The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

  Brrr, the blood positively runs cold! “The body of art that belongs to mankind as Man”? Hitler reborn!

  Cram, a Traditionalist in architecture, was as capable as, say, René Guénon, a Traditionalist in metaphysics, of appreciating the principles of another tradition, and perhaps being influenced by them, even admitting their superiority to one’s own, without failing to realize that their particular historical form was an local adaptation by a distinct culture—or dare we say it, race—and hence not directly usable by ourselves short of a crude imitation, arbitrary syncretism, or parody. Some of us can tell the difference between Debussy and “Chopsticks.”

  But this editor is unable to make such relatively subtle distinctions, and must have thought the slightest hint of “they’re not like us” especially at the start would lead “modern” readers to throw the book aside in disgust. Perhaps she is correct, but whose fault is it, other than that of academic Grundies and Pecksniffs like herself?

  And his Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in the world and the second largest church of all—eclipsed only by St Peter’s Basilica in Rome? We can read this on a tourist blog:

  The cornerstone was laid in 1892 but the grand plan envisioned by the noted ecclesiastical architect Ralph Adams Cram and the firm of Heins & LaFarge (designers of the legendary City Hall subway station and the Bronx Zoo) has proceeded fitfully, and now, 113 years later, the still unfinished building has fallen on hard times. Most of the grounds are fenced off with nasty looking chain link. The scaffolding still in place for the southwest tower looks like it is rusting on the stonework, and the northwest tower remains un-begun. The north transept was ravaged by fire in 2001, and the cathedral has struggled to recover from that tragic event.

  It is hard to escape the feeling that St John the Divine as a cathedral building is a hopeless cause. It had been about 18 years since my last visit, and in spite of the progress on the south tower (all made at least a decade ago) the cathedral still looks obviously unfinished and is even beginning to show signs of neglect. It stands as a sad, poor relation to other edifices of similar scale, such as the Washington National Cathedral.

  There’s that word again, “hopeless.” As René Guénon relentless documented in The Reign of Quantity, there is no room today for those who would be conditioned not by the quantitative standard but by the qualitative standard.

  Still, like Tradition, the cathedral remains. Someone once said of Evola that “he was our Marcuse, only better.” As for Ralph Adams Cram, the Wild Boy of American architecture: “He was America’s John Ruskin. But our Ruskin could build.”291

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  January 23, 2011

  THE ETERNAL OUTSIDER:

  VEBLEN ON THE GENTLEMAN & THE JEW

  Jack Donovan has done us a great service—or at least, done one for me—in his recent Counter-Currents essay “The Manly Barbarian: Masculinity and Exploit in Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.”292 Veblen being one of those “names” one always hears and sees referred to, I have several time tried to read him, to no avail. As Jack says, it all seems “a lot of rambling, convoluted writing and thinking,” typical of a kind of dated, Edwardian “fine writing” in the social sciences that predates the current mathematical obsession, which replaced purple prose and “elegant variation” with supposedly more scientific “hard” numbers and graphs. As readers of this site know, I’m not afraid of the dense and repetitive writing of James, Lovecraft, or indeed Evola—I even have a theory about it293—but Veblen just seems like a bore in a seersucker suit and straw boater.

  However, Jack’s suggestion that all the good stuff is in the first chapter of Theory appeals to my delight in finding distilled essences in lieu of wading through tedious volumes of old forgotten lore—part lazybones, part decadent aesthete294—and even better, the free sample chapter of one of the Kindle editions at Amazon contains the whole first chapter, as well as some swell pictures of horsies and such like illustrations of “conspicuous consumption.”

  I was particularly struck by his observation that the rest of the book also “suffers from a middle class bookworm’s ressentiment toward both “delinquent” bullies and predatory elitists (who he thinks have a lot in common).”

  Academics like Martha Banta, in her recent Oxford World Classics edition, think otherwise, on both style and value: “Twelve more tightly packed chapters lay ahead, each with insights . . . into . . . our times.” Such insights, according to Banta, include:

  Veblen only overtly reveals his distaste when describing the dogs and horses put on display by members of the leisure class.

  Display of good manners and good forms is a waste of time.

  Modern day gentlemen are merely most discreet than feudal lords who gnawed on beef-bones.

  The craving for gold and diamonds is lacking all social use.295

  Church worship is another form of “honorific waste.”

  Team sports and gambling follow the same impulse that leads to belief in God, since all are based on “animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic creeds.”

  Philanthropy is further proof of social inadequacy.

  Academic honors have little use in the modern world.296

  Reading this, and Jack’s account of Veblen’s sneering views of such “barbaric” pursuits as hunting, etc., made me smell something more specific than a “middle class bookworm’s ressentiment” towards jocks. It occurred to me that I had read something like this before, from a similar period, but in much more vigorous prose (I mean Veblen’s, not Jack’s).

