was the monstrous evil that brought on God’s judgment [in the Deluge]? The Bible does not specify beyond calling it chamas, lawlessness. But lawlessness (or violence as some render it) is the manifestation of a social disease and not its cause. [Bible interpreters] speculate that it was unbounded affluence that caused men to become depraved, that wealth afforded them the leisure to discover new thrills and to commit sexual aberrations. Hand in hand with material prosperity went an overbearing attitude toward God, whom people judged to be incapable of hearing prayers and of enforcing moral standards.
— William Hallo
Social Implosion
Le fil est maintenant cassé. Il n’y a plus d’hommes sur ce continent abandonné des dieux: il n’y a qu’une minorité surhumaine… et… une immense majorité de singes.
[The thread has now snapped. There no longer exist humans in this continent, forsaken by the gods: there is only a super-human minority… and… an immense majority of apes.]
— Savitri Devi Mukherdji
The ‘Crisis of the Modern World’ is a central theme of the Traditional School, founded by René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. During the present Postmodern époque, this crisis — which can be more specifically characterized as the Crisis of the Modern West — can be subdivided into four concrete policy issues that can only be understood and resolved in terms of mutual interdependence. Chapter 1 described them as the ‘Four Political Realities’ of the Postmodern West: global climate change (industrial ecocide), technological trans-humanism (technocatastrophe), ethnic replacement (demographic inundation) and social chaos (civil disintegration). The imminent convergence of these Four Political Realities points to a catastrophic end scenario: a true hellstorm that has the power to permanently eliminate the remains of Western civilization. Within this complex scenario, the issue of social chaos takes centre stage: social implosion is the core mechanism driving all of the existential threats that confront the Modern West. In his recent book The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War, the writer traced the cultural-historical dynamics of the Crisis of the Modern World up to the outbreak of the First World War: Sunset explains the mechanism of social implosion as an inevitable result of the ‘progress’ of Modernity. The present chapter seeks to elucidate this thesis, which is one of the ten theses of Sunset.
The accumulating loss of social-psychological cohesion and social-cultural continuity in the Postmodern West results in a collective state of self-induced psychopathy, characterized by institutionalized cognitive dissonance and sub-rational hedonist-materialist conditioning. The silent acceptance of ‘politically correct’ totalitarianism in the public sphere and of antisocial hyper-individualism in the private sphere are clear symptoms of this development. Only the ‘normalization’ of collective cognitive dissonance and individual sub-rational conditioning can explain how life-threatening developments such as global climate change, technological transhumanism and ethnic replacement can continue without meeting serious resistance. The fundamental lack of an elementary sense of responsibility — and even of an elementary survival instinct — is only possible in a society that lives in a cultural-historical void. The vacuum lifeworld of the baby boom generation — now permanently structured as a hostile elite that regenerates itself by feeding off vindictive ‘minorities’ — no longer leaves space for authentic identity or a historical sense of responsibility. The ideological counterpart to this cultural-historical vacuum is Cultural Nihilism, i.e. the baby boomer doctrine of militant secularism, social-Darwinist neo-liberalism, narcissist hyper-individualism and totalitarian culture relativism.
Armed with Cultural Nihilism, the baby boomers have eradicated the lifework of generations of ancestors and the civilizational heritage of centuries within one single generation. More than that, they have permanently mortgaged the future of their children by doing irreparable damage to the natural and cultural biotope of the Western peoples. The consistently ruthless manner in which the baby boomers and their Social Justice Warrior successors are pursuing this process to its extreme consequences — the utterly unscrupulous manner in which ecological disaster, transhumanist technology and ethnic replacement are poured out over Western humanity — bears the unmistakable stamp of quintessential inhumanity. But it is precisely the inhumanity of the deeds of the baby boomer hostile elite that provides the key to a correct understanding of its ideas. It allows the totalitarian Cultural Nihilist worldview to be understood as subhuman: it is sub-rational, sub-intellectual, psychologically regressive and emotionally atavistic in nature. Thus, it forms a system that is closed in all regards: politically, economically, socially and culturally. It is not primarily a view of the world, but rather an experience of the world: Cultural Nihilism is not primarily a rationally tangible and logically reversible ideology, but rather a pathological psychosocial condition.
