Wednesday, November 24, 2004
THE REIGN OF QUANTITY & THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Rene Guenon's Collected Works, a book with 279 pages, 40 chapters, and a useful index; written in 1945, translated from the original French by Lord Northbourne, third and fourth editions printed by Sophia Perennis, Ghent, N.Y., ISBN 0 900588 67 5.
The basic premise of the text is that civilization has degenerated, via the loss of belief in the transcendent and the embrace of a scientific worldview, to a state in which all that is considered valuable is that which can be categorized as sense data. If you can't hear it, see it, smell it, touch it, it doesn't matter. Guenon believes this focus has turned humanity into a society of bean counters who are primarily focused on the quantity of reality rather than the quality of it. He believes this reduces us to the lowest common denominator in any and every specific category, because a mass grouping, such as is required in order to generate statistical data, necessitates sameness.
We have exchanged our individuality for our numbered place in line, while being kept amused as we shuffle along in step, by the toys that a society focused exclusively on material reality acquires. He writes:
Man 'mechanized' everything and ended at last by mechanizing himself, falling little by little into the condition of numerical units, parodying unity, yet lost in the uniformity and indistinction of the 'masses', that is, in pure multiplicity and nothing else. Surely that is the most complete triumph of quantity over quality that can be imagined. (p. 194)
To a large extent he is correct. We do tend to think alike. We embrace the latest trends in dress, eating habits, entertainment, lifestyles. Those who are not "with it" as in adopting these trends, are considered backward geeks hardly worthy of acknowledgement. We take it for granted that mostly we will like the same things. Television helps to insure that we do. It is not politically correct to have a different opinion. The ad man tells us what to buy, using psychological games to generate sales. There is a high financial stake in sameness.
Guenon further indicates that our shift from an arts and crafts society to an industrial society necessitated this emphasis on conformity. Production lines produce sameness. Workers must be attuned to repetition in order to be effective on the production line. There must be many customers for the produced sameness. Ultimately man becomes an extension of the machine he runs, while the machine enjoys primary importance, since there will be financial loss if it ceases to function, holding up production. Man is more dispensable than the machine.
Guenon argues that we need to recover our spiritual life; and warns that when we attempt to do so, we are in danger of looking for the spirits of hell who are more in tune with this dreary sameness than is the spirit of our Creator who makes an abundance of difference reflected in His creation. Guenon believes this drab existence of sameness has been brought about at the direction of an unseen hand that he does not identify.
He condemns spiritualism (the practice of calling up discarnate spirits), calling it "profane", and claiming that it arose out of somnabulism. He writes:
This state of affairs had its beginning at the time when the study and the control of certain psychic influences descended, if it may be so expressed, into the profane domain, and this in a certain sense marks the beginning of the phase of 'dissolution' properly so called in the modern deviation. (p. 124)
...spiritualism...inherited the conception all the more naturally through being predisposed to it by an original connection with magnetism; and this connection is much closer than might be at first supposed, for it is highly probable that spiritualism could never have reached any very considerable development but for the divagations of the somnambulists, and also that it was the existence of magnetic 'subjects' which prepared for and made possible the existence of spiritualist 'mediums'. (p. 125)
He also condemns Theosophy and shamanism.
The book offers food for thought and many points for agreement, but there are also shortcomings.
The one most prominent is his reference to this process as being a cyclical manifestation which of necessity must repeat itself as a result of cataclysm that mark the beginning and end of time spans. Current life on planet earth is not the first manifestation of reality, nor is it going to be the last.
This is a cosmology significantly different from the Catholic cosmology. It has the advantage of being a concept that can't be disproved, which means that no one can say he is wrong. How do you argue with someone who believes human life began on Atlantis or believes the earth is hollow, and that there is a colony of beings located there?
Yet in spite of this cyclical worldview, the arguments presented by his theory of degradation are arguments based on straight-line lineal thinking...straight-line within a cycle...which he believed repeated itself. He uses the words "Manvantera" and "Yuga" to designate periods of time. The terminology, and I presume the cosmology, is Hindu.
