‘The Authentic Reactionary’ A Powerful, Distinctive Attack on Modernity
A review of ‘The Authentic Reactionary’ by Nicolás Goméz-Dávila; Aracana Europa, 2023.
‘The reactionary does not aspire to turn back, but rather to change direction.’ ‘The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills.’ These quotations should give you a sense of what Nicolás Goméz-Dávila was all ‘about’, as we say, and why he shunned the label ‘conservative’. He did not want to turn the clock back, as Evelyn Waugh did, nor to make history stop, as Bill Buckley did, nor even to delay the march of time, as Lord Salisbury did. He was content to move forward, for we can only move forward; but he wanted the path we took to be informed by what he took to be the most profound wisdom of the past.
The Authentic Reactionary is his manifesto, though the term seems inadequate. Presented as a series of aphorisms which Goméz-Dávila called ‘escolios’ (‘scholia’ or ‘glosses’), it sets out in compact yet poetic style not a systematic work of philosophy but an attitude towards the present and the past: that something has gone badly wrong and that we must reach for the undying truths in which our predecessors believed to rescue modernity from sliding into oblivion. We must ‘pursue in the human wilderness the traces of divine footsteps,’ he writes.
It sets out in compact yet poetic style not a systematic work of philosophy but an attitude.
For Goméz-Dávila, modern history is ‘a dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, and one who believes he is a god.’ The liberty of modern, progressive, utopian man is an empty kind of liberty which aims at nothing. ‘Liberty is not an end, but a means,’ he writes. ‘Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.’ Nor is modern man’s conception of progress coherent. Man does not improve, for Goméz-Dávila; thus ‘the “wheel of fortune” is a better analogy for history than the ‘evolution of humanity.”’ Like Tolkien and McGilchrist, he is sceptical of that great agent of progress, technology, which does not become more human with time but rather makes man more machine-like. Advances in technology sunder our bonds with nature and ourselves, as Hölderlin predicted.
Like Tolkien and McGilchrist, he is sceptical of that great agent of progress, technology.
Reading The Authentic Reactionary, you have the sense of encountering only someone’s insights, with all his stale thoughts neatly excised. Let’s be honest: in a great deal of non-fiction writing, the reader’s task is to sift through the mud to find those nuggets of gold. More than once (more than twice, for that matter), I have had the impression of reading a Guardian long-read, blown up to three hundred pages. Goméz-Dávila, in contrast, offers only the gold, unsullied by the mud of repetitive or superfluous text. That is not to say that what he writes necessarily invites agreement; just that it is has the originality and clarity of a thought that arises in a clear head. This is deliberate. The escolios in which Goméz-Dávila writes are typically a form of marginalia — that is, short, sharp comments on a text found in its margins. But the text on which Goméz-Dávila is commenting is implicit: it exists only in his mind.
The result is idiosyncratic, rich and dense. It rewards many readings. And for post-liberals and those who disillusioned with the traditional categories of left and right, The Authentic Reactionary is also essential reading.
