Heritage and Foundations
Page 4
Alain de Benoist
Introduction
From the right? Indeed.41 A French chief of state has said that our fellow citizens wanted to be governed ‘from the centre’. But from the centre of what? From the centre of the left? And how would there even be a left without a right? For the men of the left, the very refusal to speak of the right is a characteristic of the men of the right. The title of this book seems to escape this rule. In reality, this is only half true. Personally, the question of knowing whether I am of the right or not is completely irrelevant to me. For the time being, the ideas supported in this work are to the right; they are not necessarily of the right. I can still quite easily imagine some situations where they could be to the left. It is not the ideas that have changed; the political landscape has evolved. We will see this happen over time. On the other hand, we cannot perpetually sit on the fence. We thus accept this term, right; for words, after all, are not things. And saying that in France, at the end of the 1970s, during an era in which the entire world, or seemingly so, speaks from the left, to be ‘of the right’ is still the best way to be somewhere else.
Jean-François Revel has defined the doctrine of the right as ‘one which by principle and without dissimulation bases authority upon something other than the inalienable sovereignty of the citizens’ (Lettre ouverte à la droite, Albin Michel, 1968).42 This definition seems a little brief to me. It gives rise to the understanding that in the regimes of the left, authority always belongs to the ‘sovereign people’. We have good reasons for doubting this (and Revel certainly has them too). Indeed, it should be admitted that the doctrines of the left develop from those of the right once they have passed into the realm of fact — but that would be unfair. I will not define the right any more by a taste for order and authority. All human society rests on these notions (whatever may have been said previously by those who established them), all power implies a governed minority and a governing majority, and this desire seems the most common thing in the world to me. Ultimately, I will not retain the distinctions made by René Rémond (La droite en France. Aubier-Montaigne, 1963),43 between a traditionalist, monarchist right, a liberal, ‘Orléanist’ right, and a plebiscitary and Bonapartist right. Although they still correspond to a certain reality, these distinctions will not be of any use here.
The minimum minimorum will evidently be to define any current that rejects the left in an explicit manner as being of the right. I would like to introduce a restrictive nuance, however. I hereby define the right, by pure convention, as the consistent attitude to view the diversity of the world, and by consequence the relative inequalities that are necessarily the product of this, as a positive thing; and the progressive homogenisation of the world, extolled and effected by two-thousand years of egalitarian ideology, as a negative thing. I call of the right those doctrines that believe that the relative inequalities of existence induce the relations of force of which historical becoming is the product — and which deem that history must continue — in short, that ‘life is life, that is to say a combat, for a nation as for a man’ (Charles de Gaulle). In other words, in my eyes the enemy is not ‘the left’ or ‘communism’ or even ‘subversion’, but rather this egalitarian ideology whose formulations, religious or lay, metaphysical or supposedly ‘scientific’, have continued to flourish for over two thousand years, whose ‘ideas of 1789’ were but a step, and of which communism and the current subversion are the inevitable outcome.
Of course, this does not mean that all inequality will necessarily be just, in my view. On the contrary, there are numerous inequalities that are perfectly unjust; and often these are ones that our egalitarian society allows to subsist anyway. To profess an anti-egalitarian conception of the world is to believe that diversity is a fact of life, and that this diversity leads to actual inequalities; that society must take these inequalities into account and admit that the value of people in relation to different things is incommensurable from one person to the next. It is to deem that in social relations, this value is essentially measured by the responsibilities that each assumes, relative to their concrete aptitudes; that liberty resides in the effective possibility of fulfilling these responsibilities; that these responsibilities correspond to proportionate rights, and that the result is a hierarchy based upon the principle unicuique suum.44
In a country where everyone recognises that, with rare interludes — the Popular Front, the Mendès-France experiment, etc. — the left has never occupied political power, rare are the men who declare themselves of the right. ‘Maintained for over a century by parties, considerable periodicals, and eminent theoreticians’, observes Gilbert Comte, ‘the right itself no longer offers any readily admitted official representation’. He adds, not without reason: ‘The reluctance of the current right to wear its proper colours certainly does not deceive anyone. Beyond the opportunism, the versatility of individuals, it betrays the persistence of a deep problem, of a kind of moral fracture, even within contemporary France’ (Le Monde diplomatique, January 1977).45
The reticence of the right to define itself as such has numerous causes. The most noble, we will be tempted to say, is an implicit refusal to appear as the representative of a part of the reality of things. The right deeply feels the division of the national community into parts (and parties) as the beginning of what it contests — the commencement of civil war. Consciously or not, it rejects the tendency to give reality a single explanation. It rejects all the great reductive unilateralisms founded on economics, sexuality, race, class warfare, etc. It does not like to put the world in equations. It does not believe in the coherence of a castrated worldview when contrasted against the possibilities of perception that we have — nor does it believe that there is a destiny for divided nations. In the attribution of such labels, it detects a hidden castrating manoeuver. An aftertaste of hemiplegia.
