Western Culture, 2000 AD (or is it CE?)

Decades ago, Ortega y Gasset had warned us: “The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the generic human being as such, is no longer a juridical idea, but a psychological state inherent in the average man.” Well, are average man and woman happy? Judging from Almodóvar’s film, not in the least.

And there is more.

A hugely popular recent film reveals another aspect of western culture, possibly more alarming. Titanic tells the fictitious story of a star-crossed love aboard the doomed ship on her maiden voyage. The heroine is betrothed to a rich but callous man for reasons of convenience. However she falls in love, head over heels, with a clandestine passenger, a boyish and penniless painter. As the ship sinks, the rich man selfishly saves himself at the expense of a woman or child, whereas the poor man sacrifices his life so as to save the heroine’s. Millions and millions of young and not-so-young women have wept all the tears they had as they watched this. What do we have here? A clear anti-materialistic message? Yes, but most of all we have a reshuffling of the age-old Tristan myth. Western culture in the year 2000 is, by and large, no longer Christian, yet not secular either. It is, however unknowingly, Manichaean.

Manichaeism is hinged on a dualistic division of the universe into contending realms of good and evil: the realm of Light (spirit), ruled by God, and the realm of Darkness (matter), ruled by Satan. The two have become mixed and engaged in a perpetual struggle. The human race is a result and a microcosm of this struggle. The human body is material, therefore evil; the human soul is spiritual, a fragment of the divine Light, and must be redeemed from its imprisonment, both in the body and the world. In this world of matter, pure (spiritual) love cannot exist. Therefore, it can only be had in the afterworld. Hence, Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet, etc.

Contemporary western audiences weep at Titanic in unconscious recognition of their shortcomings and failures. Drawing from their own experiences, they recognize that pure love cannot be had in this world, and identify with the star-crossed lovers. Despite their freedom in selecting their spouse; despite the possibility of amending mistaken choices by divorcing and remarrying over and over, western man and woman long for a love of a purity that, they realize in spite of themselves, cannot be had in this materialistic world, but only in the afterworld. Since most of them do not quite believe in life after death, however, this becomes a modern degeneration of Manichaeism, with a strong nihilistic tinge.

Decadence is a comparative concept. Tremendous forces insist in showing us a rosy picture. “Progress,” this term of more than ordinary vagueness, has conscripted many powerful allies down the centuries. Indeed, the whole problem began in Florence, about six centuries ago.

Some jewelers on the Ponte Vecchio were asked to hold gold in their safes by friends and clients. Noticing that the amount of gold removed by owners was only a fraction of the total stored, they realized that they could temporarily lend out some of this gold to citizens in need, obtaining a promissory note for principal and interest. This was the very beginning of the modern banking system. Indeed, the first modern currency was the Florin, employed throughout Europe. Thus usury was legalized by governments, and became banking. This sealed the end of what I call The Age of the Spirit, but modern world calls The Dark Ages.

Yet, progressive propaganda teaches us that the Renaissance was just that: a rebirth. By intellectualizing man, and withdrawing his soul, Descartes rebelled against the magnificent edifices that Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and to a lesser extent the chronically confused Giordano Bruno, had built. (Della Mirandola attempted to fuse Christianity with Neo-Platonism and the Cabala; Ficino “limited” himself to Christianity and Neo-Platonism; Bruno attempted to revert to Egyptian magic [apocryphal, as it transpired].)

Later on, Enlightenment further consolidated man in his self-appointed throne, along with whatever was deemed useful in Newton’s physics. (It must be emphasized that Newton was much involved with alchemy, but this would not have been an ally to progress). Then came the -isms, and progress triumphed utterly: Mechanism, Darwinism, Positivism, Determinism, Modernism, and their inevitable offspring: Existentialism, Atheism, Nihilism—Western Culture, A Festival of -Isms.

In other words, six centuries ago man began to seek God in his own navel. Not finding Him, he continued to explore, albeit in the wrong place. In the end, he forgot even what he was originally seeking, and all he could show for his quest was . . . nothingness. From this, he declared that, having found nothing, there was nothing to find, and God, or the Godhead, were inventions of primitive cultures. The word “superstition” became fashionable; reason, a fetish.

Anthropocentric, unsubordinated man left to his own devices reminds me of an anaplastic cell, the cancer cell that invades and destroys the surrounding tissue, or system.

Loss of subordination to a spiritual authority came hand in hand with loss in subordination to a temporal authority.

“The problem of Power,” wrote Ortega y Gasset, “is the problem of Sovereignty, and the problem of Sovereignty is the problem of Legitimacy. Power is effective, valid and just, not abusive, if it is based on a legitimate Sovereignty. As such, it is naturally, spontaneously, even intimately recognized by all who are bound to it. Yet, a few paragraphs above, I quoted: “The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the generic human being as such, is no longer a juridical idea, but a psychological state inherent in the average man.” And the average man is he whose life lacks any purpose; he who makes no demands on himself; he who does not transcend, but rather slides down the easy slope, or simply goes drifting along.

