Nihil Sub Sole Novum

The personification of the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

Guest Op-Ed

Submitted by Erasmo Russo

In the last decade there has been an increase in confusing nomenclature. In Western Europe and the United States young people are being told that the term “middle class” is highly elastic and so meaningless, exploited by politicians to give the false appearance of a wide distribution of wealth and power where none exists. They are told, the world is a collection of  “oligarchies” and that a percentage ranging from 1% to 10% owns and controls the world’s wealth and them. Naturally, this is cast in the framework of Foucauldian power analysis and postmodern angsty despair and indignation because life in this view consists solely of the material and of power relations. It is a zero sum game in which, according to this line of thinking, if your neighbor earns two ducats you thereby loose two ducats irreparably and cannot ever possibly earn those two ducats back in your lifetime. Therefore, the young are told, they must seize as many material things and as much power as possible immediately. Human beings are no longer human beings who have cultural identities or linguistic identities, but have been reduced to the most simplistic nomenclature based upon superficialities such as the color of their skin. These tired shop-worn notions cobbled together from Marxian analysis of long dead 19th century markets and 1970s French university scholarship which are indeed no longer focused upon in France anymore, have gained traction abroad. Currently, it would seem the United States has become a large exporter of such thought, and like many American exports, it has seduced millions around the world in its shiny new packaging. In a supreme irony of postmodernism, the silliest most reductive labels of past centuries have been rebranded and sold wholesale to the next generation. With all due respect to America and the Anglosphere, we have no need of such products which were cultivated in soil so unlike our own.

In this environment, the survival strategy of the poor and of the wealthy alike is to rally around 20th century socialism and virtue signal, so as to not have to do any heavy-lifting such as making charitable donations or modifying lifestyles so as to effectuate the greater good. Meanwhile, the politicians rally around internationalism and supranational entities such as the European Union, which serve as reliable scapegoats to blame for every one of their domestic policy failures. Since the 1950s countless European politicians have loved to tell their citizens that they could have done marvels at home but for technocrats and bureaucrats in Bruxelles blocking them. To some extent Guy Debord was correct in his La société du spectacle, we have gone from millennia in which we had to actually have things and to do things in order to project status and power. Now we merely have to have the appearance of having things and doing things. Posting on social media always suffices. Shouting slogans and rolling eyes work well also. We are no longer active agents. The generations of “larpers/poseurs” par excellence have come into their own. From both the right and the left, there are few men and women of action. Indeed, to celebrate such people of action is deemed a retrograde embracing of medieval notions of chivalry and Christian virtue, and even worse, of 20th century Fascism! Quelle horreur! 

The faithful inside the Cappella di
San Gennaro by Giacinto Gigante

Yet another irony confronts us, now that postmodernism finds itself in crisis, theorists are racing to forge a “metamodernism” which even dares to include a reincorporation of religious values and an ersatz spirituality. We are now told, we don’t have to actually believe in the Divine or the Sacred, but merely act as though we do, so that we may have some foundational myth to help us cope and tally forth. Plus ça change, rien change. We have come full circle and are once again stuck at the impasse of the French Enlightenment. The day after the atrocities of the Revolution, we seek to solve our problems by reincorporating Christian and Roman law and values but remove all reference to their origins or to “God.”  We find that we actually do like and need, and can make good use of the great Western Christian tradition; of course we dare not refer to it as such. We must ask, why do our time’s thinkers and politicians find themselves stymied and stuck in old circular patterns? Those of us who live in and according to our civilization refuse to feign ignorance or to forget who we are. We reject this self-destructive dead end nihilism. We are not deracinated people floating adrift in a sea of oblivion. Unlike the loud unthinking extremists, we do truly know who we are and shall remain who we are. We authentically have our great religious and philosophical traditions, which we have indeed never left. We have political subsidiarity which comes down to us from Aquinas and the great empires of our Continent, whereby local decentralized authority was able to make decisions for ethnic and political minorities. We don’t even need Burke’s notions of neighborliness in the modern nation state to replace our historic love of our neighbor and our communities rooted in Roman mos and Christian virtue with a dose of Greek ethics. So why must we be called upon to be poseurs? Those of us who never gave up our religion, our languages, our cultures? We premoderns, who never had to suffer as postmoderns and metamoderns! We are Occidental, European, Mediterranean and Christian and accordingly live plumbing the depths of our civilization. All are free to be us; so be us. No more posing or semiotic hijinks and virtue signaling.