RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Evola

Dec. 12, 2014 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

47:22

Evola

Richard Spencer, John Morgan, and William Neville discuss Julius Evola in the latest edition of Vanguard Radio This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	William Neville, John Morgan, welcome to the podcast.
	William, I'll begin with you.
	How are you?
	I'm great, Richard.
	It's great to be here.
	Very good.
	And John, how are things in Budapest?
	They're going quite well.
	Good.
	What is the weather like in Budapest in December?
	Oh, it's been horrible recently.
	It's been raining almost continuously the last couple of days.
	I didn't really appreciate...
	You know how even Central Europe like this, how far north it is compared to the U.S.?
	Because it gets dark here around 4 in the afternoon.
	Well, actually, I think Rome is at the same latitude as Washington, D.C. So Europe is a lot more closer to the Hyperborean realm.
	Yes.
	So to speak.
	But anyway, let's talk a little bit about Evola.
	We've had a number of requests from listeners that we do an Evola podcast, and I think I mentioned this on Twitter.
	I did some really great and really fun podcasts with Jonathan Bowden a couple of years ago, and he was actually preparing to do a podcast on Evola just before his death.
	And so I'm glad that we're kind of doing it now.
	Perhaps some of Jonathan's spirit can take a hold of us while we're speaking.
	But why don't we start out, and John, I'll just throw it over to you first.
	Why don't we just talk about who Julius Evola was and his time, his background.
	Just if a listener knows nothing about Julius Evola, where should he begin?
	I'll just mention first that I think this will sound like a plug for Arctos, and I guess it is, but I genuinely do think it's the best introduction is Evola's autobiography, which is the path of Cinnabar that Arctos publishes.
	And he doesn't talk about the biographical facts of his life very much in the book, but it's a very good overview of his ideas and the things that preoccupied him.
	He was born in 1898 in Rome, which is where he lived basically his entire life.
	His early interest was actually in idealist philosophy.
	Before he started to write books on traditionalism, he wrote several very lengthy works.
	What he called the idea of the absolute individual, which was sort of a heroic, almost Nietzschean vision of the individual, but in keeping with idealist philosophy.
	There's very little of that that's been translated into English, so I'm going on just what I've read secondhand mainly, but that was his early interest.
	Like everyone else from his generation, he did fight in World War I. He was actually an artillery officer.
	Although in Cinnabar, he actually denies that...
	I don't think he actually saw much action.
	Although he did serve in the Italian army.
	After the war, he actually became Italy's foremost Dadaist painter.
	He was Italy's foremost representative of the Dada movement, which he later said that might seem somewhat contradictory for someone who later became a traditionalist, but that he saw it as a kind of way of leveling the ground, that it kind of destroyed everything he had believed up to that time and kind of opened the way for tradition to come in.
	And then it was in the 1920s when he...
	He started to get interested in the occult and the various religious traditions, and this eventually led him to the work of René Guénon.
	Guénon himself was sort of in his prime at that time, and this introduced him to the idea of tradition.
	And once he encountered that, that became sort of the basis for all of his work for the rest of his life after that.
	Although he had a very different understanding of tradition than Ganon did in some ways.
	Interesting.
	I do want to talk about tradition and traditionalism, but before that, William, do you have anything to add in terms of some of these basic facts of his life and some of the basic things that motivated Evola?
	Sure, yeah.
	I mean, John outlined it pretty well.
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	Evola proceeds from, you know, one phase to the other of his career.
	In a sense, leaving the previous phase behind, like Dadaism or philosophy, saying that he's pretty much exhausted it.
	That's what he said with philosophy.
	And occultism as well, to a certain extent.
	He pretty much, he was in...
	He always has interesting kind of seeming contradictions.
	He talks with all these Freemasons and Anthroposophists and stuff like this, but then ultimately he'll disavow their entire worldview and say that they're kind of grasping at a piece of the truth.
	But they don't really have it, and their whole system is, you know, petty and kind of diluted, and that's, you know, his system of the absolute individual and magical idealism is the real one.
	But, yeah, when he discovers Guinan, yeah, there are a couple of influences.
	Guinan is a big one.
	His morphology of history, so Guinan's basic historical worldview is that, you know, there are, you know, four ages, the Golden Age, the Silver Age.
	The Bronze Age, the Iron Age, similar to Hesiod or the Norse tradition and the Hindu tradition have this as well.
