by Greg Johnson
His most important works, few would argue, are those in his “Outsider cycle.” This sequence of books is comprised of The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat345 (an abridged edition was published in the United States as The Stature of Man346), The Strength to Dream,347 Origins of the Sexual Impulse,348 and Beyond the Outsider.349 A seventh volume, published as both Introduction to the New Existentialism and as The New Existentialism,350 presents the ideas from these books in brief, and can serve as a good summary for those unable or unwilling to read the entire series.
The Craft of the Novel is probably Colin’s most important work of literary criticism. In it he discusses his conception of “Existential Criticism,” in which he held that a work of literature should be evaluated first and foremost on the basis of the ideas and worldview it presents.
In terms of his occult work, The Occult and Mysteries351 are his two primary works, out of many he wrote on the subject. A third, Beyond the Occult,352 seems to have been an attempt by Colin to reconcile his later interest in the occult with his earlier, existential ideas.
A Criminal History of Mankind353 is undoubtedly Colin’s most important work in the area of criminology. New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution354 was the product of his interaction with Maslow, and it examines the idea of the “peak experience” at length. Also important is Frankenstein’s Castle,355 which was Colin’s introduction to split-brain theory.
And lastly, there are his novels. He wrote many, including “novels of ideas,” mysteries, and science fiction. My personal favorites would include Ritual in the Dark, which is about a struggling young writer named Gerard Sorme, who is obsessed with the meaninglessness of life until he begins to worry that a friend of his could be a serial killer who is on the loose in London. Another I enjoyed was The World of Violence356 (published in the US as The Violent World of Hugh Greene357), which is about a young mathematical prodigy, Hugh Greene, who becomes dissatisfied with the intellectual world and becomes attracted to violence, becoming embroiled in a criminal gang, the world of guns, and the hunt for a serial killer. And then there is The Philosopher’s Stone,358 which is set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Colin was enticed into the Lovecraftian world by Lovecraft’s friend and publisher August Derleth, who had challenged Colin to write an earlier novel, The Mind Parasites,359 also a Cthulhu Mythos story. Derleth praised Colin for his efforts. The Philosopher’s Stone is about a scientist, Howard Lester, who is conducting experiments in an effort to extend the human lifespan, but accidentally discovers an operation on the brain which results in greatly enhanced mental powers. As he begins to explore his mind’s new abilities, Lester comes to realize that there are ancient and powerful hidden forces which are seeking to prevent humanity from evolving beyond its current state. Bits of Colin’s philosophy always find their way into his novels.
There is a good anthology of selections from several of Colin’s works intended to introduce his chief ideas entitled The Essential Colin Wilson,360 which was also released as an audiobook. Colin regarded a survey of his work written by Howard F. Dossor, Colin Wilson: The Man and His Mind361 to have been very good, although as it was published in 1990 it was written more than twenty years before the end of Colin’s writing career and is thus incomplete, although it remains worth reading. It has been supplanted by the much more comprehensive book by Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson,362 published in 2016, which will remain the definitive introduction to Colin’s life and ideas for the foreseeable future.
Lastly, Colin’s longtime friend and hardworking bibliographer, Colin Stanley, has published a series of excellent introductions to the major facets of Colin’s work: Colin Wilson’s Outsider Cycle: A Guide for Students,363 Colin Wilson’s ‘Occult Trilogy’: A Guide for Students,364 Colin Wilson’s Existential Literary Criticism: A Guide for Students,365 and An Evolutionary Leap: Colin Wilson on Psychology.366 A fifth volume on criminology is also planned.
I would like to extend my thanks to Colin Stanley, who offered advice on this essay and provided me with information regarding Colin’s obscure occasional writings on politics, and whose exhaustive bibliography367 provided me with many of the citations included here; as well as to Gary Lachman, whose book, Beyond the Robot, helped me a great deal in filling in some of the gaps that were present in the original version of this text.
Revised version, first published as an obituary at
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
December 12, 2013
A BOOK FOR OUR TIMES:
RICARDO DUCHESNE’S
THE UNIQUENESS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
COLLIN CLEARY
1. INTRODUCTION
Every few years I discover a book that is truly great. One that forces me to think in new ways about things familiar, teaches me things I never knew, and inspires in me scores of new ideas and insights. Such a book is Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, which has been my companion now for close to two months.368 It’s a big book (527 pages, including back matter), and it demands a big review.
Please take me at my word when I say that this book is well worth the attention I will devote to it—and well worth your attention as well. In fact, I cannot recall reading any book published in the last two decades that I would judge more significant. Yet you will be surprised to hear that I read it in short installments. I kept having to put the book down to think about its ideas and make notes to myself. It often takes me a long time to get through a book that I find truly exciting.
