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Although much of the efforts that have been undertaken to “other” the Islamic world have been sophistic and have relied upon disingenuous arguments, there are some areas where marked civilizational differences can be identified. One such difference is between certain theories of the state. The Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, is a state whose ideological underpinning is based upon a spiritual understanding of the world, whereas the states of the West are largely temporal vehicles of materialism and secularism.

It seems then that in order to foster further understanding between the much maligned Islamic world and the West that the disparate conceptions of the spiritual state and the materialistic state need to be compared and contrasted. Here one ought not necessarily be restricted to the Islamic conception of the spiritual state as history furnishes us with myriad examples of such states which share many of the same traits.

The main scholar to turn to when attempting to distinguish the materialistic state from the spiritual state in occidental scholastics is Julius Evola (1898-1974). He rejected the post-Enlightenment world in toto, professing nostalgia for the transcendent state of what he termed “the world of Tradition”, which he defined in his magnum opus, Revolt Against the Modern World, based on universal criteria observable in multiple civilizations. Evola famously authored critiques of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism from the perspective of the authentic Right (which he distinguished from the inauthentic, economically deterministic Right which in fact promotes variants of Classical Liberalism), criticizing both movements for not fully overcoming the rationalistic, egalitarian and populist trappings of modernity. [1]

Writing of his preferred statal model, Evola offered the following remarks:

“Then it is possible to conceive that the true state, the state characterised by the ‘transcendence’ of the political level that we have discussed, furnishes a propitious environment for the development of personality and true liberty in the sense of virtus, according to the Classical understanding. With its climate of high tension, it issues a continual appeal to the individual to carry himself beyond himself, beyond simple vegetative life. Obviously everything depends on giving appropriate and just reference points to encourage this impulse, so that the effect is really ‘anagogical’, that is, drawing upward.”

In this piece my intention is to develop an analysis of the mechanical, materialistic state of the West which stands for values which encourage so many people not to raise themselves above and beyond “the simple vegetative life”, anagogically, as noted by Evola.

Although his work is invaluable to a discussion such as this one, I propose, however, as Evola himself did, that we initially look to certain Japanese scholars to glean an understanding, first of all, of the Western materialistic state.

Hybridizing Modernity and Tradition

In the 1850s American imperialist Commodore Matthew Perry barged into a secluded Japanese society which had, by banning Christians and other foreigners, been able to develop autonomously, preserving its ancient traditions up until that point. Perry, and later representatives of other Western states, forced Japan to accede to unequal trade treaties which caused much consternation within the nation.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and in Japan’s case the pressure that was to be exerted on her by American and Russian imperialists, in particular, contributed to inducing the Meiji Restoration of 1867 which was conceived of as a returning of Japan’s Emperor to his rightful place at the centre of the country's political life. Emperor Meiji would supplant the feudal shogunate which was perceived by many to have illegitimately usurped the power of the Emperor.

It was soon realized by the elite of Meiji Japan that in order to prevent the aggressive and expansionist imperialist states from overrunning the Nipponese archipelago that certain elements of occidental society—most importantly modern military practices—would have to be adopted.

Vibrant debate erupted among the intelligentsia about the pros and cons of the Western way of doing things. Hundreds of Japanese scholars visited Germany, America, Britain, France and other Western nations in order to develop an understanding of Western economics, science, architecture, jurisprudence, engineering, and politics. In the West, no such corresponding wholesale evaluation of the East, and of Japan in particular, has ever taken place to this day, something which I consider to be a grave mistake.

A spectrum of opinion came to exist within Japan regarding the extent to which the nation ought to Westernize, with some individuals such as philosopher Nishi Amane asserting the supremacy of the West and others such as legal scholar Hozumi Yatsuka voicing more caution.

It is a great shame that even to this day the vast majority of Western scholars are unaware of this highly compelling discourse in which some of the best critiques of Westernism were developed by some of the most sophisticated and talented scholars the world has ever known.

Part of the problem herein lies in the fact that much of this literature remains available only in the Japanese language. Also the liberalistic bias of most Western scholarship on Japan since 1867, but especially since 1945, makes affirming the literature which was defensive of Japan’s tennōcracy and critical of Western liberal-democracy taboo within occidental letters. [2]

In his text, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, Cemil Aydin shows that Japan was not alone in having to debate which elements of occidental modernity were desirable and which were deleterious to one’s own civilization in this period. The Islamic leaders of the Ottoman Empire likewise had to tread the rocky path of hybridizing certain elements of Western civilization with their own traditions and customs.

Since 1979 Iran has similarly been forced to decide which elements of the West to incorporate into her revolutionary Islamic society and which to exclude. Thus, the debates that took place along these lines in Ottoman Turkey and Japan have contemporary resonances.