	But this sort of dialectic, not even dialectic, this sort of contrast between traditional civilization and modern civilization really informs this whole worldview.
	But there are some other influences besides Gunan.
	Bakofen, if you're familiar with him, is a kind of morphologist of history who talks about...
	Sort of two different types of civilization, solar, which is patriarchal, and a lunar type of civilization, which is matriarchal, which also has a huge effect on the sort of morphology of civilization that he gives in Revolt Against the Modern World.
	So Revolt Against the Modern World is almost like a fusion of Grenon's view with Bakhofen's view.
	But, yeah, I think John covered it pretty well.
	So why don't we talk a little bit about this.
	What is traditionalism?
	And John, I'll throw it over to you again.
	How would you describe this kind of tradition?
	I think obviously the word tradition is used in all sorts of manner, whether we're talking about a Christmas tree or traditional Christianity in America or things like that.
	But what specifically is the tradition that Evola and Ganon are a part of?
	Yeah, that's a good point, and I actually think the fact that the word has so many meanings generates a lot of confusion.
	When people say they're a traditionalist on the right today, some of them think that they're using it in the sense that GetOn and Abla did, but they're not really.
	We support gay marriage as a traditionalist, not polymorphous homosexuality.
	Gay marriage.
	I'm kind of joking.
	I expect...
	I expect Republican traditionalists to actually say that in the near future, but sorry, go on.
	Well, their tradition is subject to modification, depending on the polls.
	Well, the idea that Ganon and Avila have of tradition is that behind reality, there's this metaphysical source that lies at the heart of everything.
	It's very Platonic in conception.
	Plato had this idea of the realm of ideas.
	That's essentially what Evel and Ganon believed.
	But they thought that this metaphysical essence manifests itself in the material world through the various spiritual traditions.
	Not just any spiritual tradition, but ones that came from legitimately revealed sources, like the Vedic texts in India, or the...
	Texts that formed the Bible and so forth.
	And that this tradition, even though it itself is one, manifests differently depending on the cultural context in which it manifests.
	So the Nordic tradition, when it was still living, was the manifestation of this metaphysical essence.
	Within Nordic culture, just as the Christian and Islamic one is in the Semitic culture and Vedic in Indian culture and so on and so forth.
	This might sound suspiciously New Age, but where the traditionalists really part is that they don't believe that traditions should be mixed.
	I mean, Evel and Ginnon were certainly interested in all of the world's major traditions, but they thought that syncretism, which is the mixing of several traditions, was very harmful and was actually counter-traditional.
	We see this a lot in America today where people want to take a little bit of Buddhism and mix it with a little bit of Christianity and designer religions.
	They rejected that notion.
	Because Ganon taught that tradition is manifested as a metaphysical whole.
	And he also drew a distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric.
	the esoteric is what we would call the more mystical elements of a religion that like you know monks and other mystics are more involved with.
	Whereas there's the exoteric part that's sort of like for the masses.
	The two are linked.
	And one important way in which Ganon and Abla differ from New Agers is that they thought you can't have one without the other.
	You can't take esotericism and neglect its outer forms entirely.
	Both have to be linked.
	So this kind of abrogates the idea that people will say, well, I'm spiritual but not religious.
	That distinction, Ganon and Abel would have denied that there is one.
	We Episcopalians are religious but not spiritual.
	Exactly.
	No, I would also mention that I think there's a lot about New Age...
	Stuff that we've, over the past 20 years or so, that I think is not very admirable.
	But that being said, I think even those people who might be pursuing these things in maybe the wrong way, or maybe in a kind of goofy way...
	Nevertheless, I think those people who are attracted to that are attracted to the truth, and they're attracted to something beyond material consumerism and Americanism.
	And I think that's interesting.
	I think the people who are attracted to New Age philosophy, I think it says something about them, that they might be kind of on the wrong path, but maybe they're headed in the right direction.
	Well, they're on the wrong path for the right reasons.
	Yeah, that's a better way of articulating it, yeah.
	But yeah, William, why don't you talk a little bit about...
	Sure, so yeah, like John said, John kind of outlined the overall kind of perennialist view of tradition and of history.
	Where Evola kind of gets his uniqueness from is that he does start out in philosophy and this idea of magical idealism, which...
	It has the whole absolute individual concept at the center of it.
