I pardon the contemporary reader for the aphoristic roughness that is about to follow: I claim
no vainglory by it, only an urgent call that I think desperately needs to be heard.
I. Ode to Europe – Panta Rhei
Europe! Let me listen to her music without reminding me that one day it will all end. Let me
allow myself the delusion that in her denial and danger, illusions and hopes, swords must be
unsheathed in order to preserve her – that it even deserves to be preserved. While at it, let me
do even more – let me remind Europe that it is not only Athens, Rome, Vatican and Brussels!
She is something even more terrible, she is the malady that not only lives, but also thinks
while she is living. This sceptical old woman bore nothing more than the most sceptical
children that the world has ever seen – a mother whose warmth is so lacking, that all her
children suffer from hypothermia. And this scepticism is something that was inherited
originally from the healthy Greeks, and later it was not Descartes but Wittgenstein who
taught us to doubt properly again. Europe o Europe, contrary to the Germans, you stand under
all – and please be always under my feet too. This head that wants to preserve you,
instinctively bows before those Italian city-states of yours – before those cities of gold that in
the face of the German reformation rebellion, said ‘slow down, not this time barbarians!’
Who showed to the Germans what they had always lacked, culture versus discipline. The
aesthetic terrorism of Pope Julius II, to reach his hand out to Michelangelo himself, as much
an angel as Lucifer is, only that the door where deary Luther stamped his rules, to be trumped
by mere murals: the glorious sistine chapel. To allow the noble English people to have their
due with Anglicanism, to leave alone their sea-bound civilization, to never think of Albion as
a dynamite – to even leave them do Brexit. The English as the control group that escaped the
laboratory. Europe o Europe, let me die a few deaths of my youth, believing that you did this
while knowing what you are doing! Yours, with rotten roses at heart, the Ephesian – the child
of Edmund Burke.
II. An Anglophile’s Catastrophic Romanticism
The modern mind has failed: its highest enchantment, rationalism, is stuck like a whale in
shallow waters. It cannot move, turn, lead, engulf as it should. Perhaps leadership should
have never been entrusted to a French and a German whale, whose main point, as Foucault
tells us, was – the state is not to be trusted (Foucault, 2007, p. 51). The deception of these
two whales, the French Enlightenment nation-state and the nation-state of the German blood
and soil, are confusions that only cultures without the charm of a noble English gentleness
could claim for themselves. And of course, the Germans were the first to not trust the state:
this tribal culture has not trusted the legal achievements of the mankind since the time of
Rome (can anyone imagine Common Law to be a German creature?). When they tried much
later to do things that they never were good at, the capacity for imperialism, the metaphysical
promise of the Herr Kant and Herr Hegel got completed in the Nuremberg trials this
excursion made. Germans gave us Auschwitz and Treblinka, but never told us that thereby by
negation they would birth the Universal Rights of Man too. While, when French people
started to think about laws, they wanted to make a law for all humanity (this is the
humbleness that only a country who, let us not forget, was the head-leader of the first
Crusade, can hold). Monsieur Napoleon, monsieur Napoleon, how did you feel when you
slapped the face of the Revolution, and showed the true colours of it – a hidden nationalism
under the guise of universality? Come to think about it, all of the world’s juridical fate was to
be entrusted in the hands of the French, did Europeans really believe this? A vulgar Latin
language with a hint of Gaulish intoxication was left to decide the affairs of the world? What
a joke that only the French know how to fool us into believing!
In other words, one needed the Revolution to heal, while the other needed the Volk to
remember who it apparently was. Who amongst the philosophers today can examine how the
English ‘dealt’ with the Glorious Revolution, or even more – how the English dealt with the
Cold War? However, the French and German minds were quite right – the state is indeed not
to be trusted. But this is not because we need reasons to understand this, but because it is a
good enough indication of what temptation one is feeling when one must dare to think only to
say what one instinctively feels – the modern state is not to be trusted. Even the Catholic
Church allowed herself this truth and renounced its institutional-secular flock! And Burke
knew this while living at the heart of the ancien régime, and bellowed – the modern state
should leave people alone and absolute monarchical power is even worse. England’s
preservation, – at its worst with Hobbes, Locke and Hume, – never theorized her state: she
gardened it. Hence why spiritually every attempt at preservation is of the English kind. My
philosophy, ultimately, is of the English kind. My political leanings, equivalent to anorexia: I
preserve by starving the body politic of cultures without the means of preservations. But
everything of the English kind is good at preservation when the Irish people come at play:
half of, (in Yeats’ words, mystical) William Blake, Arthur Wellesley (the one who stepped the
heart of Napoleon!), Edmund Burke himself. We know this even through other means –
Easter Rising of mere Irish people trying to preserve their state put a whole empire in a shock
mode: that’s who the Irish are!
