A Short Reflection on the Crisis of the Modern World
The Reign of Quantity against la Pensée Traditionnelle
…the belief in a never-ending 'progress', which until recently was held as a sort of inviolable and indisputable dogma, is no longer so widespread; there are those who perceive, though in a vague and confused manner, that the civilization of the West may not always go on developing in the same direction, but may some day reach a point where it will stop, or even be plunged in its entirety into some cataclysm.
René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
There can be no question that the modern world today is in crisis. One can see everyday what the world is facing just by watching a few minutes of the evening news. Wars, occurring and impending famines, and other such maladies are a regular feature. Of course one could object that this is merely the news cycle being itself, designed to drum up such spectacles to garner views and airtime. But even outside of this, the feeling of a crisis is palpable. One can bring to mind almost innumerable speculations on the end of the world, from doomsday predictions to the infamous 'Rapture'. The Traditionalist philosopher René Guénon wrote the above in 1927, almost a century ago, in a time where the stranglehold of mass media over people's minds is yet to exist. If such perceptions of a crisis can be perceived back then, what more so now?
The Reign of Quantity
The two notions of Quality and Quantity are commonly perceived together, one correlative to another. Is there not a common saying that ‘Quality is better than Quantity’? As cliché as it sounds, it actually reveals a much more profound revelation than it seems to admit. For it can be said that the two are the essential principles upon which manifestation - existence - is grounded upon. Guénon defines Quality as the principle that makes a thing what it is, and Quantity as the supporting substratum upon which Quality inheres in. In this, Guénon is not that far off from the Scholastics, and indeed he states that the two can be likened to ‘Form’ and ‘Matter’ respectively. The thesis of Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of The Times is that modernity is heading towards the Reign of Quantity, dissolving and overthrowing Quality.
Now, the ramifications of these two universal principles are far ranging, and can be applied to almost any domain. Indeed this is what Guénon does in analyzing modernity's maladies in his works The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of The Times. Of note are the criticisms of individualism, uniformity, and the so-called ‘ordinary life.’
Individualism
By individualism we mean the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all its branches, to purely human elements…
René Guénon, The Crisis of The Modern World. Chapter 4: The Principle of Individuation
The individualism of the modern world consists in the negation of the 'higher', and the affirmation that ‘what is there’ is all there is. We often speak of the ‘death of God’ and no matter how abused the phrase is, it is telling of the state of the modern world. Man, divorced from Tradition and the higher things, rejects God - Who Is the Principle of all things - and becomes a principle unto himself. But how can this be? To be a principle is to be universal. If every particular man is a principle unto himself, wouldn't this rent apart the essence of being a principle, a universal? Such is the contradiction that individualism finds itself in. Unaware of this contradiction, the modern exaltation of ‘individualism’ ultimately finds itself in chaos and disorder, giving rise to relativism, subjectivism and solipsism, and many other dissolute philosophies. Ironic too is the modern presentation of individualism. It is supposed to give attention to the ‘potential’ of the individual towards self-actualization, but what happens rather is the opposite.
Unity and Uniformity
In the Reign of Quantity, Guenon also draws a distinction between Unity and Uniformity, analogous to Quality and Quantity respectively. A Unity is that which accounts for difference in qualities but still binds the different things into a coherent whole. The spiritual and the temporal powers, for example, are qualitatively different, yet reason and divine law ultimately commands the cooperation and unity of the two for a higher end, namely the good of the realm. Uniformity on the other hand does not account for differing qualities in the effort to bind things into a coherent whole, thus seeking only its end without regard of how to achieve it properly. What happens then is reversion to mediocrity - the qualitatively higher thing becomes reduced to something lower, and the qualitatively lower ascends undeservingly to something higher. Guénon sees democratic society as an example of the pervading rule of uniformity, and again it illustrates the Reign of Quantity contra Quality.
The Illusion of Ordinary Life
Following from the above passages, we come into what Guénon calls the illusion of the so-called ‘ordinary life’:
Thus arises the idea of what is commonly called ‘ordinary life’ or ‘everyday life’; this is in fact understood to mean above all a life in which nothing that is not purely human can intervene in any way, owing to the elimination from it of any sacred, ritual, or symbolical character (it matters little whether this character be thought of as specifically religious or as conforming to some other traditional modality, because the relevant point in all cases is the effective action of ‘spiritual influences’), the very words ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ moreover implying that everything that surpasses conceptions of that order is, even when it has not yet been expressly denied, at least relegated to an 'extra-ordinary' domain, regarded as exceptional, strange, and unaccustomed.
René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times. Chapter 15
Removed from Tradition and higher principles - the principle of Quality, in short - man retreats into a sort of ennui, estranged from the things that gives him the meaning to be in the world that he moves in. A complacent cynicism about the situation of the world settles in the mind. This is perhaps captured fully in the common expressions “that's life”, “that's how things are”, or any other such iterations. It illustrates the resigned despair of man that does not know what they are or what their place in the grand order of the cosmos is, precisely because their view of the world is so limited as to not even consider the possibility of there even being a 'grand order' in the first place. Any arguments, expositions, or statements to the contrary, no matter how cogent, more often than not are swept aside, with recourse to relativistic aphorisms such as ‘that's what you believe’ or ‘that's your truth.’
Nevertheless, modern man persists in this and this is where the illusion comes from. All qualitative character to life becomes reduced to quantitative concerns which are supposedly more ‘immediate’, this immediacy more or less pertaining to contingent things at the expense of necessary ones.
