Axial Antinomianism

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The West is terminally ill, this much is clear to all. But what if the disease is truly ancient? Could you accept that? Would this be a modus tollens too far? Or would you follow to where boys fear to tread? How much of the Western tradition could you discard?

For anyone on the right, however tepidly, the answer is “at least some”. Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray would be willing to jettison the 60s onward. For Christian reactionaries, perhaps the 1660s onward, maybe a few centuries before that. There was a great article by Thomas Barghest on Social Matter years ago called Where Did It All Go Wrong? where he traces the lineage of the trannegerial state further and further back, concluding that perhaps the original mistake was the quark-gluon condensation a few microseconds after the Big Bang. This is satire, the Tyrrhic run completely off the rails, the inverse of the progressive worship of the Current Thing of the last 5 seconds. But it raises an important point: as a traditionalist, or anti-modern, or just a critic of the terminally ill West, how consistent are you going to be? Is there really a serious case to be made that Ibram X. Kendi and the institutional grooming gang that is modern pedagogy was born just a century ago? Or even less serious, that we got here through a series of historically contingent accidents? Oopsie!

I have always admired the Axial age. In fact, I was obsessed with it. There’s something almost miraculous about it. From the beginning of time to 5 seconds ago,¹ basically nothing of cultural importance was achieved, and then everything formative happened within a few centuries: Zoroaster, the Yijing, Vedanta, Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Socrates—this that Beatles 1 album, just the hits, all killer, no filler. Who wouldn’t be obsessed with the Axial age? And so, I continued to read. And eventually, I learned something—something that any good, Counter-“Enlightenment” reactionary knows: if something looks like propaganda, it probably is.

As grandiose as Zoroaster & co. are, there have always been cracks in this magnificent edifice. There has always been something missing—as though something as deep and mysterious as the world could ever be compassed by a mythic explanation, even a strange and esoteric one.² The idea of man explaining the world—or even serving as a conduit for an explanation—seems deeply hubristic. Imagine a gnat buzzing around a fetid pool, and as he casts his compound eye aloft, thinks to himself, “so this is what it’s like to see the world as God does”. Even revelation inescapably takes the gnat’s-eye view, because it must be formulated in his language—you can’t “talk down” to the gnat from a human perspective. As Wittgenstein says, “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him”. Nor he us.

And wouldn’t you expect these “explanations” to converge? Guénon thought they did, but he and his school have serious problems. The article on those problems will have to wait, but suffice it to say that the idea of “a Tradition” maps only very poorly on to what real life archaic Romans, Germanics, and Greeks actually believed. When one says “materialism is debased and anti-traditional” and the other says, for thousands of years, “my ancestor lies in this tomb, I will feed him milk and cakes, that he not become a larval phantom”, what we have here is a failure to communicate. And the convergence of “explanations” has a scientistic feel, as though myth is an immature (worse, allegorical) science, and as though the world can be exhausted by propositions. It’s hubris all the way down.

So, magnificent as it is, the Axial world has always lacked for something. But one thing is clear: the Axial worldview has won. It’s our worldview still. Is this enough? Doesn’t this mean it has the Mandate of Heaven? Does might = right? Maybe it does, but then, this is the same “reasoning” the progressive uses to justify tranny story hour. And like progressivism, the Axial worldview has tried to make a clean sweep of it; it is a New Age, year-zero ideology, and has tried to erase what came before. But like liberalism, it has not managed this feat. The Old Age worldview continued to different degrees in different cultures, some still almost completely pre-Axial.³ But what’s more, in all cultures, their Old Age worldviews continued under the surface—and in fact, at the foundation—of what followed. So, we will never be rid of the Old Age, we will never transcend it; we will only lose sight of our foundations.

In my search for the foundations of the world, there was always a kind of traditionalist “dark matter”, something that must be there, whose existence is inferred with total certainty from what is seen. It had to be formalist, ritualistic, imperious, primordial, etc. Two books gave me the tools to articulate this: The Ancient City, and The Origin of Language. I have already explicated them briefly in my Ten Books series [1][2], but to condense it even further, the former taught that what we think of as the pith and marrow of the ancient world was its version of modernity, and the latter that the “explanation” or narrative comes only very late and stands upon a deeper foundation.