Duchesne teaches in the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick Saint John in Canada. He is the author of some 36 peer-refereed articles and 13 encyclopedia entries. The Uniqueness of Western Civilization is his first book, but it is apparent both from its size and its scope that it is the fruit of many years of research and reflection. Indeed, by any standard this is a remarkable first book. Duchesne not only surveys and assesses decades of scholarship in world history, his own arguments are formed through an encounter with thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Spengler, and Kòjeve. And his treatment of these thinkers is far from superficial—indeed it is extremely insightful (particularly in the case of Hegel, the most difficult thinker in the bunch). Duchesne’s erudition is impressive, as is the profundity of his ideas.
In sum, this ought to be regarded, by historians and others, as a path-breaking book and treated as an instant classic. But it will not be. Or rather, I should say, it has not been, since it came out in 2011 (though it often takes a while for academic books to get noticed or to have an impact). It has been reviewed in a few places, but has largely been ignored, and will probably continue to be. The reason can be divined from the title: Duchesne wants to argue that the West is unique.
Now, you may be wondering, who would ever challenge such an obvious claim? Why would anyone even need to mount a defense of Western uniqueness? If such questions occur to you, then you are likely an academic virgin. For in today’s world of scholarship—in which a monolithic “political correctness” reigns supreme—not only is the West under attack for its Eurocentrism, imperialism, sexism, racism, heterosexism, and (God help us) phallologocentrism, even the idea of its uniqueness is being challenged. The position of today’s politically correct historians can be summed up as follows: not only are we bad, we’re also nothing special—though we are especially bad.
When I related all of this to a good friend recently, his response was “But isn’t it rather unique that the Europeans, a minority of the world’s population [about 20% in 1800] managed eventually to control almost the entire planet?” One also thinks of such things as the birth of science, philosophy, and participatory government in Greece, the Roman concept of the legal person, the development of mechanical clocks, the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the “New World,” the Protestant reformation, the Enlightenment, the ideal of universal human rights, Beethoven’s nine symphonies, Wagner’s
Ring, the industrial revolution, quantum physics, the moon landing, the harnessing of electricity and nuclear power, the invention of the car, radio, television, computers, airplanes, and motion pictures. And, of course, this is merely a short list of Western accomplishments. Isn’t this enough to indicate not just that the West is unique, but spectacularly, impressively, sublimely unique?
How, then, do these revisionist professors pull it off? (Calling them “revisionists,” as Duchesne does, is more gentlemanly than calling them “politically correct,” so I will use this term throughout the rest of the essay.) Essentially, their strategy is two-pronged. First, and as I shall discuss at some length, they minimize the importance of any Western achievements that are not scientific or technological, or which do not make a direct or obvious impact on economic relationships (this is an outgrowth of the latent Marxism of their position, as well as of a certain vulgar modern materialism). And so, as incredible as it may sound, they deny the importance of such things as Greek philosophy, the ideals of the Reformation and Enlightenment, Beethoven’s nine symphonies, etc. Second, insofar as they acknowledge Western scientific and technological innovations, they assert that these were either borrowed from other cultures, or were developments of ideas or inventions originated by others.
A large portion of Duchesne’s book—almost the first 280 pages—is devoted to countering these positions. Because most honest and well-informed readers will recognize that these are not only highly problematic claims but also flimsy and often dishonest ones, many will find Duchesne’s book slow going. However, those 280 pages contain a careful, painstaking analysis of the revisionists’ claims—and also a complete and total demolition of them. On completing these pages, I had the feeling that if there were any justice in the world, the revisionists should now simply melt into the floors of their lecture halls, like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz. Alas, most of them have tenure, and cannot be gotten rid of so easily.
If Duchesne’s book were devoted simply to a refutation of the revisionist position it would be quite valuable. In fact, however, it is far more ambitious. The second half of the text presents a theory about the sources of the West’s uniqueness. Duchesne argues that Europe has achieved so much because its spirit is profoundly different from that of the rest of the world. Its spirit is “restless”; it is constantly on the move, expanding outwards in all areas, seeking to make the world its own. It abhors restraints of any kind, especially on freedom of thought and individual liberty. Furthermore, it is highly agonal and competitive—even the poets compete with each other. And it is individualistic, honoring the deeds of great heroes and the iconoclasm of the great innovators.
Of course, similar claims have been made—as we shall see—by figures like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler. And Duchesne builds upon their ideas. However, he also goes beyond them. For however true it may be to speak about the West’s spirit such “explanations” are ultimately unsatisfying if what one seeks is a theory of real historical origins: where does this spirit come from exactly? Why is it the West that gave rise to such a spirit? Duchesne’s answers to these questions take us into what is truly the most radical part of his book. He argues that the West’s restlessness and creativity have their origin in the aristocratic, warlike culture of the ancient Indo-Europeans. He writes: “As this book will demonstrate, the primordial basis for Western uniqueness lay in the [Indo-European] ethos of individualism and strife. For Indo-Europeans, the highest ideal was the attainment of honorable prestige through the performance of heroic deeds” (p. x).
