The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  These guilds were incorporated in the constitution of Servius Tullius, 6th king (575-535 BC.).129 However, the Church did not rely on Greek or Roman precedence. The organic character of the Church had been explained by Saint Paul, using the analogy of the human body when writing of the body of the early Church:

  “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable… its parts should have equal concern for each other… Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it”.130

  The whole of chapter 12 of Corinthians is an explication of the corporatism that was to become during the 19th and early 20th centuries the basis of Catholic social doctrine.131 Paul writing of the organisation of the body of the Church explained that there are “differences in administration” and “diversities of operations”, but undertaken under the one lordship.132 However, every member of the Church body is a manifestation of the same spirit.133 Within this spiritual body there is a diversity of talents, but all work within that body,134 without resentment for not having the talents of another, since all are essential.135 Therefore, since all are parts of the one body, if one part causes schism, the whole suffers. Therefore “the members should have the same care one for another”. 136 It was the Reformation, Liberalism and Marxism that caused “schism” on the social body, fracturing the Western psyche; the social doctrine of Catholicism from the 19th century attempted to address these social cancers.

  At the formative stage of Western culture, guilds were established in England, France and the Low Countries by the 7th century. Something of the character of the guilds can be discerned by their apprenticeship system, in comparison to the child labour of later years:

  “The apprentice had to remain from three to ten years in a condition of entire dependence under a master, in order to be qualified to exercise his trade as a journeyman. Before a master could engage an apprentice, he had to satisfy the officers of the guild of the soundness of his moral character. He was to treat the boy as he would his own child, and was held responsible not only for his professional, but also for his moral, education. On completing his apprenticeship, the young artisan became a journeyman (compagnon); at least, such was the rule from the fourteenth century onward. To become a master, he must have some means and pass an examination before the elders”.137

  In Germany, guilds began to flourish by the 12th century. In Saxony and Bohemia mining guilds became significant. The statutes of the mining guilds show that conditions were established for hygienic, ventilation of the pits, precautions against accident, bathing houses, working hours (eight hours daily; sometimes less), supply of the necessaries of life at fair prices, wage scales, care of the sick and disabled, etc.138 The guilds in England were suppressed in the 16th century, being seen as a challenge to the spiritual authority of The Reformation. Of the attempts to revive the guilds during the 19th century, there was perhaps none so vehemently opposed to what he called “reactionism” as Karl Marx. The return to an organic society would have derailed Marx’s historical dialectic of class struggle, and rolled back his perception of the “wheel of history”, which rolls undeviatingly in a straight line over a cliff edge:

  “The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant. All these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat”.139

  Among the “reactionist” efforts, Pope Leo in his Encyclical of 1891 addressed the antagonism between employers and employees, offering the return of the organic state as the alternative for what he saw as the equally Godless and materialistic forces of “socialism” and capitalism that were fracturing the West:

  “Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labour, nor labour without capital”.140

  In contrast to the inorganic conceptions of the State by Protestantism, Marxism and Liberalism, the philosopher Paul Carus, in addressing the question of whether the State is only legitimate as a “social contract” among individuals, according to Liberal doctrines, explained that the “State” emerges from an organic development of a community of interests:

  “Common interests create a common will, and as soon as this common will becomes consciously organised by habits, traditions, and the ordinances of those who have the power to enforce them, by written or unwritten laws, by acts of legislatures, or similar means, the primitive social life enters a higher phase of its evolution: it changes into a State”.141

  The State is founded on much more than laws or economic (class) relations; it is an expression of a collective soul:

  “The State is not constituted by laws and institutions alone; the State is based upon a certain attitude of the minds of its members. The existence of a State presupposes in the souls of its citizens the presence of certain common ideas concerning that which is to be considered as right and proper. If these ideas were absent, the State could not exist”.142

  Again the situation shows that from the Medieval epoch, and the destruction of the traditional organic social order, there was a colossal deterioration. Carus critiques the Liberal dogma of the State existing to merely serve as an arbiter among individualistic interests. Carus uses the analogy of organic growth in describing the growth of the State. While he stated that the 18th century Liberal doctrine had become “obsolete”, he was writing at a time (circa 1900) when the creative role of the State was being reconsidered. In the aftermath of World War II the Liberal theory has resumed its dominance until it is regarded today by its ideologues such as being on the brink of world dominance. Carus proceeds:

