Death of the West and decline of the East

By Nicolas Bonnal

We are used since a century to denounce and comment the so-called decline of the West; the great essay of Spengler, unfit for the public of today, was published during the WW1 and it has been quickly fulfilled, Western Europe becoming an American colony and a bureaucratic disaster, both economically and spiritually. Her ageing population is rapidly disappearing and it will be replaced during the next decennials. Nobody should lament this process since Solzhenitsyn observed that the westerners do not know if there are alive! Modern world is a bad dream, said once French philosopher Deleuze, a left-wing genius completely forgotten nowadays in what is left of France (pardon, Hollande...). Statesmen in Europe hate or fear Mr Putin for he is the last statesman with a brain and a soul. This is why there are each year more youngsters fond of him in Western Europe. We will see where this hope will get us to.

Modern civilization is not anymore a civilization: no Shakespeare, no Balzac, no Nabokov; no Mozart, no Wagner, no Shostakovich. Nothing, for culture you have NYT best-selling lists, festivals and multiplex cinemas: post-modernism is about galleries, shopping malls, highways, racial riots, multiculturalism and real estate. The rest is nothing; the rest is about debt, zombie-like existence and tourism. As Nietzsche said in Zarathoustra about the last pope, he doesn't know that God is dead! We should say now that we don't know that the westerner is dead. We just have a completely indebted matrix full of sound and stupidity, and sometimes of fury (at least in Libya and Syria); and definitively signifying nothing. It is not for nothing that we are fascinated nowadays in the West by the vampires and the zombies: the vampire sucks the blood (IE the Goldman Sachs elected central bankers suck the money) and the zombie hangs around in malls and subways without any self-consciousness. Welcome to the hollow man, said once TS Eliot.

But that is enough with the West.

Now, I would like to talk about the decline of the East, because despite the growth stuff and the propaganda about emerging countries, I definitely observe a decline in the East. It is very easy to despise France or Italy: old and despicable countries that lost their charisma, as quipped once infamous Donald Rumsfeld... but if we assert what is going on in India ? Or in Vietnam? Or in Japan? I wont' mention China, even if it becomes the first world power...

When the decline of the West was diagnosed, it was mainly on a spiritual criterion; today it is even economical and demographical. But remember well: in this time it was spiritual. The modern world was materialistic, it was boring, desperate, existentialist, Dadaist, whatever. And where my fellow dissatisfied predecessors would look for an alternative?

In the East.

The East was the land of the gurus, of the traditions; of the last emperors: the East was the land of Tibet, of the I Ching, of the secret societies; the East was the land of Sufism, of yoga, of the wisdom. The East was the real travel of Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha.

All of that, sorry if I exaggerate somewhat, has disappeared. The great wise men of the East have succumbed to business wizards and have submitted to sirens of the degenerate western matrix. Vietnam has forgotten his hydraulic society (read again genius Wittfogel!), and covered his streets wits scooters and bikes and masks because of pollution; everybody has forgotten the heroic war against the Yankees, everybody wants to be rich and to live like a Yankee (well, like a John Wayne type Yankee; because one hundred millions Americans endure today poverty and social diseases); India has sold her soul to the class of the vaishya, to the merchants. Only stock exchange, real estate speculation, destruction of slums, and TV commercials are now the ordinary of the Mahatma's great nation or of heirs of the Maharshi . Think now of broke and impoverished Japan, of his junkies and hippies, of his degenerate way of life, think of the end of samurai and bushido ethics, think of the end of the emperor. There is no last emperor there; there is just an extra emperor who is as dull as a Dutch queen. I was in Tokyo last year; the atmosphere is not human, it is post-human and you have (like I already explained) to be a false cosmonaut -or a cockroach - to survive in such awful conditions.

So where is the East we used to dream of? Today's pilgrimages are just business stuff like ours. La Mecca is now a nightmare and a big one, built and rebuilt by Bin Laden clan! Last Sunday Lionel Messi was almost lynched by a mob of football fans in Saudi Arabia. He is the real god of these new humans, not Allah. If we cast aside a minority of old believers, like in the West, mosques and old temples are just business or tourist centres while the churches have been replaced by shopping malls anywhere. One century ago, many had the feeling in Europe, like René Guénon, Schuon or Daniélou that there was something left intact in the entropy of the modern world. It was the East.

Guénon prophesised so an eastern victory at the End of Times and he was wrong. The East barely became the fifty-first American state like anyone. And no country has conserved a drop of his fading charisma (except Bhutan may be?). I won't even mention China. Last night I almost wept reviewing my wonderful crouching tiger hidden dragon. Look post-modern China: is that what we were promised to? You just have fumes, smokes, corruption, empty luxury shops, traffic jam and imperialistic bargain with the Americans. Have you been recently in China, once the most beautiful landscape in the world turned into a Las Vegas suburb? Is that the result of the first world economy? Killing her soul as well as her body?

Well, may be we were expecting too much of eastern humanity. They were so poor, you know, and civilization was so fascinating, you know... Everybody wants his fridge, his smart phone and his holidays on the beach, I know...

Yet I am not resigned. The decline of the east will come too, economically and demographically, like in the West and like in Japan. The human being who betrays his ideals his ancestors and his faith to behave like a Yankee is spiritually and economically doomed. Here will be Obama everywhere, bankrupting a morally deficient and warmonger country!

This is why I wait a lot from Eastern Europe, eastern Christianity, after the fall of our cataclysmic currency (euro) and of our alliance with the Americans.

As put once Heidegger, the West means what it is the nearer to the origin. There will be a rebirth of the West.

Nicolas Bonnal