The following is an essay from the Iliade Institute book, «Pour un réveil européen» (For A European Awakening). It was written by the rising star of Éléments, Guillaume Travers. The original French is available at Iliade Institute. The English translation is available at Arktos.

 

Modern man’s relation to the surrounding world is an almost exclusively utilitarian one. Faced with every single thing, he wonders whether it is of value to him, whether it satisfies any of his desires, and whether it can contribute to his personal comfort. In his eyes, a tradition is only worth preserving insofar as it provides him with pleasure and amusement—he thus breaks with it as soon as it turns out to be burdensome. In accordance with this same logic, everything is subject to comparative evaluation in terms of its costs and benefits: a natural landscape can therefore be destroyed if building a block of flats instead proves financially profitable. Everything is a matter of ‘good business’. Utilitarian man thus only exists as a perpetual consumer of goods, all of which can be purchased and sold. Nothing has any intrinsic value to him, and nothing deserves to be protected in the face of the unbridled championing of personal interests.

The Empire of Utility

This utilitarian relation to the world goes against traditional European thought. Indeed, Europeans (including the Greeks, for example) did not perceive man and the world as being disconnected from one another, viewing them instead as one single living whole. Greek man’s connection with nature was not one of consumption, but of co-belonging. He did not define himself in an abstract and external way in relation to a world of objects, but in a specific manner, through the particularism of his natural and cultural belonging: his environment was thus not foreign to him, but actually defined him. He considered the world, furthermore, to be a place of divinity, a divinity that revealed its presence through a myriad of natural and artistic manifestations that bestowed upon it its very value. Within this worldview, the idea that the value of things could be primarily assessed in a subjective and utilitarian way makes no sense whatsoever, since there are neither abstract ‘subjects’ nor ‘objects’ whose existence is radically distinct and devitalized.

Historically, the first divide between man and the world to pave the way for utilitarianism appeared in the Bible, which reorganized the entire old kosmos in accordance with a distinction between created beings and uncreated ones. As a result of the acknowledgement of a single heavenly God, the earthly world lost its once sacred aspect. Stripped of its value, the surrounding world could thus be subdued:

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)

This ‘dis-enchantment’ would not, however, be immediate: indeed, the medieval period had no notion of utilitarianism, firstly because it focused on man’s relationship with God, and not on his connection to things, and secondly because it had borrowed from Antiquity the notion of a ‘common good’. The almost complete devaluation of reality is actually a result of modernity, which discarded any relationship with God to overvalue individual reason (as seen with Descartes). The ideal type of utilitarian man is the homo economicus envisioned by economists from the 18th century onwards (even if the term itself was actually coined later) and defined as an individual whose sole purpose is to rationally maximize utility through consumption. The resulting ‘empire of utility’ completely eliminates all notions of beauty.

To the Greeks, the experience of beauty presupposed man’s in[1]separability from the world. And beauty was experienced above all through sight, not intellect: one thus spoke of ‘beautiful things’ rather than ‘beautiful ideas’. Unlike intellect, looking implies a relationship to things, a feeling of shared presence: beauty is essentially all that al[1]lows one to perceive cosmic harmony, whether in nature or art. With man defined in accordance with his belonging, experiencing beauty as harmony is what establishes his identity—none of which is possible, of course, the moment man is perceived as being separate from the world: in early biblical tradition, beauty was viewed suspiciously and often condemned (as revealed by the prohibition of all divine representations and the practice of iconoclasm) or reduced to abstraction (oriental art). In practice, however, medieval Christianity would blend together with European tradition and become representational. In the modern world, widespread utilitarianism is structurally incapable of envisaging any sort of harmony between man and the world, and thus lacks any notion of sheer beauty. Its awareness is limited to market prices, and everything can be sold or destroyed once a good price has been negotiated. Beauty is thus no longer, as understood by the Greeks, the very foundation of identity.

The Rise of the Bourgeoisie

Not only does utilitarianism lay our relationship with the world to waste, but it also diminishes what we are as men. Indeed, although man was traditionally defined in terms of his awareness of all that connects him to both others and his environment, his essence becomes, under the impact of modernity, one of self-consciousness. No longer primarily defined by his belonging, but by abstract individuality above all else, modern man withdraws into himself—into his interests, personal comfort and material well-being, which he sometimes terms ‘happiness’. Leading a purely utilitarian life, man dries up bit by bit, gradually losing all awareness of what surrounds him, be it his own community or his natural or cultural environment. The contemporary archetype of utilitarian man is the traveling financier or consultant, whose sole purpose in life is to accumulate wealth by making beelines from airports to large hotels and back again, completely oblivious to the civilizations he’s flying over and to nature itself, which he cannot see from his taxi window.

Historically, the spread of utilitarian values has gone hand in hand with the rise of the bourgeoisie. In Der Bourgeois, Werner Sombart highlights the manner in which the utilitarian mindset is born from the notion that everything can be calculated and thus de facto rationalized. The personality of the modern bourgeois contrasts with that of the medieval lord, whose life was fraught with prodigality, donations, unrestricted expenses, disinterestedness and a sense of honor, none of which are strictly quantifiable nor ‘rational’ from an individual point of view. Hence the following statement:

To enable capitalism to flourish, natural man—i.e. impulsive man—had to disappear, as life and all of its spontaneity and originality gave way to a specifically rational mental mechanism: in short, the prerequisite for the flourishing of capitalism lay in an inversion or transmutation of all values. And it was from this very inversion, from this transmutation of values, that the artificial and ingenious being known as homo economicus was born.