  “As a factor in the development of States the conscious aspiration of individuals for their ideals even, in practical life, cannot be estimated high enough; for this factor has grown in prominence with the progress of the race, and it is growing still. In the explanation of the origin of States, however, this very factor can most easily be overrated, and it has been overrated, in so far as some savants of the eighteenth century, the great age of individualism, have proposed the now obsolete view that States are and can be produced only by a conscious agreement among individuals, which, however, they grant, may be tacitly made. And this theory found its classical representation in Rousseau’s book, Le contract social, in which the existence of the State is justified as a social contract. This is an error: States develop unconsciously and even in spite of the opposition of individuals; and it is a frequent occurrence that the aspirations of political or other leaders do not correspond with the wants of their times. Thus it so often happens that they build better than they know, because they are the instruments of nature. The growth of States is as little produced by conscious efforts as the growth of our bodies. Conscious efforts are a factor in the growth of States, but they

  do not create States. A State grows solely because of the need for its existence. Certain social functions must be attended to; they are attended to, and thus the State is created as the organ of attending to them”.143

  Although there have been States created through legalistic processes, such as in particular the USA with its constitutional foundations, whose “Founding Fathers” were children of the Enlightenment, Carus insisted that,

  “The existence of Empires and States does not rest upon the final resolutions passed at the time of their foundation, but u
pon the common will of the people, which, such as it is, has been shaped in the history of national experiences. The United States developed in spite of the individualistic clauses of its founders…”144

  Where Marx and Rousseau only saw the state as a reflection of relations between classes or individuals respectively, Carus accepts that the State is a reflection of “God”, insofar as it is a part of the unfolding of God’s laws expressed in nature. It is a “reflection of a moral empire” that “reveals the nature of that All-power, which religious language hails by the name of God”.145 He revives the traditional perception of the State as a reflection of the divine:

  “When we grant that the State is a divine institution, we mean that its existence is based upon the un-alterable laws of nature. All facts are a revelation of God; they are parts of God and reveal God’s nature; but the human soul and that moral empire of human souls called the State are more dignified parts of God than the most wonderful phenomena of unorganised nature”.146

  “For the purified conception of Christianity is monistic; it regards natural phenomena as the revelations of God, and the voice of reason as the afflatus of the Holy Ghost. The State is a human institution, but as such it is as divine as man’s soul; the State should not consist of rulers and ruled subjects, but of free citizens. And yet we must recognise the truth that the State is a superindividual power, and that the laws of the State have an indisputable authority over all its members”.

  Hence the state is “organic” in the sense that it is a superorganism that coordinates into one body – the body politik - the constituent cells (individuals) and organs (classes). Any intrusion, such as Liberalism, Marxism and Capitalism, is a social pathology. Such ideologies literally destroy the harmonious functioning of the cells and organs of the social organism, and are therefore social cancers. Carus writes that the organic State does not invariably maintain divine perfection any more than the individual soul:

  “When we say the State is divine, we do not mean to say that all the ordinances of government are, a fortiori, to be regarded as right. By no means. We might as well infer that because man’s soul is divine all men are saints, and their actions are eo ipso moral. Oh, no! The State institution, as such, and the human soul, as such, are divine; they are moral beings and more or less representative incarnations of God on earth”.147

  One modern economist who does capture the spirit of the Medieval era, writing of Nuremberg, states that Medieval man saw himself not as an isolated unit but as “part of a larger organism”.148 Bliss states that to the Nuremberger (or Medieval man) “competition is the death of trade, the subverter of freedom, above all, the destroyer of quality”.149 The Reformation was more disruptive as a social pathogen on the Western social organism than any political revolution.

  Professor Howard Wiarda in his history of corporatism states of the Liberal, Enlightenment era that is the basis of our present epoch, that it fractured the social organism. While it is “individual rights” that were from then to the present lauded as the ultimate in human aspiration, they came at the cost of “group rights”, the rights of association that had served as the social foundation of High Culture:

  “The emphasis on the individual and on individual rights accelerated in the West during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; in the course of the French Revolution beginning in 1789, and subsequently throughout most of the rest of Europe, group rights (of the Roman Catholic Church, guilds, and other groups) were extinguished. Thereafter, at least in the West, the atomistic individual ruled supreme, while the older system of historic or natural corporatism was snuffed out”.150

  Until the French Revolution, royalist France was an organic, corporatist state.151 A 16th century Church document explained the doctrine of the organic state where “the head is the king. The arms are the nobility. The feet are the third estate… the clergy is the heart. The three estates are members of one body, of one province which is mother to them all”.152 Professor Kennedy in his history of the French Revolution commented that “one man is seen equal to another”, and that “although the members perform different functions, they are integrated organically into one body”.153 How very different was the traditional hierarchy of the West to the money-based, greed-oriented, ego-driven ideology that has dominated Western Civilisation since the tumults of The Reformation, English Puritan Revolution, French Revolution, and Industrial Revolution, each one a phase in the continuing rise of oligarchy over the traditional hierarchy.

