Culture, Civilisation
Culture is the compass of a people’s mentalities, traditions, mores, and values. Civilisation is the tangible material expression of the culture, representing culture’s practical realisations.
As an ethnic group, a people can superficially adopt the civilisation of another group, but it can never be integrated into the culture, since the latter ultimately rests on a hereditary or biological disposition. A civilisation grows out of a culture’s mental and spiritual stock, whose ethnic disposition is largely inherited. Language is an attribute of civilisation, but not culture, except insofar as an acculturated population can adopt the civilisation and language of another people by reconstructing it in an ethnicised and hence deviant way (French-speaking or American-speaking Blacks, for example). Culture is the basis of civilisations, but culture also rests on a people’s genetic capacity — that is, on its bio-anthropological substrata, its germen. Civilisation is the material, exterior aspect, or projection, of a culture. Contrary to the illusions of Marxist and liberal philosophers, culture is not some sort of superstructure produced by a given techno-economic condition, but is, instead, the mental infrastructure determining social and economic forms.
As an integral part of man’s physiological nature, culture is the ‘grid’ upon which man interprets the world in terms of his heredity and milieu. The West has tried to impose itself as a homogenising ‘world civilisation’, founded on economic materialism, plutocratic democracy, and the egalitarian humanitarianism of human rights. But it has failed. The revival of Islam and several other ethnospheres (India, Black Africa, China, Latin America . . .) demonstrates that the plurality of civilisations, produced by distinct races and cultures, like the conflicts that divide them, are intrinsic to humanity. The Twenty-first century heralds a clash of civilisations — not the advent of a unified, humane civilisation, as modernists believe.
‘Western civilisation’ is not actually a civilisation at all, but rather a technical mode of life, lacking depth, based exclusively on a quasi-Pavlovian domestication of material habits; and, as such, it’s ephemeral, for it rests on no memory, no tradition, no cultural substance, but rather on modes as fleeting as a cumulonimbus cloud, on the most superficial forms of conditioning.
Islam denounces Western civilisation, like it formerly denounced Communism, and for good reason. But what it proposes in its stead is something even worse: another form of totalitarianism. Above all, its civilisational project is totally incompatible with European culture, for it’s founded on the notion of absolute submission and lacks, as a consequence, an organic, harmonious accord between freedom and order.
Today, the two principal adversaries of European culture and civilisation are American-Western civilisation and Islamic civilisation.
Nothing is ever permanently acquired. Everything can be lost. A people can see its culture die, either through a modification of its ethnic substrata (colonisation), a loss of its inner substance, or through decadence. The latter is explainable only in terms of the psycho-biological decline of its life force. European peoples today are threatened by the exhaustion of their identity and cultural vigour (by cosmopolitanism, Africanisation, Islamification, and the transformation of their culture into a folkloric remnant), but the principal cause of their decline resides in themselves and not in the aggressions assaulting them. In dereliction, one is rarely an innocent and almost always a consenting victim.
A cumulonimbus cloud is the type of cloud which is conducive to thunderstorms. They tend to have very short life-spans.
