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Acolytes in the Temple of Iron

Battle of Augustodunum, Peter Dennis

You may admire the past – but you wouldn’t want to live in it. This is the most basic repudiation of traditionalism. Life before the modern era was painful, squalid and short. It is thus self-evident that to any progressively minded individual that the crowning achievement of modernity is the longevity and painlessness of contemporary existence. More people are living longer than ever, it is an undeniable fact. The once terrifying scourge of plagues and famines have been nullified, and this was achieved without the help of any God. We have abandoned faith in the divine who no longer can harm us and replaced it with our unquestioning belief in the doctor, the medical researcher, and the pharmaceutical company. These are the new high priests and preachers of a transhumanist utopia which promises a future where every human imperfection can be solved and even improved upon by rational and technological means. Adherence to this cult is now so pervasive that healthcare has become a shibboleth which makes and breaks our governments. We have gleefully trampled on the past in the hysterical stampede towards this new promised land, but in doing so have we blinded ourselves to the possibility that modernity itself may be sick?

While on the surface it seems that the inexorable march of modern medical progress has been an objective and linear improvement in the human lot, there is trouble in paradise. We are faced with being the first generation that may not live as long as parents, not owing to some new and insidious disease or cataclysmic war – but largely because the ravages of plenty have overtaken modern medicine’s ability to deal with them. Diabetes and heart disease are exploding as a result of obesity which is a product of our own gluttony and laziness. The addiction to killing the pain in our life has caused many to kill the pain for good, with deaths from legal drugs now surpassing deaths from illicit substances in many regions; a trend starkly demonstrated by recent reports of an epidemic of deaths attributed to the powerful painkiller fentanyl. While polio, smallpox and measles may have vanished from our collective fears, the rise of chronic diseases is becoming more and more apparent. Crohn’s, Celiac Disease, fibromyalgia, asthma, diabetes and Lupus have now become the consumption and venereal disease of our time. They may not kill – but they are leaving a whole generation of youth locked into a life of pain and despair, with no solution from our new medical overlords in sight.

The picture is even darker for young men, who have now been confirmed as on average possessing less grip strength than their grandparents; coupled with testosterone levels and sperm counts which are in dramatic and largely unexplained freefall. These problems almost pale into insignificance when compared to the tsunami of mental health problems which have washed over society, with rates of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia skyrocketing to the point they have produced the grim and highly revealing statistic that suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK. It may be the case that modernity has extended our life span, but in doing so it has created lives which many do not actually want to live. The God of new medicine has proven to be as seemingly arbitrary and unmoved by human suffering as the wrathful Lord of the Old Testament. Modernity has failed to live up to its end of the bargain; the promise of an easy path to self-mastery has proved a hollow one. The acceptance of the lie has been aided by the disingenuous soothsayers of modern leftism who have consistently reassured us that humans beings are raw clay, open to being entirely re-worked by technology and ideology.

It may even be the case that modern attitudes have in fact impeded genuine medical progress. It is widely known that the precipitous rise of antibiotic resistant diseases has sprung from modern profligacy with the overuse of antibiotics. It is also true that the major medical breakthroughs that fuelled the rise in life expectancy: the discovery of insulin, the creation of penicillin, the development of anaesthetics are all breakthroughs which pre-date the Second World War, and whether they can even be truly considered ‘modern’ at all is up for debate. Their discoverers may in fact be the inheritors of the more rigorous scientific standards of the Enlightenment, not the products of the affirmative action riddled, subjectivist, and market driven scientific field of today. A new and compelling medical nihilism is developing among some sections of the former faithful, who are daring to question our secular religion, such as Jacob Stegenga and his upcoming book on the topic.

Yet our crusade against the blind and unquestioning belief in modern medicine is not fundamentally based on its efficacy. It does not derive from sour grapes at the fact it has failed to increase our life span to a hundred fifty years; nor is it grounded in disappointment that not one human organ can be replaced by a better synthetic alternative. Our objection is much more fundamental than that. The entire basis of the modern worship of the physician is rotten, not because they can’t achieve what they claim, but because even if they could it would be meaningless. Life is not a game where living another year is an end in itself. Age is not a scoring system. A long life is not necessarily a good life. The modern obsession with clinging to life at all costs has smothered the flame of the heroic impulse, it has rendered us all cowards. Even more damagingly, modern medicine’s quest to delay death has distracted us from our true foe: human entropy. The human experience is one where we are locked in a constant and unending battle with the limits of our own physical and intellectual capabilities. Life is a series of attacks and counter-attacks by the human will battling against the natural decay which we are subjected to. The heroic path in life is not to pray impotently to the medical monolith, hoping it will cure your problems – it is to take your destiny in your own hands. We cannot transcend death, but we may be able to transcend our own limitations.

