An Indictment of “Progressivism”

[My Review of Rene Guenon's "The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times."]

A fan of my Amazon reviews, unhappy with my less-than-positive three-star review of Rene Guenon’s “The Essential Rene Guenon,” suggested that I needed to reconsider my assessment of the renowned French spiritual philosopher – and so, as he suggested, I read “The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times.”

In this text, a scathing critique, Guenon blisters early-to-mid- 20th-century Western society, culture, and values and argues for the importance of true, esoteric spiritual tradition. Guenon blasts egalitarianism, moral relativism, multi-culturalism, neo-spirituality, pseudo-initiation, simplicity over depth, humanism over super-humanism, rationalism over super-rationalism, substance (or matter) over essence (or spirit); in short, quantity over quality.

According to Guenon, so-called “progress” is euphemism for “profound decadence, continuously accelerating, which is dragging humanity toward the pit where pure quantity reigns.” This tendency toward quantity results in a “downward leveling,” where uniformity becomes a “caricature of unity” and everything is within the reach of Everyman.

Speaking of unity, one particular Guenon description of it stood out for me: “Unity is that wherein all quality subsists, transformed and in its fullness, and that distinction, freed from all 'separative' limitation, is indeed carried therein to its highest level.”

In contradistinction to “Integral” philosopher Ken Wilber, who views 20^th-century modernity/postmodernity as a progressive “Up from Eden” ascent, Guenon views it as a regressive down-from true-tradition descent, the “final phases of cyclical manifestation” in this Dark Age of Kali Yuga..

I have mixed feelings about this prescient text. On the one, hand I applaud Guenon (born November 15, 1886) for his Scorpionic scorching of decadent, de-esotericized modern socioculture, and on the other, I find his analysis severely lacking, devoid of innovative, integral solutions. Guenon had no real answer for the downward spiral. Instead of proposing something new and vital, he simply argued for genuine tradition, and in line with his argument, he left France and spent the last two decades of his life deeply involved in a Sufi order in Egypt,.under the name Shaykh ‘Abd al Wahid Yahya. I wonder what he would say about Islam today.

Although I have mixed feelings about Guenon’s discourse, I don’t have mixed feelings about his dense, tortuous writing style: In short, I don’t care for it. It’s as if Guenon is straining to make it inaccessible to the common man, whom he has little regard for.

To summarize, I have decided to give this book four stars because I resonate with Guenon’s critique of modern society, but I didn’t really enjoy reading it.