People will object that I am being unfair to the human elites who create culture. It will be pointed out to me that without a certain encroachment on the jungle, the savannah or the forest, and thus without the restriction of the natural domain of the wild animals, there would never have been cities or monuments, or all that is encompassed under the name of ‘civilisation’; the arts being all more or less linked to each other, as well as to certain fundamental techniques.
This is true, and no one can deny it. Or rather, it was true in the days when one could still think that it was worth cutting down a few trees to erect, on the top of a promontory or some other ‘high place’, a perfect temple or to build, in the middle of a plain, one or more pyramids with powerful symbolism, whose measurements corresponded to those of the Earth itself, if not the solar system. This was true in the days when, as an integral part of Nature, man had not yet risen against her in the laughable pride over other living species; in the time when, in the best societies—traditional societies—the most eminent minds, far from exalting themselves like Francis Bacon or Descartes at the idea of the ‘domination of man’ over the universe, dreamed only of expressing allegorically, in carved, painted, sung or written work, or by rhythmic sound and dance, their intuitive knowledge of cosmic truths, their vision of the eternal.
Then, human creation within certain limits fitted harmoniously into the natural environment. It didn’t spoil it or desecrate it. It couldn’t be otherwise, given that at that time only what René Guénon calls ‘objective art’ was considered ‘art’: work whose standards are directly linked to the artist’s knowledge of the standards of the visible and invisible, human and non-human universe. Thus were born the colossi of Tiahuanaco, the pyramids of Egypt and America, the Greek, Hindu or Japanese temples, the prehistoric or relatively recent paintings at the bottom of caves in Altamira, Lascaux, Ajanta; the Byzantine, Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals, the great mosques of the world, and all the sacred or initiatory music from Antiquity to Bach and Wagner, and the sacred dances of the Indies and the whole world. None of this takes away the soul of the native environment—on the contrary: it expresses it, translates it into the language of the eternal by linking it to it.
But all this was yesterday; it was mostly in the past. It dates from before, and in general long before, the appearance of the insect-man and before his sudden multiplication into not arithmetical but geometrical expression, the result of techniques for protecting the weak.
I repeat: quality and quantity are mutually exclusive.
Those whose numbers are increasing in geometric progression—doubling, and in some countries tripling every thirty years—can only ruin the land, the landscape, and the soil itself to which they cling like leeches. They need houses—any kind of houses quickly built and as cheap and ugly as possible. Art doesn’t come into play provided that, in technically advanced countries, they offer more and more comfort and allow an increasingly automatic life. In other countries it will be enough for them to line up, all alike, like a built-in series, on the site of uprooted forests. Corrugated iron will replace the fresh thatch. And fragments of rusty cans, roughly fixed together, will form the walls instead of palm leaves, which have become rarer. Thus these cheap dens are certainly not as good as the most primitive African or Oceanian huts or the ancient caves. But they do have the advantage that they can be built at the same pace as the human population.
As for the work of art, the visible reflection of the eternal, destined to last for millennia—the pyramid, the tomb, the temple or the colossus freed from the living rock, or erected like a stone hymn in the middle of the plain or at the top of an escarpment—has long since been out of the question. Man no longer builds under the direction of the wise, to give substance to a truth that cannot be expressed in words, but under that of entrepreneurs eager for quick profits to house as many people as possible, and any people whatsoever. The landscape is sacrificed, the forest is torn away, and its inhabitants—the beasts, the reptiles, the birds—are pushed back to where they can no longer live, or killed outright. Man, once an integral part of Nature, and sometimes its crowning glory, has become the executioner of all beauty, the enemy of the universal mother, the cancer of the planet.
Even the superior races no longer create symbols. They have replaced, or are increasingly replacing, temples and cathedrals with factories and medical research centres. And they ‘decorate’ their public squares with caricatures made of cement or wire. The music that their young people like, the music that they let blare out of their transistors all day long as a background for all their activities, all their speeches, all their remaining thoughts, is a bad imitation of Negro music.
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Editor’s Note: This is why, as soon as I hear degenerate music in the first minute of some white nationalist podcast, I immediately get off that website—just like I treat TV shows: as soon as I see a black guy I change the channel. Compare this attitude with WN pundits’ recent reviews of the latest Batman film.