This notion is not a popular one in today’s society. We have opted to prostate ourselves, grovelling meekly to foolhardy doctors and amoral pharmaceutical companies because most people today have abandoned the unyielding fight against human entropy. They have not only embraced and accepted their own physical and intellectual failings but have sought to make virtues of them. This is why to point out obesity is ‘fat shaming’. It is why the veneration of disability and victimhood is everywhere manifest in society. It is the reason the quest to seek real and meaningful knowledge and to not hand hold those without the capacity is deemed exclusionary and elitist. Even implying that people create their own problems and are at least in part responsible for managing their own health is considered reactionary. The assertion that it is what you do in life, and not how long you live is an explosive challenge which the coddled and craven find deeply uncomfortable. It is time to re-state a primordial truth which may be deeply troubling for those loyal to the necromancers and butchers of the modern medical establishment. Life has no inherent meaning, it is given meaning by our struggle to achieve self-mastery against the constant whirling tides of misfortune, decay, disease and violent opposition.

A whole generation of young men have simply rotted and withered away awaiting the transhumanist utopia promised by modernity and the Left. A hundred years ago the flower of European youth died in the blood and mud of the Great War. A century later that youth is fat, weak, depressed, and fundamentally unfulfilled – it has been stultified almost beyond salvation. The death in the trenches has been replaced with the purgatory of spiritual death. Idleness is killing society as surely as warfare did. The human spirit yearns to test itself against the limits of life, to be allowed to strive for greatness, to burn with the brightness of youthful vitality. Modernity offers us only the fear and temptation of death, the goal of doing nothing but simply staying alive for the sake of it and the sweet release of the ending the boredom of a life lived in such way. The average life expectancy of a Roman was 25, yet their lack of longevity did not preclude their greatness – in fact it contributed to it. The choice of a painful death in the service of glory and greatness, or the ‘easy’ death amid clinical surroundings of a local hospital is a false dichotomy. Living entails pain; dying entails pain. It is time to stop buying into the modernist belief it can be avoided, but instead meet the prospect of our own mortality head on.

It is long past time to completely reject the failed church of modernity: its promises have been laid bare. It is now the time to live like the Roman; to embrace the spirit of the youth who a century ago chose to charge machine guns rather than to petrify and decay. It is time to don your robes and become acolytes in the Temple of Iron, to adopt the credo of Yukio Mishima and the Golden One that we must make savage the body and civilise the mind. Step out of the shadows and dispel the fear of death, laugh in the face of those who are vainly demanding clemency and that nature itself abide by the imaginary laws of equality. Wear your body with pride, and always seek self-betterment. Be the first to point out that modernity is sick, and we acolytes in the Temple of Iron are healthy.

Sparks from the Golden Anvil: How to Save Western Civilization

February 18, 2018 / admin / 1 Comment

Joseph Derby Wright, The Iron Forge

An awakening has taken place in European consciousness. Never before have so many minds almost independently concluded that there is something deeply and irreparably wrong with the system that rules them. Whether in Hungary, Austria, or the United Kingdom an irrepressible torrent of revolutionary spirit is threatening to break the dam of modernist thought. The primal, inchoate and unshakable desire to revolt against the modern world has spread across Europe like a series of lightning strikes. To capture and direct this tumultuous raw energy requires two fundamental things: to understand our enemy, and to know how to defeat it. Those claiming intellectual leadership of this nascent movement for the renewal of the European spirit have so far failed to provide a coherent vision of who our foe is or how to beat them. If we want to succeed, we have to change this now. It is time to develop a plan that can save Western civilization from its manifold enemies.

But before we can do that, we must ask who are these enemies? It is obvious to almost everyone that modernity is the enemy of a continued European way of life. But what is modernity? The orthodox view for many in the movement is that modernity is simply a point in time – it is the present and everything that has been created in the present. Modernity by this definition is reduced to skyscrapers, computers, automated factories, big tech and global government. Thus, if our enemy is the notion of technological progress, then all we need to do to defeat it is to simply go back in time. Mass migration, big government, the destruction of the family unit, and the death of religion have all happened in the present – therefore the material conditions of modern life must be the cause of these ills. To put it simply, the plough is innately more noble than the combine harvester, the oast house is more beautiful than the modern brewery.

