The Crisis of the Modern World (Collected Works of Rene Guenon) Revised Edition

Rene Guenon makes an excellent case when he presents the ontologically corrupt nature of our time in his _Crisis of the Modern World_. Guenon's prose, as noted by other readers, translates horribly into English from the original French. Never before have I read "paragraph long" sentences and Guenon is probably one of the few authors who uses semicolons and colons more frequently than periods in his ultra-dense prose. His train of thought is difficult to follow but once concentrated upon closely it is apparent how insightful Guenon is explaining his subject. He was an early twentieth century advocate of the "perennialist" philosophy: all of the world's genuine religious faiths share a common root and esoteric teachings that have been obscured by the process of time. The modern world, whose historical origins lay during the Renaissance period, is the spiritual nadir of this time "cycle" according to Guenon's understanding of ancient Hindu mythology. It is marked by a decline in the role of spiritual élites, both exoteric and esoteric religious devotion, and by the subsequent rise in the study of material, empirical sciences, and the ascendancy of secular humanist philosophy and the replacement of objective, transcendent religion with sentimental moralism. Guenon's perspective is interesting because he defends the Catholic Church as Europe's sole remaining traditional body, despite dropping out of the Catholic fold. Guenon instead affiliated himself with Freemasonry and the study of Hindu texts, and who later in life moved to Egypt and converted to Islam in order to live in a more traditional (i.e. non-Western) society. Guenon decries the fact that the West has lost touch with its religious roots and is in the meantime corrupting the traditional eastern societies. He also notes how the current, anti-traditional Western advocates of democracy and thus majority rule "by the people" are in fact in the minority if the East and its views are taken into consideration. All mental activity and emphasis in the West have become geared to the external and purely rational, not toward the "intellectual" in the classic sense of the term. Consider the apocalyptic nature of the pro-sports phenomenon:
"There is no longer any place for intelligence, or anything else that is purely inward, for these are things that can neither be seen nor touched, that can neither be counted nor weighed; there is only place for outward action in all its forms, even those that are the most completely meaningless. For this reason it should not be a matter of surprise that the Anglo-Saxon mania for sport gains ground day by day: the ideal of the modern world is the 'human animal' who has developed his muscular strength to the highest pitch; its heroes are athletes, even though they be mere brutes; it is they who awaken popular enthusiasm, and it is their exploits that command the passionate interest of the crowd. A world in which such things are seen has indeed sunk low and seems near its end" (92).
The only hope for the West, Guenon notes, is for a spiritual elite, an initiated aristocracy of sorts, to guide society into the next "Golden Age." However, the forces of the modern world prevent such a naturally dispersed and alienated group from organizing and turning back the clock. Nevertheless, the modern world, built as it is on materialistic presuppositions, will experience a catastrophe (_Crisis_ was written in the 1920s before the first nuclear weapons were constructed) that will usher in the next "cycle," the "new heaven and new earth" according to the Gospel. With the proliferation of nuclear technology and the continuing Mideast conflict, Guenon remains to be proven wrong. I disagree with Guenon's rejection of Catholicism for shady esotericism, Hinduism and Islam, but overall he reveals the modern world for the false, temporal sham that it really is.

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.