A RETVRN to the Future
Thinking about a Traditionalist alternative to globalism…
If you spend enough time in right-wing circles, you’ll come across the notion of a “RETVRN”—that is, a return to tradition, to a time that was truly befitting a human being, to a time before the modern technophilic schoolmarm panopticon rose up from the Abyss to crowd out every human aspiration, ambition, and yearning toward beauty and greatness, to drag us all down into the filthy hell of modernity.
I think that just about captures the gist of the idea.
And if you spend even more time in right-wing circles, you’ll encounter the eminent thinkers and philosophers who did more than anyone else to codify and elaborate the intellectual groundwork for this kind of thinking—men like Julius Evola or René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon or Ananda Coomaraswamy. And if you dig a little deeper, you’ll learn about the school of thought that these men founded, which is called Traditionalism (although it was never called this, nor even regarded as a “school of thought,” by those considered its founders and leading lights).
But Traditionalism is far more than mere nostalgia for a romanticized or idealized notion of the past…it is much, much more than that. It can be thought of as a kind of metaphysical worldview, a comprehensive way of looking at the world and understanding one’s place within it. It is neither reactionary nor obscurantist, as its critics claim; if it is anti-modern, it is so because it views modernism as the radical reaction to the true human path, the path of Tradition, which served mankind well, if imperfectly (as all things subject to time and contingency must), throughout most of its history.
In his short book Religion in the Modern World, Lord Northbourne defines Tradition, as it is understood by the Traditionalists, about as well as anyone could:
“Tradition, in the rightful sense of the word, is the chain that joins civilization to Revelation. It comprises all the distinctive characteristics that make any given civilization what it is, including those that can more specifically be called religious. Every Divine Revelation has inaugurated not only a new Religion, but also a new civilization, each with its own particular advantages and limitations, its own genius, its own point of view and its own arts and sciences.
“Tradition and civilization are not mere accidents of time and place, nor are they human inventions, nor yet mere mechanical responses to environment, that is to say, products of evolution in the modern scientific sense of the word. A Tradition once established does indeed evolve; it has a history covering its rise, the development to maturity of its full potentialities, and its eventual decay. Tradition could be said to make history rather than to be made by history. Its origin is the kind of direct divine intervention we call Revelation, and all its potentialities are present, though not manifested, at its inception.
“The existence of Traditions and, above all, their qualities, cannot be accounted for by any man-made theory, and certainly not by the theory of evolution for which Darwin is commonly held responsible.
“Each Tradition has as it were an individuality of its own and a perfection of its own, which is however always relative. Thus the world is enriched as it could not be if all civilizations were the same, or if all men were of the same type…”1
That last point is an important one, for it contrasts so strongly with the attitude of the WEF types and Globohomo. The fundamental sine qua non of globalism and liberal-democracy, of the Regime, is that all civilizations are basically the same (or will soon enough be made so, backsliders and traditionalists be damned), and that all men are basically of the same type…or, again, will be made so through careful social, cultural, and political engineering, and perhaps even someday biological and genetic engineering as well.
This brings us to the definition of modernity, or what Northbourne calls “the profane point of view”:
“It is anti-traditional, progressive, humanist, rationalist, materialist, experimental, individualist, egalitarian, free-thinking and intensely sentimental. Such a point of view has always existed in one form or another. What is new is its dominance. Now practically worldwide, it dominates almost every domain of human life and thought.”2
Tradition, in other words, is the original state of humankind. Its origin is to be sought in the non-human or supra-human, in God, and it eschews all notions of progress, evolution, or the idea that the future must of necessity be better than the past; it views time cyclically, as a falling away from a Golden Age in the distant past, that nevertheless also lies in the distant future when the cycle completes itself and begins anew.
Modernity, or anti-tradition, is the upstart, which defines itself in opposition to all of this. Its view of time is linear, and its historiography is triumphant, with a distinct, unerring progress or evolution from a benighted past to an enlightened present, and the promise of an even more glorious future.