To those content with this superficial account, an understanding of a purely technological explanation seems like a solid foundation to save Western civilization. But it is a foundation built on a misunderstanding. Those who accept this line of thought are confusing medium and message. The modern world is not evil because it has skyscrapers or computers. We are not engaged in a battle with an architectural style or an economic system – but with an ideology that has injected itself into every facet of our lives. To subscribe to technological determinism is to put European man in the role of permanent museum curator. True traditionalism is honouring and understanding the achievements of the past but having the will to build on and surpass them. The original European Renaissance was wrought by those who looked upon antiquity at first with awe, but then with the hubris and colossal will necessary to believe they could do better than it and recreate it in the medium of their own time. The artists of the Italian Renaissance had no compunction about painting the Romans in Renaissance dress.

Technology is a means at the disposal of the European spirit – it always has been. The great cathedrals of the past were built with cranes. The plough in itself was not more noble, it was the system which harnessed it that made it so. To attempt to go back in time is not only impractical, but harmful to the European spirit because ultimately the flaw in the logic of the neo-Luddites is that it was the European who created the modern world. Isaac Newton and Darwin did so willingly, and given the chance, if we rewound the tape it would play out in the same fashion. Society cannot be kept in a static vacuum, nor should it be. But if we are not revolting against the supposed depredations of the material conditions of modern life, what are we fighting against?

Our fight is not fundamentally about the fact that modernity has forced us to live an urban, technological life. It is about the fact modernity is bent on killing us and expunging our record from this earth. It is a death cult that has inverted every positive aspect of the European spirit and turned our nature against us. Where once technology was used in the service of the betterment of our lives, it now constrains us – with surveillance, with oppressive state power, with the speedy importation of our lower paid and more co-operative replacements. It does not need to be this way. It is not bricks, steel and glass that have made our world ugly but the pernicious and warped ideology of the architects that built them. Therefore, we are not engaged in a battle with a point in time, we are locked in a struggle for survival with a set of alien ideas. The particular must be championed against the global. The metaphysical good must be pitted against relativistic nihilism. The nation must triumph against the international. The European spirit must not be subsumed by the Islamic.

Yet how can we hope to triumph in a war of ideas? We must first and foremost understand that culture forms the basis of civilization – and culture is at its elemental level simply a set of ideas. While political activism seems the obvious recourse for those wanting to destroy the modern world, the real revolt in modernity is to create great works and to contribute to our culture. The reason the traditionalist has lost almost all the culture wars of the late 20^th and early 21^st century is that he has not even been on the field to fight them. Not only has the orthodox traditionalist view failed see to that our enemy is not material progress; but it has wrongly assumed that cultural developments in the modern world are inherently harmful to a traditionalist message. It is common to look down on cinema and video games as mediums that can only serve the modernist; mediums to be rejected. This is a catastrophic mistake.

The enemy is winning the war of ideas because modernism makes no distinction between high and low culture – it inserts itself into every sphere of human activity. Modern films are inculcated with the message that Europeans are a blight and should despise themselves. Modern buildings have no connection to the nations that host them. Modern TV shows and video games are literally re-writing history to co-opt and subvert the achievements of European heroes of the past. Marxist deconstruction operates just as effectively on opera as it does on Saturday night television. The traditionalists who believe that shunning popular culture and adopting the strategy of the hermit will save them are wrong. To guarantee our continued existence we must believe not only in the past, but in the future. We must imagine an alternative world where all culture is once again harnessed in the service of creating a healthy, progressive and upward future for our civilization.

The orthodox traditionalist has already consigned Western civilization to the funeral pyre, they are the last Roman loyally at their post as the Pompeii of modernity destroys us forever. We must be engaged in creating a new radical traditionalism that believes that if we want to live, we must create. We are the new generation of Wagner’s warriors, taking up the mantle of the Gesamtkunstwerk, turning our lives into a piece of total art. We recognise no distinction between high and low culture; whatever we do – whether making video games, shooting cinema, or writing fiction we do not ask ourselves is this medium traditional? We instead set ourselves to the task of creating works of beauty, works which honour European history, works which raise our consciousness and above all instil our people with the will to survive. This not a hypothetical exercise, because we can look back to examples of the recent past to see how it is done. In the early dawn of what later came to be known as modernist architecture, in the Venetian Prealps the monument to the Italian war dead at Monte Grappa proved that concrete and modern building methods could be pressganged into the service of traditionalist aims – to honour the past.