  Then it hit me: Maurice Samuel, author of You Gentiles and The Gentleman and the Jew! Two works that would be classics in the literature of anti-Semitism, but for the fact that Samuel was a Jew, and thought he was defending, nay, writing an encomium to, the bitter, timeless hatred of the Judaic for the goyim.297

  As a reviewer at Amazon says, to Samuel

  Gentiles are not even remotely close to being God-people, but are more like children; they are not as serious and their worldview is shaped by sport. This sporting mentality manifests itself in war, competition, business, religion, scholarship and a host of other worldly activities. Samuel believes that Jews can partake in these affairs as well, but they aren’t as good at it as the Gentiles. This is because Jews see these sporting activities as ridiculous. All activity for a Jew should be directed to religious study and reflection on God. Jews will fight in a war, but only if they have to, and then they want to finish the business as quickly as possible. A Jew, according to Samuel, will never revel in the sporting “rush” from an event as much as a Gentile will. Samuel does make an interesting observation when he examines Plato’s idea of utopia that is found in The Republic. Samuel is amazed that in this ideal society, war still exists. This is because of the sporting mentality. Even in our ideals, we have to have competition through sport.

  Well, there you have it: Western Civilization, from Homer to Hemingway, from Alcibiades to Lee to Patton, just a bunch of dumb as rocks jocks. Think Winkelvoss twins, rowing away like it was Brideshead Revisited, thinking Larry Summers will make Zuckerberg “play fair.”

  It’s not surprising that Veblen and Samuel, each undoubtedly unaware of the other, started to sound the same as they gazed at and puzzled over the Establishment that had rejected them both. They’ve both unconsciously stumbled on the same truth, which we’ve been trying to hammer into the hard heads of the Hard Right for years: Western or Aryan Civilization has its origins not in hard work, strict morality, and family values, but in the primitive Männerbund; art, religion, the military, all arise out of the barbaric play of the Wild Boys. If the Right wants to “conserve” the institutions of the Gentleman, he needs to cultivate Jack’s Barbarian, not, as the neo-cons would advise them, the Mormon Family Man. And of course, if you wanted to destroy our culture, you couldn’t do better than to take Veblen or Samuel to heart and subject it to a “scientific” or “rational” or “moral” regime—and who could object to that?—red
ucing culture to “sensible” things like reproducing or money-making.

  Although after the upheavals of the ’60s we’ve come to think of the Protestant Establishment as, well, The Establishment (The Man, if you will), it must be remembered that they are, after all, Protest-ants. From Luther himself through the Puritans to the New England busy-bodies to the Progressives, there has been a outsider strain in Nordic Protestants, derived from the Judaic elements in Christianity, representing what MacDonald has called an ethical in-group mentality. This is the “I’m an outsider because I’m morally superior” attitude taken up by Veblen which takes him almost entirely onto the side of the Judaic. The Northern WASPs only became “the” Establishment after righteously exterminating the Southern Cavalier class.

  Thus Banta is correct in distinguishing Veblen’s Nordicism from that of the National Socialists, who themselves comprised a fairly broad spectrum from almost New Age pagans like Hess, through Aryan mystics like Himmler, to accomodationists like Hitler. Rosenberg most closely resembles Veblen; one of the most prominent exponents of the so-called German Church (i.e., Christianity without Judaism), he none the less was sufficiently Lutheran to indulge in what Evola found to be the most primitive kind of anti-Catholic, Germans versus Romans rhetoric. As Evola insisted, and we agree, the German nation, like all nations, was a mixture of various racial strains; the task of the racial hygienist is to select the one that is to become dominant; ideally, the least Judaic.

  THE VEBLEN QUESTION

  If Veblen’s complaints about “barbarians” sound like Samuel’s jaundiced Judaic eye on Gentiles, the question arises, was Veblen a Jew?

  Although easily proven not to be, he is, as one of Hermann Hesse’s characters calls Harry “The Steppenwolf” Haller, a “rotten patriot” for a supposed Aryan. Even Banta notices something a little off:

  But although Veblen’s family was of Nordic descent, the emphasis he places upon the ruthless nature of the “dolicho-blond” shares none of the pride later expressed by members of the Nazi Party. Instead, Veblen’s negative remarks anticipate the attacks launched in 1918 by Cyril Briggs, editor of the radical black journal The Crusades, against “the blond beast”—the bloodthirsty, ape-like predator of the “mongrel” European race. (Kindle Loc 222)

  Yes, these ape-like mongrels are truly not “God-people.”

  Even the Jews have asked the question, and quite recently. According to no less a source than “Tzvee’s Talmudic Blog” (aka הבלוג התלמודי של צבי) the question remains:

  Was Thorstein Veblen Jewish?

  No the famous social critic and economist, Thorstein Veblen was not a Jew. He was a Lutheran from Minnesota.298

  Why even raise the issue?

  The reason that we ask is that Wired magazine in an article this month “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up,” by Jonah Lehrer, discusses Veblen’s analysis of Zionism and Jewish intellectualism.

  The results of his thinking 92 years ago, summarized by the magazine, are provocative.