III. Burke Said ‘No Metaphysics’
What if the preservation man has no arche? The inner makeup of such a man would not be to
look at history, blood, nation with the eyes of one who finds one’s mother in it. One’s
belonging is nowhere to be found. Motherland and fatherland are attempts to enchant one’s
own land that one never felt pre-politically: to ultimately create the illusion that our house is a
home (has anyone to date understood Scruton’s England: an elegy?). Some countries should
be ashamed to admit that they are not so noble as to call themselves ‘conservative’ (though a
good Burkean should renounce this name and call them of the ‘preservation kind’) – in other
words, the countries that lie below the English Channel, and especially those East of the Iron
Wall (is Poland an exception?). How can, that is, my Albanian kin do crimes in the Albion’s
shore and still think themselves as honourable and conservative at home, and even go as far
as to defend such actions?
Origin, source, beginning, genesis, arche: all these are denotations of time and nothing more.
It takes truly a long time to admit that the preservation man sees in history something akin to
a necessary monster: that always, by mere contingency, destroys beautiful things, and in turn,
beauty abandons us. And not to be preservationist because things do not want to change, but
because things necessarily change (as Burke wrote ‘a state without the means of some
change, is without the means of its conservation’ (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 256)). In other
words, the preservation man sees in these things that are gone only the shadow of what one
once loved and now has nothing more to love (unless one loves graves). The patience and
appreciation, reverence and affinity one has for them as things that have gone and are going. .
. loving them only because they were for a very long time, the proven things that from the
beginning have kept human beings under the spell of being the right things (the Chesterton’s
fence). This is what preservation is.
O sancta simplicitas! – The preservation man is nothing more than a child taken by things,
who reaches the wildest doubt within oneself. The doubt that human nature is not to be found,
because it too is another, more savage monster: it holds nothing in itself, and is as ‘sacred’ as
today to believe in the soul and tomorrow to deny that it has body and soul altogether. That
today it can think from the essence and tomorrow it cannot. This is what Burke meant with
‘art is man’s nature’ (Burke, (vol IV), 1869, p. 176) – a doubt that even Descartes did not
allow himself. Preserve what you can and change to preserve as much as possible – why?
Because all things are changeable. All beauty leaves. All beauty decays. The Heraclitian
paradox, or if I am allowed the Deor’s lament one, of understanding that to love ultimately
means to lose.
Revolutionary Conservatives, Paleo-conservatives, Julius Evola, Nick Land, Alexander
Dugin, all the conservative of Europe that never can unite – have you said, like Burke did, no
to metaphysics? Or did I have to say everything in a metaphysical way for you to understand?
IV. The Chivalry of Rejection
We must become unknown. We must reject the notion of belonging to the modern or
postmodern world: we must not hang our philosophy on the language of things that either
push us towards rationalism alone, or to the understanding why this is not possible. In the
observing light of the panopticon, our freedom is to bring out the strange things from the
darkness that we have hidden. The fairy is our heritage! This old baroque and romantic faith,
must not be denied where we need to preserve it (Tolkien was no stranger to it, while
Shakespeare made a whole culture out of it). In no way should we accept even those who
cannot find themselves in this century, the charade of the circus – Alexander Dugin, Evola,
Land. . . these low-charming souls who found nothing to believe in except their ‘ideologies.’
But wait – wasn’t I clear enough? We are much better off even if our constitution spoon-feeds
us human rights – o Hegelian deity, fill our bellies as much as possible – we don’t want to get
drunk even though we are aware that we have become obese. But wait! Does this mean that
preservation is not as an ideology, but as Burke understood it – as a way of life? As a
physiological response, that in front of this pharmakon we choose what gives us less cancer
and more healing. But wait a bit more! Preservation as proof that we are healthy to live. As a
foolish way to live where you are not invited, and to make yourself invited where the things
that are – are the things that you can love, that you have loved, that in the end you want to
love! But wait even more than a bit! Be careful not to love the whole world – for your love
becomes as cheap as the value of the whole world.
Preservation against the ideologies of conservation, this is the gothic case. And this is why
Burke’s preservation is a total rejection of the conservative chimeras now: but who is actually
in tune with Edmund Burke today? Even the Englishmen of his time did not read him, and the
King himself went against Burke over slavery, India – and even worse, it allowed the world
the first successful enlightenment revolution, the American one.
Europe o Europe, I cry onto you my Rilkean terrible angel – where is my Burke? O Lord,
what have we done. Europe again is dancing at the gallows. . . and the English have left us.
References.
Burke, E. (1865). The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (vol. III).
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Burke, E. (1869). The works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (vol IV).
Boston: Little, Brown & Company.
Foucault, M. (2007). The politics of truth (S. Lotringer, Ed.; L. Hochroth & C. Porter,
Trans.). Semiotext(e).
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