The Reign of Quantity in Philippine Society
As Guénon writes, modernity itself is the manifestation of the Reign of Quantity. What was said above will help us understand the reign of the principle of Quantity as it manifests specifically in Philippine society. These manifestations are most obviously seen in the political, social, and religious aspects of Philippine life.
Pillar of Liberty has often talked about the hollowness of a ‘Filipino identity’, and on an analysis using the concepts explained by Guénon, this still certainly rings true. The Filipino identity represents the rule of Uniformity over Unity. Differences are a manifestation of Quality. It is by differentiating that we can judge and know what a thing is apart from another thing. Thus there are differences between the different ethnic groups - a Kapampangan is not a Tagalog, a Tagalog is not a Visayan, a Visayan is not a Bikolano, and so on. To ignore such differences is to give way to Uniformity, which as we said does not take into account the differences when ordering things towards a certain end. The totalizing character of Filipino culture - in reality merely a puffed-up version of the Tagalog culture - imposes itself on other ethnic groups and ignores their differences and thus their qualitative significance. A veritable Reign of Quantity prevails. What exists here is not unity, no matter how the Philippine state tries to make it to be. It is uniformity, a disregarding of qualitative characteristics that makes people what they are in the wrongheaded pursuit of trying to make the country a coherent whole. The effort to derive Unity from Uniformity, to Quality from Quantity, will always be doomed to fail, much like building a castle on quicksand. A ‘unified Filipino’ culture will not really come about unless at the cost of totally obliterating regional identities, and even then it wouldn't be a truly unifying principle for it lacks the inherent qualitative significance that an organic culture has.
A look at Philippine politics also confirms the reign of Quantity. The politicians' promise every election cycle is always centered upon ‘more’ - more jobs, more handouts, economic growth and other such promises that more or less are forgotten once the politicians in question have taken power. Very rarely are Philippine political organizations centered upon values or principles - most are big-tent movements with principles and objectives that are either so vague that they are indistinguishable from the other organizations or so common that they really aren't worth voting for more than the next organization. Let the reader understand that this is ultimately what a modern democracy is - atomized masses of individual units voting for their own supposed ‘self-interest’ or ‘good’, with the Good largely ignored. In this, democracy can truly be said to be the reign of Quantity.
Now, one could object that this scheme would actually be better since it allows citizens to have more freedom in exercising political actions. We answer that such a conception is false since man is a social animal with organic ties to his community, first on a small scale then progressively going to a larger scale. Man first has responsibility towards his immediate community - first his family, then his neighbors, then his village, then his town, and so on. Modern democracy does away with these principles and would inevitably posit that it is a game of ‘all-against-all’. This is precisely what we have seen with the recently-concluded national elections initiating fights within families and among friends. The Gospels speak of the Lord saying that He had come to set father against son and daughter against mother, for the cost to follow Him is that great. Democracy does the same, but for an infinitely lesser reward.
Speaking of faith, the most obvious and the most grave proof of the reign of Quantity is found in the domain of religion. Our dear Catholic readers would agree, seeing the state of the Church and her faithful in the current year. Relativism reigns. The doctrines and traditions of the Church are forgotten, a grave matter for a nation where the vast majority of inhabitants profess the faith. Morals are lax. The great decline of the Catholic religion and its doctrines has caused a certain cynicism for matters of the spiritual and the metaphysical - a cynical outlook that this world is all that is, that man cannot transcend it, and that there are no higher principles that he must follow for his own good.
This trend is the illusion of ordinary life that we spoke of earlier. Aside from this cynical agnosticism there exists a fideist pseudo-mysticism that puts God’s supposed Charity above all, even justice. It is the conception that God is Love, that indeed He is so loving that He would be willing to overlook all of man's wrongdoings. In practice this is a radical individualism that gives way to antinomianism, or believing that God has given man a ‘blank check’ for his deeds so long as we believe in Him. This belief has its roots largely in sentimentalism. We see this mostly in Protestant sects, though it worryingly increases among the Church Faithful itself.
The Age of Dissolution
Guénon writes that the decline we perceive is part and parcel of the age of Kali Yuga - the last phase in a ‘world cycle’ where chaos and strife reigns. The Kali Yuga is a concept from the Hindu tradition and for our purposes we shall term it, as Guénon also does, the Age of Dissolution. It is an age where higher principles will be forgotten and the traditions handing down those principles will be lost. Quality will be dissolved into Quantity. Christian writings also speak of an Age of Dissolution, as our Lord speaks of calamities, wars, famines, persecutions of the faithful, and that ‘the charity of many will grow cold’. Saint Peter says that many will be scoffers in the last days. Many false prophets will arise. It will get worse more than any of us can think of.
But Guénon leaves us with these words:
Those who might be tempted to give way to despair should realize that nothing accomplished in this order can ever be lost, that confusion, error and darkness can win the day only apparently and in a purely ephemeral way, that all partial and transitory disequilibrium must perforce contribute towards the greater equilibrium of the whole, and that nothing can ultimately prevail against the power of truth.
Rene Guenon, The Crisis of The Modern World
And Our Lord Jesus Christ, Truth Itself, says:
In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world.
Vexillum works in Financial Modeling, and has observed the Walls of Jericho enclosing him since youth. He has since become an avid student of René Guénon, Thomism, and Aristotle. Follow him on Twitter @V1RGIL1US.