and I was disappointed. (I believe he had been praised by certain paleoconservatives.) De Benoist encourages Westerners to rediscover a pre-Christian identity, but he can only do it but writing an anti-Christian polemic, blaming Christianity for all of our modern political ills. (Is writing a genealogy an European thing? Or did he pick this up from Nietzsche?) Some seek to separate Jerusalem from Athens; de Benoist (and the translator Tomislav Sunic) seek to separate Athens from Jerusalem. But this is impossible. Up to this point I had not read much of de Benoist's writings, content to look at him as a possible source of good European "rightist" thought. Now, I have my doubts. Does he take the modern nation-state for granted?
Once the polytheism of values "disappears, we face totalitarianism." Pagan thought, on the other hand, which fundamentally remains attached to rootedness and to the place, and which is a preferential center of the crystallization of human identity, rejects all religious and philosophical forms of universalism.This would seem to take the "particularity" endorsed by paleoconservatives and traditional conservatives to an extreme? Does de Benoist argue for moral relativism? Or should one instead distinguish between moral norms that are universally binding, and their different instantiations in human law? Traditional conservatives recognize the order of charity and the distinctions between people upon which our duties are based, while rejecting the obliteration by liberalism of these differences. If there is a God, are not all people bound to love Him?
Is the anti-Christian direction of this essay the reason why Alt Right published it?
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