While Weaver loved the South with a fierce passion, he avoided one of the besetting sins of the heirs of the Agrarians: a constricting sectionalism that thrives on the belief that all would have been well south of the Potomac had the Confederacy bested the Union Armies. Weaver perceived that the infirmities of modern Western civilization transcended the dichotomy between North and South.
George M. Curtis & James J. Thompson, Jr [i].
Who is Julius Evola? His career was many-sided: As a philosopher he belongs among the leading representatives of Italian Idealism … to some he might appear as an èminence grise in politics, for Mussolini apparently wanted to implement some of Evola’s ideas to create more freedom from the restrictions of National Socialism … and many of his books testify to his understanding of alchemy and magic, and it is reported that Mussolini stood in considerable awe of Evola’s ‘magical powers.’”
H.T. Hansen [ii]
When a thinker says civilization has taken the wrong road, when he says civilization is in the process of disintegrating, when his political sympathies lie with a defeated power that tried to establish a different pattern of civilization, then that thinker is a pariah. He stands outside the circle of “received wisdom.” What, then, can we learn from him? Being an outsider, he sometimes sees what the rest of us have missed. Some of his views may be repellant, or outrageous, yet he should not be ignored; for those who find themselves standing outside a civilization are not entangled in the conceits of that civilization, or engaged in the deceptive flattery that feeds it. The thinker who stands outside civilization, who suffers intellectual exile, may be civilization’s only honest critic. He may, in fact, be honest and courageous enough to pour cold water over our heads and cry “shame.” Why, indeed, would he do such a thing? There is never any money is such a career. Everyone and everything, in fact, is moving further and further from him. Whatever his failings or missteps, he has his little corner of truth. Wariness is advised in approaching him, of course. One should never approach pariahs uncritically. One approaches them to learn truths that we have exiled. One approaches them with one burning question: What have we failed to see?
Read more