	And the absolute individual is similar to what would be described in Hinduism as Atma or what we describe in other circles as the real I, a kind of transcendent identity beyond your material body or even your material personality, which of course changes and is in constant chaos and dies with the body.
	But this sort of transcendent I, which...
	And the whole goal of magical idealism is to discover this I and identify with it.
	And that's sort of what leads him away from his philosophical phase.
	Because for Evola, and as well for Grenon, the only purpose of knowledge is basically only good if it leads to a change in existential condition.
	Again, it's similar to Plato.
	Plato, you know, true knowledge for Plato is, you know, the universe, the outer universe and your inner world are kind of analogs of one another.
	And when you truly know something, you almost, it might be too strong to say that you become it, but it's sort of internalized within you.
	So when you grasp these higher things...
	The real true knowledge of it changes your whole existential condition and state of being.
	So for Evola, the most important thing with knowledge is this sort of real supernatural knowledge, which is why he finds really all profane philosophy, which is basically all philosophy for the last few hundred years.
	And even science, he says, science can achieve these great things in the external world.
	If you can go to the moon and do all these things, but you're still kind of a pathetic, cowardly, fearful individual, what good was it all?
	If you haven't changed your existential condition, for him it's all useless unless you yourself become better, become more of a master of yourself and more of a master of the universe even.
	So that's sort of his perspective that really...
	And Evola, another difference between Evola and Ganon is that, and most people who follow Ganon, is that Evola sort of thinks of himself as a spiritual member of the warrior caste.
	And he thinks the whole West is sort of oriented more in this direction of being warriors rather than contemplatives and ascetics.
	So we're kind of more driven to action and trying to change the world and impose our will on things.
	And this is really what kind of differentiates him from Gunon, because Gunon is content to expound metaphysical doctrine.
	That's pretty much all he does.
	He studies various traditions, expounds the metaphysical doctrine, sort of explores the higher unity behind different traditions.
	But Evola is much more concerned with the goings-on of the world, what can be done to manifest tradition in the world, at least until he reaches the last phase of his career, when he kind of...
	You know, after World War II, he gets a little bit hopeless about this.
	But, you know, Evola is engaged with existentialist thought.
	So he engages a lot with Heidegger and Nietzsche.
	Ride the Tiger discusses these philosophers at length.
	He's engaged heavily in politics.
	He was very much...
	I mean, he's engaged with all these idealist philosophers who were, you know, at the top levels of the fascist regime, like Giovanni Gentili and others.
	So he engages with the...
	He was on personal basis with Mussolini.
	Mussolini, for example, really liked his doctrine about race.
	So he was very much involved in the world and in the politics of the world until maybe the last phase of his career, which is probably the biggest thing that would differentiate him from Gunon and Chuan and other perennialists.
	Before we talk more about fascism and also Evola's concept of race, which William also touched on, I'm interested in thinking a little bit more about religion, particularly Christianity.
	I mean, with Ganahl, he ended up converting to Islam.
	And in this traditionalist conception of religion, Christianity is, I would say, deeply a Semitic religion, or at least derived from a Semitic religion.
	So what were Evola's thoughts on Christianity in Europe?
	I mean, he is a Roman, after all.
	It's obviously a deeply Christian city and a deeply Catholic country.
	What were his thoughts on this paradox of Christianity and Europe?
	Well, Evola had deep respect for Ginnon.
	I mean, they corresponded, I think, for about a quarter of a century until Ganon's death.
	But he did have some differences of views.
	I mean, Ganon was raised a Catholic, and he always considered it to be a valid tradition, but he thought in the modern world it had lost its way.
	He thought it had become too corrupted by modernity.
	It's a bit of a mistake to say that he converted to Islam.
	There's actually a letter that survives where somebody asked Ganon about this, and he said, well, the important conversion isn't from Christianity to Islam or to any other religion.
	He said the important conversion is from modernism to the point of view of tradition.
	So he didn't really...
	If you look at even Ganon's work, there's very little about Islam in it.
	And I think it's a mistake to kind of read his decision with the kind of political valence that we would tend to look at it with today.
	But when it comes to Evola, Evola was very much a Nietzschean in his younger days.
	And even though he kind of became critical of Nietzsche after his turn to tradition because of what he saw as Nietzsche's materialism.
	And lack of a transcendent perspective.
	I think Nietzsche always exerted kind of an influence over him.
	And his understanding of Christianity was that it was something that had sort of imposed itself on Europe and that Europe was still inherently pagan.