Antistatism And The Secular Society

In attempting to define what post-1867 Japan was to be, then, it behooved the intellectual elite to likewise define what an evolving Japan was not to be. If Japan were to cherry-pick the best elements of the West she had to be clear about which components of Western society were undesirable for emulation. This sifting process produced a wide range of perspectives, which I cannot stress the worth of too greatly to those unacquainted with them.

One of the main themes to emerge from this discourse emphasized that the West was spiritually bereft and that while the East was obliged to take its hat off to the West for its achievements in the scientific disciplines that it was incumbent on the West to look Eastward to fill the spiritual void that existed within its ambit. Scholar Okawa Shumei, for example, hoped to see what he termed a “synthesis” between East and West come to fruition in which the best elements of Western materialism would be fused with the best elements of Eastern spiritualism as embodied in Shinto Japan (which in addition to its native religion of Shinto had incorporated many elements of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism into its spiritual and ethical superstructure). Wrote Okawa:

“Asia, speaking of it in its entirety, has really been a seminary for the spirit of mankind while Europe has been a school for cultivating the knowledge of mankind.” [3]

Legal scholar and Shintō nationalist, Uesugi Shinkichi, like Okawa, stressed Japan’s privileged position vis-à-vis the West when it came to religiosity. For such thinkers, the fact that Japan had kept in tact one imperial dynasty since her founding, dated from approximately 2500 years prior to when they were writing, as well as the fact that the Emperor was widely believed to be a sacred representative of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, had enabled Japan to avoid the pitfalls of dissention and revolutionary change which had befallen the West. Even the seminal Meiji Restoration was viewed to be more a reform than a revolution when compared to the political tumult which had arisen in the West over many centuries.

Harmony between the state and society distinguished Japan from the West, it was believed. Uesugi contended that the inhabitants of a country and their state should exist in unison, albeit hierarchically, and that the feeling of loyalty and reverence held by Japanese people for their spiritually-defined state had encouraged the suppression of the ego and the absorption of individual selves (the Japanese people) into the larger self of the holy imperial state (personified by the Emperor). This contrasted markedly with the trajectory of the West where subversive antistatist thought had indeed decoupled the state from society, pitting one against the other and encouraging secularism, individualism and materialism.

For such Japanese analysts of the West, the high point of Western civilization could be found in ancient Greece and the pre-Christian Roman Empire whereunder the state was sacred; imperial subjects deferred willingly to the state’s hegemony based on its function as a vehicle for religious morality and its connectedness to the spiritual world. Here Plato’s conception of the polis and the moral state was lauded.

With the advent of Christianity in the West, however, people became loyal to a universal God and identified with a universal humanity as opposed to the state, the nation and the volkish deities. Christianity was thus the first and perhaps most pernicious injection of antistatism into Western thought, which initiated the process of divorcing state from society, enabling the modern secular state to come to fruition. The state could no longer purport to speak for supramaterial, spiritual values as these were to be derived from a universal, supranational God.

The Enlightenment embodied in many ways the secularization of Christian values: the idea of a universal humanity, egalitarianism, and the individual’s separation from the state persisted but with secular, rationalistic justifications. The Enlightenment was therefore the next stage in antistatism and the alienation of society from an increasingly weakened and disregarded state.

Rulers would no longer stand for superior, perennial values and high civilizational aspirations: they would exist merely to address formalistic and materialistic concerns. Walter Skya summarizes Uesugi’s core thesis:

“Western state theories were based on the fundamental notion of personal profit seeking, whether it be the profit of one, as in the case of monarchy; the profit of the few, as in the case of aristocracy; the profit of many, as in the case of liberal democracy; or the profit of all, as in the case of socialism. In all cases, he insisted, people sought to use the state as a means to enhance their own ends. This type of thinking was the result of considering the state a mechanistic material entity. The state was merely a means for other ultimate ends.” [4]

The belief then was that while Japanese viewed themselves as agglomerated constituent parts of the state, Westerners viewed themselves as being autonomous individuals existing distinct from the state. The Western materialistic state existed merely to enable wealth distribution to whichever faction of society acquired economic power through a highly uncivilized, darwinian struggle which lent itself to societal disintegration and disharmony. Economic clout, as opposed to moral and spiritual superiority, or what Evola called a “chrism”, was the only prerequisite for power. The Western materialistic state was therefore not a model that should be emulated by Japan who, in preserving her own native religion and due to the very real love felt by Japanese for their Emperor, had not deteriorated into the fragmented, anarchistic society that could be viewed in the West. Japanese had never seriously contemplated the severance of state and society and this put Japan in a privileged position.

