Caustic Ramblings

I came across a rather interesting comment discussion thread on this very topic. A person who is presumably-left-leaning asserted in the thread that one can be a "Leftist" and Traditionalist (in the spiritual/religious sense) and at the same time. And of course the replies challenging this assertion came pouring in right away. Below, I shall highlight the reply I found to be the most insightful. But first things first:

I must say that over the years I've become less and less interested in whatever "-ism" or ideological orientation people claim to be affiliated with. The reason why is because what a person professes to be ideologically or religiously often has very little to do with how they behave in mundane, everyday life. By this, a person's stated ideological or religious affiliation becomes little more than an act of flag-waving; or shall we say "virtue-signalling" in today's internet culture parlance. So my best guess regarding the motivations of the above commenter, is that he might be suffering from a sense of conflicted identity, which is quite normal for young people (yeah, I'm guessing he's young). Here is the comment, MB states:

I disagree with those on this thread who argue that leftism and traditionalism are necessarily opposed. I would cite in this regard the works of Erich Fromm and Fritz Schumacher, who both challenged capitalism. Fromm did so from a traditional Jewish perspective on the grounds that capitalism is a form of idolatry, because capitalists worship the dead product of labour and do not appreciate living, creative labour itself.

Although he was Catholic, Schumacher’s critique comes from a Buddhist perspective as he too argues that the value of labour can be massively increased by focussing on the experience and conditions of the worker rather than narrowly on the end product.

I believe that MB's primary thinking error here is conflating opposition to modern capitalism with support of leftism. In other words, the mere belief that modern capitalism is problematic does not automatically make that person a leftist. This is a sort of, "Great, you don't like X, therefore you are in our Y-camp!" fallacy. When in fact, most Traditionalists do indeed realize the shortcomings of modern capitalism and the sort of nihilism and cultural degeneracy it breeds. This leads me to believe MB is likely not very well read on the authors he is claiming to be compatible to whatever his own pre-existing ideological beliefs are. He goes on:

I think there can be ‘right’ and ‘left’ views of traditionalism just as there are ‘right’ and ‘left’ views of modernism. Leftist traditionalism would typically emphasise the egalitarianism of the religions and their breaking down of previous hierarchies. Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam all have strong narratives in this regard. (Brahminism less so, but it is important to remember many other egalitarian movements within the Hindu fold, and many Indian spiritual teachers who saw past caste).

I think this might actually clue us into an inherent weakness in the Perennialist ideology I'm about to get at below. What I mean is that including Abrahamic religions and thus the inherently-egalitarian tendencies of Christianity and Islam, might undermine the premise that these religions are perfect expressions of some notion of eternal spiritual tradition. BTW, I think MB is wrong here about Buddhism, as in its most orthodox form, it's a religion for renunciate monks; the scriptures say very little on the topic of social structures; historically, Buddhists have never been in the business of undermining established social hierarchies, much less devoting much attention to those topics.

But yes, I must state that this whole thread I'm bringing up makes reference to the Rene Guenon brand of Traditionalism, which is the most well known modern-day take on the Perennial Philosophy. This is the small cultist intellectual circle that calls itself "The Traditionalist School" and is centered around Guenon and the other intellectuals of his time period who followed his lead; authors like Julius Evola and Frithjof Schuon. And I must state that I do not buy into Guenon's criteria of what constitutes and does not constitute a proper religious tradition. But that's something for a different post, or shall I say series of posts. Anyway, here's the response from JR:

Sorry, but you literally, and I mean literally, a priori, cannot have leftist traditionalism. And this can't, in principle, be up for debate. It is a contradiction in terms. It is like saying "liquid ice" or "a married bachelor." This isn't a rightist claim to Traditionalism, this is simply the definition and formulation of Traditionalism given by Guenon and Evola. It is an absolute mistake - one that reveals a trenchant modernism - to think that any critique of capitalism must come from the left, and if you don't believe me, I simply direct you to the aforementioned authors. Capitalism is the civilization of the Third Estate, of liberal democracy, the civilization of the merchant, by the merchant, and for the merchant. Traditionalism opposes this not from the base, irrationalist proletarian side, but from above, restoring to society the proper dominance of the warrior-aristocratic ideal and the sacred above that. Traditionalist critiques don't degrade the worker; they lament the enslavement of the worker to the materialist ends of capitalist society and bemoan the subsequent loss of his dignity (they don't support a workers' state, of course, since it is not in the worker's nature to rule). Any Traditionalist agrees to the subhuman nature of consumerism/capitalism.