Likewise, in the golden era of PC games the medium was de facto traditionalist. Games like Caesar and Civilization inspired the young with a new digital rendering faithful to our past, while adventure and roleplaying games like Heroes of Might and Magic introduced many to European mythology. Perhaps unknowingly the architects of the memorial at Monte Grappa and the designers of these games provided a fleeting glimpse into an alternative world – a world where modern games, modern architecture, modern culture is not antithetical to traditionalism, but promotes it. We must take up where they left off – to win the war of ideas all we have to do is to imagine a future in which we could live; a future for us and by us, a future unrestrained by the fastidious and wrongheaded belief that Western man is confined to the same set of tools he had five hundred years ago. The new generation of Wagner’s warriors are pushing aside the dusty and petrified last Roman and leaping onto the funeral pyre to rescue Mother Europa from the flames, because we believe Western culture is not dead, but lives through us and our acts of creation.

Once we grasp that our culture is the arsenal that we must use fight the ideational war in which we are engaged in, we can direct all our efforts to bolstering this great armoury. Every game we make, every movie we produce, every work of literature we pen, is a bullet we are firing at the monolith that is modernity. Every work of cultural significance is the forging of another spearhead that we can thrust into the odious and misguided minds that now rule us. The act of creation is our collective work to wire the cultural bomb that will blow up the foundations of modern life and ultimately free us of its deathly mental grip.While this war may be ideational, it involves real dangers and real sacrifice – the road will not be easy, because in every great artistic work, every true piece of beauty brought into human life, there is a cost.

The stones of Neuschwanstein are coated in the blood of both its patron and its builders. The elegant squares of St. Petersburg rest upon the bones of the serfs who created it. Likewise, the madness that overtook Nietzsche was the price he paid for birthing his intellectual works. The re-casting of art and culture as an activity for the weak and effeminate is yet another corridor of the mendacious mental maze that is modernity. Serving in the war of ideas will require tough characters, and it always did – the great Renaissance masters may have painted high art, but Caravaggio was no stranger to the drawn dagger in the defence of his artistic ideas. We must re-embrace the masculine, Byronic and D’Annunzian view of culture. If we do this, we will easily sweep the modernists from the field of ideas, because still innate within the European mind is the will to live, the deep-seated desire for beauty, and the divine spark necessary to create great works.

The worldview of the orthodox traditionalists is ultimately a dereliction of duty. They praise the past and want to live in its warm womb simply because they are too timid, too craven, too weak to believe that this generation alive today could contain another Dante, another Wagner, not operating in some anachronistic style – but who was a master in wielding modern mediums in the service of traditionalist aims. The virtue of European civilization has in fact always been its malleability, it has been forged and re-cast more times than we care to remember. Traditionalism is simply the challenge of issued by our forefathers – the offering of the divine hammer of culture by the craftsmen and artists of our distant past to the new generation. The orthodox traditionalists don’t believe we have the strength to wield the hammer; and the modernists can’t imagine we’d dare to wield it.

All we need to do to save Western civilization is to understand that traditionalism is not a style, or a museum, it is the transmission of culture from one generation of Europeans to the next. European civilization is a gleaming golden anvil on which we constantly re-forge ourselves in a new image. We are currently staring at the broken, shattered shards of our inheritance – but we can re-forge them once again. All we must do is believe that we come from those endowed with the sacred will to live and create, and the challenge of recasting European civilization now falls to us. We should not shrink from this task, but relish it. With all our collective strength, we must strike the Golden Anvil and watch the sparks that fly from it reignite the yearning hearts of those Europeans who want to revolt against the modern world, see our people live, and forge a new European century, even more bejewelled and glorious than the last.

Hail to our people!

Hail to the three-thousand of Charlottesville who rode with Robert E. Lee and gave the rebel yell, which was heard across America!

Hail to the Briton, who when duty demanded emerged from sleepy shires and windswept Welsh valleys to decree the nation might be free!

Hail to the Austrian, secure in his mountain halls of stone against the flood!