	I mean, Evola loved the pagan religions of Rome.
	He was very interested in the other pagan religions of Europe, although he agreed with Ganon that one of the important things about a tradition for it to remain living is that there has to be an unbroken chain of initiations in the priesthood.
	So even though Evela had a great amount of respect for all of these European pagan traditions, he didn't think they could be revived.
	In the modern world, because this chain of initiations had been broken and there's not really any way of getting it back.
	He did write a book in the late 20s, around the time that Mussolini signed an agreement with the Vatican, because there were a lot of fears in the Vatican in the 20s that this crazy fascist movement was going to turn against them somehow.
	And Abel was actually, in his younger days, he was very much hopeful that Mussolini would do this, would sort of re-establish Rome as a pagan society.
	And he wrote this book, which is called, it's been translated as either pagan imperialism or heathen imperialism.
	A lot of people like it because it's an extremely anti-Christian work.
	But he actually, in later life, kind of retracted it and said, well, I was young and kind of naive, and I was a little bit too harsh.
	He always had respect for Christianity, and you can see this in Cinnabar, where he writes about it, at least not so much for Protestantism, but at least for Catholicism, even though he agreed with Ganon that it had become very corrupted by modernity.
	But where he disagrees with Ganon is that he didn't think that this was really an appropriate religion for European peoples.
	And he really thought that for a European man to really rediscover his true identity, he was eventually going to have to sort of overcome Christianity.
	But he still acknowledged that there was a great deal that was good in at least traditional Christianity.
	I mean, his political ideal was always the Holy Roman Empire because he thought it had the perfect balance between the political authorities and the sacred authorities in the church.
	but there's also a great quote in Cinnabar where he says I would rather spend an afternoon chatting with the lowliest country pastor than with the loftiest literary celebrity of our time so he did have a respect for Christianity but he did think that there was something inherently un-European about it and
	he definitely thought that for Europe to rediscover itself it was going to have to overcome it and how could it do that?
	I mean one thing that a number of people have talked about is in a way discovering The pagan aspects of European Christianity.
	And that doesn't really include so much of the Christianity that we see in America, which when you look back to early pilgrims and so on and so forth, there was a very strong kind of Judaic element to Maybe
	you should pick that up so we can...
	Sure.
	So, yeah, I mean, Evola's view about the Middle Ages in particular, and specifically, like John said, the Holy Roman Empire, is that it was this ideal synthesis between Europe's old pagan heritage and Christianity, which in other works he says actually, you know, despite his kind of negative assessment of Christianity's general effect on Europe and the character of the religion and all of this.
	He does say that the Nordic tradition, all these pagan currents, had kind of lost their awareness of the transcendent dimension of life, and that these things had kind of just become like nature worship at that point, and that the contact with Christianity actually had sort of a conditionally positive effect for both sides.
	Resulting in this kind of ideal synthesis of the Holy Roman Empire and the tradition of chivalry and the myth of the Holy Grail and all this kind of virile warrior spirituality that he approved of.
	Yeah, Evolo's view on these traditions is not so much like the Semitic versus not Semitic.
	More of this idea that goes back to Bakoven, which is the idea of solar versus lunar civilizations.
	Civilizations that are fundamentally feminine and matriarchal and civilizations that are fundamentally masculine and solar.
	And he takes this to very extreme levels.
	And so that's really the issue with Christianity is mostly in that it requires...
	Most of its manifestations, aside from what I'm talking about in the Ghibli Middle Ages and certain mystics, have a devotional, passive relationship with the divine, whereas Evola highly admires pagan Rome, which kind of had a more active, masculine relationship with spirituality.
	And it's part of his idea about, we can get into it later, about spiritual race is defined by what kind of relationship you're inclined to have with the supernatural.
	But yeah, like John was saying, he does have a very complicated relationship with Christianity.
	You know, he thinks the lowliest priest is of more interest to him than the most haughty philosopher.
	How would he describe a kind of theology of modernity in the sense of, you know, thinking about a solar civilization, which we might associate with, say, the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire, versus the more matriarchal lunar civilization?
	In a way, modernity might have a little bit of both.
	I mean, there's one aspect of the modern age that includes things like futurism, certainly includes things like fascism.
	Let's harness technology for our will and this kind of aspect of it.
	But it's almost like the world we live in, I think it's remarkable the degree to which it's becoming very matriarchal.
