Revolt Against the Modern World

* Revolt Against the Modern World. Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. By Julius Evola. Inner Traditions,

URL = https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Revolt-Against-the-Modern-World/Julius-Evola/9780892815067

Description

"With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed. At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent dimension of being.

The revolt advocated by Evola does not resemble the familiar protests of either liberals or conservatives. His criticisms are not limited to exposing the mindless nature of consumerism, the march of progress, the rise of technocracy, or the dominance of unalloyed individualism, although these and other subjects come under his scrutiny. Rather, he attempts to trace in space and time the remote causes and processes that have exercised corrosive influence on what he considers to be the higher values, ideals, beliefs, and codes of conduct--the world of Tradition--that are at the foundation of Western civilization and described in the myths and sacred literature of the Indo‑Europeans. Agreeing with the Hindu philosophers that history is the movement of huge cycles and that we are now in the Kali Yuga, the age of dissolution and decadence, Evola finds revolt to be the only logical response for those who oppose the materialism and ritualized meaninglessness of life in the twentieth century.

Through a sweeping study of the structures, myths, beliefs, and spiritual traditions of the major Western civilizations, the author compares the characteristics of the modern world with those of traditional societies. The domains explored include politics, law, the rise and fall of empires, the history of the Church, the doctrine of the two natures, life and death, social institutions and the caste system, the limits of racial theories, capitalism and communism, relations between the sexes, and the meaning of warriorhood. At every turn Evola challenges the reader’s most cherished assumptions about fundamental aspects of modern life.

A controversial scholar, philosopher, and social thinker, JULIUS EVOLA (1898-1974) has only recently become known to more than a handful of English‑speaking readers. An authority on the world’s esoteric traditions, Evola wrote extensively on ancient civilizations and the world of Tradition in both East and West. "

Contents

From the Wikipedia:

"The first part, the world of tradition, is a comparative study of the doctrines of traditional civilizations where Evola indicates that the fundamental principles of the life of traditional man are manifested in the doctrine of two natures, the existence of a physical order and a metaphysical one. It follows the indication of the way in which the man of the tradition conceives law, war, property, relations between the sexes, immortality, and race.[6] The second part instead contains an interpretation of history on a traditional basis: it starts from the origins of man to arrive at the modern concept of evolution in the Darwinian sense which, according to tradition, is considered a regress, an involution.

Evola begins the second chapter of Revolt against the Modern World stating that the traditional world is never perfectly realized in history. According to Evola, the key to tradition and what he supposes was the defining feature of the traditional world, was the experiential knowledge of the two natures: high and low, being and becoming, supernatural and natural.

Then, Evola leads to promote the beneficial qualities of historical societies that embodied tradition.

- "The traditional world knew divine kingship. It knew the bridge between the two worlds, namely, initiation; it knew the two great ways of approaching the transcendent, namely, heroic action and contemplation. It knew the moral foundation, namely, the traditional law and the caste system; and it knew the political earthly symbol, namely, the empire." — Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (1995)

From this, Evola concludes that the traditional world had no defining ethics so therefore, it had no theory of any kind. Without theory, there was no learning of such theory and without learning, no progress. Evola explains how any progress or change from these traditional societies is involution rather than evolution, the study of history is only the study of decay. Evola appreciates how due to this, in traditional societies there was only adherence to the primordialism, a single ethnic identity, which he believes has been lost due to modernity.

Once Evola characterizes traditional societies, he proceeds to dive into his metaphysical views of gender roles. As Evola divides the universe between above and below, he relates this to the supernatural and the natural. According to Evola, women are natural and men are supernatural. The male is self-subsistent while the female is dependent. In Evola's worldview, the role of the female is to be a mother and a lover, while the male's sole role is in war. Evola justifies his idiosyncratic views on gender roles by relating it to Hinduism and Taoism."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_Against_the_Modern_World)