The moment rapidly approaches where civilization declines with each new comfort.
—Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Montaigne, after a busy life, full of activity, had decided to retire to his estate and allow idleness to overtake him in preparation for death. He found, however, that leisure did not still his mind and was assailed by “chimeras and imaginary monsters.”
In the words of Lucan: “Leisure always breeds an inconstant mind.”
Never has there been before a society so concerned with material comforts. Indeed, it seems to have become the singular aim of the work of modern society. The contributions made to art, literature, and music pale in comparison to the novel forms of comfort that are produced every day.
Modern man is comforted in ways that had never even occurred to people in ages past.
We enthusiastically wait for the day when we need no longer even get out of bed in the morning and all our needs and desires will be fulfilled with the push of a button.
Needless to say, all this comfort does not provide us with happiness or meaning or health. Modern man imagines that all this comfort is his reward for harnessing the power of technology, when really it is his punishment.
Ultimately, progress can be reduced to the process of stealing from man that which ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price that which debases him.
- Nicolás Gómez Dávila
In more ways than one, modern man has gotten the short end of the stick. Deprived of his inheritance, the ancestral laws of tradition, man is sufficiently impoverished in order to arouse our deepest pity.
What is worse, however, is what he is offered in exchange for this loss. While progress promised liberation and an end to suffering, it has clearly failed to deliver the goods. All it offers in reality are the most vulgar comforts and conveniences, which enervate the body and wither the soul.
Progress measures its success in terms of its ability to provide these things to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Never mind the fact, however, that these things are insalubrious at any price and only increase our misery and wretchedness.
Thus, having forgotten what he once possessed, modern man is content to judge his happiness and well-being in proportion to his ability to accumulate these paltry stuffs.
The prolonged childhood enabled by the prosperity of industrial society results in the growing number of infantilized adults.
—Nicolás Gómez Dávila
It doesn’t take more to demonstrate the pitfalls of overvaluing material comforts than to simply observe the lives of contemporary prosperous Western adults. Millions of men and women, whose material needs are abundantly provided for, overwhelmingly resemble overgrown toddlers.
They fill their days with distractions and trifles, never imagining that they were meant for something more. Those whose development and growth has been so radically stunted cannot even be said to live in blissful ignorance, for they clearly experience no bliss. They simply live in torpor. Preindustrial society could not accommodate a population of so many millions of vegetative individuals.
It has been suggested that the contempt of the reactionary for the modern world derives not from hatred but from love—love of happiness, love of truth, love of the world, love of God, and, yes, even love of humanity.
For one who truly loves, how can the spectacle of modern life not inspire the most bitter indignation?
You can find these passages in the remarkable book—The Authentic Reactionary: Selected Scholia of Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
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