  Indeed. As Wired tells the tale:

  In 1918, sociologist Thorstein Veblen was commissioned by a popular magazine devoted to American Jewry to write an essay on how Jewish “intellectual productivity” would be changed if Jews were given a homeland. At the time, Zionism was becoming a potent political movement, and the magazine editor assumed that Veblen would make the obvious argument: A Jewish state would lead to an intellectual boom, as Jews would no longer be held back by institutional anti-Semitism. But Veblen, always the provocateur, turned the premise on its head. He argued instead that the scientific achievements of Jews—at the time, Albert Einstein was about to win the Nobel Prize and Sigmund Freud was a best-selling author—were due largely to their marginal status. In other words, persecution wasn’t holding the Jewish community back—it was pushing it forward.

  The reason, according to Veblen, was that Jews were perpetual outsiders, which filled them with a “skeptical animus.” Because they had no vested interest in “the alien lines of gentile inquiry,” they were able to question everything, even the most cherished of assumptions. Just look at Einstein, who did much of his most radical work as a lowly patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. According to Veblen’s logic, if Einstein had gotten tenure at an elite German university, he would have become just another physics professor with a vested interest in the space-time status quo. He would never have noticed the anomalies that led him to develop the theory of relativity.299

  Indeed, a provocative thesis.300 It explains why Veblen is suspected of being a Jew: Veblen too was an alienated outsider cynically critiquing White civilization. Furthermore, although Veblen’s thesis is enough to earn the “suspicion” of anti-Semitism through its anti-Zionism, it’s really just another version of the same old vaudeville routine: “without us Jews you goyim are nothing!”

  One wonders how Babylon, Athens, Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire, the Elizabethans, managed to do anything at all. Not a good deli in sight. You might as well kill yourself!

  Moreover, a glance at the great cultural centers of today’s Jewry, New York and Tel Aviv, would easily belie any such notion. Tel Aviv, well, meh. As for New York, its reputation as a world capital of culture and everything else is a function of well-known Jewish logrolling or ethnic networking: J-artists “discovered” by J-gallery owners, pumped by J-critics in J-periodicals, sold for big bucks to J-“patrons” (the ones still whining, after nearly a century, for the “return” of “their” artworks that were liberated by the forces of the European Revolution) and ultimately for bigger bucks to bemused goyishe patrons (blue bloods or Junkers as the case may be); substitute any other area of society ad lib.

  The truth, as always, is exactly the opposite: rather than bringing the light to the benighted Aryan, it is the Aryan who has, always and everywhere, created culture, and the Judaic who, unable to do so, exists only as a parasitical hanger-on, at best; a destroyer, at worst. Any “contributions” have indeed been just that, something added onto a pre-existing Aryan structure, which had been totally absent from native Hebrew society from Genesis to the granting of civil liberties by Napoleon.

  The Judaic is not an “outsider” just coming in to lend a hand or a new pair of eyes; he is an underminer, and so is Veblen, for that matter.301

  Of course at this point someone will bring up “the Moslem contribution to Western Civilization,” which is fine with me, since Moslems are effectively a Semitic people who, like the Romans and Germans, recognized the value of what Athens had created and chose to emulate it, thus earning the eternal enmity of their “brothers” the Judeans. But then, the Judeans hate everybody, always and everywhere; the Romans coined the word “misanthrope” to describe this turbulent race; and the Judean, as always, projects this onto US, making him the innocent victim of an unmotivated, irrational hatred—what Kevin MacDonald has called the “lachrymose” version of Judaic history.302

  At this point someone will also mention Israel. Always the go-to counter-example for stereotypes of Jewish helplessness or ineffectuality—first, after the 1948 land grab (the very first episode of Mad Men shows the Men, all WASPS— “Have we ever hired a Jew? Not on my watch”—shouting and jumping around like school kids over the battle scenes in the movie Exodus—“First they’re in camps, then they’re on the beach with machine guns!”); then, after the “Six Day War” becoming incongruous models of dark, hairy manhood—Woody Allen on the Times Op-Ed page no less, exclaimed, “Jews with machine guns? Come on!”303

  Anyway, the much vaunted, much promoted—by the Judaic-minded media, of course—“Jewish State” is largely a vanity project (more Judaic preening), a paper tiger or Potemkin village:

  No matter what the “Clean Break” document aspires to, Israel’s whole survival strategy has always been to rely on aid from the outside: without the billions that flow from the US Treasury into Israeli coffers, the entire Zionist project would have failed long ago. It has been kept on life support all thes
e years by money from abroad, and by the hopes of the Israeli leadership that more Jews will emigrate to the Promised Land. The main problem, however, is that American Jews are so thoroughly assimilated that the idea of taking up residence in Israel never occurs to them: for American Jews, America is the Promised Land. Aside from that, the appeal of moving to a country that sees itself as besieged—and whose leaders every day assert that they are sitting on the edge of a second Holocaust—is necessarily quite limited.304

  Alas for the Zionists, things have turned out pretty much as Veblen suggested they would.

  THE OUTSIDER AS INSIDER

  But the important work MacDonald and others have done to document the extent of ethnic networking leads to another problem with the Outside Contributor thesis. Even if we granted Veblen the “contributions” of the Jews, due to their outsider status, that would hardly be relevant today, when Judaics dominate all the relevant fields (especially if we consider, and I do, those goyim in name only that Evola would say had a “Jewish soul”).

  How much “outsider” perspective can the Judaic provide, once they dominate a given field?