Evola: Sallis Right Again

Origin of “spiritual race” ideas.  In all cases, red font emphasis added.

This is a surprisingly (reasonably, not perfectly) objective look at Evola’s race ideas and his tacit criticisms of Nordicist thought, coming from TOO of all places.

Now, the interesting thing is the two part summary of what Evola’s underlying agenda is in The Myth of the Blood:

Evola’s belief that there is a lack of higher aristocratic impulse in generalized racial thinking (i.e., making the assumption that being Aryan is simply a matter of birth rather than also of spirit/nobility/character). Ferraresi cites Evola as arguing concerning the people: “only of an elite may one say that ‘it is of a race’, ‘it has race’ [in the French meaning of race for ‘of good breed’]: the people are only people, mass.” In other words, Evola is advocating a radically aristocratic and anti-egalitarian concept of race.

Evola’s unease or even annoyance at the special place accorded to the Nordic type in his day, at the expense of other Europeans.

Now, it is clear – or should be, to anyone with an understanding of human psychology - that point one derives from point two.  In other words, Evola essentially reasoned thus:

1. Materialist race concepts are Nordicist and say that only Nordics are a superior, honorable, cultural people.

2. Hey!  I’m superior, honorable, and cultural, but I’m not Nordic.

3. Thus, racial materialism must be wrong and we must instead substitute it with spiritual race concepts in which it are elites (like me, the great and good Baron Julius Evola) who are “of race” and are of a superior and honorable breed, whether we are Nordic or not.

It never occurred to Evola that maybe point #1 is incorrect, that racial materialism can be a simple objective evaluation of biological racial differences, without making subjective evaluations of relative worth, or making absurd leaps of faith as to assert that positive qualities of character are bestowed, or not, at birth in an automatic yes/no fashion.

But I’ve realized all of this about Evola (and Yockey) before.  Thus read:

My contention has been that Yockey’s embrace of “spiritual” (“horizontal”) race had the same genesis as Evola’s: a misguided response to Nordicism.  Ironically, Yockey discussed how a Culture can react to Cultural Pathology in ways ultimately harmful to the Culture (akin to a destructive fever resulting from an infection in a person), but he lacked the self-awareness to understand that his own destructive ideas about biological race were also an over-reaction to Nordicist theory.  Yockey wanted European unity, and Nordicism was (and is) an obstacle to that.  Yockey equated Nordicism with biological race theory and so biological race had to be discredited (although it still holds for White-Negro differences in his eyes, clearly demonstrating that Yockey was really specifically concerned about arguing against intra-European racial differences). Evola was likely distressed by theories that attributed all positive qualities only to Nordics; therefore, Evola thought – “hey, I’m honorable and noble, but I’m not Nordic, so I must be a spiritual Nordic.”  Neither Yockey nor Evola had the scientific understanding or the moral courage to just state that Guntherite Nordicism was wrong; instead they had to invent fantasies to go around it.

Back to the TOO piece:

In de Lapouge he sees the origin of the idea of Nordic Aryan man as a blond dolichocephalic. Such was his concern with facial angles and skull proportions that de Lapouge prophesied:  “I am convinced that in the next century millions of men will come to the battlefield on account of the difference of one or two degrees of the cephalic index.”

Well, how does that differ from “movement” dogma?  Let’s bring out Durocher and his calipers!  At least today we can drill down to ultimate interests and talk about gene frequencies rather than of cephalic indices.  And, no, I’m not suggesting that “millions of (European) men” should “come to the battlefield” against one another based on “one or two percentage points of gene frequencies.”  That’s more of Der Movement’s attitude, not mine.  I’m just saying that at least gene frequencies are actually tied to kinship and ultimate interests than are cephalic indices.  Guess which of the two are more closely associated with familiar ties, for example.  Then extend that to ethnies.

That being said, I found it difficult to shake the feeling that The Myth of the Blood risked sliding into a kind of racial-philosophical apologetic for non-Nordics.

And we certainly can’t that!  Blasphemy!

Seriously though, given that the entirety of Der Movement is a kind of racial-philosophical apologetic for Nordics, what’s wrong with having some dissident ideas here and there in opposition?  However, those ideas should be better than Evola’s nonsense.

By the way, for a materialist view of “spiritual race” see this.

Sallis will no doubt be proven correct about that one day as well.