Chronic Sexual Intoxication as a Manifestation of the Crisis of the West. Thoughts of Twentieth-Century Cultural Traditionalists

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss the views of cultural traditionalists on human sexuality. The paper presents the views of the following thinkers: René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Pitirim Sorokin. Each represents a different line of cultural traditionalism. However, they are united by expressive, radical views as well as by peculiar choices and life experiences. (Guénon was a convert to Islam, Evola sympathized with paganism and fascism, whereas Sorokin was one of the fathers of American sociology, an emigrant from Russia, with the soul of a “Russian traditionalist.”) René Guénon, Julius Evola, and Pitirim Sorokin recognized a deep crisis of the Western world. They argued that the cause of this crisis was sexual intoxication: anarchy and the sexual revolution. They thought that culture and the spiritual tradition in the Western (material) civilization was disappearing and that the primary cause of the crisis and the decline of the West were individualism and rationalism – manifesting themselves as pride, prudishness, perversion, the cult of the body, and orgasm. Guénon, Evola and Sorokin craved the restoration of the previous state: the sacralization of sex, community bonds, male domination, and ritual procreation. This was supposed to prevent the crisis and the decline of culture.