Guillaume Faye is a poet of political theory. One can almost hear the Centurion trumpets blaring in the background as his sentences and paragraphs march forward into the landscape of his imagined future.
I hesitate to describe Faye as a political philosopher because political philosophy is more concerned with theories of justice rather than soothsaying about the dynamics of the 21st Century. ArcheoFuturism isn't animated by concerns with distributive justice but rather with a prediction about the future. Equity, it is said, depends upon ample natural resources. Once physical resources are depleted, equity becomes an absurdity. The future, Faye argues, demands a reasoned method for an un-equal distribution of the world's resources so that a breakaway subset of Man can proceed forward both spiritually and technologically while the masses are consigned to live cyclically in a repetition of traditions that lock them in a contented, innocuous whirlpool that drives in the opposite direction; that is, backwards, into the past, then finally into an oblivion with more simian than human qualities.
Justice, as it is normally conceived of, plays no part in the new ArcheoFuturistic distributive model because the dynamic force is simply the Will to Power. The mandate to proceed forward to the highest destiny of Man justifies a partition of resources that is unequal. And as this dynamic plays out in the 21st Century, Faye envisions institutional collapse and widespread ethnic warfare, with a Balkanization of the planet based on race. Europe expands to Euro-Siberia. China in cooperation with Japan controls California. Africa, I believe, is partitioned between Asians and Europeans. Similarly, the resources of the balance of the solar system, particularly Mars, fall to a negotiated split between Asians and Europeans.
I suppose that in the ArcheoFuture Europeans and the quasi-Europeans of America will no longer watch television, in as much as it is well known that only the Japanese and Koreans are able to manufacture televisions worth watching at all. So, in the future, Europeans will have to watch other white goods, such as the Electrolux washing machine or, perhaps, their Phillips vacuum cleaners. Similarly, Asian women will have to carry their secret caches of cosmetics and other necessities in pockets or in their bare fingers, in as much as they will no longer have access to the Ferragamo and Chanel handbags of Italy and France.
The ArcheoFuture is a catastrophe. Faye describes a dystopia. There is nothing that is normatively desirable in his universe. It is likely that models of distributive justice will have to be devised for a future that will be frustrated with increased resource constraints. And the Will to Power will continue to operate as it always has to order the distribution of resources among individuals within the box we call civilization. However, to PROPOSE that we abandon justice is different from recognizing that justice will become more difficult in the 21st Century. In fact, it should be conceded that we do not today live in a system in which serious effort is made towards distributive equity. We live in a world of slogans and dreams. Faye suggests that we should WANT to abandon those dreams.
Indeed, it is my experience that we have abandoned justice already in too many sectors and for too many varieties of people. Visit any jail in America or attempt to walk through a poorer neighborhood in Southeast Asia. The dreams of distributive justice that have been knocked about and discoursed upon in classrooms in the major capitals of the planet have failed to achieve practical effect in reality. How is it that we can be exhorted to abandon what we have barely even begun?
Nonetheless, this is an important book, not because of its prescriptions, but because it may, in a positivistic way, amount to an accurate description of the developing mindset of many Americans, Europeans and even East Asians. The 21st Century, I believe, will begin to advance towards the resource choke points that were imagined in "Soylent Green" and similar works. Inequality will once again attempt to achieve conventional legitimacy. However, even in the midsts of catastrophe, one would hope that some communities would persist that continue to believe in the possibility of utopias.
Guillaume Faye postulates that the current iteration of civilization will fail within our lifetimes. He describes a "jump" phenomenology consistent with chaos theory: once acceleration and velocity reach zero, order degenerates into chaos. The parabola of the rise and fall of society isn't symmetrical. After the sluggish rise from the left to the very pinnacle, the plunge to the right is more or less vertical, from the grand dream of an equitable civilization to the reality of the rocks in just a few cycles of hyperventilation. Mad Max is waiting for us, and no one in our vicinity looks much like Charlize Theron.
We've all heard the peak oil theory; and after a few runs through it, we've dismissed it. But now, I've begun to reconsider the validity of the peak oil hypothesis. USD as the reserve currency is simply a restatement of oil. Once oil as a control mechanism begins to fail in a sort of Green Crisis, Guillaume Faye's ArcheoFuture may begin its march towards a horrific realization.
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S. J. Hulbert
A bold, uncompromising vision of Europe's future
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 26, 2011
M. Rasmussen
A fast and furious book, somewhere between sci-fi and political philosophy!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 27, 2011
