Excerpt from THE REAWAKENING OF MYTH by Boris Nad, forthcoming (December 2020) from PRAV Publishing:
The process through which the West has passed ever faster and faster has already been deemed “creative destruction”: the West has constantly destroyed its own traditions, including its own religions, and subjects everything to doubt, including even the very principles upon which Western (European) civilization was constructed. At the same time, the West is not building up anything: although it is a product of or deviation from European tradition and civilization, it is not Europe, but rather a negation of traditional Europe, an Anti-Europe…The consequence of this development is a distinctly “materialist civilization”: the consumer society composed of atomized individuals in which no superior principle matters and in which everything is allowed to be “doubted” except “doubt” itself. In fact, this is a matter of inner disintegration and deep spiritual crisis, of dissolution which creates nothing, instead only moving aimlessly, a crisis still awaiting its outcome. Such societies are very unstable and fragile on the inside: the fact of the matter is the internal disintegration of (Western) society itself. For some time now, the West has emanated premonitions and forebodings of the end of this very civilization.
Until altogether recently, the West firmly believed in one dogma: infinite development, infinite “progress” towards one all-obligatory goal which can in no way be stopped. All others have simply “lagged” (and in time, presumably, will accept “Western superiority”). The root illusion is the conviction that Western civilization has a “privileged place in the history of the world.” As early as the beginning of the 20th century, however, if not earlier, there appeared certain individuals who “perceive, though in a vague and confused manner, that the civilization of the West may not always go on developing in the same direction, but may someday reach a point where it will stop, or even be plunged in its entirety into some cataclysm.”[1] Consciousness of this crisis has in itself been essentially a favorable development, a sign that these chimeras and illusions have begun to dissipate…
The crisis is here, but, again, it has not yet seen itself through. Etymologically, “crisis” is, among other things, the hour of decision: “The phase that can properly be termed ‘critical’ in any order of things is the one immediately preceding a resolution, be this favorable or unfavorable – in other words, one in which a turn is taken either for the better or for the worse.”[2] Yet it is far from the case that the possible outcomes of the crisis will be arbitrary or accidental. The chaos of the modern world is also illusory. It is governed and ruled by definite cyclical laws. What appears to be disorder and anomaly is, in fact, a necessary, constituent element of a higher order; the “totality of disorder” constitutes the order in the world…
The ostensibly sturdy and immutable “international liberal order” established by the Western powers over the past few decades is now proving to be extremely unstable, or simply a mere illusion, and the same can be said of the internal structure of many Western countries. The crisis of the Western world is spreading uncontrollably, worse than any epidemic, in all fields and spheres…
No virus or pandemic caused the current crisis. The crisis of the West has long been in development, its effects are only finally becoming cumulative. This crisis is spiritual, civilizational, political, cultural, social, economic and financial, a crisis of health, migration, and an environmental crisis all at once, and this whole series of crises has but one outcome – one which could turn into a devastating tsunami that would sink one civilization and shake the whole world… Metaphorically speaking, “the West was the first to be infected”, and the infection therefrom “spread throughout the world”, for it, the West, “plays the role of the historical mold”, and the virus itself destroys that which is already weakened. If the warning posed by this situation is not heeded, then the present pandemic will certainly not be the last.
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[1-2] René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World (Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2004).
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– Boris Nad, “The Secret of the East and the Crisis of the Western World”, forthcoming in THE REAWAKENING OF MYTH