Read More in New English Review:
Posthumanism and Moral Myopia
Dear Hollywood Celebrities
American History and American Identity

“Traditional” civilizations, unlike “modern” ones, were based on a different vision of the world. Reality was sacred and spiritual, as opposed to material and materialistic. Consequently, Power, Authority and Sovereignty were not based on the number of votes (which would have been a very outlandish concept indeed), but on a superior and metaphysical origin. In a society living in the time of myth, the divine origin of Power was not absurd, as any contemporary bien pensant would have it, but natural. It was not an abstract, but a concrete and indeed factual concept. The person who incarnated it, the King or Queen, the Monarch, had a twofold function. Not only did he govern his subjects, but was also a go-between with the Authority that, from above, legitimated his power. He or she was, in other words, a pontifex, a bridge-maker.

The Catholic pope is still considered a pontiff, a pontifex, but from the inception of the Christian Church this concept was misapplied. When the Holy Roman Empire was born in 800, its first Emperor was not a pope, but Charlemagne. This fracture between Spiritual and Temporal Power has caused wars, blood-baths and man-made calamities since.

HRH Queen Elizabeth II is “by the Grace of God, Defender of the Faith,” although not the Head of the Anglican Communion, as the latter has no central authority and no one person from whom it can expect final authority. Rather, it consists of national, autonomous churches that are bound together by ties of loyalty between the see of Canterbury and each other. This is due to historical reasons, of course. But, as Defender of the Faith, Queen Elizabeth II is the closest incarnation of a Traditional, and metaphysical, form of Authority. As is to be expected, many, many forces have been at work in the Twentieth Century so as to undermine Her Authority. This is a pity, for She represents a miracle of Tradition in an otherwise degenerated world.

Liberals may now trumpet their slogans and stock phrases. But they must be reminded, once more, of what Ortega y Gassett wrote:

Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the person of excellence, and not the common person, who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for her/him unless (s)he makes it consist in service to something transcendental . . . This is life lived as a discipline—the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us—by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige.

Yet, in this self-satisfied age in which ordinary man presumes to govern himself, we have become acquainted with a new set of afflictions. Never before have the masses been afflicted by the degradations of affluence. Insomnia; obesity, and its Phase 2: anorexia and bulimia; manic and chronic depression; drug addiction; alcoholism; autoerotic deaths, and so on. Unsubordinated, anthropocentric, listless people in the rich world realize that they are sick of themselves and of what they have worked so hard to surround themselves with. The mentioned degradations seem to them the only options. One might say that they need dope to counteract the impact of all their labor-saving devices. And those free from these afflictions can easily be complacent robots, food tubes.

One of the many casualties of this climate of self-destruction and nihilism is prayer. The West no longer prays. On the other hand, Moslem nations pray five times a day, and then more. A semi-serious hypothesis has come to mind time and again. Could it be that, in response to their fervent prayers, the Arab nations were granted immense oil-fields, as if they were a manna, while the non-praying West produced its various industrial revolutions, which made this liquid hydrocarbon so all-important? It would be a meta-historical instance of retroactive praying. The response to their supplication was under the feet of the faithful, already. But it took the West to “activate” this long-granted response.

Does this mean that praying is advisable? By all means, and not merely for selfish reasons, obviously. Praying, kneeling before the Godhead, sanctions one’s subordination to a Transcendental Authority. The goal in one’s life is outside it, beyond it. Transcendence makes us yearn for God and this goal at once. They may well be one and the same. As Queen Elizabeth II a-scended to the throne, so can we tran-scend our insulated egos and short-sighted desires. This is the life of the pilgrim, or, as the Sufis call it, the Tariqa. Transcendence implies subordination to a higher principle, and yet the elevation, and sanctification, of one’s life.

But the intelligentsia sanctifies, with awards and promotion of all types, the glorification of degradation. There is an intrinsic anti-transcendental meaning in the very word. To degrade, from the Latin de- de- gradus- step. To transcend, on the other hand, derives from trans- trans- scandere to climb.

When man was created, he could not help being jealous of the birds. Flying along invisible lines, they soared as high as he could see, and migrated to distant lands he could only imagine. Since he could not fly, he started to dream. In time, he began to build temples. But a more compelling drive was inside him.

He became a pilgrim.

His necessity to integrate the cosmic course made him contemplate, consider the flickering course of the stars. The very words say it: contemplate, from con- templum (a space for observing auguries); consider, from con- sidera, with the stars.

Solar in his conception of the sacred, but also seeking the complementary lunar principle, all he needed was to align his path with the invisible tellurian forces along which shrines of all types have been erected down the ages.

May we all start on a pilgrimage, reach our destination, and go well beyond it.

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Guido Mina di Sospiro was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an ancient Italian family. He was raised in Milan, Italy and was educated at the University of Pavia as well as the USC School of Cinema-Television, now known as USC School of Cinematic Arts. He has been living in the United States since the 1980s, currently near Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books including, The Story of Yew, The Forbidden Book, and The Metaphysics of Ping Pong.

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