	It's becoming a world based on comfort and protection and security.
	And it really isn't that kind of masculine Faustian world of going off to the stars.
	So how would, and either of you could pick this up, but how did Evola think about modernity and using those?
	I'll pick this up briefly and then I'll hand it over to John.
	So Evola's idea about this sort of Faustianism, this modern drive to conquer the material world, is essentially Titanic.
	And what he means by Titanic is this myth of the Titans that were these huge...
	Beings that revolted against the Olympian gods and failed.
	It's this idea that, yes, they have this sort of masculine drive, but it has no reference to the transcendent, and so it's kind of futile and destructive.
	So he specifically calls out Spengler and diverges with him on this point, along with some others.
	His views are similar to Ernst Jünger's in this respect.
	Ernst Jünger writes a lot about the Titans versus Olympians, which is a subject Evola is very focused on.
	So yeah, John, whatever you had to add.
	Well, this doctrine of the cycle of ages was very important to Evola.
	And the traditionalists typically use the Vedic understanding of the cycle of ages.
	They believe, like Hindus themselves, that we're currently in the Kali Yuga, which is the last and most degenerate of the ages.
	Traditionalism really...
	No, we're heading towards greater and greater progress.
	That was one of the things that really blew my mind when I first started to read Avalon Ganon.
	I'd always grown up with this idea that progress was infinite and things were getting better and better and we were advancing.
	To really understand the traditionalists, you have to completely reverse that and say, you know, the golden age was in the past, and at least as far as the outer world is concerned, you know, things are only going to get worse.
	And even when it seems that we're making progress, because it lacks this transcendent aspect, you know, it's really not achieving anything that's genuinely transcendent.
	And because of this idea that we're in the Kali Yuga, Even the universe itself is sort of beginning to fall apart over the course of many centuries.
	So for Avila and also Ganon, I mean, modernity is sort of the quintessence of this spirit of degeneration.
	And there's a lot of things we could say about this.
	I mean, Avila thought the best thing for an individual who was interested in tradition to do at this time Was to just withdraw from the world as much as possible, to try to escape the degenerative effects as much as possible and stick to the worldview of tradition.
	And he said, if you're forced to engage with things in the outer world, and I think he understood his relationship with fascism this way too, he said, you can do it if it has some benefit for you spiritually, but you should remain detached from any result.
	So, you know, there are ways in which you can engage with the modern world, like including politically.
	And since everything is degenerating, you shouldn't actually expect that you can actually make anything better.
	You should only engage with it in terms of how it helps you as an individual spiritually.
	Interesting.
	I think this is also a good transition to Evola and fascism.
	What did Evola and people like him...
	Did they actually see it as maybe something that wasn't just titanic and wasn't just modernist or authoritarian, but actually could reawaken the spiritual realm within us?
	And maybe that led them to disappointment.
	John, why don't you just pick that up first?
	What is Evola's relationship to fascism?
	Well, Abele was never a member of the fascist party, actually.
	I mean, he was on personal terms with Mussolini and some of the other fascist leadership, but his involvement was sort of restricted to these essays that he wrote, some of which were actually published in the official fascist newspapers.
	We published a collection of them in English in Arctos called Metaphysics of War, although there's many more that haven't been translated yet.
	But he basically, he saw that, he thought that fascism had potential.
	I mean, he, in fascism viewed from the right, which he wrote after the war, and which we've done in English, he...
	He basically says that it had the potential to transcend its sort of bourgeois mass movement origins, and he thought it could become something more like the Holy Roman Empire.
	I mean, he thought it ultimately failed in that, but he did see the seeds of many good things in it.
	He actually does say in Fascism Viewed from the Right that the fact that fascism was defeated in war, Bad fortunes in war shouldn't lead us to just dismiss it out of turn because he actually thought there were many positive aspects to Italian fascism.
	He didn't actually think very highly of German National Socialism.
	But Italian fascism in many ways was actually more interesting from a traditional standpoint because they still had a monarch.
	It wasn't quite as totalitarian.
	It wasn't as obsessed with this biological view of race that the Nazis were.
	So, yeah, he saw that it had potential, and there were actually some people who listened to him.
	I don't think Evo had any significant impact on Italian fascist policy other than maybe a little bit in their racial policies.
	But apart from that, I mean, he was really, you know, kind of on the fringe.
	And after the war, you know, of course, he kind of stopped being involved with politics altogether.
