The Essence of Organic Society
Alleged critics of modern civilization speak about the superiority of “organic” communities over the “artificial” communities that predominate today, but often they do not understand the very meaning of the words, and only create further confusion. A clear understanding of these terms is essential to any legitimate resistance to modernity. When the most basic terms used to describe the current situation and the possible atlernatives are misunderstood, the best of motives and accompanying efforts can be diverted away from the goal, and even end up serving the enemy.
First we must explain what we mean when we use the word “organic.” By organic, we mean that the different aspects of a traditional society (including farming and hunting techniques, rules of courtship and marriage, house building, clothing and ornament manufacture, myths and legends, music, and a thousand other things) are not the products of one man or even one generation, but rather the products of countless generations. These traditions were given to men by the divine and persisted through many years. They were designed to fit a specific people in a specific environment, and removed from themselves conflicting elements. Over the course of generations these traditions shaped the people, and this cohesive set of traditions made up the entire social environment of an individualk, from cradle to grave. The contrast between this and the modern lifestyle is jarring. In a traditional society, a man or woman dresses in a certain way because that is their way. They wear the clothing produced by their own craftsmen, who make clothing in the way that is in accordance with tradition. Likewise they sing and dance in a way that is in accordance with tradition, and because they draw from tradition, nothing about the way they dress or the way they sing will conflict with any other aspect of their culture.
Let us now turn to what we mean by an “artificial” way of life. Moderns have a wildly strong and irrational attraction to novelty, and this causes them to desire an endless succession of styles in clothing and music, differing styles that have no inner coherence or clear connection to the culture as a whole, and cannot serve as a connection with the divine. Another strong tendency of moderns is the desire for efficiency/profit. These two desires, for novelty and efficiency, overwhelm whatever remnant of fidelity to tradition that might still exist, and often stimulate and enable each other, as the “new” and “improved” almost always go together in the modern worldview. During the rise of modernity, people either failed to recognize or willfully ignored the importance of traditional ways of life. Despite the fact that, for example, the women in their villages had spun wool into yarn for centuries, they decided to manufacture wool in factories because it was more profitable. Despite the fact that their ancestors had sung and danced in the same way for as long as anyone could remember, they embraced new dances because they were novel and “more fun.” In the modern worldview, “more fun”=”better”, when it is more likely that “more fun”=”appeals more directly to the baser instincts”. When these desires for novelty and efficiency gain control, a very significant change occurs. Previously, the dances, songs, clothing styles, diets, family structures, beliefs, farming techniques, etc, that existed together in one place had existed together in that same place for countless generations, had in fact grown up together, and were the way they were because they had developed under similar conditions with similar goals. But now all of the different aspects of society, including manufacturing, entertainment, recreation, etc., are all drawn from different unrelated sources, and, because they are not designed to work with each other, they cannot create a stable environment. It is like trying to build consensus among a group of people drawn from a thousand different countries, each speaking a different language and having different values and beliefs. Perhaps the most shocking is how infrequently anyone has the commonsense revelation that making major changes in every aspect of a society in a single generation might lead to trouble.
Because many people who feel an aversion to the current situation do not understand these terms, they often make proposals to fight modernity that would merely replace one artificial environment for another. One example of this is the belief that if we were to abandon modern industrial society tomorrow, we would naturally revert to the state in which we lived prior to the advent of industry. This belief is based on the assumptions that a) traditional societies were “simple”, and b) that any aspect of human culture can be created by one gifted individual or group of individuals. They reason that if modern ingenuity has allowed us to travel to the moon, surely it can also reproduce the practices and techniques of “primitive” men. This view, however, does not take into account the fact that modern technology is artificial, whereas traditional society is organic. Leaving modern society and living in the woods does not necessarily recreate an organic, pre-modern way of life. To borrow an image from René Guénon, traditional society is organic, and can be represented as a plant growing from a seed, the seed containing in potential form every aspect of the plant, adapting itself as it meets different exterior conditions. On the other hand, modern society is created from the outside by artificially welding together incompatible pieces. This artificial welding together can also represent the modern mind, as it is composed in a similar manner. Throwing this mind into the woods and giving it the task of surviving without invention a, b, and c will not lead to a traditional way of life.
Another example of the confusion that arrises from not properly understanding the terms in question is the phenomenon of the artificial “organic” communities set up by misguided leftists (collective farms, etc). We say that these enterprises are artificial, against the most strenuous claims of those involved, to highlight the point that they do not understand what it means to have an organic community. All truly organic communities have three key components: family, religion, and ethnicity. And this is an empirical claim, not a theoretical one. There are no organic communies that are not shaped and sustained by these three components; and yet modern ideologues claim that family, religion, and ethnicity are three unnatural institutions that ought to be destroyed. These pseudo organic societies in fact rely on the very modern idea that a community is composed of individuals who share a purely rational and conscious agreement or contract.
These proposals are dangerous because they form a false opposition. As the horrors of modernity continue to manifest themselves, more people will become aware of the problem, although most will not be able to accurately describe the problem. In their ignorance they will come accross some charlatans claiming to have an “organic” alternative, and they will think that they have found a way to fight the horrors that they have encountered, when in reality they will be contributing to them, being just as confused and modern in thought as their supposed enemies. The only successful way to fight against the modern world is to build communities using traditional materials as our guide. As westerners we look at natives of “underdeveloped” nations and laugh contemptuously at their traditional customs, failing to realize that even the most degenerate tradition is superior to our modernity, which is a satanic anti-tradition without any vestige of truth or connection with divinity. It is imperative to study and understand the “folk cultures” of our respective nations, as it was these collections of techniques and knowledge that formed a bulwark against chaos and cultural disintegration from time immemorial up until relatively recently, and it is these, together with proper metaphysical understanding, that are the key to living once again in a healthy civilization.