Therefore, whatever is newest is always best, and whatever doesn’t change or, worse, regresses or backslides, is actively evil.
Given the supposed future-oriented and progressive antithesis of modernism to the past- and first-principles-oriented thesis of Tradition, it’s easy to caricature Traditionalists as having nothing important to say about the future, or about a future political dispensation, which territory is all ceded without contest to the modernists—in other words, to the leftists, the liberal-democrats, the managers who are gleefully ushering in the dystopian techno-state of the future that they all fervently hope will crystallize and solidify their power forever and ever, amen.
Not so fast.
It may be true that the Traditionalists don’t often have much to say about future social or political conditions, but that doesn’t mean some in their “school” are entirely silent on the matter, nor that they have nothing at all to offer us by way of imagining a future RETVRN, so to speak.
In the final chapter of William W. Quinn, Jr.’s The Only Tradition, the author takes some pains to envision what a future planetary culture based on Traditionalism and first principles might look like.
To begin with, there would be no anachronistic reversion to some neo-Medieval world of knights errant (perhaps with AR-15s instead of swords), crusading military orders, and a revived feudal economy. Honestly, looking at the way things are going, that seems more likely than ever; but according to the Traditionalists, a RETVRN of this sort is not in the cards:
“The natural opponents and critics of the Traditional perspective—namely, the ‘true believer’ neurotic neoteric3 whose faith is secular scientism (and the accompanying ideologic impedimenta)—will assume all the fulminations of the Traditionalists about the vicissitudes of modernity are little else than a reactionary nostalgia for some medieval oligarchic illud tempus.4 This neoteric would assume further that, unable to cope with the real technologic and engineering challenges created by the desire for satisfaction of all material wants (as opposed to needs), or unable to adjust to democratic or socialist massification, Traditionalists prefer to turn back the clock to a bogus image of medieval life they consider as paradisiacally in illo tempore.
[…]
“There can be…no question of ‘returning to the Middle Ages,’ any more than there can be a reversal of the evolutionary cycle, which spins in only one direction. Because it is inseparable from the notion of periodicity, the Traditional solution differs dramatically from the modern technologic solutions, based on science and temporally linear progressivism.”5
Furthermore, a future Traditionalist culture would not necessarily be one that eschews all science and technology, preferring superstition, ignorance, and primitivism instead. Of course, that’s how the smug and ignorant partisans of scientism would characterize it; but they matter less and less each day, as they Follow the Science™ right off the cliff of credibility and into the chasm of irrelevancy.
In a well-ordered civilization, there needn’t be any conflict between a true science, which concerns itself with the phenomena of the material universe, and Traditionalist metaphysics, which concerns the entire cosmos, seen and unseen, material and non-material—and to which empirical science has no choice but to conform in the final accounting. The problem, of course, is in distinguishing between real science, and the muddled, superstitious scientism that modern society testifies as its one true faith:
“The basic reduction of progress and scientism is the theory that science and technology will eventually banish all material—and social—evils of humanity; this reduction is the faith. Scientism, the faith of the neoteric, is now increasingly coming under attack by those who perceive the foibles of its presumptions, and who see it as the great chimera of modernity…The modern high-entropy environment is one wholly based on faith in scientism, quantity, technologization, and is the most potential medium for autoannihilation; unless the human race begins to reintegrate first principles of Tradition into its worldview, the course to irremediable destruction is set.”6
In his book, Quinn, Jr. foresees that the trend toward greater global integration that we see today will continue, but not necessarily in the way that the average NPC imagines. The future, “planetized” culture may have just as much a chance of representing a return to Tradition, or in fact the creation of a new Tradition, as it does of metastasizing into a Globohomo monstrosity; in this brave new world, science will be easily reconciled with the philosophia perennis that comes down to us from the past, even as scientism is finally swept away:
“It is in the most recent scientific theories (as opposed to scientism) that one finds the fundamental postulates of the ensuing planetary culture and consciousness. Pure science (scientia), and not scientific reductionism, is gradually beginning to corroborate the Traditional perspective of holism. Einstein’s famous unified field theory and later David Bohm’s implicate order have kept alive the notion of universal interconnection for generations of physicists…The new holistic views currently found in pure science in addition to theses only recently gaining wide recognition—for example, the second law of thermodynamics or ‘entropy law’—are ironically becoming profoundly subversive to the older mechanistic, analytic, fragmented worldview that has dominated modernity since its rupture with Tradition—in Guénon’s opinion—or since the Enlightenment in the more accepted consensus.
