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| ISBN-13: | 9781932528947 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | IHS Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Action
By Jean Ousset
IHS Press
Copyright © 2002 IHS PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-94-7
CHAPTER 1
On Action in General
1. Fundamental Principles. As the word indicates, "action," in the philosophical sense of that term, signifies the passage of something from "potency" into "act," the realization of something which was formerly present only potentially and not actually.
Action is therefore a means: a means towards that realization, that passage into act, of something which was as yet only possible, "in potency." This supposes a strict and harmonious relationship between the nature of the realizing action and the nature of that which is realized.
Let us take as examples a grain of corn and a tree trunk. These contain "in potency" the ear of corn and the baulk of timber, which can be obtained from them. Nevertheless, the operations by which the ear and the timber, virtually contained in the grain and the trunk respectively, are made to pass from potency to act are quite different.
To produce the ear it is necessary to sow the grain in definite conditions, to cultivate it and wait for the harvest, etc.
To produce the timber, the trunk must be cut down and transported to the sawmill where arrangements are available to square it into baulks, etc.
All of these imply different human skills, methods, techniques, instruments and a perception of very different circumstances. In short, the action required to raise a harvest of cereals does not resemble the action by which beams and rafters are produced.
So we can see the relevance of Marcel de Corte's comments at the Lausanne Congress of 1965: "I often hear it said that means, taken as such, are neither good nor bad. I confess that this assertion leaves me at a loss, for I ask myself where can we find means that are purely means, without being, by the same token inert, unusable, unused, non-existent, resembling perhaps some strange Heath Robinson gadget. A means can never be considered as such, except purely in the mind. A means is always considered in relation to an end."
How often, in matters of political and social action, are the truths of common sense forgotten?
2. The Means Must Accord With the End. The error is frequently observed of employing in the service of an end, methods or means of action which in practice have been devised for a quite opposite end. Under these circumstances, it is scarcely surprising if results are disappointing.
Unfortunately, many people think it opportune to have recourse to methods which have been efficacious in the service of the Revolution, and which continue to serve revolutionary ends even when they are for counter-revolutionary purposes, which goes to show that the indispensable relationship of means to ends is by no means as well understood as it is thought to be.
We often hear trotted out the metaphor of the train or the automobile which can take us indifferently to the city or into the country. But it is the function of a train to roll on rails and to transport us wherever the rails go. Our destination is irrelevant, always provided it is on the railway. So with the automobile, which is designed to circulate on highways, roads or tracks. It can take us wherever there are highways, roads or tracks, but it cannot travel over sea nor climb a rocky cliff. If our destination is the Isle of Man, neither railway nor car will serve.
The fact that even the most well-meaning of people misconstrue this relation of means to ends makes these elementary reminders all the more necessary.
The efficacy of Communist methods is so notorious that many people imagine that it is expedient to use in the service of Order what appears to be so powerful in serving Subversion. But this ignores the essential difference between the two tasks. The metaphor often applied to this situation – snatching the revolver from the aggressor and turning it against him – cannot be accepted. For, in this example, the action of the person attacked is to shoot down the aggressor who tried first to shoot him. The revolver can be used by either side, but in using it the purposes of both sides is not strictly identical.
To suggest that the same doctrine of action can serve indifferently either the progress of the Revolution or the restoration of a Christian Social Order proves that the person concerned fails to distinguish between the two operations, which is a very grave matter! Because this is tantamount to admitting that the oppositions which exist between the two causes are no wider than, say, the competition between two sawmills, both producing timber. In this example, the essential feature of both establishments is that they saw wood; consequently, on either side, the same procedures and implements can be used.
The basic question is this. Is the difference between working for the Revolution and working for a Christian Social Order no greater than a party dispute, or a competition between shops dealing in similar merchandise? For, if the merchandise is similar, it must be admitted that methods and means of action can be the same in either case.
But how can the same doctrine of action and the same proceedings be accepted when, on the one hand, it is a matter of demolishing the social order, by "dialectizing" it, and transforming the people into a mass proletariat, and on the other hand of re-establishing true social order in all its hierarchies, liberties and essential diversities. One might as well maintain that the same operations, methods and instruments could serve equally well in planting trees as in cutting them into planks.
This goes to show that many who are against Liberalism in the dogmatic sense are liberals at heart when it comes to action, being incapable of distinguishing the incompatibility of methods and means in relation to ends as radically opposed as is construction to demolition.
In order that we should be able to adopt efficaciously (in the service of our own end) revolutionary modes of action, the Christian Social Order which we are seeking to promote would have to possess nothing which was essentially opposed to the Social Order willed by the Revolution. Between conscious revolutionaries and those faithful to Christian Social doctrine there would have to be only opposition on points of detail, personal rivalries, clashes between cliques and between parties. And this is not the case.