Rather than a social class, the bourgeoisie is therefore a mentality that may well not spare anyone in its path. Sombart contrasts it with the personality of feudal or aristocratic lords. Indeed, a bourgeois is always wondering what else he can appropriate, and is enriched by what he has; a lord, by contrast, wonders what he can offer others, and is enriched by what he gives. Furthermore, whereas a bourgeois places his own interest above the community’s, the opposite is true of lords. One does not, therefore, have to be rich at all to belong to the bourgeoisie—all it takes is for their sole ambition to be geared towards wealth and material comfort: a proletarian whose only purpose in life is to go on a ‘low-cost’ holiday to Tunisia to take some selfies amidst the palm trees is also a paragon of the bourgeois mentality. The bourgeois hierarchy places at its very top the ones who have accumulated the largest amount of money; in contrast to it, the traditional European hierarchy gives the sovereign and military functions priority over wealth alone. Obviously, these two types of mentalities have antagonistic attitudes when it comes to beauty. A bourgeois thinks to himself, ‘it’s expensive, so it must be beautiful’, and proceeds to buy some contemporary art; for his part, a lord thinks to himself, ‘it is beautiful, and therefore priceless’, and goes on to contemplate the work in question. Georges Sorel was thus right when he wrote that ‘the sublime met its fate in the bourgeoisie’. In short, a bourgeois is incapable of experiencing the world in a poetic manner and of appreciating its beauty.

The Impasse of Utilitarianism

In terms of its perception of the world, utilitarianism displays considerable contradictions that undermine European man. First of all, an ever-growing number of works in the fields of psychology and behavioral economics have shown that the human potential to act ‘rationally’ is limited (Daniel Kahneman, Jon Elster, etc.). There is more, however. Having devoted all his energy to the accumulation of material goods, modern man ends up realizing that his life lacks meaning: indeed, never has loneliness, suicide, and people’s consumption of antidepressants and tranquilizers been so prevalent. Alone in a world of atomized individuals, utilitarian man gradually rediscovers his thirst for collective experiences and community-related thrills. Isolated in a world of commercial items, he senses intuitively that his needs are not only material in nature, but also spiritual and aesthetic. Day by day, the world of widespread utility feels increasingly colder, impersonal, and ultimately unbearable to him.

This is by no means a coincidence: indeed, reducing all human activity to a quest for utility could never account for all social facts. In The Sociological Tradition, Robert Nisbet clearly highlighted the extent to which the birth of sociology during the 19th century was very much a response to modern individualism. Essentially, one cannot reduce all major sociological facts to the quest for individual utility. For example, the sociological concept of ‘alienation’ ‘is understood as a historical perspective in which man virtually becomes a stranger to himself, losing his very identity when the ties that bind him to the community are severed and he is robbed of his own moral compass’. Likewise, anthropology has clearly demonstrated that utilitarian inter[1]actions were rare in traditional societies. On the contrary, exchanges took place in accordance with a logic of gifts and counter-gifts (Marcel Mauss5 ). Last but not least, almost all of human history remains inevitably incomprehensible to anyone who adopts a strictly utilitarian perspective. Just think about it: neither the placing of the Stonehenge megaliths during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age nor the construction of cathedrals in medieval Europe make any sense to utilitarians, especially at a time when considerable resources were mobilized to build these monuments instead of being used to increase people’s otherwise minimal daily comfort.

Such constructions, not to mention countless other masterpieces of civilization, can only be understood if we acknowledge the fact that for most of his history, man did not place his own material goals above all else, but subordinated them to various spiritual and aesthetic aims.

Re-Enchanting the World

How are we, then, to escape the reign of utility? The tragedy of utilitarianism—indeed, that of individualism as well—lies in its self-fulfilling character. Modernity thus made the unfounded claim that the value of things never stretched beyond their material utility. In the name of this abstraction, many things that had hitherto been valued for their beau[1]ty, as well as their contribution to tradition and identity, were simply discarded, as they could not be justified using an acceptable cost/profit ratio. As a result, beauty, quality and disinterestedness vanished from the world to make way for sheer quantity (often of the monetary kind). Thus, all that remained over time were purely utilitarian and monetizable goods, the kind of merchandise that could be exchanged in accordance with the law of supply and demand: once a mere abstraction, utilitarianism had now become reality. Owing to this very dynamic of self-creation, it continued to gain ground, as all non-market-related aspects of our civilizational universe simply disappeared.

Although utilitarianism does, therefore, result at least in part from our own laxity, resisting it on a personal level presupposes making a conscious decision in this regard, willingly embracing the necessary efforts and discipline, and abiding by a certain attitude to life, by a certain ethical code. We must, in fact, stop thinking as individuals and, instead, think as a community. Just as we must be mindful of all that connects us with others, before taking our own individuality into account, we must also think about all that connects us with the world. For it is under this condition alone that the latter can be ‘re-enchanted’ and its beauty restored. For this reason, we must first preserve what cannot be reduced to the level of mere merchandise, namely the cultural, natural and artistic elements that define us as a civilization. As regards the future, it thus becomes necessary to reject the cult of material values, while giving quality priority over quantity, placing beauty above market prices, and giving birth to a new hierarchy of values. In order for us to be equal to this enormous task and provide the anti-utilitarian effort with the necessary inspiration, we will also require the presence of role models and heroes. The European civilization abounds in them, and it is thus urgent for us to rediscover and re-interpret them.

 

Bibliographical References

Alain de Benoist, Contre le libéralisme, 6 Éditions du Rocher, 2019.

Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois—Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen, 1913. Translated from German by S. Jankélévitch as Le bourgeois—Contribution à l’histoire morale et intellectuelle de l’homme économique moderne, 7 Payot, Bibliothèque politique et économique, 1928.