	William, do you want to chime in on this subject?
	Sure.
	John covered it pretty well.
	Yeah, Evolo was always sort of disappointed in the Italians for, I think he said, they're not quite worthy of fascism.
	They're too bourgeois degraded.
	He said that it wasn't that fascism had failed the Italian people, but that the Italians had failed fascism.
	Exactly.
	His work never really got too much traction in Italy.
	Actually, despite his disapproval of National Socialism, it did get a lot of traction in Germany, and the official National Socialist government was always a little bit...
	Suspicious of him, because his school of thought is basically most congenial to the conservative revolution in Germany, which includes Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and plenty of others.
	But it was in these circles where he really became fairly widely read, and of course they tried to do the assassination attempt on Hitler.
	But then after the war, all of this conservatism in Germany kind of dries up, and you don't really hear very much more about it.
	But yeah, he was actually more popular in Germany and Austria at a certain point than he was in Italy.
	But yeah, he did have hope for fascism that was ultimately disappointed.
	He said that basically the point of the state is in its transcendental function, basically enabling men to act in the name of something supernatural.
	And interestingly enough, it's basically something that transcends their own individuality.
	And Evolo was always careful to distinguish between two different types of quote-unquote transcending individuality.
	On the one hand, he noted the kind of state he advocates that enables man to once again be in contact with the divine and act in the name of But on the other hand, he noted, and so an example of that would be, you know, the kamikaze or something like this, the Japanese warrior spirituality that he admired during the time of the war.
	But then his kind of polar opposite of that, which is also sort of, quote, transcending individuality, but in kind of a subhuman direction, was the collectivism of, you know, communism and the Soviet Union, where instead of being in touch with transcendent forces, you're in touch with, you know, kind of demonic.
	Yeah.
	That, so, but yeah, yeah.
	So you had hope for fascism that didn't quite play out, especially in Italy.
	So.
	No, I mean, in some ways, what we've seen in the post-war world has been this, you know, until 89, 91, has been this battle between two big ideological empires that had very similar...
	presumptions in a way that was, you know, we can provide comfort basically better and more efficiently than you can.
	It was kind of a battle of the last man at some level.
	Let's move to this concept of race and the spirit, because I found this very fascinating.
	While I was doing some light research before we began talking, one quote from Evola that stuck out is he said that the idea is our fatherland.
	And that is, in a way, something directed at the racialism and nationalism of, say, the Nazis, who thought that...
	You know, obviously, your ethnos, your people, your race is the fatherland.
	And that he was looking towards this platonic ideal, something higher than a mere human being or a race or something like that.
	And also, he did have a very strong concept of race, but it was one that wasn't biological or genetic.
	It was one that was really primarily spiritual.
	So why don't, John, I guess you can start with this one.
	Maybe talk a little bit about Evola's concept of race.
	What was it and how does it actually differ from both, say, the National Socialist conception and also from the conception of race that many people in our movement have, which is a kind of HPD genetic conception of race.
	Well, I actually think...
	I'll say a few words, but I actually think from what he said before we started recording, William seems to know more about ableist racial beliefs than myself.
	But he didn't discount the biological.
	I mean, it would be a mistake to say that he thought that race is purely a spiritual thing.
	It was related to the biological.
	But, I mean, he actually was famously said that...
	Somebody who is Aryan or European can possess a Judaic soul, just as somebody of Jewish background he thought could have an Aryan soul.
	If you look at the thinkers who influenced Abel, there were several Jews who had a big influence on him, like Otto Weininger would be a prominent one.
	And he sort of explained this by saying, well, they have very much an Aryan soul.
	I think, as William was saying before we started recording, he thought that when one's spiritual nature, one's character, was in line with one's biological nature, that that was the ideal, but that's not always the case.
	In this, he was kind of similar to Spengler.
	Spengler didn't really have much time for people who were purely biological racists.
	In fact, I think it's in The Hour of Decision, he says, those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.
	His point was that we shouldn't just talk about racial purity, but characters should play into that as well.
	His argument was sort of, and I think Avila would have agreed with this, if somebody...
	Even if they're of pure European descent, but they act like a complete degenerate in the way they live their lives, can we still really call that person Aryan?
	Because certainly in India, in the Vedic tradition, where the word Aryan comes from, it actually has much more to do with character than with racial or ethnic concerns.