“This collaboration between the newer scientific theories and first principles does not, incidentally, stand the Traditional view of science on its head. Pure science has never been the enemy of Tradition; only scientism, which carries with it a blind soteriological faith in technology and a repudiation of the nonempirical based solely on sciolistic reductionism.”7
It is, after all, the Traditionalists who hold that some of the more interesting fields of forbidden ancient knowledge—such as astrology, for instance, or alchemy or even magic (not the men pulling rabbits out of top-hats kind of magic, but the sort of thaumaturgy or theurgy that Julius Evola dabbled in from time to time)—are actually the remnants of sophisticated traditional sciences that descend to us from previous cycles of human history, when civilizations as “advanced” or at least as materialistic as our own, or more so, may have existed upon the earth.
And that’s to say nothing of other, perhaps forgotten traditional sciences that may be buried within the beautiful metaphorical language of ancient myths and legends, belonging to traditions that have been supplanted or superseded.
What then might a Traditionalist civilization of the future look like? According to Quinn, Jr., it will be a planetary culture, since that is the future toward which the present is unerringly directed; but it will not be a globalist or techno-scientific culture:
“If planetization is an inevitable fact, then eventually—possibly within the next few centuries—there will be only one culture remaining on earth. How we value this future occurrence is not at issue here. The point is whether, at some future time, this planetary culture will contain in a wholly new form a unanimous religious or spiritual expression based on the first principles and consequently become a living Traditional culture, as so many have done in the past…”8
In other words, the future planetized culture might bring about the emergence of a new Tradition, perhaps with its own revelation and prophets, which will lay the groundwork for a traditional civilization analogous in many ways to medieval European Christendom, or Islamic civilization during its Golden Age.
Technology and science, as we know it, would not be abandoned by this planetary culture, any more than the scientific and technological achievements of Classical civilization were abandoned during the Middle Ages, despite popular depictions to the contrary. Rather, the emphasis of this culture would be on metaphysics and first principles, much as it was in medieval Europe.
And that’s when things get interesting.
“Planetization has already begun—both technologic and conceptual—as we have seen. But the vision of a planetary culture based on the precepts of Traditional culture as outlined by Guénon and Coomaraswamy9 is a new entry into the field of futurism. The developed metaphysics contains elements of both the new pure science and crosscultural expressions of first principles in the manner in which Coomaraswamy elucidated the philosophia perennis: ‘All that I have tried to show is that the axioms of this philosophy by whomever enunciated, can often be explained and clarified or emphasized by a correlation with the parallel texts of other traditions [and now pure science].’ By definition, the social structure of the Traditional planetary culture must be hierarchical, and of this Tradition refers only to a spiritual elite determined solely by virtue of ability, whose function it will be to relay, as it were, the higher metaphysical principles and the doctrine that unfolds from them.”10
It’s safe to say, then, that a future Traditional civilization will be neither egalitarian nor democratic, neither scientistic nor secular. Woke commissars and DIE apparatchiks will find no safe haven in this society, which will self-consciously reject the rule of easily manipulated masses, and the worthless “elite” that does the manipulating, for an actual elite comprising intellectuals in the truest sense of the word.