Hail to the Visegrad Four, the shield of Europe, stalwart as Sobieski’s hussars!

Hail to the unvanquished East, confounder of evil schemes!

Hail to all our people who dream we might yet live!

How to Believe: Becoming The Men of Janus

November 11, 2017 / admin / 0 Comments

We are living in an age of dissolution. Every institution of government and society is in a state of seemingly terminal decline. At the individual level the notions of honour, personal responsibility, and self-sacrifice have largely vanished from public life. The cause of this malaise is not material inequality, but the collapse of faith. The credo of sterile rationalism has triumphed over the metaphysical vision of a divinely ordained world ruled by angels and Gods. For many, the transition from the esoteric world of faith and divine truth seeking to the clockwork universe of the rationalist is vindicated by our cornucopia of material wealth and the unparalleled ease of our lives. Yet is plain to see, for all our prosperity and plenty, the average person remains deeply unfulfilled. No matter the veracity of their nihilistic consumption and hedonistic hoarding, the experience of the modern world is ultimately a shallow and an empty one. Despite all its garish efforts to distract from it, modernity cannot hide the incompleteness it has created by the denial of faith.

It is in fact impossible for the acolytes of modernism to admit to the necessity of faith, because faith itself is incompatible with the primary tenet of today’s anti-faith: an unwavering commitment to total equality. To have a metaphysical belief, to be religious, is to accept that you must subordinate yourself to a higher being – to something outside of, and above, yourself. In doing so you create a cosmic hierarchy; and in following a strict set of moral tenets you exercise discrimination. The sinner thus becomes lesser than the righteous. God becomes greater than the individual. It is these two acts that make faith antithetical to modernity and make its practice a primary existential threat to the modern order. The atheist of today thus screams loudest that no metaphysical world is possible, because he has the most to lose if such an order did exist. He is at once fearful of the collapse of the modern world and its hedonistic pleasures, and simultaneously driven by pathological terror at the idea of being judged by the divine and being found utterly wanting.

It is fundamentally fear that accounts for the lack of true heroism in modernity – a fear of death. A long life is treated as an inherently good life, because the ardent deniers of faith must strenuously attempt to reassure themselves that is the truth. Today’s society seeks to cling to life at all costs. The citizen of today embraces infirmity and avoids danger because if existence itself is the only objective moral criteria, remaining alive is the only true metric of success. What kind of life you lead is irrelevant, only cold utilitarian survival matters. It is ironic that this mode of thought which values only survival has in fact precipitated the gravest danger to the West’s security it has ever faced. In abandoning faith, in retreating into a fear of the great unknown after death, the West has singularly failed to respond to the threat of militant Islam. It is not political correctness that has hamstrung our efforts to repel this new invasion, but our fundamental lack of faith. The burning zeal of a believer will always prevail over the fearful who believes only in living at any cost. The atheist is a slave; the believer is the master.

It can thus be seen both for our personal salvation and to save our way of life we must return to the path of faith. Yet we are the first generation largely to be born without any predetermined spiritual path. We have been totally severed from the great continuum of our native religions. We are thus the first generation presented with the task of choosing a faith for ourselves, rather than simply inheriting it from history as every other generation has. To many traditionalists the solution is simple – we must return to Christianity. In their view, if we all began attending our local church on a Sunday, faith would be restored, and Western civilization would flourish once more. Not only is this a ridiculously parsimonious answer to the complex question of how to regain our faith, it is also an incorrect answer. It does not address the primary reason most of us were driven away from Christianity in the first place: The Church itself. Five hundred years after Martin Luther’s tumultuous revolt against Church corruption and decadence, the selling of indulgences pales in comparison to the scale of hypocrisy, debauchery and outright treachery present in nearly all forms of modern Christianity.

Both spiritually and temporally Catholicism and Protestantism in their modern format are so nauseating it is almost impossible for this new generation of faith seekers to take them in any way seriously. The Catholic Church – once the bejewelled repository of European faith – is now reduced to a shadow of its former self, more associated in the popular imagination with paedophilia than spirituality; and headed by a Pontiff who is more concerned with kissing refugee’s feet than engineering a resurgence of the European spirit. Protestantism fares no better. European national churches which have always been wedded to the zeitgeist of the state have simply joined modernity’s war on faith. In their Evangelical and American form, the Protestant faith is reduced to little more than an activity group, a superficial faithstyle choice which has no serious capacity for esoteric knowledge and searching for divine truths. The nouveau branches of Christianity such as Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses seem almost as alien to the European spirit as Islam itself.

