The Untimeliness of an Anti-Politically Correct Correctness
Tibet is on fire, but in spite of what one might presume their natural sympathies to be, libertarians and paleoconservatives have been soft-pedaling their support for the uprising. As a good example of this see the generally perspicacious Justin Raimondo’s article “Why They Hate China” at Anti-War.com. The primal logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has asserted itself, the enemy in question being, of course, the neoconservatives and their next target (after making a mess of the Middle East) presumably being China. Far be it for the Nousprakikon to advocate an intensification of the already chilling Sino-American cold war. I will offer no suggestions as to how one might support the Tibetan people without causing friction between world powers, although I hope someone has ideas to that effect. No, I simply want to point out, for the benefit of paleoconservatives in particular, that this is what a true “civilizational conflict” looks like…that the Han/Tibetan crisis is located across the most significant fault line in human history, that which separates traditionalist from modernist views of reality. As such the Tibetans deserve, at the very least, our sympathy…even if we must remain agnostic in relation to what political modalities might save them from cultural genocide.
Hermetic sympathy for a Hermit Kingdom?
Tibetans are isolated from the sympathy of most of the human race due to the circumstance of their religion, which to the uninitiated 99% of mankind seems “weird” i.e. esoteric and alien. Be that as it may, until the recent outbreaks the problems of Tibet received short shrift in the international media in contrast to supposedly graver problems elewere in the world. The apocalyptic expression “civilizational conflict” has been employed almost excursively to tensions between the post-Christian West and the Muslim middle east. However in a broader perspective this fight is little more than an ethnic or sectarian conflict acted out on a grand scale. Islam and Christianity are close enough that they can engage in mutual theological polemics, and it is arguable that secularized individuals of ether faith have little sympathy with revivalist movements in their own countries other than a generalized ethnic affinity.
However the conflict in central Asia between the Tibetan people and the Chinese state is a kind of tectonic friction between modernity and an archaic substrata, i.e., much more of a civilizational conflict in the pure sense of the term. In this case it is less important who is the aggressor and who is the victim, than the essential rectitude or otherwise, of the values in conflict. It has been pointed out by libertarian commentators that in past centuries the “Tibetans” (in the form of a priest cast) were aggressors, or at least collaborators in aggression, in serving as the religious experts of several Chinese dynasties. The determination of who is the aggressor and who is the victim is a matter of empirical jurisprudence about which historians and journalists will have much to say. I am only speaking as a traditionalist who asserts the value of archaic culture over modernity as something to be defended in its own right. This is, almost by definition, an unpopular viewpoint, especially when it is offered as a bare phenomenological judgement…one which precinds from any sort of ethnic, racial, religious, or sectarian affinity. Obviously if the reader is a Tibetan Buddhist these arguments will seem superfluous, while for the sympathetic “liberal” they will seem absurd, for, in contrast to the latter I am not making an argument from the principle of toleration or pluralism. No, I am saying (echoing Kierkegaard) that it is a matter of either/or: either archaic civilization or modernity is an illusion…they cannot both be true.
Note that I am talking values rather than corpses here. As harsh as the Chinese repression may become, I doubt that it will lead to the extinction of the Tibetans as a race. What we are talking about is cultural genocide: assimilation, secularization, and forced development. From the point of view of relativism there is nothing tragic in this, after all, populations can change cultures as easily as individuals can change clothes. But the traditionalist view is quite different, its staunchly claims that some cultures are metaphysically correct while others are metaphysically defective. This is the only weapon that the paleoconservative has to fight the rival neoconservative and progressive notions of “political correctness.” Tibet may indeed succumb to cultural genocide, but this will be a tragic death, not an instantiation of the frivolous “culture change” routinely touted by secular anthropology. Admittedly, without a sensitive understanding of the relation between culture and metaphysics, it is hard to see what is at issue here.
The traditionalist principle of metaphysical correctness
It is possible to conceive of the world being ideologically divided into two camps of secularists and religionists. However this is generally not done, for while the secularists may share a general consensus on indifference to metaphysics, religions are scrupulous in their adherence to specific points of doctrine. Why, for example, should a Christian or a Muslim have any sympathy for a Tibetan Buddhist, simply because the latter is in some way “religious”? Why indeed? Again, the easy answer would involve the trivialization of doctrinal differences…a sort of happy ecumenical holding of hands and singing “kumbaya.” This, however, is not the traditionalist view.
The traditionalist view is that any religion, if it contains any truth whatsoever, must be based on certain metaphysical propositions. Having this fundamental metaphysical correctness may not be sufficient to constitute the “true religion”…but it is absolutely necessary. This posting is not an appropriate place to go into a detailed enumeration of the propositions which go into a “correct” or “traditional” metaphysic…and to tell the truth such a metaphysic is not so much constructed out of propositions as compounded by intuitions. It has been called “the perennial philosophy” but in fact it is nothing like what is called philosophy in contemporary departments of Western-style philosophy. One of the greatest of the exponents of traditionalism Rene Guenon, made this quite explicit in his work Man and His Becomings according to the Vedanta. Let’s just be content to say that in the true tradition which underlies all genuine religiosity the human sensory world is only one small sphere within an array of intangible worlds, or what is in vulgar parlance simply tossed into a portmanteau category called “the supernatural.”
In contrast to the naturalist and materialist world-view, where the function of the cosmos is to be sacrificed to human use, the metaphysics of tradition sees the most noble human action in a sacrifice to something greater than empirical humanity. Naturally, the effect and appropriate modalities of these sacrifices is a matter of significant difference between religions, and non-relativizing thought presumes that here too there must be a hierarchy of approximation to truth. However even before this question (i.e.: whether Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, etc. corresponds to the truest doctrine) arises, the sad reality must be faced that those moderns who call, and even earnestly believe themselves to be “Christians” “Buddhists” or whatever have no notion of traditional metaphysics. Therefore, as per the premise stated above, they would be better designated as pseudo-Christians, pseudo-Buddhists, and so forth…and thus disqualified from investigation into which religion best expressed the traditional metaphysic…as much so as the avowed atheists and materialists who’s premises they unknowingly share.
Conclusion: Tibet vs. China
Remarkably, Tibetan Buddhism, on the whole, remains grounded in “the tradition” or “the perennial philosophy” or whatever one wishes to call it. I wont enumerate any empirical evidence for this here, there are plenty of examples for those who take the time to investigate. As such Tibet, as a culture, has an absolute value for the rest of humanity, not simply as an exotic ethnic specimen, but as a remaining archaic outcrop of “the tradition” which was once the universal “background noise” of all human cultures.
Across the great divide looms the opposite “truth” which, if I and my fellow traditionalists were wrong in our “Pascalian wager” would have to be saluted as the winning cause in the either/or proposition of value absolutism. It is the cause of all which promotes utility, progress, and rationalism. It is not even really “Chinese” though the contemporary Chinese mainstream has become enthralled to it. It has been stripped of Confucian ethics and Marxian egalitarianism…an amoral movement for power and expansion surging from the cities of the eastern seaboard into Central Asia. If it is anything, it is a kind of Asian doppelganger of America…and those who counsel against needlessly antagonizing it speak well.
None the less, those of us who value cultural conservatism should lament the passing of Tibet…and support whatever means, short of abetting an extension of American power into Central Asia, of delaying the demise of a great and sagacious people. Yet even in the best scenario, it may be that the Tibetans, like Tolkien’s elves “are not long for the circles of this world.” If so, and even if it is a cultural rather than a physical exodus, those of us who remain on this rock orbiting through the space of secular time will be immensely impoverished.
