Which Way, Western Man?
European man must assert himself or perish.
by Revilo P. Oliver
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review of William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man? was published — in an abridged version — by NATIONAL VANGUARD in 1979. When William Simpson (pictured) died at the age of 99 in 1991, he had completed a series of supplementary notes and emendations he wished to be added to his monumental book.
William Pierce promised him that the book would be revised and expanded as he intended, a task which was entrusted to and completed by J.N. Abbott — and published in a new authorized edition by Simpson’s estate. — Ed.
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TO ANSWER THE QUESTION posed in the title of his book, William Gayley Simpson has condensed into 762 closely-printed pages the experience, the research, and the philosophical thought of a lifetime. He is now 87, and he began to write the present book thirty-five years ago. It is a veritable encyclopaedia of everything that is directly pertinent to our race’s position in the world today and our problematic future.
The book is unique. What makes it so cogent is that it is both an intellectual autobiography and a synoptic treatise. The reader, even if he begins with conditioned reflexes that make him hostile to his own race, can follow, step by step, the process by which reason and intellectual honesty forced Mr. Simpson to his conclusions. His work may also be taken symbolically as an epitome or recapitulation of the course of Western civilization, which likewise began with the Christian faith of the Dark Ages and has now brought us to the point where we can no longer refuse to face the grim realities of the world in which we must either live or perish.
Born in 1892 in an educated but sternly Christian family, Mr. Simpson was graduated, magna cum laude, from a highly reputed theological seminary, became a minister, and, unlike most clergymen, he had a religious faith so ardent that instead of regarding some of the most striking parts of Christian doctrine as convenient subjects for professional oratory, he, like St. Francis, tried to live in logical conformity with them. Our race, like some others, has a strain of sentiment that can be excited by the idea of tapas, the mirific virtue and spiritual power produced by austerity, self-sacrifice, and self-mortification. The notion of tapas was a fundamental part of Aryan religions from India to Scandinavia, and it was not remarkable that our ancestors, accustomed to venerate Odin, a god who, by an act of supreme self-sacrifice, hanged himself on the great world-tree so that he might arise from the dead, should have accepted the cult of a god who had himself crucified and likewise rose from the dead; nor that, so long as they believed in their new religion, they held to the faith that spiritual excellence could be attained by inflicting degradation and pain on oneself. St. Francis was merely one of the many who had the fortitude to live up to that faith.
Mr. Simpson, too, tried to carry the religion to its practical consequences, but, unlike St. Francis, he did not lapse into a kind of amiable insanity. He learned from his dolorous experience that reality is not to be denied and that magic is either clever trickery or an hallucination. He realized that there was no way in which he “could be an honest man and remain a minister.”
Innumerable clerics, even in the darkest ages of Faith, found their creed unbelievable, but either took refuge in the Mediaeval aphorism, “populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur,” or, if not without honesty, accepted Cardinal Dubois’s celebrated dictum that God is a bogey that must be brandished in order to scare the masses into some semblance of civilized behavior. But since the forced unity of Christendom was effectively broken in the Sixteenth Century, not a few clergymen have publicly denounced the religion to which they gave assent in their youth. It will be worth while to illustrate the profound difference between their reactions and Mr. Simpson’s. And it will suffice to list the five who are now most generally remembered in this country.
Early in the Eighteenth Century the Reverend Mr. Thomas Woolston set out to “establish the truth of the Scriptures.” He soon saw that it was no longer possible to claim that the various tales in the Christian Bible were historical accounts of events that had actually happened, so he tried to defend them as allegories, as edifying and somewhat more dignified than Aesop’s fables. That device, however, was a rod that broke in his hands. He became a deist and published his Discourses, of which sixty thousand copies are said to have been sold in the brief time before the corporations in the salvation-business took alarm and he was, by a pious perversion of the law, thrown into the prison in which he died in 1731. He is remembered now for…
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