Reenchantment, Rectification, Reckoning

The Movements of our Moment

Some moments in the intellectual history of the West have been so transformative that historians have given them a name: The Renaissance; the Reformation; the Enlightenment. These were epochs in the history of Europe which transformed everything that had come before.

The Renaissance, spanning from 14th to 17th century, witnessed a revival of classical learning and art that had been, if not forgotten, at least neglected during the preceding centuries. From the Renaissance were born representational art, empirical science, and humanism. The concept of the Renaissance was not articulated until many years later, when the French historian Jules Michelet published his 1855 work "Histoire de France" (History of France). However, it was the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt who popularized the term with his influential book "Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien" (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), published in 1860.

The Reformation, dating from the early 16th century to the mid 17th century, was even more transformative. It shattered the monolithic power of the Catholic Church and ushered in an era of religious conflict in Europe that culminated in the 30 Years War (1618-1648), in which 20% of the population of Europe and 40% of the population of Germany perished. In the aftermath of the continent’s first total war, Europeans developed the concepts of religious pluralism, inter-faith tolerance, and nation-states organized around ethno-religious peoples. Unlike the Renaissance, the Reformation was a contemporaneous title given to the movement by its leaders and adherents. The word "Reformation" (Reformatio in Latin) was used by Martin Luther and his followers to describe their efforts to reform the Roman Catholic Church. The widespread use of the term by historians can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries, as the significance of the religious upheavals became more apparent.

The Enlightenments of the 17th and 18th centuries extended the intellectual revolution that commenced with the Renaissance. It was at this time the intellects of people such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant discredited the church and destroyed the power of monarchies with their ideas of liberty, democracy, and justice. This epoch strongly forwarded the political revolutions toward new forms of government, most specifically the American and French Revolutions. This was to be an age of scientific discovery, philosophical inquiry, an age in which a greater emphasis would be placed on reason and observation as sources of knowledge.

The term "the Enlightenment" (L'Âge des Lumières in French, Aufklärung in German) was coined in the 18th century by the thinkers and writers of the period themselves. Immanuel Kant famously used the term in his 1784 essay "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" (Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?). In this essay, Kant described Enlightenment as humanity's emergence from self-imposed immaturity, advocating for the use of reason and critical thinking. The term gained traction among contemporaries and was used to describe the intellectual and philosophical movement that emphasized reason, science, and individualism.

Each of the movements was intellectually distinct, yet chronologically connected to the others. The Renaissance paved the way for and overlapped with the Reformation; the Reformation set the stage for and led into the Enlightenment.

Today I think we stand on the brink of a new epoch, and the thinkers and writers of our period have begun to coin names for the movements of our moment. But what is our moment? John Carter has said it better than any who have come before:

You inhabit a world in which supernatural evil in the form of demonic princes older than the Hadean epoch may or may not lurk in the aether, a world divided into principalities under the rule of powers that may or may not be in conscious spiritual contact with those demons that might or might not exist, but which powers are with certainty implacably hostile to you. Those powers control the global financial economy, through which they own the governments, the militaries, the security services, the corporations, the schools, the universities, the corporate media, and the empty churches. Their stated intent is to annihilate you. They are well on their way to doing so. They have reduced your culture to ruins. They have opened your borders, giving your patrimony to alien invaders whom they demand you adore while instructing them to despise you. They have harassed those who disagree, and imprisoned those who resist. Their economy is breaking down. There are zombies in the street. There are plagues and rumours of plagues and rumours of cures for plagues, all of which those powers have something to do with, and all of which take their toll. Their smouldering, intractable wars spread like brushfires. Their cognitive engines of burning sand may (or may not) be accidentally (or deliberately) summoning as much of Legion as they can bring over from hyperspace. The normies are hypnotized, clueless, and apathetic, or at best aimlessly dissatisfied. Everything around you breaks and decays and malfunctions, it’s all falling apart, and you have a hard time really caring what happens to most of it because it’s all been ugly and hateful already for a while.

What do we call a movement that confronts such a moment?¹

The first names were, of course, Mencius Moldbug’s Neo-Reaction and Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment. Both labels have been attached to members of the dissident right, but neither has gained widespread adherence as the name of our movement.

Earlier this week, the inexhaustibly productive John Carter introduced a new term for the movement of our moment: The Reenchantment. His essay “The Reenchantment of the World” runs 22,000 words long and its complexity defies easy summary.

Perhaps JC² is the best summarizer of his own work, when he says that his essay “describes, or attempts to describe, a way out of the spiritual desert in which our society has wandered since the Enlightenment, without simply rejecting the Enlightenment wholesale in a quixotic attempt to restore the cultural operating system to the last working version (which led to the Enlightenment in the first place).”

The Reenchantment, then, is a spiritual movement with political implications - a contemporary equivalent to the Reformation, hopefully with a little less bloodshed. What do we name the political movement which follows Reenchantment?

I think JC is entirely correct: we cannot restore the cultural operating system of the past. The last working version was wrong and it led us where we are. We do, or should, know better now. For that reason, our movement cannot be a Reaction or a Restoration. It must be something else. But what?

Levi of Sularia offers us the answer in his essay “An Unnatural Affinity”, when he writes:

We need a better gathering ground than under the aegis of right wing politics or even “traditionalism”, which both associate us with hobbling and corrupting influences. I would tentatively suggest something like the Latin term “Recta”, meaning straight or direct, and having the proper connotation to what is solid and upright. This is a position that will always have political implications, but is not doctrinally political; it is the insistence on virtue as the lode-star of all questions which determine the affairs of men, and will prove moderate and extreme as times and questions blow about its more primal mooring… Rectitude, uprightness, virtue; this is our true love…

Rectification is defined as “the act of correcting something or making something right;” and thus our movement, the Rectification, is that which is devoted to making right our civilization, for returning it to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. For the Rectification to succeed, we must be more than just the Right Wing; we must be the Upright Wing and the Forthright Wing. We must achieve virtus heroica - the superlative excellence of gods and heroes.

The Reenchantment and the Rectification must go hand in hand. Just as the political philosophy of Tradition cannot be understood without an appreciation for its esoteric metaphysics, the Rectification cannot succeed without the Reenchantment: For in the absence of God Most High, who can tell us what is Upright? Ten generations of Enlightenment thinkers have sought in vain for the True, the Beautiful, and the Good in the disenchanted material world. They cannot find and will not find it, because it lies in the enchanted one.

But what if the Reenchantment fails to re-enchant? What if the Rectification falls short? Then our moment will have a different name. It will be named The Reckoning. And it will be the moment when that which cannot go on forever will finally stop.

Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.

1. My friend Ahnaf Ibn Qais would call such a movement “Doomed” but we shall be more optimistic. His pessimistic takes can be found at the Fall of the West.

2. I note the suspicious similarity of these initials to those of Julius Caesar.