Postmodernity and the Possibility of Ethno-Cultural Renewal

T HE term `Postmodernity' is the designation given to our time by the critical theorist Jean-François Lyotard.[1] The central defining element of this cultural phenomenon is said to be a widespread `incredulity towards metanarratives', which is essentially the proliferation of sceptical attitudes towards systems claiming to represent universal truths. This is hardly a new observation, and indeed Nietzsche, in his proclamation of the death of God, already prefigures Lyotard's argument. However, where Nietzsche could view himself, through the Madman, as one who had `come too soon', since the 1960s the consequences of the death of God have been actualised and appear most clearly in the degeneration of culture into a nihilist vacuum or static nothingness. No longer does the West look to the past for inspiration, nor dream of a future that will be much better than the present. Here we see that an `end' of sorts has indeed been reached, and postmodernist claims about the `end of history', or the end of historical consciousness, undoubtedly ring true in the contemporary Western cultural situation. The death of God, fully enacted, now appears in and as a culture of pessimism, a culture no longer grounded in anything tangible, other than the inevitability and irresistibility of consumerism and the absence of depth.

The Enlightenment was the period in which the death of God was first triumphantly announced, yet this was a hollow proclamation, for God simply metamorphosed into `Man', a universalised construction upon which the pseudo-religion of Humanism based its `faith'. Humanism and Communism simply displaced one transcendental construct for another, and in a way that even Christianity had failed to do previously, these two ideologies attempted to create a vision of a `universal humanity'. Both Humanism and Communism have now effectively exited the world stage, yet their progeny remain in the form of Capitalism and Leftist `Cultural Studies'.

Shortly afterwards, a calligrapher named Edward Johnston - who was born in 1872 and had previously shared lodgings with Eric Gill - moved to Ditchling with his family. Meanwhile, Hilary Peplar, a hand printer, also joined the growing number of those who sought to escape the pestilence of urban England. These three men became the founding members of the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, which became a colony based upon craft and agriculture and the principles of 'a religious fraternity for those who make things with their hands'.

The triumph of liberal Capitalism, a by-product of Humanism, has seen individuals reduced to the level of mere cogs in one huge financial machine, and on a larger scale has been reliant upon the suppression of concepts such as peoples, cultures, and homelands, phenomena seen as `divisive', and therefore running contrary to the wishes of a system aiming to homogenise the world. Communism, of course, was the ideology most hostile to ethnic and cultural variance, desperately seeking to erase all difference, seen as the source of `oppression'. Communism has now effectively fallen, yet its legacy lives on as a cancer ever-more progressively spreading in Western academia. Here, Marxism has morphed into postmodernism, an ideology that proclaims the end of metanarratives as a liberation from bondage to `meaning' and `truth' (seen as oppressive and divisive), and advocates a state of universal non-identity, effected through the proliferation of an endless multiplicity of `non- essential' identities, and through the trivial `playing' with the shattered pieces of the thought and cultural productions of the past.

If both Capitalism and Leftism have brought us to the end both of the notion of God and of His earthly representation, Man, albeit by somewhat different routes, they have also both sought to impose a new hegemony on the world, a new universalisation. This new minimalist transcendental vision appears in Capitalism as the Market, a unifying overarching force that must destroy diversity and variation in order to further its goal: total monopolisation of the world as a single entity. In postmodernist Leftism, the new transcendental vision is one of a universal nothingness, a radical absence of meaning and truth that, it is hoped, will break down the possibility of hostility and division, by rendering everything merely contingent and by reducing difference to `cultural constructions' that should be done away with (for example, `nature') or mixed together as a multicultural soup in a melting pot of `tolerance'. The final goals of both these ideologies appear as ultimately the same: the total destruction of culture, tradition, and ethnicity.

Of course, we hear much from Leftists on the value of `oppressed' or post-colonial cultures, and nothing but self-hatred filled assaults upon White European culture, but the lauding of non-White ethnic cultures is a manifestation of `political correctness', and therefore an ultimately vacuous manifestation. Leftists by and large do not care much about non-European cultures, although they like to promote the view that they do as they are so filled with self-hatred and so indoctrinated against their own people and heritage that this idea appeals to them. The ultimate goal or inevitable result of Leftist promotion of non-European cultures and non-White immigrants is the end of ethno-cultural difference as a serious concept, for it is hoped that a `multicultural' society will actually lead to the disintegration of *all* notions of ethnicity and culture, as these many different cultures and ethnic groups eventually amalgamate and cross-pollinate to produce a grey sea of nothingness.

This, then, is our reality in postmodernity: universal truth has disappeared, replaced by a soulless International Capitalism and a nihilistic Leftist social vision. However, the emergence of the `postmodern condition' need not be a cause for despair, for there is another possible direction to be taken, a direction made possible precisely by the impasse that is postmodernity. As we have seen, postmodernity is ultimately the cultural legacy of the death of God, yet this end to universality potentially opens more doors than it closes. The `death' of the Christian god, and the subsequent `death' of His temporary replacement, Man, puts an end to centuries of enslavement to an ideology seeking to fit all the world into one straight jacket of faith, and an end to the pretence that there is something universal called `Man' or the `Human', as opposed to a plurality of very different variants of one species of animal, which we term human beings, but which are split into many diverse ethno-cultural sub-groups. The Capitalist and the Leftist seek to play down this diversity, or to treat it in a trivial and superficial manner, yet if Western culture no longer accepts an over- arching reality about humanity, a single narrative encompassing `us' all, then we may quite legitimately advocate a return to localised visions, to tradition, and to genuine diversity: ultimately to ethno- cultural renewal.

If we have given up on creating a single answer to everything, if we have rejected the notion of creating `one world', gathered together in agreement over one single vision of reality – Christianity, Humanism, Communism, and so on – then we in the West have rejected an alien ideology, and now have an opportunity unknown for millennia, to express European ethnicity and tradition, freed from the burden of attempting to `convert' the world to our culture, and freed from dependence on another people's heritage (that of the Jews) for our spiritual and ethical vision. Postmodernity, then, is potentially the gateway to the retrieval of a world destroyed by Christianity and its offspring, a world of many cultures and ethnicities, and a world in which those cultures and ethnicities can choose to live amicably, yet separately, thereby preserving the rich ethnic and cultural inheritance of ancient nations, and reversing the trend of descent into a cultureless vacuum. We stand at a crossroads. One possible path is the one we are already walking, a path leading to an ahistorical and decadent anti-culture, compounded by a complete lack of cohesive identity. A nightmarish vision of where we are headed can be seen today in contemporary urban America, but another vision is attainable, and this is a vision of Europe reborn, a Europe united by a common ethno-cultural inheritance, yet a Europe that also embraces within itself a variety of localised ethno-cultures - Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Slavonic, and so on – drawn up into a higher unity by the common thread of shared blood, shared history, and shared destiny.

[1] See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).