From a Modern scientific perspective it is easy to explain this condition in terms of rational categories: at an individual level, it can be explained by the psychoanalytic method and at a collective level it can be explained by the psychohistorical method. But such scientific descriptions of the Cultural Nihilist condition offer no more than rational understanding: they fail to address the meta-historical meaning of the phenomenon. Rational explanations of Cultural Nihilism can reconstruct objective historical realities — Chapter 1 pointed to relevant bio-evolutionary feedback loops and psychohistorical adaptation mechanisms — but they cannot remedy its present consequences. The Cultural Nihilist ‘key values’ of militant secularism, shock doctrine neo-liberalism, hyper-democratic consumerism and totalitarian culture relativism have disastrous effects on the natural environment and human society that cannot be remedied through mere scientific analyses. Scientific treatises concerning the realities that are created by these ‘key values’ — industrial ecocide, economic cannibalism, ethnic replacement, social anomie, anti-intellectual ‘idiocracy’ — are futile as long as they are not framed by meta-historical meaning and metapolitical ethics. A full head is useless with an empty heart.
In this respect, Traditionalist thought can offer a remedy: it offers a meta-historical framework of meaning with an anagogic — holistically pedagogic — functionality. The book Sunset is relevant in this respect: it describes the historical background and genealogy of the Postmodern phenomenon of social implosion. The applicable thesis of Sunset retraces this phenomenon to a regressive ontological modality, i.e. to the reduced ‘experiential capacity’ of ‘modernized’ humanity. From a Traditionalist perspective, the cultural-histori
cal background of Postmodern social implosion can be understood as a ‘Regression of the Castes’ (Julius Evola). For the reader unfamiliar with the Traditionalist concepts on which Sunset is based, a short introduction to this term will be given here.
The Regression of the Castes
The two main problems of the modern world, demographic expansion and genetic degeneracy, cannot be solved. Liberal principles prevent the solution of the first and egalitarian principles prevent the solution of the second.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Proceeding from the basic notion of Sophia Perennis, ‘Perennial Wisdom’ in relation to transcendental reality and capital letter Truth, there are various ways by which the concept of ‘Tradition’ may be approached. Most of these are esoteric in nature and therefore irrelevant within the framework of Alba Rosa. But there are also three, slightly overlapping exoteric definitions: (1) the scientific definition (a hermeneutic system that achieves meaning through symbolic structure), (2) the ideological definition (a socio-political system founded on charismatic authority, holistic community and anagogic direction) and (3) the cultural anthropological definition (a worldview that coincides with an optimal ontological modality).
(1) Scientific Tradition is now ‘canonized’ in the ‘Traditional School’ that was started, as mentioned earlier, by René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. It thus represents a minor but coherent scientific discipline that retains a marginal presence within religious studies, art history and cultural history. It involves a structuralist approach to functionality and symbolism, aimed at epistemological analyses of cosmological, religious, artistic and cultural-historical phenomena. Given its research focus on metaphysical issues and ethical philosophy, scientific Tradition may be considered the last remaining link between pre-modern and Modern knowledge.
(2) Ideological Tradition maintains a concrete presence in the contemporary world only in the geopolitical margin: the downfall of all Traditional Imperia during the World Wars of the 20th century has virtually eliminated Tradition as a formally articulated political presence. All that remains are a few symbolic forms (the nominal Japanese Imperium, the sovereign Holy See) and a handful of historical miniature curiosities (Swaziland, Brunei). Formally, there still exists a single larger ‘absolute monarchy’: Saudi Arabia. But that state is a highly artificial creation, historically constructed around Anglo-Saxon oil interests and presently maintained by an American military protectorate. Considering the fact that even hybrid Modern-Traditional experiments such as the Third Reich are merely degenerate reflections of authentically Traditional Imperia such as the Assyrian Empire, such Traditional Imperia constitute socio-political constructs that must now be considered entirely incompatible — because unbearable — for ‘Modern men’. On the other hand, ideological Tradition as an abstract concept has recently been making an unexpected comeback: the recent phenomenal rise of Archaeofuturism (Guillaume Faye, Jason Jorjani) is largely due to a revolutionary reincorporation of Traditionalist thought in Western metapolitical discourse.