But it was not until I happened upon a course of lectures, now forgotten, that the pieces started to really fall into place. Fascinating as the Axial worldview had been, it was really the Old Age worldview that fascinated me, and fascinates so many of us on the right, even if it remains dark matter to us. Here was that deeper foundation, here was the worldview of The Ancient City, here was the “imperative culture” of Gans. Not only that, but it dovetailed with all the most venerable Counter-Enlightenment figures like Vico, Spengler, and Maistre who said that “reason” corrodes sociality, and who pointed out that the height of metaphysics augurs the end of a civilizational cycle. This is another way of saying that “propositionality parasitizes imperativity”; the propositions, the “explanation”, the narrative does not come first, but rather, the commands, the rites, the practice. Hume was on to something when he noted the is-ought gap, the gap between the proposition and the command, between the “truth” and the “do!”, but the gap is only in moving from the is to the ought—as it turns out, the ought fathers the is.

As I looked deeper, my assessment of the Axial started to change; there was a move away from “respect for” and toward “critique of”. In each culture, the transition from Old Age to New Age took the same basic form, but the paradigm is the transition from the Indo-Iranian cults to Zoroastrianism.⁴ The Indo-Iranian familial cults had changed but little from Coulanges’ archaic Aryans;⁵ they were orthopraxic, particularistic, centred on the hearth in the domus, and constitutive of the state cults.⁶ Conscience did not enter into the regulation of conduct—each House Father performed the rites as he had received them from his father. He was such a rigorous formalist, performing the rites with such exactitude, that certain formulae were sufficiently old that he no longer understood their meaning. This is what Max Weber called the magical religious paradigm,⁷ which does not traffic in ideas of “true” or “false”, but in ideas of “ordinary” and “uncanny”.⁸ Within this paradigm, conduct is essentially automatic and formulaic; one might compare this with Julian Jaynes’ “bicameral mind”.⁹

Into this ur-traditionalist paradigm was introduced Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda was not the innovation of Zoroaster, but was re-framed by him as the synthesis and culmination of the two other “ahuras”, Mithra and Varuna.¹⁰ Ahura Mazda was now the greatest of the three lords, the lord of Wisdom. But Zoroaster went further. Not content simply to elevate one deity, he recast the whole pantheon, particularly the venerated “daevas” such as Indra, as demons and illusions,¹¹ to where there could be but one omnibenevolent god, Ahura Mazda. And yet, there is evil in the world. Not content to simply call this the absence of good, Zoroaster hypostatized all the lesser malevolent spirits into one, Angra Mainyu, the apotheosis of evil, whose real name Ahriman must be written upside down.

The depth of this world-shattering transition must be underlined. We have here the invention of freedom—man must now make a choice between the force of absolute good and the forces of absolute evil.¹² He is no longer bound by the religion of his fathers; he is free, absolutely free, to go his own way. But he can only go his own way, he can only make this choice, on the basis of conscience. Man’s conduct is no longer circumscribed by his relationship to others, by where he sits in the network of familial ties. He has been freed, and his moral compass is now within himself, and himself alone¹³—we have here the invention of the individual. The seed of the Reformation has been planted, and it is only the hardness of the Aryan soil in which it was sown that will delay its flowering—but flower it will. We have more. Religion is no longer primarily about propitiating a god (carrying out the rites, i.e. obeying commands), but before the rites, it is about a transcendent right and wrong (belief, “truth”, the narrativized “explanation”). We have here the invention of the proposition nation, identity as defined above all by belief, by the truth. And because the truth is the same for a fire-worshipping Parsi as it is for a tadpole, religion based on truth ceases to be a constitutive principle for a distinct people, but at least irrelevant to it, and at worst hostile to it. There is still more. The stakes of this choice, this infant sola fide, are ultimate, but the consequences of the choice follow primarily in the next life. Prayers are said and the god invoked not primarily for worldly goods, but for otherworldly goods, constraining the powerful and casting his eye away from this world—it is a magnificent piece of what Nietzsche will call “slave morality”. In the demotion of this world, we have here the abstraction of man from his immanent reality—no longer is he a mere dirt farmer, or a merchant, or even a king, but he is, in his essence, something not of this world.