It is undeniable that the political influence of the Church has been harnessed in almost every occasion against the traditionalist world view – whether supporting mass migration or lending its support to regimes beyond our shores. The reason for this is that at the heart of modern Christianity, the doctrine of universalism has been placed on a pedestal above all other values; and universalism is in actuality simply a euphemism for the total equality of atheism. It is for this reason that flocking back to our local Church will neither enlighten us nor shield us from the ravages of modernity – it will merely grant legitimacy to another tainted, destructive force and add voices to the deafening chorus demanding more equality, more nothingness. Faced with the seeming irredeemable nature of modern Christianity, an increasing number of spiritual nomads have decided to take their quest to an earlier, more primordial form of faith. Perhaps we do not need the return of God, but the return of Gods.

The neo-Pagan revival which is underway in many parts of Europe is fuelled by a wholesale rejection of Christianity as a proto-modernist credo which usurped the true faith of Europe. Certainly, Paganism has many attributes which lends it to be seriously considered as a possible solution to our modern predicament. In an era which is increasingly barbaric, the revival of the Gods of war, strength, and honour seems a welcome and necessary step. The inherent fluidity of divinity in Paganism – the notion that Gods walk amongst us, and that we ourselves may attain a modicum of divine power provides the mechanism by which Paganism can turn life itself into a heroic adventure. Just as in Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle it was Siegfried who was the embodiment of divine heroism, by reconnecting with the Pagan Gods of the past we too can transform our lives into an epic saga as we seek self-mastery and to both revere and chafe against the divine hierarchy.

Thus, by accepting Wotan into our hearts, while the average person drowns helplessly in the slime of modern life, we soar above them as we are carried on the wings of Valkyries. Paganism is an antidote to the timid veneration of luxury and safety which has replaced faith in modern life. A man who believes he will cross the Rainbow Bridge to join his Gods and comrades in the vaunted halls of Valhalla is not paralyzed by the fear of death and therefore is not acquiescent in trading his freedom and integrity for a few more years of the easy life. While the huddled masses view the impending clash of Western and Islamic civilization as a disaster, the pagan relishes it as a chance to attain honour and glory – the pagan revolt is truly a total inversion of modern values which enjoins the strength of the Gods with a personal quest for self-betterment.

Yet while this appeal to heroic individualism may captivate some – more serious-minded faith seekers have their reservations. It is certainly true that Paganism creates a hierarchy and reignites the metaphysical, but it at times can seem a narrow, limited faith system which has little space for the monastic intellectual, esoteric, and spiritual truth seeking which Christianity once provided. To return to Paganism would naturally entail the regression of certain aspects of civilised life we have come to enjoy for centuries, and its kinetic nature is seemingly incompatible with fixed stability. It may prove, at best, to be a temporary solution to our crisis of faith. After all, Paganism was washed away once by Christianity, and it is perhaps possible that a reformed Christianity could provide an even greater dynamo for our spiritual revolution. It is true that almost anyone that enters the great cathedrals of Europe can still hear the faint whispers of God.

The very success of Christianity has always been its ability to be reinterpreted and reformed. It has provided the impetus and driving force for Western civilization because its schisms, its doctrinal disputes, its interminable and blood drenched civil wars have kept Western civilization vital and have driven it onwards to ever greater heights of aesthetic and doctrinal beauty. When Luther launched his withering attack on Catholicism, it responded not by timidity and acquiesce – but by launching the greatest programme of artistic and intellectual prowess the world had ever seen: The Counter Reformation. Just because almost all Christian churches of today are weak-willed and unfit custodians of the faith, it does not mean the faith itself is the problem. On the contrary, Christianity can also provide a framework for man to ascend the golden path and leap from the gutters of modern life.

