Last month, an overlooked meeting took place under clandestine conditions in Austria’s capital. Professionals, invariably active in right-wing politics across the European continent, travelled from far and wide to listen to Renaud Camus, Martin Sellner and Harrison Pitt discuss why Europe appears to be struggling to meet the challenges of a profound demographic and identitarian crisis.
Those gathered included journalists, political organisers and activists on the Right, meeting to deliberate on questions such as ‘remigration’ and the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ with evident concern. Within the confines of an old Viennese home, lavishly decorated with symbolically aristocratic taste, the talk – which is available on YouTube – proceeded by atmospheric candlelight in a serious and reflective manner.
Whether the meeting will ultimately prove consequential remains to be seen. Its host city is not without precedent in forming political movements and ideas which go on to have continental and historical significance. What is certain is that a new – radical, confident – intellectual Right is forming, one which is re-examining its priors. It is reassessing post-war Europe’s commitment to universalistic thinking and a civic nationalism which often denies that ethnic groups whose ancestors have resided in a nation for millennia have any particular claims over it. It is also, as the discussions that evening surprisingly revealed, reconsidering its secularity.
All three speakers profess, in varying degrees, Christian belief. How does this influence their ideas and emerging political movement? Fortunately, Pitt and Sellner spoke to the Catholic Herald.
During the talk earlier that evening, Sellner and his co-speaker, the philosopher Renaud Camus, had suggested a European tendency to see themselves as uniquely sinful: colonial oppressors guilty long after the fall of empire and much restitution, but without a capacity for absolution unless their entire civilisational inheritance, with its attendant wealth and glory, is surrendered to outsiders. Camus reflected that this probably has something to do with Western man’s historical religious propensity to self-examination and confession. I pressed Pitt and Sellner on this.
Catholic Herald: Why do you think, paradoxically, as European populations stopped examining their own individual consciences and confessing their sins, they began to forgive themselves for their collective prosperity, beauty and glory less – almost subconsciously believing they were stained by an unabsolvable original sin as they stopped believing in sin itself?
Harrison Pitt: As the theologian Edward Feser likes to remind us, grace does not smother nature so much as build upon it.
The desire to be good, to win redemption for one’s failings, is an extinguishable eros in the human soul. These yearnings do not disappear once we stop seeking God’s grace or understanding our hopes in the light of Christian tradition. They simply become less organised and more easily preyed upon by bad-faith actors.
Martin Sellner: This is a profound paradox. Having discarded the Sacrament of Penance, the modern European has no mechanism for absolution.
The universalism of transcendent faith was replaced by the universalism of worldly guilt. Consequently, ‘white guilt’ has become a secularised Original Sin. But unlike in Christianity, there is no one who pays the debt. It is a permanent, hereditary stain that can only be ‘managed’ through endless self-flagellation and, ultimately, the sacrifice of one’s own civilisation.
As Ernst Jünger aptly noted: ‘The abandoned altars are inhabited by demons.’ Without a return to the sacred, we are simply arguing about the most efficient way to manage a cemetery.
Catholic Herald: Sellner describes how, in the ‘white guilt’ paradigm, all of the world’s sufferings and evils are the white man’s failing – supposedly either through his historical crimes or through his inaction to help others. But would materialism, agnosticism and the like not make Europeans powerless against this thinking?
Martin Sellner: Indeed. Materialism and atheism, as the foundations of modernity, breed individualism, hedonism and nihilism. The shadow of faith persists as the idea of ‘realised transcendence’, the attempt to create a universal paradise here on earth.
If you accept the premises of modernity, you will always arrive at some form of material egalitarianism and a universal mission to ‘heal the world’. In this framework, the imperfect state – including any differences in wealth, rights, prestige, beauty or health – is viewed as an unbearable injustice and a source of personal guilt. The only way to absolve oneself is to become a ‘Social Justice Warrior’.
Harrison Pitt: The facts of the world as we reckon them to be and our conduct within the world are not always at one. Very often, they are in tension. If ought implies can, then human freedom is essential to human morality. The genetic determinist denies human freedom. Remember Richard Dawkins’s colourful flourish: ‘DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.’ If this is true and the material world is all there is, the very idea of human morality, since it assumes human freedom, must collapse.
But as far as I can tell, this logical implication has done nothing to make Dawkins any less morally indignant about behaviour he dislikes. We all speak from the pulpit to varying degrees. Professed materialists are no different. I am not one myself.
But assuming a future in which materialism remains the default outlook of Western man, we would only be powerless to resist the implications you mention if our societies began to run on strict rules of logic: worldview X implies explanation Y, therefore policy Z. I see no sign that our societies do or ever will.