The reader will have already seen where this is going. In the introduction of freedom, of the individual, of the proposition nation, and in the abstraction of man from his brute facticity, from his thrownness, we have seen the advent of liberalism.¹⁴ Not the liberalism of Locke and Rousseau in all its superficial detail, but the essential core of the worldview that would lead from Rousseau to tranny story hour and state-sponsored grooming gangs. At the surface level, we oppose liberalism because of the latter; the deeper opposition is to the former. Rolling back and punishing grooming gangs is good and necessary, but this is to treat the car crash patient by stanching the wound and then sending him on his way without addressing the alcoholism and nihilism that led him to plow into that tree in the first place. These core aspects of liberalism are upstream of the more immediate crises, and it is precisely the core that must be attended to. The advent of the Axial worldview could only lead to this core of liberalism, and once set in motion, could only be stopped in two ways: a) by abandoning it, and b) by holding to it incoherently. The latter has served us for millennia but could not hold back the tide indefinitely—we need now to consider the former, if it is even possible.¹⁵

If this thesis is right, it is a reorientation of our worldview. It is also one hell of a blackpill. As it turns out, the problem is far more ancient than we thought—prehistoric, even. Civic nationalism was not born yesterday. This does not mean that the problem is insoluble. What it does mean, however, is that to even begin to think about solving the problem is to adjust our time horizon radically. We must begin thinking not in terms of election cycles, or even decades, but centuries.

But the thesis also has implications so radical that the vast majority will reject it out of hand because it entails things too awful to think about—things like that much of “the West” will have to be re-evaluated and discarded. Only a few of the most intrepid, forward (and simultaneously, backward) thinkers will survive this great winnowing, which will look like folly to the great many.¹⁶ Abstraction will no longer rule man, but man abstraction; the world will again come to be a mysterious place of chiaroscuro; man will again see that the foundation of this world is not his friend or his Daddy, but something that does not want to be looked upon; and man will again become the mythic maintainer of the cosmos in an ecstatic participation in the divine.

And he will finally be rid of those doubts, those cracks in the edifice—he will no longer believe that something so deep and abiding as reality itself is bounded by a series of propositions. Above all, the path to health and strength will again become clear, along with the sheer size of the mountain he must climb. But at last, man will have the tools to weather the coming storm—and the storm is gathering. If he can weather it, on the other side will be an open sea. Perhaps there has never been such an open sea.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar#/media/File:Cosmic_Calendar.png

2. This is not to reject myth, but to question whether there is something anterior to it.

3. Think of our “materialist” barrow priest.

4. This is obviously not to say that the problem with the modern world is Zoroastrianism, only that this example provides the clearest outlines of the problem.

5. He uses the 19th century term for Proto-Indo-Europeans that later came to apply only to the Indo-Iranian world, where it is found as an endonym.

6. See Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, ch. 1, “The background”.

7. Max Weber, Sociology of Religion.

8. We have no real English equivalent for this term anymore, although the old acceptation of awful, as in both “awesome” and “terrible”, comes close. The Latin term sacer, itself of archaic provenance, which means both “holy” and “untouchable/polluting”, is closer still.

9. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The jury is out on the bicameral mind as a physiological fact as Jaynes presents it, but it very closely resembles the pre-Axial paradigm.

10. We will be familiar with them from Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna as the Tyrrhic and Odinic respectively. Ahura simply means “lord”.

11. Through many historical twists and turns, the Persian term daeva has come down to us as the root of our word “devil”.

12. This good/evil framework comprises Weber’s alternative to the magical: the ethical paradigm.

13. cf. the move from shame culture to guilt culture.

14. The Axial worldview has had more liberal consequences than have even been enumerated here; I have simply confined the discussion to the principal ones.

15. It is.

16. “And just as a tyranny of truth and science would be in a position to raise the value of falsehood, a tyranny of prudence could force into prominence a new species of nobleness. To be noble that might then mean, perhaps, to be capable of follies.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, bk. I, §20.