Saturday, July 16, 2022

Intellectuals of the old far right and the new far right (from the archive)

 Intellectuals of the old far right had respect for Western science, men like Raymond Cattell, Richard Lynn, Roger Pearson, John Baker, and Wilmot Robertson respected the Enlightenment. But in the last several years the far right has seen the rise of the Traditionalist School and the works of Julius Evola and Rene Guenon who rejected rationalism and materialism in favor of a Vedic-Hindu, neo-Platonist worldview that disparaged Darwinist material evolution and downplayed the biological origin of social behavior in favor of spiritualism over naturalism.

Was it the deep desire for an all encompassing religion missing from Western science that drew the new Alt-right away from the science-oriented intellectuals of the old far right, or did the Traditionalist School de-emphasizing of race and genetics appeal to the new Alt-right as a way to escape the hatred of racism across the media-driven culture? It was probably some of both.

The new intellectual far right seems to have ignored or is unaware of work of research psychologist Raymond Cattell and his religion from science, Beyondism, or my religious development of theological materialism.

Theological materialism is thoroughly Western and proud of it, following the Western path in centering on science and reason. But unlike the Enlightenment, theological materialism affirms religious tradition transformed rather than rejected.

It is difficult to find ecumenical commonality between the ethnocentric proto-Indo-European pagan religion and the traditional Judea-Christian religions. Rather than getting lost in comparing the symbols of lost spiritualism it is better for us to return to the material world and find our religious connections that way.

The eastern experience of Buddhist nirvana, and the beatific experience of heaven, or the Father Within of Christ, were just that, a peak experience in the physical mind after much ascetic discipline in blocking or overcoming material desires. We can conservatively retain that preliminary Inward Path experience of the God Within, but it needs to be transformed in the Outward Path of material evolution to real Godhood.

We can look beneath thoughts and feelings and find the multifarious processes of the instincts activating life to evolve toward the supreme survival success of Godhood. This activation exists within material life and is never separate from it, and adapts and evolves within the environments life finds itself living in---there is no spiritual/material duality here. The activation of material life toward evolving to Godhood is the unchanging constant as natural selection and evolution make new discoveries and present new challenges as we evolve toward ascending levels of Godhood.

While I respect some of the conclusions of the Traditionalist School (Guénon and Evola---and now Aleksandr Dugin) the Traditionalist School does not find science (a jewel of the West) nearly as important as Eastern spiritualism (a jewel of the East) and they reject and want to destroy the Western world (and its great genetic potential?) due to its gross materialism. Among American followers of Dugin, patriotism seems unfairly lost in seeing only the flaws of the West, which are redeemable. For example, an ethnopluralism of ethnostates or regions could be established, legally, in the United States with our constitutional separation of powers and states, protected from marauding imperialists, supremacists, Marxists, chosenites, and money grubbers, by a defensive federalism.

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