René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

In any case, whether it be a question of the places themselves, of the influences remaining attached to them, or again of knowledge of the kind just mentioned, the old adage corruptio optimi pessima may be recalled, and may be applied perhaps more accurately here than in any other case; and moreover ‘corruption’ is just the right word, even in its most literal sense, for the ‘residues’ here concerned are, as stated at the beginning, comparable to the products of the decomposition of a once living being; and as all corruption is more or less contagious, these products of the dissolution of things past will themselves exercise, wherever they may be ‘projected’, a particularly dissolving and disaggregating action, especially if they are made use of by a will clearly conscious of its objectives. All this may be likened to a sort of ‘necromancy’, making use of psychic remains quite other than those of human individuals, and it is by no means the least redoubtable sort, for it has by its nature a field of action far more extensive than that of common witchcraft, indeed no comparison between the two being possible in that respect: matters have reached such a point nowadays that our contemporaries must indeed be blind not to have even the least suspicion of where they stand!

The material presented to the reader hitherto and the examples given should make it easier to understand, if only in a general way, the precise character of the stages in the anti-traditional action that has really ‘made’ the modern world as such; but it is of first importance not to forget that, since all effective action necessarily presupposes agents, anti-traditional action is like all other kinds of action, so that it cannot be a sort of spontaneous or ‘fortuitous’ production, and, since it is exercised particularly in the human domain, it must of necessity involve the intervention of human agents. The fact that it has conformed to the specific character of the cyclic period in which it has been working explains why it was possible and why it was successful, but is not enough to explain the manner of its realization, nor to indicate the various measures put into operation to arrive at its result. In any case, a little reflection on what follows should suffice to bring conviction, for the spiritual influences themselves act in every traditional organization through human beings as intermediaries and as authorized representatives of the tradition, although the tradition is really ‘supra-human’ in its essence; there is all the more reason why the same condition should apply when only psychic influences come into the picture, especially such as are of the lowest order, and are the very antithesis of a power transcendent with respect to our world, apart from the fact that the character of ‘counterfeit’, everywhere manifested in this domain, and to be referred to again later, makes human intermediaries even more rigorously necessary. On the other hand, initiation, in whatever form it may appear, is that which really incarnates the ‘spirit’ of a tradition, and is also that which allows of the effective realization of ‘supra-human’ states; obviously therefore initiation is the thing that must be opposed (at least insofar as any such opposition is really conceivable) by anti-traditional action, which tries by every means to drag men toward the ‘infra-human’. The term ‘counter-initiation’ is therefore the best for describing that to which the human agents through whom the anti-traditional action is accomplished belong, both as a whole and in their various degrees (for, like initiation itself, it must necessarily comprise degrees); and this term is not merely a conventional expression used for convenience to designate something that really has no name, for in its form and in its meaning it corresponds as exactly as possible to very precise realities.

It is rather remarkable that in considering the whole assemblage of all the things that really constitute modern civilization, from whatever point of view it is envisaged, one is always driven to the conclusion that everything seems to be increasingly artificial, denatured, and falsified. Many of those who criticize modern civilization today are struck by the fact, even when they do not know how to carry the matter any further and have not the least suspicion of what really lies behind it. A little logic should, it seems, be enough to indicate that if everything has become artificial, the mentality to which this state of things corresponds must be no less artificial than everything else, that it too must be ‘manufactured’ and not spontaneous; and once this simple reflection has been made, indications pointing in the same direction cannot fail to be seen in almost indefinitely growing multitude everywhere. Nevertheless it seems unfortunately to be very difficult to escape sufficiently far from the ‘suggestions’ to which the modern world owes both its existence as such and its persistence, for even those who declare themselves most resolutely ‘anti-modern’ generally see nothing whatever of all this, and that is why their expenditure of effort is so often a dead loss, or at any rate has almost no real significance.

The anti-traditional action necessarily had to aim both at a change in the general mentality and at the destruction of all traditional institutions in the West, since the West is where it began to work first and most directly, while awaiting the proper time for an attempt to extend its operations over the whole world, using the Westerners duly prepared to become its instruments. Moreover, once the mentality had been changed, the institutions could be the more easily destroyed because they would then no longer conform to it; the work that aims at a deviation of mentality therefore appears to be really fundamental, and on that work all else must depend in one way or another; attention will therefore be chiefly directed toward it. It is a work that obviously could not be made effective all at once, although perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is the speed with which it has been possible to induce Westerners to forget everything connected with the existence of a traditional civilization in their countries; if one thinks of the total incomprehension of the Middle Ages and everything connected with them which became apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it becomes easy to understand that so complete and abrupt a change cannot have come about in a natural and spontaneous way. However that may be, the first task was as it were to confine men within the limits of their own individuality, and this was the task of rationalism, as previously explained, for rationalism denies to the being the possession or use of any faculty of a transcendent order; it goes without saying moreover that rationalism began its work before ever it was known by that name, and before it took on its more especially philosophical form, as has been shown in connection with Protestantism; and besides, the ‘humanism’ of the Renaissance was no more than the direct precursor of rationalism properly so called, for the very word ‘humanism’ implies a pretension to bring everything down to purely human elements and thus (at least in practice if not yet by virtue of an expressly formulated theory) to exclude everything of a supra-individual order. The next thing to do was to turn the attention of the individual toward external and sensible objects, in order as it were to enclose him, not only within the human domain, but within the much narrower limits of the corporeal world alone; that is the starting-point of the whole of modern science, which was destined to continue to work in the same direction, thus making the limitation more and more effective. The constitution of scientific or, if preferred, of philosophico-scientific theories also had to be embarked upon gradually (and here it is necessary to do no more than to summarize matters already dealt with); mechanism prepared the way directly for materialism, which was to mark the more or less irremediable limitation of the mental horizon to the corporeal domain, thenceforth looked upon as the only ‘reality’, and itself stripped of everything that could not be regarded as simply ‘material’; naturally, the elaboration of the very notion of ‘matter’ by the physicists had an important part to play at this point. This is the point at which the ‘reign of quantity’ was really entered upon: profane science, mechanistic ever since Descartes, became more specifically materialistic after the second half of the eighteenth century, and was to become more and more exclusively quantitative in its successive theories, while at the same time materialism insinuated itself into the general mentality and finally succeeded in stabilizing that attitude, without resort to any kind of theoretical formulation; thus it became all the more diffused and passed finally into the state of being the sort of ‘instinct’ that has been called ‘practical materialism’. This attitude was to be yet further reinforced by the industrial applications of quantitative science, which had the effect of attaching men more and more completely to purely material realizations. Man ‘mechanized’ everything and ended at last by mechanizing himself, falling little by little into the condition of numerical units, parodying unity, yet lost in the uniformity and indistinction of the ‘masses’, that is, in pure multiplicity and nothing else. Surely that is the most complete triumph of quantity over quality that can be imagined.