It has been said that the key words of the right’s vocabulary have been discredited by the various fascisms. Let us say instead that this discrediting has been cleverly created and maintained by factions experienced in the diffusion of debilitating and condemning myths. We must be clear about this. We are not in the presence here of an analysis, but of a propaganda. This propaganda consists in assimilating every doctrine that the right affirms, with some vigour, to ‘fascism’, and as a corollary, to define as ‘democratic’ only those regimes that conceive liberty as some kind of statutory free pass for the revolutionary undertakings of the extreme left. By extension, this assimilation to Fascism is applied retrospectively. We thus see Ernest Kahane, from the Union rationaliste, affirm that the œuvre of Gobineau ‘borders on crime’ — which is about as intelligent as accusing Jean-Jacques Rousseau of being responsible for the gulag. Our society thus offers the surprising spectacle of a right that cannot affirm itself as such without being tarred with the brush of ‘fascism’, and a left, and an extreme left, that can at any moment call itself socialist, communist, or Marxist, all the while affirming, of course, that their doctrines have nothing to do with Stalinism, nor indeed with any form of historically realised socialism. Now, if the supporters of diverse varieties of socialism do not feel committed to any of the concrete experiments that have preceded them — and notably to the most criminal among them — I do not see why the modern right, which formally rejects every totalitarian temptation, should have to chastise or justify itself. Before the tremendous nerve of the partisans of a doctrine in whose name more than fifty million people have already been massacred, and who present themselves as nothing less than the defenders of freedom (holding a rose to their heart), liberty herself responds by laughing freely — and continuing on her way.
The right, unfortunately, is most often mute. I have followed numerous televised debates. They always — or almost always — follow the same scenario. Stage right,46 the ‘man of the right’, usually a gentleman of a certain age, well dressed, well groomed, always smiling, full of good intentions, completely unconscious o
f the stakes of the discussion. And stage left, some young wolves of the extreme left, bearers of a worldview having its own consistency, refusing the least concession, versed in the art of dialectic, in the play of paradigm and syntagm, who tear their interlocutor to pieces. I think that current society is a reflection of these debates.