There can be "right" and "left" views of Tradition, yes. The rightist views of Tradition will cohere it to the extent that "right-wing" doesn't merely mean the bourgeois capitalist "conservatism" of today. The left-wing, by definition the forces of progress and change, cannot even in theory comport with an ounce of positive Traditionalist doctrine. This isn't to say they can't agree with Traditionalists about an abstract fact like "capitalism is degrading," but that their metaphysical presuppositions absolutely preclude any possibility whatsoever that they could agree as regards how to solve the problems or society or what an ideal society even looks like. Progress, mass society, egalitarianism, class conflict, humanism, democracy, etc. are all fundamentally opposed to Tradition.

The takeaway here is that egalitarian presuppositions about human nature (and thus how to properly order society) are utterly incompatible with the world's deep religious traditions. And I can't think of a single world tradition that considers progress-for-the-sake-of-progress (progress here meaning forward motion change) to be an inherently-positive value. Any honest Leftist who knows their stuff will unequivocally declare religious traditions to be a reactionary force and at odds with the sort of materialist utopian aspirations which underpin all forms of Leftist thought.

And I'd say the grand takeaway here is that people should spend more time acquiring knowledge and having internal dialogues about what they learn, before going around and loudly declaring themselves to be proponents/allies/supporters of this-or-that big idea.

Some notes:

1. The central claim of Perennialism is that there is the same core kernel of universal truth contained within every major world religious tradition. However this just raises the following question: are these universal truths naturally inherent within each tradition or do these truths eventually assert themselves within the practices and theological speculations of these traditions?

2. Most (if not all) of the 20th century Perennialist authors seem to imply in their writings that the former is the case. Admitting the latter as even a remote possibility opens up a can of worms that those who wish to remain within good standing of their respective mainstream religion of choice would rather avoid opening.

3. That can of worms is the notion that perhaps several of the world's major religions arose as fallible literary creations of men and thus NOT perfect/infallible divine revelations from above. The concept of "revelation" we know of today is actually peculiar to a single historical culture that Oswald Spengler termed the "Magian culture." Another term for this would be the Arabian or Aramean worldview that emerged during the late Iron Age and the high Classical era, just around the time after the Iranian Medes and Persians had crushed the old empires of Assyria and Babylon and took over the region.

4. The new spiritual paradigm was a cross fertilization of Sabean-Chaldean astrotheological mysticism and Iranian-Zoroastrian dualism. This was a time of great spiritual inspiration, probably owing to the destruction of the archetypal great-evil globalist empire, i.e. the brutal Assyrians; represented by the Tower of Babel motif. Also around this time, we see a very sudden disappearance of the Ziggurat temple form; a form that had dominated institutional worship in Mesopotamia for the prior 3,000 years. The Magian worldview eventually encroached upon the dying Apollonian-classical paradigm of the Greco-Roman world. And thus we saw the rapid spread and flowering of various Magian religions and philosophical-spiritual systems, i.e. Christianity, a constellation of various Gnostic sects, Manicheaism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Orthodox Zoroastrianism, ect.

5. In this age of huge empires and conquests, the more esoteric Magian teachings of seers and mystics eventually distilled down into concrete belief systems for the common man. These scripture-based doctrines were the creations of institutional priesthoods. The first of these was the Temple priesthood of Jerusalem during the Persian and Hellenistic period. This priesthood, originally a group of scribes and tax collectors working for the Achaemenid Persian crown (At the time, Judea was a part of the Persian imperial province of Trans-Euphrates, basically Syria or the Levant region) who were tasked with presiding over the cultural affairs of the local region. The scribe-priests created a new narrative from scratch, essentially weaving together various myths and legal doctrines of neighboring/preceding cultures into a synthetic new ethnic identity, i.e. Judaism, and imposing this new doctrine on the locals who were largely still practicing polytheistic Canaanite customs. The scribe-priests may have been scholarly survivors of the old Assyrian-Babylonian regime whom the Persian rulers relocated out of the Assyrian heartland and into an alien region where they'd be unable to stir up too much trouble (i.e. rebellion) among a new local population they would have no kinship ties to. We should remember that large-scale population relocations was a common practice among Iron Age Near Eastern empires. The Persians would have merely copied what their Babylonian and Assyrian predecessors had been doing prior. The OT/Tanakh perfectly illustrates this practice via the Babylonian Exile narrative.