He believes we are nearing the end of a cycle--approaching a cataclyism--after which a golden age at the beginning of the next Yuga will follow. Never does he set out the state, in concerte examples, that he credits with being "golden", nor does he indicate when our present cycle began. Thus the reader, while acknowledging that "deterioration" in the culture is probably taking place, has no clear idea when or how he believes this deterioration began, apart from his reference to the beginning of spiritualism. He writes:
...time, in its active opposition to the antagonistic principle, unfolds itself with ever-growing speed, for it is far from being homogenous, as people who consider it solely from a quantitative point of view imagine, but on the contrary it is 'qualified' at every moment in a different way by the cyclical conditions of the manifestation to which it belongs.
We experience time differently as we age. This concept seems to argue that the world also experiences time differently as it, or a cycle of it, ages. Seems rather contrary to the evidence of the alarm clock.
Another shortcoming is his constant use of run-on sentences, necessitating too frequent re-reading.
His thinking is elitist. If you "get" his theories, you are one of the few remaining persons of "quality." It is not difficult to see how Julius Evola morphed Guenon into Nazism.
He mixes cosmologies at random, borrowing from religions where he will, and combining disperate structures into a philosophy that is entirely his own. Yet despite his enthusiasm for a variety of religions, he is critical of quantity in general. This theory of quantity bringing degradation, combined with mixing cosmologies hints at primordial unity; and in fact he discusses it. But an argument for quality as opposed to quantity is an argument for the Catholic faith in which he once believed and subsequently abandoned. While arguing for a lost "quality", he fails in his own life to give witness for that quality, and instead demonstrates use of "quantity" in his very arguments. In other words, he fails to practice what he preaches.
Guenon believes that there was a continent of Atlantis where the Nephilim - an angelic or godlike being - mated with humans, inciting the wrath of God which brought about the destruction of one civilization. The Nephilim are in Scripture, yet I have never gotten the idea from Scripture that there was another world which they inhabited. Guenon writes:
...[the] most ancient things so far made known to us by archaeological research do not belong to a period more remote than about the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, where naturally there is situated a second 'barrier'; and if some means could be found for crossing this one, there would be yet a third, corresponding to the time of the last great terrestrial cataclysm, and the cataclysm traditionally referred to as the disappearance of Atlantis.
I could make claims that can't be proven, too. Why should anyone believe them? Why should anyone believe his?
In one chapter he speaks of "squaring the circle" (p. 142), a familiar Masonic concept, though I don't think they invented it. This entire chapter, in fact, discusses Masonic concepts, speaking of cubes, squares, compasses, "egg of the world", and the Hermetic Androgyne.
Chapter 4 focuses on the Masonic concept of geometry having spiritual values, a prominent feature of Kaballah, occultism, and esoteric Freemasonry. On page 27 he refers to "order out of chaos," a theme of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.
In the latter chapters of the book he applies what he learned from his days in the occult movement, identifying the dangers inherent in sorcery, shamanism, psychic residues, anti-traditional action, inversion of symbols, the problems with psychoanalysis, initiation, and anti-initiation. Here he differentiates between spiritual paths. With little effort it is possible to read into the material the activities of Luciferians such as Ordo Lapsit Exillis. He condemns the activities of the occult revival. In these chapters he gets much closer to a Catholic cosmology.
In conclusion, while I found some of his points valid and interesting, especially in those last chapters, there was too much of airy-fairy ethereal new age thinking in the book for me to be converted to Guenonian Traditionalism. We do not as a society need a return to traditionalism described in as many ways as man can conceive of it. What we need is a return to belief in the transcendental Trinitarian God who made heaven and earth, who sanctifies and redeems us, who is our light and our hope. We don't need a return to a traditionalism of quantity, but rather a return to quality in the truth that is Jesus Christ.