All of this happens in truth as if the right had lost the desire to defend itself. Criticised, harassed, scolded in every way, they remain purely passive — and practically indifferent. Accused, it has retreated into itself. Not only does it no longer respond to its adversaries, not only does it no longer seek to define itself, but it grants almost no attention to this shifting of ideas, to current controversies, to new disciplines. Or rather, it has lost interest in this development of ideas because they move away from what could strengthen it. It neglects the recent results of ethology, genetics, historiography, sociology, and microphysics. In England, the United States, and Germany, more than sixty books have appeared recently on the social and political implications of the new life sciences. In France — nothing, or scarcely anything. The book by A. S. Neill on ‘anti-authoritarian’ education, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing,47 sold more than 260,000 copies. There were numerous refutations abroad. But here, silence. On Konrad Lorenz, on Dumézil, on Althusser, on Lévi-Srauss, on Gramsci, the right seems to have nothing to say. The right could rely upon the writings of Jules Monnerot, Raymond Aron, Debray-Ritzen, Louis Rougier, etc., but curiously, one has the feeling that it is above all by the left that they are read, by adversaries who are more attentive than the presumed enthusiasts. Parallel to this, the left itself, enacting its own perpetual process of calling everything into question, obtains results that the right should have unlocked by its own process of reflection. It is therefore the left, not the right, who critiques the myth of an absolute ‘progress’ linked to the absurd idea of a meaning to history. It is the left who, after having supported the idea that celebration is essentially revolutionary (the thesis of Jean Duvignaud, Fêtes et civilisations. Weber, 1973)48 discerns today that it is above all conservative (the works of Mona Ozouf). It is the left who, after having exalted the hope of equal opportunities in schools, now sees it as a ‘mystification’ (Christopher Jencks, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling. Basic Books, New York, 1972). It is the left that highlights the limits of a reductive, pseudo-humanist rationalism, and observes that the spirit of the masses is more transitional than revolutionary, and so forth. Little by little, the right is dispossessed of its themes and of its mental attitudes. And it even happens that the right criticises these ideas — without exploiting the contradiction of which they are the instance — when they are rediscovered in the ranks of the adversary, without understanding that these ideas have been drawn from their own. At the same time, the right opens the field to all recuperations. Having become dead or frozen, its thought is mended, restored to health, and finally annexed by a left which then becomes more credible than its traditional legacy; it busies itself, not without success, by annexing the right’s themes — themes now ‘neutralised’, and upon which the left performs an inversion of meaning.
In an extremely interesting article on ‘le droite livrée au pillage’ (Le Monde diplomatique, January 1977),49 Paul Thibaud, director of the review Esprit, remarks: ‘certain themes which classically belong to the right reappear with intensity in contemporary thought. The hatred for a falsely universalist abstraction which inspired Burke arose on all sides; the realist feeling for limits, and first of all of death, is a collective obsession that imposes an ecological threat; the value of rootedness in a cultural or geographic particularism has become a commonplace. But this reversal of tendencies appears to proceed without any gain for the intellectual right. All of this occurs within the left. The left plays all the roles, it formulates theses and makes objections to them, launches methods and attacks them. The intellectual contents can only be admitted in connection with the left. All nationalism must be revolutionary, all regionalism can only desire to be socialist. (…) Nothing is more characteristic than the change of status of certain authors today subject to rereading. In confronting their most virulent critics, or marginal ideas, the left renews itself. We henceforth see conferences by the left, or by leftists, on Chateaubriand, Balzac, or Péguy. Sorel comes back from the left wrapped in the baggage of Gramsci. Tocqueville becomes a reference for workers’ self-management.50 The failings of the left seem to be at the root of a new intellectual vitality, an anti-dogmatism that opens striking fields for them which were until then forbidden’.
The sociological right has always manifested a certain reticence before doctrines. And yet, in the best of cases, we have still been able to see a healthy enough reaction against a consistent form of intellectualism that only views life from the perspective of problematisation. Or, as the American social workers say so well (or so badly) — what’s your problem? But today the struggle is unequal. Facing an adversary who advances into battle armed with a fully flourishing ideological corpus, the man of the right is decidedly helpless.