The most useful example of this is to take seriously the notion of St. Peter and his eternal watch over the Gates of Heaven. It is pertinent to always ask yourself the question, could I justify myself to Him right now if I died? If the answer is no, then it is time to revolt against the materialistic considerations of this life, and prepare instead a life worthy not of the judgement of your self-absorbed peers, but one which holds up to Divine scrutiny. It is this test of St. Peter which so terrifies the nihilists and atheists of modernity, who in the dark recesses of their mind know that if they are wrong, if their conduct in life was ever set against any objective test of morality, they would fail. This vision of St. Peter’s judgement becomes all the more powerful when we view Christ not as the meek, hapless Shepherd he has been portrayed as by the modern Church, but as Christ the destroyer of evil, vanquisher of the moneylenders, Christ the morally inflexible, crucified and whipped because he would not renounce his views or his mission. Once we view Christianity as an armour of faith which lends its power to our cause, we reconnect with the muscular Christianity that inspired the Templars, turned back the Ottoman’s at the gates of Vienna, and can now traverse the chasm of lost confidence we need to restore Western civilization. Once we accept our task as being able to look St. Peter in the eye and say with total honesty that we fought for the good, then we are no longer simply the agreeable Anglican or mildly contrarian Catholic. We have moved our frame of reference from the worldly to the divine – we have become Knights of Christ.

A case then has been made for both Western Christianity and Paganism being the true faith which can revitalise both the individual spirit and Western civilization itself. Yet the question which preoccupies many of a traditionalist persuasion, is how do I choose – Paganism or Christianity? In a world of inherited religions, this question would have never arisen. Yet in our modern situation it can become a serious philosophical stumbling block. And this is without speaking at all of other alternatives – of Eastern Orthodoxy, of a Nietzschean transcendental quest for self-betterment, or of the elevation of nation or nature to the place of God. Thus, how can one choose between one faith or another? By what criteria can we decide?

That is fundamentally the wrong question. We must understand that we live in an aspiritual age – that we have been conditioned from birth to reject faith in all its forms. We are in the position of the barbarians of the dark ages who slowly came to understand the ruins they were huddled in were not made by God, but by men. We are at the very beginning of the process of relearning what faith is, of understanding what the world of religious sites we have inherited mean. We must at this stage merely examine, and attempt to understand the religious heritage of Western man. We must straddle the dualistic, even contradictory nature of our faith. We must become Men of Janus who understand that Western man was both the Roman, and the Gaul. He was both the Viking, and the Templar. The Men of Janus understand that in the quest to save themselves and Western civilization, the final reckoning will be decided by how many faithful stand against the indifferent. By exploring faith, by studying religions, by re-learning spirituality we will come to know what appeals to us, which god speaks to us, and in the end – how we can escape the spiritual wasteland we find ourselves in and finally free ourselves from our fear of death and what awaits us.

Generation Nomad: Travellers Without Destination

February 7, 2017 / admin / 0 Comments

Bridal Journey, Adolph Tidemand

The youth of today are quite possibly the most decried and despised generation in history. Millennials are regarded as a selfish, entitled generation who believe in neither country, nor God. Despite being the supposedly most educated, wealthy and free human beings to have ever lived, they are also some of the unhappiest and most chronically ill – both physically and mentally. While some attribute this unhappiness to rampant materialism, this claim is misguided. This is a generation that may have easy access to a cornucopia of consumer goods – but one that also willingly accepts tens of thousands in debt for their education; and remains steadfastly unfazed at the prospect of never owning their own home. If the goal of this generation is not wealth, duty, or faith – what is it? On the surface some may be inclined to say that there simply isn’t one – that rampant hedonism and active nihilism have become the modus operandi of today’s youth. Yet there seems in this dissolute cohort to be one unquestioned good remaining; one universally accepted truth. Travel is good. The credo of this age is summarised succinctly by the vacuous phrase: “I would rather have a passport full of stamps, than a house full of things.”

On the surface, though trite, this assertion may not seem altogether a bad one. Wanderlust has always been a part of the human spirit; the innumerable explorers of the past are testament to that. Even the indulgent holidays and vacations of today featured in history for those who could afford them, exemplified by the genteel grand tours of the English aristocracy. To a generation raised on the notion of cultural relativism, literally expanding your horizons by meeting and learning from other cultures is an undisputed positive. And equally, to a mass of rootless existentialists who believe literally this world is all that there is, it makes sense that exploring as much of it as possible should be the primary goal. Yet elevating travel in and of itself to the goal of life – to becoming an entire raison d’être – is a dangerous and ultimately unfulfilling path.