About this latter group, Quinn, Jr. has more to say:
“Presumably this will be the role of the advanced scientists/metaphysicists (‘one and the same can be both’) and/or religionists and students of philosophy—like Guénon, for example—who concentrate on these subjects…They, like the Brahmins of classical Indian culture, might act as the priestly caste, and presumably the Dumézilian system would operate beyond modernity as it did before the concept (and actuality) of hierarchy was temporarily destroyed by the socialist and egalitarian sentiments of modernity, with politicians and business people occupying their respective places.”11
And the establishment of this new social hierarchy, and the formation of a planetary Traditional culture, might have interesting consequences for all aspects of human life:
“The art of this future, unlike modern art, might reflect the higher sacred principles and would apply equally to crafts, which even now are becoming more popular and widely practiced. Employment might become more humanized, less drudgerous, and would consequently be considered more a vocation than a necessary evil. This would in turn affect the notions of work and play; the worker may no longer seek leisure as the ultimate good, but seek to realize and express his or her true nature through a vocation, which might serve as both an initiatory and integrative element in the culture as a whole.
“Finally, and most important, every person in a Traditional planetary culture might see the unity, the sacrality, the oneness of life, owing to its universal acceptance as a scientific fact. All might hold, consequently, the principle of the universal brotherhood of humanity, and perceive the homology of person/planet/universe and the reciprocity of these phenomena in the wholeness of the system. And there will inevitably be anomalies and exceptions in this Traditional planetary culture, just as Traditionalists and Traditional ideals are anomalies in the modern, quantitative secular culture, for those anomalies may represent the tiny seed elements of a newer regeneration as this new Traditional planetary culture in turn runs its cyclic course in the millennia to come. In any event, a future planetary Traditional culture must be new and congruent with its time, but most importantly it must be unanimous—accepted and participated in by all—for without this unanimity it could not be considered Traditional.”12
Now that may all sound a little utopian, or maybe even “New Agey,” and perhaps it is; the Traditionalists themselves never spoke of what a future Traditionalist culture or civilization might look like. But William Quinn, Jr. merely extrapolated their ideas and applied them to a hypothetical planetary culture of the future, one that was based on religious and metaphysical first principles, rather than the insatiable and ultimately self-destructive pursuit of power and novelty that goads the globalist types to their ruin and ours.
Who knows if any of this shall come to pass? But I find it interesting that this hypothetical Traditional culture of the future bears more than a passing resemblance to Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, or some of the other futuristic scenarios I’ve discussed in these pages, even if the emphasis is weighted more toward the metaphysical than the material.
So we’ll see how things shake out in times to come. Personally, I find the prospect of a future planetary civilization—hierarchically constituted and oriented toward a true Tradition, and governed by a clerisy of erudite sages and metaphysicians—at least a more appealing one than the grotesque, vulgar, thoroughly stupid culture, with its corrupt and greedy governing class, that we currently find ourselves in.
I guess time will tell…
Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World (Ghent NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pp. 29-30.
Ibid., pg. 12.
In other words, the quintessential globalism fan or “NPC.”
A reference to Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred time and space, of a primordial time, the Golden Age, the era nearest creation itself, when gods walked the earth; it is a time that most human cultures have celebrated in myth and poetry, and to which all human cultures (even modernist cultures, like our own, that claim to disbelieve in such things) wish someday to return.
William W. Quinn, Jr., The Only Tradition (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 292, 294.
Ibid., pp. 291-2.
Ibid., pp. 298-9.
Ibid., pg. 303.
The Anglo-Indian scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy is considered, along with René Guénon, one of the “founders” of Traditionalism.
Ibid., pg. 304.
Ibid., pp. 304-05.
Ibid., pg. 305.
A timely read, I'm working on a piece on the pre-modern worldview. I'd like to call it "traditional" but it gets messy with the traditionalism you have described here.
Great stuff! Eliade’s ‘Myth of the Eternal Return’ would probably be worth mentioning here as well