  The Value of Tradition

  Our “progressive” obsessions for change neglect to consider consequences. Change is demanded for the sake of a fad or a slogan: “equality”, “democracy”, “reproductive rights”... Even a word of caution is damned as “reactionary”, “old fashioned”, or “fascist”. Traditions, customs, beliefs, are regarded as being as transient as the planned obsolescence of computers. Carl Jung made the point that Western man’s psyche is not keeping pace with his technology. The levels of our unconscious are multi-layered, reaching back to primordial existence, yet Western technology has exponentially leaped ahead leaving behind any anchorage of tradition. That is called “progress”. Jung wrote of this:

  “Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The ‘newsness’ of the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no place in what is new. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in things that have just come into being. We are certainly far from having finished with the middle ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged into a cataract of progress which sweeps us into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it take us from our ranks. The less we understand of what our forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts”.154

  Konrad Lorenz, the father of the science of ethology, the study of animal instinct, gave a warning from an ecological viewpoint, that the abandonment of customs and traditions is steeped with dangers which are likely to be unforeseen. Culture is “cumulative tradition”.155 It is knowledge passed through generations, preserved as belief or custom. The deep wisdom accrued by our ancestors, because it might be wrapped in the protection of religions and myths, is discounted by the “modern” as “superstitious” and “unscientific”. Lorenz referred to the “enormous underestimation of our nonrational, cultural fund, and the equal overestimation of all that man is able to produce with his intellect” as factors “threatening our civilization with destruction”. “Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance”, stated Lorenz. Writing at a time when the New Left was rampant, as it is today under other names, Lorenz observed that the attitude of youth towards parents shows a great deal of “conceited contempt but no understanding”.156 Lorenz perceived a great deal of the psychosis of the Left as a pathogen in the social organism, as it remains today: “The revolt of modern youth is founded on hatred; a hatred closely related to an emotion that is most dangerous and difficult to overcome: national hatred. In other words, today’s rebellious youth reacts to the older generation in the same way that an ‘ethnic’ group reacts to a foreign, hostile one”.157

  What is of interest is that Lorenz saw this as a youth subculture that was tantamount to a separate, foreign ethnos, when a group forms around its own rites, dress, manners and norms. In the biological sciences this is called “pseudospeciation”. With this new group identity comes a “corresponding devaluation of the symbols” of other cultural units.158 The obsession with all that is regarded as “new” among the youth revolt was described by Lorenz as “physiological neophilia”. While this is necessary to prevent stagnation, it is normally gradual and followed by a return to tradition. Such a balance however is easily upset.159 Fixati
on as the stage of neophilia in the psychology of individuals results in behavioural abnormalities such as vindictive resentment towards long-dead parents.160

  This lack of respect for tradition is aggravated by the breakdown of traditional social hierarchy, mass organisation and “a money-grabbing race against itself”161 that dominates the Late West.

  Since Lorenz wrote of these symptoms of Western decay during the 1970s the Western social organism has increasingly fractured. There are now the presence, vastly greater than in Lorenz’s time, of actual ethnoi that have no attachment to the West, but maintain a great resentment. There is also further pseudospeciation among women in terms of radical feminism and “gays”, possessing their own manners, rites, dress, terms of speech, and even their own flags and other symbols. They are united in their hatred of the West, which is often denigrated as “white patriarchy”; with its symbols being torn down162 and its heroes ridiculed as “dead white males”.

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  1 Two particularly cogent expressions of the traditionalist outlook are the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, and in our Western Civilisation the poems of W. B. Yeats.

  2 Julius Evola (1898-1974) wrote on historical cycles from a traditionalist outlook. His perspective might most readily be compared to the Ancient Vedic, with a focus on the divine origins of caste, and on the “cosmic” or dharmic duty of the warrior caste. Evola was the Italian translator of Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West).