It is somewhat perplexing that travel has become the pathological obsession of the younger generation at this point in time because the prospect of modern travel could scarcely be less appealing or rewarding. This is the first generation that has grown up with perfect knowledge of the earth; with the ability to in an instant conjure nearly any image from around the globe. Every region of earth, no matter how remote, has become a hive of human activity, and has not escaped digital documentation. Every traveller of today thus travels with the knowledge they are simply trekking well-worn and safe paths. And at the same time, the ardent belief in internationalism, in cultural relativism and equality has meant that not only the destinations are tired and cliché, but the cultures upon arrival are more similar than ever. Ironically, in their restless pursuit of an escape from their own roots, the new travelling generation has remade the world in its own image – an entire world of fast food chains, coffee shops, recognisable landmarks, sanitized locations, and interchangeable populaces all adherent to the same view.

What is increasingly apparent is that this generation did not adopt travel as its mode of living by choice, but rather was forced to adopt it by circumstance. They have deluded themselves into believing they are travelling for the purpose of discovery and enlightenment, but in reality, they are not exploring but fleeing. They are fleeing from the rootless and incoherent nature of their own societies. The harsh truth is modernity has made refugees of us all. This fact becomes apparent when one observes that one of the primary destinations venerated by the new nomadic generation is Japan. Japan is omnipresent in the mind of the millennial – from anime to cosplay to the pop culture image of the Samurai and the ninja – Japan holds a sacred place in the pantheon of travel and youth culture. But the idiosyncratic nature of Japan is predicated exactly on its resistance to travel – on a long history of wariness of outsiders. The Japanese culture remains vibrant and unique precisely because, even in the face of demographic disaster, it has steadfastly refused to succumb to the itinerant world and accept migrants, refugees, and settlers. While the Japanese may travel, they also understand that a traveller must in the end, also have a home to return to.

The millennial obsession with Japanese culture is not simply a trivial desire to experience a culture and place different to their own; but symptomatic of a deeper pining for a coherent history, society and religion. The nomadic youth of today travel in distance and physical space because they have been robbed of the ability to travel back in time or upward towards a higher plane of existence. They are victims of a conscious effort to erase their collective history; to make them illiterate in the language of their own built environments. It is therefore natural that they should prefer to roam and carelessly disregard and overlook the local which they can no longer understand. While the world may be an open book to the generation of today, their own history is kept under lock and key, a forbidden knowledge guarded by the dual gatekeepers of revisionist political correctness and forceful cultural relativism. Forget your ancestors for they were not any greater than anyone else’s; nor were they great at all is the refrain of this mode of thinking.

This is the exact reverse of the circumstances the great explorers of the past set out under. Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, and Charles Darwin all took to the sea with an unwavering understanding of who they were, and with the firm belief that their voyages were not simply exercises in moving through space, but were anchored in greater historical processes of science, philosophy and nation. It was the impetus of such people to go forth and create civilization, not simply to travel around and gormlessly spectate it. Even the decadent participants of the Grand Tour partook in it with the higher purpose of observing the civilization and beauty of the enlightened Mediterranean and bringing it home. And further to this, all these adventurers and explorers of the past did so while accepting the dangers and discomforts travel of the age entailed. Travel today is unfulfilling because it is easy – it entails no heroic battles with the elements, the limits of technology, or the unknown and the unexpected.

It is no coincidence that the generation of self-declared supreme travellers have no stomach for the true test of the age, namely space exploration. Despite the theoretical means being in abundance, no popular movement has arisen calling for mankind to traverse the stars – this kind of travel would require personal commitments and mass co-operation beyond the capabilities of the self-interested atomised traveller of modernity. It is this timidity in the face of the higher calling of the age that exposes the superficial nature of people who self-identify as living to travel. Their goal is not exploration and discovery in any real sense, but rather a self-indulgent feel good procrastination around a safe and already charted globe.

The vapid gypsies of modernity will gain no solace from their travels however. Even in the very limited goal of making the individual happy, modern travel singularly fails to deliver. Just like wealth, travel is a goal without end and with diminishing returns. The more of the globe viewed, the more an individual will be inclined to ask about their own place within it; the more of a spectator rather than a participant they will feel. It is not that travel is inherently morally bad or degrading, but simply that it is not expansive and fulfilling enough to fill the void of a true transcendental purpose. Purpose and destination are not fixed geographical points on the map to be discovered, but rather come from within. It is self-discovery rather than searching the globe that will bring about true fulfilment. It is high time that this generation reconnected with the philosophical currents of the past and began to ponder the meaning of Destination, rather than seeking new destinations in vain. It is time once again to become – Travellers with Destination.

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