The contention then, was that only via a spiritually-orientated state could harmony between the competing factions within a society be reached; by subordinating the short-sighted greed of the capitalist and the aspiration to wage retributive class warfare by the worker the holy state had the potential to create a form of organic, voluntarist collectivism which primarily had a spiritual and cultural trajectory as opposed to a purely economically defined, sectarian one.

Whether one was a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism with a minimalist state or whether one was a proponent of communism with a big state, Western society would ultimately be doomed to failure because in both cases the state was viewed merely as a mechanism for enabling the distribution of wealth to one faction of society at the expense of another. In the case of the former the state creates law to buttress the capital accumulation of the bourgeois capitalist class and in the latter case the state usurps the capitalists’ wealth and remunerates the masses in various ways. In Japan, and I shall elaborate upon this in Part II of this essay, the Emperor’s role was to affirm that which was above and beyond man, and this had a wide range of consequences for the economic practices in that society. Suffice to say, economic determinism was rejected and few had an appetite for antagonistic class warfare; the economy did not dictate which values were hegemonic, rather the economy was subordinate to divinely oriented values which sought to fuse essential existence with existential existence, ontologically.

As Uesugi stated:

“Nations are now in a condition of disorder. There are classes within the nations, each class struggling for its own interests and each thinking the other an irreconcilable enemy. Radicalism is spreading abroad. The poison of the disease penetrates flesh and bones and threatens to overthrow the state. The idea of reliance upon the state is conspicuously weakened. The heart of man has lost its power to cooperate. Individuals do as they please, acting dissolutely without restriction. The capitalistic class of England and America, flushed with the victory of the Great War, have become arrogant and domineering throughout the world and are giving rein to unbound greed. Behold the world is full of the struggle between capital and labor. . . When we [Japanese] observe such conditions there is not one of our people who does not believe that, if only they had our emperors, they would not come to such extremity. . .Our people, through benevolent virtue of the emperors, have attained a national constitution that is without parallel in the world.” [5]

The Reharmonization of State and Society

Those who would attempt to portray the spiritual state as prone to poor governance and obsolete must first contend with critiques of the materialistic statal model which is arguably a symbol of the decline of the West. This is a subject that scholars like Evola and Oswald Spengler wrote about compellingly in a previous era.

If political debate remains obsessed with different variants of materialism and inane hair splitting over the use and abuse of “taxpayer money”, the necessary reharmonization of state and society cannot take place. Indeed the designation of members of the body politic as “taxpayers” speaks volumes about the primitive economistic mentality which prevails in the West. Only when capitalist and worker are united by being drawn to that which is above and beyond man can reharmonization even begin to ensue.

Insofar as the amoral rule of the jungle which is the basis of the status quo in the West is recognized by civilized people as being anathema, it seems pertinent for us to consider what ought to be the basis of a post-material or supramaterial existence for Western man. Alain De Benoist’s On Being A Pagan is one of the few texts in occidental scholarship for some time to proactively broach the problem of the spiritual vacuum that exists in the West, something which was so glaringly obvious to those Japanese scholars who scrutinized occidental societies in the period 1867-1945.

Looking to Japan, which even today, albeit in an attenuated form, can boast many of the traits of the supramaterial state, seems necessary. This is a cardinal thesis of mine which I intend to belabour. If Japan has been able to accommodate and improve on so many of the technological innovations of the West with great skill, why shouldn’t the West heed the advice of scholars like Okawa and accommodate certain spiritual assumptions which have historically prevailed in the East and in Japan specifically?

Similarly the revolutionary Islamic society in Iran should provide us with food for thought, although for Europeans it would seem fair that we should primarily attempt to revert to our ancient religiosity which is far more akin to Japanese Shinto, a term which translates as “the way of the gods”.

Endnotes

[1] Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right (n.p.: Arktos Media Ltd., 2013), Kindle ebook, chap. 4.



[2] Tennō is the word for emperor in Japanese. It seems fruitful to distinguish between tennōcracy and the Christian absolute monarchies which possessed a different character to Japan’s Shinto version of an absolute Emperor. Japan’s tennō has had a comparatively economically austere and some would say apolitical existence.



[3] “Item 32 – Addition to Doc. 684 – ‘Asia, Europe, Japan’ by Okawa, Shumei”. Inventory of the Personal Papers of Frank S. Tavenner and Official Records from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1945-1948. University of Virginia Law Library.

[4] Walter A. Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), Kobo ebook, under “Western History through the Eyes of a Radical Shintō Ultranationalist.”

[5] Stuart D. B. Picken, Sourcebook in Shinto: Selected Documents (n.p.: Praeger, 2004), 98.