The Children of the Ashes
Making Peace with (Post-)Modernity
We are all children of the Ashes, victims of civilization in a death spiral, who have grown up in a world mostly lacking in moral and spiritual guidance and dominated by the reign of quantity. People on our side of things read René Guénon and Julius Evola, turn against materialism, find God and join a church, lament ‘degeneracy’, disdain modern technology, long for the Butlerian jihad after absorbing the teachings of Uncle Ted, and adopt the stance of Revolting against the Modern World. I am, however, a realist. I do not believe that any more than a handful of people will try to live off the grid. I do not believe that people will be able to make it through the miasma of modern life without taking on some taint of modernity. I also do not believe that the children of the Ashes can be ‘de-Ashed’ so to speak. This is Paradise Lost; you cannot recapture innocence once it is gone. Once you’ve seen pornographic footage of five men gangbanging a woman, and her feminised husband licking the semen out of her vagina, you cannot unsee it. Even if you personally refuse to look at such material, you live in a culture where it is entirely normalised and discussed openly on ‘marriage.com’.[1] You live in a culture where you know as well as I do that you can find the exact disgusting scene that I’ve described in a matter of seconds – probably many versions of it – for free. Sorry to be so graphic and shocking from the get-go, but I want to remind you of the total depravity of our time.
Once you’ve seen your entire culture deconstructed, you cannot pretend that it hasn’t been deconstructed. Once you’ve adopted an attitude of cynicism, how can one ever lose it?
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred[2]
When you’re lost and alone in such a time as this, even the sacred can be made to seem profane, deadened into matter and crushed by detached irony. The whirligig that the 1960s wrought on our morality and culture is still bringing home its revenges. Many of us grew up the shattered debris of its aftermath – that’s also a Rolling Stones album kids. It seems now we are entering its death throes; one hopes that when Vox Day’s much heralded Day of the Pillow comes, Boomer Truth will die with the last boomer.[3] Cynicism, however, may not die until the last Gen X eats the Pillow. That’s probably me, by the way, because I’m secretly a millennial.
Po the Person and Auron Macintyre once made a meme to combat the constant accusations of ‘larping’,[4] but that meme is notable for the paucity of its ambition. The meme is not trying to overthrow the government; it is not a bid to find transcendence; it is not an attempt to Revolt against modernity; all that happens is that a man gets married and has a son. It is also implied he goes to the gym for a bit and loses a pot belly. This is the tragedy of lowered expectations – things that were just social norms a few short decades ago, now appear to be a challenge. Once people dreamed of walking on the moon, now they dream of mundane domestic life. To me, the meme is not the uplifting message of ‘ignore the haters, you can do it’ that its authors might have intended, but rather an exact measure of how far we have fallen as a culture. The final panel does not signal the final defeat of nihilism by sincerity, because the mocking friend still exists and will continue to do so until he dies. Likewise, the man who gets married is still a child of the Ashes and still aware of the nihilism and cynicism – at some level it has touched him, to adapt an analogy from Panama Hat, like leprosy. There is hope, however, in the idea that the child, the son, could make it to adulthood with a renewed innocence.
This has been done at least once in the past hundred years. In 1934, Cole Porter wrote:
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose.
Anything goes.
If driving fast cars you like,
If low bars you like,
If old hymns you like,
If bare limbs you like,
If Mae West you like,
Or me undressed you like,
Why, nobody will oppose.
When ev'ry night the set that's smart is in-
Truding in nudist parties in
Studios.
Anything goes.[5]
However, by the 1950s, somehow, people became innocent again. It was called ‘The Last Age of Innocence’, and society was markedly more socially conservative than it had been before the war, both in Britain and America.[6] The Age of Innocence is also the title of a novel by Edith Wharton, written in 1920, about her upbringing in New York during the so-called Gilded Age of the 1870s. If the late nineteenth century was a time of social conservativism, we know from William Hogarth or the Marquis De Sade that the late eighteenth century was a time of debauchery and social unravelling. So, it appears that Paradise can be regained, but as they show in The Fourth Turning, things happen generationally in blocks of about eighty years.[7]
So what am I saying? I am not saying that you should not try to find God, that you should not seek to improve yourself, and so on, but rather that even if you do, we cannot escape our historical moment. Rather, we should be aware that nothing lasts. History is not only a series of transitional moments, it is seasonal. We live in Winter, but Spring is coming.
Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away[8]
As children of Winter, we cannot suddenly pretend to be the children of Spring. They may be our children or our children’s children, but they are not and cannot never be us. This is not a blackpill, but just an awareness of where we are and who we are. What we are, what we can be and what we cannot be. We must accept our role in the great cycle of things. This does not mean we have no agency or no part to play, we have a role, but it is and always will be transitional. Spengler, Evola and so on understood this.
We must be authentic to ourselves. Quoting rock and pop songs as I’ve done throughout this article, for example, comes naturally to me because this is the postmodern language of our time. Why pretend it were otherwise? When I have talked about being a ‘postmodern’ traditionalist, this is what I mean. Evola was a modernist traditionalist, even though that sounds paradoxical. How could that be? It is because he wrote like a modernist, thought like a modernist, even if everything he wrote was against modernity. He lived and breathed in air that was so full of Nietzsche that it almost suffocated him. He understood all this. When he told us to Ride the Tiger,[9] he was giving us instructions for how to get through this cursed phase of our history. All things must pass.
When people talk of ‘Saving the West’, they are really adopting the wrong frame. ‘The West’, where that means a functioning and morally upstanding civilization, is lost already. The West has been ‘lost’ at least twice before, probably many more times. Whatever arises anew from the Ashes will be something else. This new thing may bear characteristics and aspects of continuity with it, but it won’t be it. If we stick with the idea of the seasonal cycles, this coming year we will experience once again Summer. But it won’t be last Summer or that of the year before. Each year’s Summer bears resemblance to the last, but it is also entirely different. We tend not to think in terms of ‘saving Summer’. We know every year it will fade into Autumn. Likewise, civilizations rise and fall. We must have the humility to recognise what we can and cannot do. We can fight for the shape and tenor of the coming Spring, but we will spend the rest of our days in Winter. All things must pass.
[1] See https://www.marriage.com/advice/physical-intimacy/married-woman-revealed/#Womens_topmost_common_fantasies_finally_revealed.
[2] https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding/
[3] https://voxday.net/2021/06/18/rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light/
[5] https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/1086993
[6] https://historyplex.com/family-life-in-1950s
[7] William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Bantam, 1998).
[8] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/georgeharrison/allthingsmustpass.html
[9] Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, trans. Jocleyn Godwin and Constance Fontana (1961; Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003).
No matter how pozzed things become, the final victory will be Christ's over Satan.
This type of cyclical thinking is so tiresome. There is no reason why history must follow these set paths. History is dynamic and can be turned on a dime, as it has many times.
The masses’ degeneracy means nothing for the elite few who can resist temptation long enough to take power and correct civilizational decay.