	So, you know, I think that's an important thing for the right to inculcate, because I don't think we don't want just a society where everybody is European.
	I mean, we want people, a society of people who act like, you know, in accordance with the greatest ideals of Europe.
	Oh, yeah.
	And we don't want to define being white or being Aryan or being European, what have you, as being, oh, see, we're more economically efficient units, and we commit lower crime than other races.
	That might very well be true, but that's really not a basis for anything, spiritual or noble.
	But William, what do you have to say about all this?
	Sure.
	So, yeah, I mean, Evola's main problem with biological racism, as he puts it, is that it's this idea that the superior is determined by the inferior.
	Like, the character and the intellect and the spirit are all determined by biological heritage in a completely mechanistic way, which is the reverse of the way Evola and probably Guénon see it, which is that your spiritual race, if anything, If, at least, if it's active, it's going to have a formative effect on these other two races and not the other way around.
	The idea that the...
	When Evola says, you know, the idea should be our fatherland, it's important to differentiate that from, you know, the American concept of what a nation is, because on the surface it might sound quite similar, right?
	You know, America's an idea and exists everywhere where people eat Big Macs.
	You know, it's not quite...
	Which is true.
	But it's really, like John says, it's more based on the platonic ideal of a transcendent idea.
	This is kind of related to how every single ancient city thought of itself as being founded by a god or by an archangel or something like this.
	There's kind of a divine basis that serves as the...
	The fount of authority for everything in the civilization.
	And yeah, so Evola thought there were three races, and basically these three races were of the body, the character, or the soul, and the spirit.
	And this pretty much corresponds exactly to Plato's idea of the three souls.
	So there's this idea that every...
	A person has kind of three races, which are ideally in harmony, but in the modern world are almost always in some level of disharmony.
	And that real, quote, racial purification consists not in just purifying the biological race, but in, once again, achieving a kind of harmony between the body, the soul, and the spirit.
	So like he said, like John said, you know, you have these quote unquote Aryans who act more like Jewish bankers or something like this.
	I think he amusingly uses like the Scandinavians as an example of that.
	Yes.
	Like decorated, you know, pure blooded people.
	Yeah, so basically, Evel's idea is that spiritual race has primacy over biological, and he basically even says that, like I mentioned before, that these higher races have formative power over the lower races.
	The spiritual race has a formative power over your psyche and over your body, over even the way you look, which seems like a pretty phenomenal claim to make.
	But he uses the example of the Jews, for instance, who were completely ethnically diverse at the beginning of Judaism, and then through this one spiritual tradition kind of molded them into having nowadays very distinct ethnic traits, very distinct psychological traits, even.
	That's fascinating.
	What does Evola think about Jewishness as a spiritual and racial concept in modernity?
	So, yeah, he acknowledges the problem, the quote Jewish question, but he has a very different take on it than, you know, say, like most people of his time did.
	He didn't have exactly a problem with the Jewish religious or mystical tradition, which he respected.
	He uses the...
	Kabbalah, for instance, in a number of his works as a positive reference.
	But his basic concept is that secularized Judaism has more or less this kind of psyche that Jewishness created when secularized enables the emergence of a particularly regressive type of human being who previously, in previous areas, had been kept in check.
	So he does acknowledge the problem, but he doesn't really have a He thinks that basically the currents of subversion in the world go far deeper than Jews or just Freemasons or anything else,
	but these things are all kind of manifestations of this deeper current of subversion.
	I don't think it's been translated yet, but basically what he said was that, well, it may actually be true that it's a forgery, but he said that's irrelevant because it still accurately describes what's happening in the world today.
	So he sort of thought it had a deeper kind of esoteric metaphysical truth about the state of the world, even if it wasn't an actual document.
	Actually, a historical document, I should say.
	No, that's fascinating.
	That would be a pretty provocative text for Arctos to publish, but maybe you should be kind of a kamikaze and go for it.
	It's possible.
	Well, gentlemen, I have really enjoyed this conversation.
	I've certainly learned something myself.
	Why don't we just put a bookmark in it and...
	Definitely return to Evolo, because as with all things, I think we just scratched the surface.
	But let's just do that.
	Let's come back to this in a couple of months and maybe take on some other elements of his thought.
	But first, William, your first time on the podcast, thank you for being on.
	Yeah, it's a pleasure being here.
	Great.
	And John, you're an old hand at this, but thank you for joining me again.
	Oh, you're welcome.

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