Without precise theory, no effective action. We cannot create the economy without an idea. And above all, we cannot put the cart before the horse. All the great revolutions of history have only served to transpose into facts an evolution already realised, in an underlying way, in the spirit. We cannot have a Lenin without having had a Marx. This is the revenge of the theoreticians — who are only the great losers of history in appearance. One of the tragedies of the right — from the ‘putschist’ to the moderate — is its inability to comprehend the necessity of the long term. The French right is ‘Leninist’ — without having read Lenin. It has not grasped the significance of Gramsci. It has not seen how cultural power threatens the apparatus of the state; how this ‘cultural power’ acts upon the implicit values around which the consensus indispensable to the duration of political power crystallises. It has not realised how direct political attack harvests the fruits of the ideological war of position. A particular kind of right peters out in little groups. Another, parliamentarily strong, always attends to what is most pressing — that is, to upcoming elections. But each time, it loses a little more ground. Due to playing the short game, the right finishes by losing the long game. As to the left, it progresses consistently. It owes this progress to the activity of its parties and its movements. But it owes it even more to the general climate that it has succeeded in creating metapolitically, and by comparison, its political discourse rings more and more true. Now such a task is only possible when a theory has been produced, when a distinct line with precise references has been established. In this there is a ‘theoretical practice’,51 to speak with Althusser. A no before the theory = two nos before the pure application. It would be a grave error to imagine that a right that doesn’t dare to speak its name can maintain its power in the long term, when its silence has let the psychological soil in which it is rooted disappear.
One of the causes of the current malaise is the progressive elimination of the substance of the State. The State depoliticises itself. Not in the sense of ‘politicking’ or ‘party politics’,52 more present than ever. But in the meaning of politics. Of the essence of politics. The State becomes purely administrative. At the same time, it places itself in the position of being reversed by the powers that form themselves outside of it — and against it. The State denies its proper principle, which is a principle of authority and sovereignty, to concern itself essentially with economic and social problems. But people do not live solely for their purchasing power. They live for everything else. Never have we lived in a society so rich. Never has the standard of living of the greatest number of people been so elevated. Never has education been so widespread. At the same time, however, never has unease been so great, never has protest been so strong, never has anxiety reigned so much. The state has become a prisoner of the ‘pleasure principle’: instead of appeasing the demand, every satisfaction given
to those who demand makes it more acute. This is why the State has confined these demands to economic and social spheres. In the spiritual domain, the State no longer says anything, no longer offers anything, no longer exudes anything. It does not trace the outline of any destiny. I say that men, once their elementary needs have been met, aspire to a destiny, aspire to an authority that justifies a project. For only a project can give meaning to their lives. But the State gives no meaning. It furnishes no reasons for living — merely means of existing. (Nothing has value anymore, but everything has a price). And provided this role is no longer fulfilled by the State, it falls to sects, parties, pressure groups, and philosophical societies53 to fulfil it, in disorder and confusion. Expelled from its natural sphere, politics arises everywhere.
In Le complexe de droite and Le complexe de gauche (Flammarion, 1967 and 1969),54 Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra go beyond the simple quip that the man of the right has a completely different gastronomy to the man of the left. They affirm, effectively, that no domain escapes ideology, or rather, escapes the worldview that one inherits or chooses. Everything is neutral outside of man. But within human society, nothing is neutral. Man is an animal that gives meaning to the things that surround him. There are different ways of seeing the world and of being-in-the-world55 (the modes ‘of the right’ and ‘of the left’, as we have it), and they encompass both pure forms of knowledge, as well as intuitive beliefs, emotions, implicit values, daily choices, artistic sensibilities, etc. Let us be clear. I do not truly believe that there are ideas that are of the right and of the left. I think that there is a way of sustaining these ideas that is of the right and of the left. (The defence of ‘nature’ is no longer of the right or of the left, but there is a way of apprehending the concept of nature from the right and from the left). The arts, literature, fashion, symbols and signs, nothing escapes the interpretation that a specific worldview is prone to give. In general, the individual of the left has understood this, and this is what furnishes their methodological superiority. They know what they should think, from their point of view, about the relations of production in the feudal era, about abstract painting, cinema vérité, quantum theory, or the forms of public housing. Or at least, they know that on these points as on any other, the theory that they lay claim to has something to say. The man of the right, however, is too frequently content to shrug his shoulders. He does not want to see so that he does not have to do. I feel that the right will have progressed immensely when it has: (1) understood the necessity of declaring what it is; (2) identified its ‘principle enemy’, that is to say, egalitarianism, the denier and reducer of the world’s diversity; and (3) admitted that nothing in existence is ‘neutral’, and that it must produce its own discourse on every subject.