3. Revolutionary Methods. Through ignorance of these absolutely fundamental distinctions very few people take into account the fact that by trying to combat the Revolution in the way they do they are actually contributing to the spread of Marxism; at least by the diffusion of an attitude of mind from which Marxism is not slow to emerge, as a chicken does from an egg.
By studying, as they do, means in isolation, by thinking about action without paying attention to the specific end of the means they envisage, they cannot but encourage the cult of procedure as such, of the technique as such, the cult of pragmatism. And such is the essence of Marxism, however little this may be realized.
The truth – alas! – is that, in the majority of cases, Communism finds a favourable attitude of mind, a sort of pre-Marxism. Those who entertain this notion had better be on their guard. They may think that they are struggling victoriously against the Revolution by adopting its own weapons, but they forget that Marxism, being purely pragmatic, is merely the action implicit in pragmatism. They forget the educative effect of that action. They forget that this educative effect does not depend on intellectual adhesion to some Marxist or Communist "truth," but that it stems from the mere habit of acting, or of thinking about action, according to Marxist methods.
If our behaviour is regulated in Marxist fashion, how can its educative effect fail to be Marxist?
Many are in this state of mind while nonetheless pretending that they are struggling against Communism. At a given moment, however, a mere trifle is enough to reunite them with their apparent enemies. Some event is sure to make them "become conscious" of their latent Marxism, when these pretended "defenders of the social order" will rejoin the ranks of the Revolution. In this way the Nazi troops of Von Paulus, after their surrender at Stalingrad, went over to the communists.
To act like a Marxist is to be already a Marxist, even if one is combating Marxism. Thus, many efforts, which are reputed to be counter-revolutionary, have resulted and will result in increasing the Marxist consensus throughout the world.
These well-meaning people not only lack a doctrine of action, not only do they tend to adopt the methods of the enemy to their own undoing, they do not even know how to profit by what they might legitimately learn from the enemy. Because they do not understand what the enemy is about, or have such a wrong idea of it, the enemy's power for evil tends to be exaggerated.
Thus, the idea that is formed of revolutionary action is almost always a caricature of reality. All that is perceived is what is most crudely evident in the history of the Revolution. All that is perceived is the very superficial and deceptive aspect of mass movements, clumsy through their excess of numbers, and their orientation by rudimentary catchwords and a childish notion of doctrine. Mass agitation and massive influence. Demonstrations and scuffles, preparations for violent action; more or less clandestine operations; popular mob leaders; enormous meetings. This is the image we have of revolutionary activity and of subversive agitation, the very aspects that can scarcely be transposed to suit our purposes. For this kind of action is impermissible.
On the other hand, we know very little about what might well be a lesson to us: the Communist concern for working in-depth; their keen sense of action through ideas; the diligence with which they attend to the formation of key people; their determination, so extreme as to be ridiculous (but nevertheless characteristic), to think out action "scientifically."
The one thing we can learn from the revolutionary example is the need to emulate and be stimulated by the zeal of Revolutionaries. We should be able to see in them the kind of ardour we ourselves should have, for when we observe how the agents of subversion buckle to their task, how they are always striving to act better, this can at least put us to shame.
Some pages of Mao Tse Tung are well worth studying, for there is nothing subversive about them. On the contrary, in these pages Mao pitilessly denounces undisciplined zeal, want of reflection and imprudence or (to use Communist jargon) subjectivism, adventurism, putschism. How profitable to us the reading of these chapters would be!
They contain so many features which are not essentially revolutionary, from which we should be keen to draw some profit. But these we refuse to notice. And so we are ignorant both of the doctrine of action which ought to be ours and of that which we could learn from the example of the adversary.
The fact remains however that it would be absurd to set about constructing something in the same way as one would set out to destroy it. For the Revolution is destructive in this sense, that its dialectics lead to conflict and disorder by provoking, exploiting and keeping up social contradiction. It pits class against class; Third Estate against the nobility; sans-culottes against ci-devant aristocrats; the Mountain against the Gironde; the poor against the rich; proletariat against the bourgeoisie; workers against bosses; Left against Right; radicals against liberals; Bolsheviks against Mensheviks; nation against nation; colonized people against colonialists; blacks against whites; democrats against fascists; defenders of the laity against clericalists.
Even in the heart of the Church it tries to provoke opposition between "progressives" and "integrists," polarizing Council Fathers against the Curia, John XXIII against Pius XII and Paul VI. Generally, the majority are stirred up against the minority, unless these latter seem to be more intensely subversive.
This is how the Revolution goes to work. Its drive is towards negating previous social growth, towards the levelling out and atomising of society by a progressive elimination of intermediate social bodies. Its action has never ceased to open the way towards a State totalitarianism which every day becomes more and more tyrannical. Everyone must be aware of innumerable examples of this.
