The Crisis of the Modern World

REVIEW QUOTES:

“Guenon is a largely ignored writer due to his thought being foreign to presently acceptable academic philosophy. This should make you want to read him. His political leanings are often cited as a reason for people not to read him, as he’s a right-winger, but that doesn’t stop anybody from reading Heildegger – excuse me, Heidegger.

I’m rating this book four stars, because it’s not an outstanding work (I’ve heard that The Reign of Quantity is his magnum opus), but it does what it sets out to do fairly well. This is a slim volume, at a little over 100 pages, and very readable. If you’re looking for an introduction to some of the oddball traditional/esoteric thought of the early 20th century, look into this rather than Evola, as this provides a succinct introduction. Evola gets all the press because his writing is dense and impenetrable and he writes with a certain passion and conviction and force of will, while Guenon is more detached and clinical in his approach. That being said, Guenon elucidates the pure theory in a way that Evola can’t, which makes him valuable.

The main draw of this book is its diagnosis of modernity as an effect of a particular idea that manifests as democracy and materialism, among other things. He posits that democracy and materialism are interlinked ideas – in fact, he states that, at their root, they spring from the source, both being purely quantitative modes of thought that deny any fixed reference point.

This book is not for everyone. Academic types will spurn it because it’s not part of the de facto canon of the present philosophical establishment, and non-academics will be baffled by it. Guenon’s ideas are unpopular; his conclusions are the kind of thing that many contemporary philosophers take as a reductio of premises, but making a non-circular argument against him is difficult because he’s prepared to accept some highly unfashionable (but still coherent) conclusions. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to cut through the French postmodern/existentialist bullshit and get a different angle on what makes modern life so frustrating.” – Caleb Beers’ Reviews – Goodreads

“The scholarly world is never too short of what is in vogue as `critiques of modernity’ that another addition to this stock would have been redundant. Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World however, is not simply `another’ of this but is distinguished by its profound wisdom, transcending conventional approaches that either diagnosed the symptoms and not the real disease or carried from an exclusively `philosophical’ viewpoint, oblivious to the fact that `philosophy’ itself is among modernity’s offspring. Guénon’s theme is sophia perennis, or primordial Wisdom, which seeks to resurrect the sacred metaphysics that lies at the root of the world’s major religions.

Guénon begins with the premise that the modern world as we know it corresponds exactly to the period of Kali Yuga (or Dark Age) in Hindu cosmology, similar to the Iron Age in Western traditional doctrine, a time when the forces of matter reign supreme and spirituality has been thoroughly eclipsed. In fact, history itself is a gradual process of declining spirituality and “progressive materialization”, so that at the last phase of the human cycle (or the darkest of the Dark Age), mankind shall witness the abundance of material prosperity as has never been witnessed before, while simultaneously impoverished spiritually and utterly divorced from true intellectuality and hence truth itself.

Intellectually, this decline is especially evident in science and philosophy. Philosophy – `love’ of wisdom – became wisdom unto itself; `physics’ – the science of `nature’ in its totality – became a science that deals with only a portion of nature; astrology degraded into astronomy; alchemy degenerated into chemistry; and all that was once meaningful and bound to truth transcending the domain of matter and the world of sensible experience is reduced to bare facts bereft of truth, meaning and purpose. It is no wonder that the modern man today feels alienated from the world, from each other and from himself. The ancient sciences were invariably bound to metaphysical principles found in the world’s great religions, made possible by the eminently religious and theocentric character of the earlier people. Truth for them is one, just as God is One. The different orders and aspects of Reality are but reflections of this same, single and universal truth. Whichever angle the truth is approached, contradictions only appear at the surface so that `specialization’ would eventually lead to the convergence of the various disciplines, which explains why the ancients were so adept at mastering several different branches of knowledge at the same time, insofar as mastery of certain basic laws underlying all of reality permits their application to many different domains.

Modernity by contrast, is built upon the spirit of opposition to religion (think of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Enlightenment) and therefore hostility to metaphysics and truth. Once the ultimate Truth is denied, the ground is cleared for the manufacture of many different “truths”, tending naturally towards relativism and nihilism that are so prevalent in today’s world. Indeed, relativism is the logical outcome of rationalism, this in turn being the result of humanism and individualism, which of course, is the “determining cause of the present decline of the West.” Descartes’ rationalism, instead of raising man to transcend himself towards truth, seeks to drag truth down to the “purely relative and human faculty” of rational thought. The mental outlook that made this possible is materialism, “a conception according to which nothing else exists but matter and its derivatives.” Now this is significant even symbolically, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, hence the source of strife and conflict.

This decadence even manifests itself in the social order – from the separation of religion from the state, the triumph of mediocrity over the wise (democracy), the spread of `mass education’ (which compromises the uniqueness of each individual) to the rise of the cult of `originality’ in the intellectual domain, for whom it is better to create a new error than repeat an old truth. All this are but manifestations of the same catastrophe – neglect of spirituality, hence the loss of unity.

Materialism is also tied to Western domination. The East has been traditionally religious, but in the face of (material) challenge and encroachment by the modern West, is now compelled to adopt the materialistic worldview to compete in this profane realm and in this regard, its religious past is certainly no guide. Where else would they seek guidance and `light’, if not from the very civilization in which materialism organically springed forth? This is in fact how the present age fits neatly into that last phase of Kali Yuga as Guénon understands it, namely that the darkness of materialism will ultimately bring the whole world into its dominion (long before `globalization’ and `end of history’ became common lingo), marking finally the end of an era, i.e. the end of a human cycle, or Manvantara, where `the wheel stops turning.’ This is when chaos, conflict and strife will erupt as never before, a time known in Christianity as the reign of the Antichrist and in Islam as the era of Dajjal.

There is a way out – for the establishment of a spiritual elite to lead the masses out of this darkness. This elite necessarily has to operate covertly, like a secret puppeteer when others could not see the strings, for the masses have become deeply entrenched in their materialism, which continuously creates in them more artificial needs for materiality than it can satisfy. In the West, the only institution capable of bringing about this change is the Catholic Church, which alone is in possession of the sacred traditional doctrine of Christianity. Yet even then, Guenon remains skeptical and calls for the Western world to summon aid from what modicum of true spirituality is left in the East, unadulterated by the `modernized’ outlook that is fast making headways throughout the Orient.” – Tengku Ahmad Hazri’s Reviews – Amazon.com

“Most translated works are difficult reads, but this topic resonated deep with me. It made me re-think the way that I see life. How can we call straying far from God “progress?” Everything in this world has become so secular (perhaps with the intention of finding neutrality), but everything is so profane. We live in a world that actually is suspicious when we say the name of God. I bow in deep respect for this author and for his poignant and sober literary expression. Also, for his perennial philosophy. He is my hero. If you think this review is biased, you are absolutely right.” – Dina Kaidir’s Reviews – Goodreads