2. THE RISE OF THE REVISIONIST HISTORIANS
Duchesne’s first chapter is entitled “The Fall of Western Civilization and the Rise of Multicultural World History.” But what “fall of Western civilization” really refers to is the demise of the old “Western Civ” courses that used to be ubiquitous in academia. In the old days, it was thought that since our students were living and studying in the West, they needed to have a firm grasp of Western culture. Furthermore, the old-fashioned texts used in those classes tended to assert that history exhibited a discernible pattern: a linear trajectory, with the West leading the way. They assumed, in short, an ideal of progress, and were guilty of what is denounced today as Eurocentrism.
All this changed in the 1960s. With the rise of the New Left in the academy, the West was now seen to have advanced through the exploitation of other peoples, which scarcely counts as “progress” at all. “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the 1960s saw the onset of a tidal wave against the idea of progress,” Duchesne writes (p. 23). Cultural relativism, post-colonialism, historicism, deconstruction, and critical theory all converged, with the result that by the 1970s most academic historians had lost faith in Western civilization and in the old progressive interpretation of history.
One of the most influential architects of the new revisionism was the anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927–2001), whose work was heavily influenced by Franz Boas’s cultural relativism. Harris grafted Boas onto Marx, specifically Marx’s theory of the different levels of society, where what we normally refer to as “culture” is held to be a “superstructure” founded upon economic relationships. The result for Harris was not only a rejection of any progressivist and Eurocentric model of history, but the dismissal of all attempts to understand cultures in terms of things not directly connected to the struggle for material survival and prosperity. Harris claimed that this was the only proper consideration, not just because of his Marxist roots but because he insisted that only a consideration of purely material factors could lend a semblance of “scientific objectivity” to the study of culture.
In fact, this is one of the central claims of the revisionists. As Duchesne puts it, they hold that, “the first and most important preoccupation of human life is adaptation to the environment, and that this must be accomplished by creating technological and economic systems. . . . This premise assigns ontological and causal priority to the material conditions of social life. It views the role of ideational factors (philosophies, religious beliefs, art) in terms of their ‘feedback’ effects on these conditions” (p. 321, italics in original). I have already identified this premise as derived from Marxism.
Furthermore, Duchesne observes, correctly, that packed into it is an understanding of human nature as fundamentally passive and reactive. Essentially, the revisionists see human beings as buffeted about by material conditions, and culture as a kind of construct that has arisen as a result of how men have reacted to those conditions. The revisionists will permit no talk of “great men” moved by ideals or motives that transcend the drive for survival and reproduction. For such ideals and motives are vague, unobservable, and impossible to measure. Hence, to build an account of culture or history on them is “unscientific.”
To see the fundamental error in this, imagine how revisionist anthropologists or historians might explain the following situation. Suppose that a husband and wife go out to dinner. Suppose further that there is a complicated dynamic between these two. The wife has complained for years that her husband must always have things his way, and is fundamentally inconsiderate and selfish. She feels that his behavior demonstrates a basic lack of respect for her, and thus she has come over time to deeply resent her spouse. Now, suppose that a table full of revisionist anthropologists and historians observe these two at dinner. At a certain point the husband picks up the salt shaker, which was sitting at the center of the table, sprinkles his food with it, and sets it down beside his plate. Seeing this, the wife reaches out, snatches the salt shaker, and places it beside her. If we ask our tableful of revisionists to explain this behavior, their answer will likely be: “There must be a salt shortage.”
Should we suggest that it might be wise to consider the psychological dynamics of this relationship—the husband’s selfishness and lack of consideration, the wife’s desire for respect and resentment against her husband—we will be told that such considerations are “not objective,” and irrelevant anyway since in fact al
l human motivations relate to material conditions. The revisionists will have based their account on something “objective” all right, but the account misses everything. Duchesne will argue, in fact, that it is impossible to understand culture—especially Western culture—without taking into consideration the ways in which men are motivated by concerns that transcend the material, and physical survival.
Despite these obvious shortcomings, the approach of Marvin Harris and his followers was extraordinarily influential not just in anthropology, but in history and sociology as well. Another key figure in the rise of revisionism is the sociologist Stephen Sanderson, who was greatly indebted to Harris. To cultural relativism and historical materialism, Sanderson added the ostensibly reasonable idea that individual societies must be understood in terms of networks of relationships to other societies. All cultures are interdependent, and none can be seen as standing entirely on its own—especially Western culture. The West, he argued, is not unique: other cultures have achieved most of the things that have been (falsely) credited to the West, and the West has been heavily dependent on what it has borrowed from other cultures.
However, as Duchesne argues at length, these claims are false on two fronts. First, most of the resemblances that revisionists find between the West and other cultures are, predictably, in the area of economics—such as trade practices, the development of commercial networks, etc. But even there the similarities are often quite superficial. Second, though it is undeniably true that the West has learned much from other cultures (demonstrating an openness that is in fact uniquely Western!), it has developed the ideas it has taken from others in ways they never dreamed of. Further, it must be said that the claims made by the revisionists about the achievements of other cultures are often patently dishonest. One revisionist historian, for example, claims that Newtonian mechanics was anticipated by the Chinese! (See p. 173.) Before we come to the dishonesty of revisionism, however, we must first treat more fundamental matters.
