Present Western "civilization" awaits a substantial upheaval (rivolgimento), without which it is destined, sooner or later, to smash its own head. It has carried out the most complete perversion of the rational order of things. Reign of matter, gold, machines, numbers; in this civilization there is no longer breath or liberty or light. The West has lost its ability to command and to obey. It has lost its feeling for contemplation and action. It has lost its feeling for values, spiritual power, godlike men (uomini-idii). It no longer knows nature. No longer a living body made of symbols, gods, and ritual act, no longer a harmony, a cosmos in which man moves freely like "a kingdom within a kingdom", nature has assumed for the Westerner a dull and fatal exteriority whose mystery the secular sciences seek to bury in trifling laws and hypotheses. It no longer knows Wisdom. It ignores the majestic silence of those who have mastered themselves: the enlightened calm of seers, the exalted reality of those in whom the idea becomes blood, life, and power. Instead it is drowning in the rhetoric of "philosophy" and "culture", the speciality of professors, journalists, and sportsmen who issue plans, programs, and proclamations. Its wisdom has been polluted by a sentimental, religious, humanitarian contagion and by a race of frenzied men who run around noisily celebrating becoming (divenire) and "practice", because silence and contemplation alarm them. It no longer knows the state, the state as value (stato-valore) crystallized in the Empire. Synthesis of the sort of spirituality and majesty that shone brightly in Chinaa, Egypt, Persia, and Rome, the imperial ideal has been overwhelmed by the bourgeois misery of a monopoly of slaves and traders.
Europe's formidable "activists" no longer know what war is, war desired in and of itself as a virtue higher than winning or losing, as that heroic and sacred path to spiritual fulfilment exalted by the god Krishna in the Baghavad Gita. They know not warriors, only soldiers. And a crummy little war (guerricciola) was enough to terrorize them and drive them to rehashing the rhetoric of humanitarianism, and pathos or, worse still, of windbag nationalism and Dannunzianism.
Europe has lost its simplicity, its central position, its life. A democratic plague is eating away at its roots, whether in law, science, or speculation. Gone are the leaders, beings who stand out not for their violence, their gold, or for their skills as slave traders but rather for their irreducible qualities of life. Europe is a great irrelevant body, sweating and restless because of an anxiety that no one dares to express. Gold flows in its veins; its flesh is made up of machines, factories, and laborers; its brains are of newsprint. A great irrelevant body tossing and turning, driven by dark and unpredictable forces that mercilessly crush whoever wants to oppose or merely escape the cogwheels.
Such are the achievements of Western "civilization". This is the much ballyhooed result of the superstitious faith in "progress", progress beyond Roman imperiousness, beyond radiant Hellas, beyond the ancient Orient - the great ocean.
And the few who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion find themselves ever more tightly encircled.
Poster Comment:
According to A. James Gregor on page 91 of The Search for Neofascism: Use and Abuse of Social Science, Evola's publication of this book coincided with the Lateran Treaty between the papacy and the fascist state of Italy in 1929.
It can be described as a polemic against fascism's links to Christianity, one which Gregor states Mussolini welcomed, as it put the church on notice that its authority was no longer considered supreme by his government.
For background on the term "dannunzianism" see this text pulled from an announcement of a lecure by Mario Cimini on Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italian writer associated with decadence and internationalism:
Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) was undoubtedly one of the most influential writ- ers of Italian literature between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. On the one hand, his writing was in tune with the European avant-garde, drawing themes and suggestions from contemporary French culture, while on the other hand he regarded France and Europe as the perfect platform to spread his work and his image. It is no coincidence that for the Euro- pean readers - from Hofmannsthal to Musil, from Mann to Brecht, from Henry James to DH Lawrence, from Joyce to Hemingway, from Barre�s to Proust and Valery - the Italian decadence came to coincide with dannunzianism. A key role in this process of internationalization of D’Annunzio was played by his first French translator, Georges Herelle, who not only translated early novels, short stories, plays, poems, but also promoted his myth and created around him a considerable network of intellectual relations and advertising.
This would describe America's founding fathers and the thinkers of the British Enlightenment perfectly: And the few who are still capable of great loathing and great rebellion find themselves ever more tightly encircled.