So we come to the advice given by Joseph de Maistre concerning counter-revolution. "It must be and do the opposite of what the Revolution is and does. It ought not to be an opposite sort of revolution. That is, it must renew social bonds instead of breaking them, and exercise a co-ordinating action in the opposite direction to the disorganizing action of the Revolution."
This should suffice to dispense us from the need to insist further that an opposition in the order of ends must forbid the employment of the same kind of action, in the order of the means.
4. The Parts Played by Doctrine and Practical Experience. Our aim is not to re-establish artificially a particular political and social system, to secure the triumph of a party over its rivals. We cannot, therefore, resort to the procedures of the Revolution, for these are partisan on account of their addiction to the dialectics of disruption.
We have to restore to society its health, its natural and true life. We have to bring back life, health and strength (i.e., normal activity) to social organs which have fallen victims to the unnatural sclerotic conditions which modern totalitarianism has forced upon them.
Because the Revolution was produced by a rationalistic kind of reason, it tends to impose formulae deriving from the human mind alone. And it is therefore led by its infernal logic to use means which can be described as alien to the natural order – a miscellaneous collection of procedures for exercising pressure which do violence to the nature of things. It must, however, be recognized that the means employed are admirably suited to the purposes of the Revolution.
For, as St. Pius X has put it, we do not seek to rebuild the City otherwise than God has built it. We know only too well that civilization no longer requires to be invented, nor is it a new city to be built in the clouds.
We take for granted a knowledge of the laws and conditions of life for a true society. This is none other than a sense of what is True, which is acquired in the first place by doctrine. We say, "in the first place," because only extensive experience can bring to perfection this sense of knowing what is True, and because a formation that is too theoretical, too dogmatic, too speculative, can also have its dangers. It is prudent to complement this knowledge with a more practical knowledge, the knowledge to be found, for example, in history and in several other humanistic disciplines. Shakespeare's Hamlet puts it admirably: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be found in your philosophy" (meaning, the scholastic doctrines taught at the University of Wittenberg). Not that we are inciting our readers to cock snooks at the idea of a sound doctrinal formation. We seek only to remind them of the danger of stopping short there.
History shows that the most brilliant minds were frequently unable to discover what the experience of a mediocre empiricism succeeded in making evident some centuries later. Only the very ignorant or the very blind are unable to distinguish in the various spheres those aspects of truth which are formulated by doctrine, and those other lessons not less precious, lessons of history, the lessons of human experience in all walks of life.
The man who is forever reducing everything to principles is but a bogus "brain," whose wisdom is superficial and ill-regulated. The title of "prudent" is merited only by those who perceive the complexity and the hierarchy of ideas and things, a perception of what matters most, what matters least, and what simply does not matter at all.
Indeed, as soon as thought and action cease to run in double harness, both become corrupt; vain formulae on one side or the other.
Left to itself, deprived of the counterpoise which experience affords, thought becomes more and more rarefied. It cuts and slices truth, it makes plans and universalizes theories solely in terms of principles. Thereafter, orthodoxy becomes a title accorded only to the finest splitter of hairs who can sub-divide them into four, eight or sixteen different parts. Formation becomes an end in itself, and tends towards fatty degeneration, to doctrinal fibrositis and to veritable impotence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Action by Jean Ousset. Copyright © 2002 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface by A. S. Fraser,Introduction by The Directors, IHS Press,
Foreword by Jean Ousset,
Part I: On Action in General,
Part II: Men,
Chapter I. The Most Decisive Asset,
Chapter II. People in Their Various Networks,
Chapter III. The Clergy and the Religious Orders,
Chapter IV. The Importance and Dangers of Certain Social Categories,
Chapter V. Action on the "Masses",
Conclusion. The Church's Example,
Part III: Instruments and Methods of Work,
Preliminary Observations,
Chapter I. Doctrine and Money,
Chapter II. The Means of Action,
Chapter III. Looking,
Chapter IV. Listening,
Chapter V. Meeting Others,
Chapter VI. A Difficulty to Be Resolved,
Chapter VII. Methods of Mass Action,
Chapter VIII. The Use of Force and Secret Organization,
Chapter IX. Use of Everything in the Right Order,
Part IV: Situation and Circumstances,
Chapter I. Situation, Circumstances,
Chapter II. Four Types of Situation,
Chapter III. Pluralist Societies,
Part V: Conclusions and Directives,
Chapter I. An Élite,
Chapter II. A Certain Style of Action,
Chapter III. Notes for Individual Action: the First Level,
Chapter IV. Notes for a More Organic Action: the Second Level,
Chapter V. Notes for Specialists in Our Particular "Style" of Action: the Third Level,
Conclusion. The Need for Prayer,