Progressivism without progress by Damien Perrotin (original)

He discusses Alain de Benoist with respect to progressivism:

A number of thinkers on the fringes of the radical right have remained, or become again quite sceptical of progress. Americans will think of the Southern Agrarians or of modern paleoconservatives. Being an European, I will rather speak of the so-called New Right and of its leader : Alain de Benoist. While the New Right was born from an attempt of the far right to break with the string of defeats it experienced since the fall of the Petain regimen de Benois himself can hardly be called a fascist or even a traditionalist. He claims not to be a racist, and I have no reason not to believe him – a politician can lie about his opinions for electoral gain, not an intellectual whose only aim is to found a philosophical school. What de Benoist advocates is a world of local communities based upon non-mercantile values and with a renewed relationship with nature. Each one of those would have an inalienable right to its own culture and local, concrete, liberties inside the general framework of a loose European federation. He has recently written a book to support the idea of degrowth, which shows he understands, somewhat, the predicament of industrial society, even if his support for large-scale geopolitical constructs proves that he does not yet understands all its consequences.

The question is, of course, why do I fee so ill at ease reading him ?

I am hardly the only one in this situation. Supporters of degrowth were horrified by de Benoist's endorsement of their ideas, but for bad reasons. One can hardly blame de Benoist when he refuses to follow the degrowthers when they claim that by implementing their pet political project, they will get the perfect, classless, society two centuries of leftist revolutions consistently refused to give them. The fact is that degrowth is very bit as infused with progress mythology as the growth ideology of the old, traditional, left. They just differ on what is should be measured by.

The problem is elsewhere.

The ideology of de Benoist and his ilk may not be racist – at least in its pure form, most of its supporters definitely are – it is definitely anti-egalitarian. We tend to assume that anti-egalitarianism is necessarily racist, because it is how it manifested itself during the last century. It is a mistake, however. You can base your anti- egalitarianism on virtually anything and de Benoist bases his own upon the idea of an intellectual elite, whose supposedly innate superiority would have its root in genetics. This means, of course, that he refuses democracy, since democracy is based upon the idea that every man is, at least in theory, able to formulate an informed opinion about the way public affairs are run.

It is also a celebration of closed society. Every society, must have some kind of closure, lest it dissolves away and it is likely that post-peak societies will be more closed than our own. There won't be any large state apparatus to hold them together, so they will have to rely upon organically enforced shared values for cohesion. There is however a difference between accepting this as a lesser evil and turning every culture into a kind of ethnic island where any departure from tradition would be ruthlessly punished.

De Benoist's utopia, is in fact Sparta reborn, with its insular economy and culture, its heroic, freedom-loving, armed citizenry... and its helots.

Most peak-oil activists, even those who consider themselves conservative, would find De Benoist's project abhorrent, and that is where lies the possibility of progressivism without progress. In a world of scarce resources, it is no longer possible to dream of the shining futures of the last century. It would even probably dangerous to do so. This does not means, however, that must renounce the ideal of a common human dignity beyond and above cultural, religious and political boundaries. By this, I do not mean the false universalism and real ethnocentrism the West imposed upon the world, and which is still popular down here, just this very simple idea : every man should be respected as such, no matter his condition.

This is this idea which lies under the failed utopias of the left and no matter how bad the coming decline turns to be, they are still worth defending

Does an authentic republican require egalitarianism? Does it always involve the political participation of all? The classical and medieval conceptions of republicanism would seem to answer no to these questions. Aristotle holds that a republic is a government by the many, not by all. Apparently Machiavelli would agree with him. (Is this true of the other civic humanists? That is likely.)

Though I have been reading Mr. Perrotin's blog for only a short time, nothing that he writes here is unexpected.

Nouvelle Droite - New Right - English articles
French Philosopher Alain de Benoist Believes that the EU is more Atheist than the Former USSR