Why I don't have much time for Dugin

“Is Dugin a Traditionalist?” Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovtsov asked in their review of Neo-Eurasianism and Perennial Philosophy (The Russian Review, 2009). They decided that Aleksandr Dugin was only using traditionalism or giving his own interpretation to the authentic traditionalist school of Rene Guenon. Even though I don't approve of the imperialistic West-hating Neo-Eurasianism of Dugin, I say, it is well that Dugin try to breathe some life into the anti-life school of Guenon.

As Umland and Shekhovtsov said the traditionalist school repudiates all achievements of modernity. Traditionalist's believe that a “perennial wisdom” or “primordial Tradition” was revealed to humanity during a “Golden Age” (the Hindu Satya Yuga). As ages (Yugas) superseded each other, the world slid into decadence, and “perennial wisdom,” as a single “spiritual language,” gradually disappeared from people’s life. In our current age—the Era of Vice (Kali Yuga)—the ancient cultural foundations of human existence have degenerated completely: only traces of the “primordial Tradition” remain, and they survive only in certain world religions that traditionalists understood to be dialects of the lost single “spiritual language.”

The big problem with that worldview is that there is no non-material spiritual world, there is only ascetic interpretations derived from spiritual language and strict ascetic disciplines that overcome or block all material desires, which bring feelings of great bliss to the ascetic that is exaggeratedly described as a spiritual union with God. The inward God of the beatific vision of Christianity, or the Samadhi in Hinduism, was/is an ascetic peak material experience and not a spiritual union with God.

If we take the word “metastasis,” the spread of something, like a disease, from an initial site to a different or secondary site, and apply it to the split between the material and the spiritual, we can see the numerous problems this led to, not the least of which was, ironically and tragically, the decline of religion.

The liberals and progressives more or less rejected religion mainly because Western science could find no trace of the spiritual or a spiritual God. And they were right. But they were wrong to reject religion and Godhood. 

Rather than killing religion and God or going backward to a traditionalist school which repudiates all the great Western achievements of modernity, we might have gone back to the point of the metastasis and rejected the the split between the material and the spiritual. There is no non-material spiritual God but we can reach ascending levels of supermaterial Godhood by way of material and supermaterial evolution. As seen in the philosophy of theological materialism, real Godhood is reached by material evolution and not by the symbolic experience of bliss reached in ascetic practices.

So given Dugin's combined imperialistic West-hating Neo-Eurasianism and his version of the anti-life Traditionalist School, I don't have much time for Dugin.