(3) Cultural anthropological Tradition has also been reduced to a marginal phenomenon in the human lifeworld: it only continues to exist in the farthest (physical-geographic and psychological-sociological) recesses of the Modern world. On the one hand, authentic Tradition continues to be represented by a handful of ‘primitive nature peoples’ hidden in isolated locations (e.g. the tropical jungles of Amazonia, the mountain valleys of New Guinea, some of the Andaman Islands). On the other hand, it also continues to be represented by a handful of societal ‘drop outs’: marginalized thinkers, seers, artists, hermits and other Aussteiger. In terms of functionality and symbolism, these include — as hidden and unrecognizable ‘antipodes’ to Modernity — the ‘guardians of the hidden flame’ and the ‘watchers of the world’: the Tsadikim Nistarim of Judaism, the ‘Latter Day Saints’ of Christianity and the Qalandars of Islam. It is this cultural anthropological marginalization of Tradition that renders the Traditionalist thesis of the Regression of the Castes tangible, scientifically quantifiable, a reality in Modern anthropology and sociology. The book Sunset sketches the cultural-historical development of the Regression of the Castes in more detail. Here it suffices to say that early industrial Modern mankind was already living according to a suboptimal ontological modality, viz. the qualitatively reduced, materialized, damaged and devalued world of repressed nature, metastasizing industry, monetary slavery and lost faith. Late industrial Modern mankind is now living in an ontological modality that is located much farther below even this early industrial level: it is living in a hallucinatory world of demonic possession in which the anagogic ideals of Tradition — goodness, wisdom, power and beauty — are systematically reversed into the direction of their perverse antipodes.
The marginal position of Tradition according to all three preceding definitions can be logically explained through the near-total historical defeat of Tradition by triumphant Modernity. Sunset specifies the point of no return: it dates the ‘sunset’ of Tradition in the year 1914 and thus confirms a newly emergent historiographical consensus. The outbreak of the conflict that contemporary observers simply called the ‘Great War’ is now increasingly taking centre stage in the historical conscience of present-day Western thinkers. Long before the outbreak of the First World War the Bible Students — the predecessors of the present-day Jehovah’s Witnesses — had published a count-down system that assumed the year 1914 to be an important milestone in the Biblical plan of salvation. On August 3rd, 1914, on the eve of the British declaration of war against Germany, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey — who was slowly losing his own eyesight — expressed his forebodings in these famous words: The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. It is only now, over a century later, that Western thinkers are starting to recognize the true significance of ‘turning point 1914’ (a recent Dutch publication relevant in this regard is Tom Zwitzer’s book Permafrost).
The Experiential Reality of Modernity
What made it special, made it dangerous. So I bury it, and forget.
— Kate Bush
Modernity, defined as the phased inversion and ultimate negation of Tradition, has meanwhile advanced to the point that all forms of authentic identity — religion, ethnicity, caste, gender, vocation — are now in an advanced stage of decay. This critical development, which is logically first reaching its extreme stage in the Western heartland of Modernity, is now affecting the material and institutional foundations (the bio-evolutionary incarnations and socio-political structures) of Tradition to such an extent that there is ever less space for its immaterial and cultural Traditional forms of civilization (religion and art). In this regard, the present critical state of all remaining forms of authentic identity is of decisive importance: in the final analysis, the failure of Tradition is an anthropological phenomenon; it re-defines what it means to be human. In the world of Tradition, humanity’s experiential reality was of a fundamentally different nature than it is in the Modern world. The fundamentally different capabilities of perception and cognition of Traditional mankind may be considered as functions of a fundamentally different experiential reality. The natural world illustrates the principle of necessary adaption in perception and cognition to varying experiential modalities: the echolocation of the bat and the whiskers of the mole are examples of radically different, but functionally effective systems of orientation adapted to wholly different living environments. It is in this sense that the radically different experiential modalities of Traditional and Modern mankind can be most easily understood. On the one hand, Modern mankind is endowed with highly developed capacities for rational calculation and emotional immunity: these capacities are adjustments to the experiential realities of urban artificiality, scientistic abstraction, materialist competition and hedonist escapism. Compared to Traditional mankind, Modern mankind is a true Übermensch in terms of abstract and social individ
ualism (monetary profit, sexual experiment). On the other hand, Traditional mankind was endowed with highly developed capacities for mystical insight and applied magic: these capacities are adjustments to the experiential realities of cosmic equilibrium, sublimated naturalism and holistic community. Compared to Modern man, Traditional man was a near-divine being in terms of spiritual perception and instinctive effectiveness. It is this archaic ontological quality that is referred to in ancient lore (e.g. the deuterocanonical ‘Books of Adam’). Given the historical primacy of Traditional existential modes and given the increasing distance from the old ‘paradisiacal’ qualities of humanity, it is inevitable that the tension between the Traditional nature of humanity and its Modern self-image is building to a breaking point. The inevitable results are intellectual disorientation, cognitive dissonance and emotional instability. These symptoms are the psychohistorical price that must be paid for the forced devolution of the human condition, which is most dramatically illustrated by humanity’s enforced separation from the Transcendental sphere (through radical secularism) and from the natural environment (through ecocidal urbanization).
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