6. By the Hellenistic period, i.e. after the fall of the Persians to Alexander's armies and the subsequent establishment of Macedonian empires upon the region, the Jerusalem corpus seems to have been consolidated into a totalizing doctrine with a central narrative of common ancestry and nationhood. What was probably once a mere encyclopedia of various teachings, myths, poetry and legal codes of the broader Near East region, was then put through an editing and redaction process whereby the various gods, goddesses, heroes and other personages once featured in constituent texts were transformed into narrative cogs. The higher and most potent characters were consolidated into a single tribal All-God (Yahweh); the rest were re-branded as various patriarchs and prophets. And at some point, the priesthood presented the entire corpus to the masses as being an unequivocally-divine and inerrant "revelation" from the new All-God. And thus the common rabble could not dare question any element of the doctrine in question; the written doctrine itself became a sacred object ('Can't touch this!') and of course this eventually devolved into a text-based type of idolatry we can call Bibliolatry . Not long after this first synthetic literary creation came to be (Judaism), various copycats would repeat the same process. And thus we now know the naked essence of exoteric Magian dogma and the revelatory mask it hides behind.

7. More than 2000 years later, modern Perennialist authors are passing off these synthetic narratives as being on equal footing with the genuine mystical teachings of sages, seers and magi. We could say that the latter contains what we can truly call Perennial teachings. But yes, major world religions based on synthetic narratives do indeed include Perennial truths, but this is a result of what I would speculate as being the work of said sages, seers and magi within the respective traditions who re-infused Perennial wisdom into these systems, gradually over time. And thus the synthetic doctrines are not the SOURCE of Perennial wisdom, but rather vessels of such wisdom; and only under the right conditions.

In my internet travels, I have noticed that the so-called Traditionalist School (Guenon, Schuon, Evola, ect.) has produced a small (but dedicated) cult following of pseudo-intellectual repeaters who faithfully parrot the general sentiments and select talking points the original authors like Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Julius Evola, ect., expressed many decades back. Many of these followers are simply devout adherents of sectarian religions looking for a metaphysical and intellectual rocket-booster for their particular set of beliefs. Take this commentator as an example, as he attempts to write-off the ancient Pythagorean-Platonic lineage of classical antiquity as something that should not qualify as what he personally considers to be a "tradition" based on his own Confucian-style readings of the aforementioned authors.

You ask about “independent sages”. The only person I can think of whom the perennialist authorities would regard as a genuine master, but who seems to have been unaffiliated with any revealed tradition, is Plotinus. One recalls his response to Porphyry’s suggestion that he attend a Christian liturgy, since there would be angels there: “It is not for me to go to those beings, but for those beings to come to me!” He, and perhaps a very few others, are exceptions that prove the rule.

Though one must of course grant that such a possibility exists in principle, it is nonetheless obvious that a man is a fool if he refuses to take advantage of the sacramental protection of an orthodox tradition on the grounds that he might himself be among so selective a group. Those who suppose themselves the equals of a Plotinus, with angels running up and down the ladder of their being, would be well advised to ponder Schuon’s admonition: “Metaphysical intuition alone does not prevent titantic falls.”

It is one thing to have glimpsed certain truths, and even to be able to convey them to others; it is something altogether different to be wholly transformed by these truths—to know That Which is by virtue of having become That which knows. Don’t make the mistake of equating a planimetric understanding with a truly global realization.

IMHO the problem here is that the author implicitly states that he only considers a very limited number of "revealed" doctrines of middle eastern origin to be "orthodox traditions." And by "revealed creeds of middle eastern origin," I mean the more dogmatic of the Magian religions of Near East that Oswald Spengler referenced in his eminently-profound work "Decline of the West."

The commentator I quote above conveys either a misunderstanding or willful misrepresentation of the Tradition sages like Iamblichus, Plotinus, Porphyry, Ammonius Saccas, Plato ect. hailed from, which was at least 700 years (at the time of Plotinus) of sacred teachings passed down in an unbroken teacher-disciple line. On the other hand, Christianity at the time was still a very young, new religious movement. If we were to apply 20th century "Traditionalist" rhetoric to this particular time period in late antiquity, then it would be Christianity that would be considered the upstart, possibly "inauthentic' religion (unless of course it followed Jewish tradition to the letter), not the Pythagorean-Platonist schools, which would in fact be a firmly established Tradition of the Hellenistic world.

Basically this "independent sages" label being applied in this situation is quite nonsensical and reeking of sectarian solipsism. It's also a straw man. I would wager with the best of my thinking abilities at this particular time that, like all devout Judeo-Christian apologists, the commentator's imperative is to defend and promote his particular version of religion.