Catholic Herald: Camus castigated the pernicious effects of mass production and industrial culture, pointing out that in the old religion and philosophy, peoples are irreplaceable. Likewise, Sellner decried the loss of ‘essence’. I would bring to the speakers’ attention the Russkaya dusha – the Russian soul. This was a spiritual and literary concept that ran through the intellectualism of the dying decades of Tsarist Russia. Germany, with Heimat or the concept of the völkisch, has something similar.
In scholastic philosophy, the soul is not apart from but intrinsically includes the body. The Church’s view is not atomistic. It acknowledges that nations, tribes, villages and peoples are real entities with actual, binding commonalities, rather than mere abstract categorisations of individuals and particular matter. Therefore, lest we fall into a kind of nominalism which rejects universals, do you believe the Right will have to recover a concept of the ‘soul’ of a nation – which by nature includes the bodies and physical material and blood (ancestry and lineage)?
Martin Sellner: Your point on Thomistic philosophy is vital. According to Scholasticism and Church teaching, a nation is not merely a ‘social contract’ or a ‘marketplace’; it is a mystical body.
To suggest that a people can be replaced by any other group of individuals simply because they ‘signed a paper’ can be seen as a form of political nominalism, fuelled by cultural and historical relativism. A realist position defends the truth that ethnicity, lineage, language and land are the physical components of a spiritual reality.
Adding to that, Heidegger’s Dasein provides a more modern framework for this phenomenon, transcending the mind–matter dichotomy. The idea of an atomised, equal and pacified humanity progressing towards a worldly paradise is the exact opposite of Christian teaching.
As Theodor Storm wrote: ‘God does not want a global people; God does not want a Tower of Babel reaching up to the heavens. We stand up for His eternal order when we stand up for ourselves. Our hearths and our country are sanctuaries according to God’s will. And His faithfulness will not forsake us if we remain faithful unto death.’
Catholic Herald: Mr Pitt alludes to the fact that the debate between neo-pagans and Christians can be put to one side. I know neo-pagans are slightly different, and may sustain a sensible Aristotelian and Platonic understanding that is largely compatible and aligned, sans mercy and resurrection. However, is there a purely utilitarian danger that it is relatively esoteric, philosophically complex, and less likely to be held as objective, as the Incarnation and Crucifixion make Christianity? Meaning that, when patriotism or justice is placed under strain in the face of financial or institutional advantage, neo-paganism would be far more likely to be disposable as a set of convictions, when push comes to shove?
Harrison Pitt: In academic seminars, I would join you in holding the neo-pagans – many of whom I count as close friends – to many of these points. But for the purposes of urgent action, a certain amount of coalition-building will be required. The intellectual foundations of an organised philosophical worldview need not be identical to those of an effective political movement. They probably cannot be.
Martin Sellner: Neo-paganism is very often more of an aesthetic attitude rather than a lived faith. It lacks the personal conviction, the institutional ‘bones’ and the historical continuity that Christianity has.
While I would not say this is a danger to their patriotism – many non-Christian nationalists have been willing to die for their convictions – the real defect arises elsewhere. The aesthetic ‘art-as-religion’ of modern paganism is no basis for a social order or a family. Nietzschean aestheticism might suffice when it comes to a single act of self-sacrifice, as with Yukio Mishima, but when it comes to a life of silent sacrifice – the life of a priest, a nun, or a faithful husband and wife – the figure of the anti-Christian ‘radical decadent’ has proven quite powerless.
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Their answers suggest that, if the emerging Right is to avoid the dead-end of biological assertion or aesthetic nostalgia, it must recover the full depth of the Christian vision. The faith it upholds must be one, as Pitt and Sellner recognise, that sanctifies particular peoples as irreplaceable bearers of the divine image. They contend it cannot, like the present tabula rasa materialism and liberalism, dissolve nations into abstract humanity with floating rather than particular souls.
If Europe is to meet the problems of demographic replacement, to forgive herself for her prosperity, and to exorcise the demon of despair and unabsolvable ‘white guilt’ that swarms the vacated altars, this faction of the Right is concluding that Catholic sanity may be needed.
Perhaps Pitt is right that, given the immediacy of the crisis – some 40 per cent of Vienna’s schoolchildren are already Muslim – and the absence of time, a successful political movement will need to form coalitions.
But here are two influential right-wing actors who address growing audiences on an ascendant nativist Right, who recognise and contend that Catholicism provides answers to Europe’s spiritual, philosophical and psychological malaise.
Both men are believers, and Martin Sellner has historically attended the Traditional Latin Mass. That is not insignificant on the political scene of our, until now, conspicuously secular post-war world.
