The Organization of Chaos
Memorie.al / Our Albania of today is a small chaotic World. In our veins flow many sorrows and poisons, traces of destruction, of servitude, of an intangible historical-social upheaval. The turmoil and anarchy, which reign today in our language, are but a single part, a view, a phase of our historical-social decay. All this turmoil, all this anarchy reign also in all other manifestations of our civilizing dynamism. In our social ideas and tendencies, even more so in our understandings of the form and essence of our social institutions. It is an anarchy, which has swallowed almost our entire life. Ideals we have none.
Our rationalism is almost like that of children. The disposition for a persistent scientific and systematic inquiry is entirely lacking in us. Where does this evil have its root? Are there perhaps historical reasons? From the perspective of sociological understanding, what is the cause of this condition? These are some questions that Neo-Albanianism puts before our intellectual and idealistic Youth. It poses them and adds: Without giving answers to these questions, not a single step forward can be taken!….
Long has passed that epoch in which Nationalism was a companion to Romanticism. Today’s Nationalism primarily values Reality. It is the living expression of Sociology as a science, a kind of application ground for Social Hygiene, a Laboratory of psychological-social diseases. As a positive value, it has only inquiry. The discovery of the root of the evil.
The fundamental demand of Neo-Albanianism from the Youth – from that Youth which, enlightened by the lantern of the mind, feels without doubt a deep respect toward the historical fate of the Fatherland and has set itself heart and soul upon the path of fate and the future—is this: To follow a scientific form in inquiries and definitions, as well as a full and contemporary philosophical understanding in national idealism.
An intellectual faces the greatest and most terrifying danger: to fall into the trench of error and self-delusion, if he wishes to make a journey into the infinite and chaotic sphere of his fantasy. This sphere contains only false worlds, dead values that bring only sleep, and “genius utopians.” The light is Science. The World of Realities.
The problem of life, the mystery of the future, has need of this light. We must not see life through the prism of our fantasy. Our gaze we must turn toward life, i.e., to see life as it is and not as we want it to be. Life wants a solution. This solution is not found high in the national heaven, but is hidden deep in the national soul. Here is the point from which we start.
To illuminate the deep causes of our social anarchy, which the past left us as a legacy, with the lantern of sociological science. And here is the point of our direction: Upon the ruins of yesterday’s Albania, destroyed and enslaved, let us create an accomplished, enlightened, civilized Albania of tomorrow – an Albania not historical, but civilizing.
The goal of the struggle: The Idealization of life
The Albania of feeling, the Albania of thought, is waiting for its creators. Light upon the fantasy of the past. We are neither the orphaned great-grandchildren of the mythological Pelasgians, nor the ruins of the Illyrians: We are Albanians – A new Nationality. The Pelasgian fable is a baseless hypothesis. An absurdity. This sophism we must loathe. Today there remains no learned Turk who dreams of Turanian fables.
Not a single Greek, of sound mind, today boasts that he is the great-grandchild of Pericles. Even the modern Romans have long ago forgotten their origin. The life of peoples is nothing but the Miracle of Development, which regulates the great waves of the centuries. Yes! We are Albanians and we constitute a new Nationality. The Mother of Nationalism, the National Emotion of the XX century, brought to light a new offspring.
This offspring are we. Like today’s Neo-Greeks, like today’s Turks of Asia Minor, so we too were birthed by a magical summer night, the fresh and eternally new creative dynamism of nature, in the invisible and mysterious bosom of the God of Creatures. We are still boys. Our consciousness has not yet known the entirely radiant face of the Creator.
Our eyes are not yet accustomed to seeing the Sun of the Intellect with sympathy. Where are our memories of society? Where is our sentimental Unity? Where is the Poetry, the Literature that represents our race, our seed? Where is the pure and developed national soul? Where is our language? Where is our culture? Albania has not yet erected its Temple…!
We were born in darkness, but we seek the light. And the mission of today’s generation is to lead us from darkness to light. Dangers have surrounded us from all sides. Notwithstanding this, there is no danger. It is enough to understand it. He, who lives, lives because he saw and conquered the danger. Life has no other value, no other meaning. Life means to conquer danger.
Even the Ancient Greeks, in the first steps of their development, had to fight against this same danger. They even fought for an entire century. But they strove like giants. Notwithstanding this, with great difficulty they escaped from the danger of being drowned in the terrifying current that the entry of foreign influences had caused, which the past had left them as a legacy.
The “mania of historicism” almost destroyed that magnificent Statue of the Human Mind, even before it was erected. And not because it had not yet discovered the path of life, which opens within the purity and flame of national consciousness. For a long time their civilization was nothing else, but a turmoil of misunderstood Semitic, Babylonian, Indian, and Egyptian concepts.
Their religion was an anarchic and hot field of war between one another, a field upon which reined all the Gods of Asia. Despite all this Chaos, Greek civilization was born, lived, and reined upon the thrones of all subsequent epochs. The Greece of Plato was able, little by little, to vanish their influences, to drive the Gods of the Barbarians from the Temple of Thought, i.e., to organize the Chaos, which was found within its own Self./Memorie.al
Published on July 1, 1930
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