It really does not.
To write an essay, an author may use "to some extent" a given
material, but this obviously does not mean that he agrees, whether in
full or in part, with the conclusions reached by those who have
produced it.
In 1958, a few decades before his conversion to neoconservatism, the
young leftist intellectual N. Podhoretz argued in his essay 'The
Know-Nothing Bohemians' that the 'Beat Generation' glamourised the
primitive and the instinctual and hated the civilised and the rational
; therefore, to oppose or support the Beats, "has to do (...) with
being for or against intelligence itself". Evola criticised the 'beat
generation', but never for being "against intelligence itself", for
the simple reason that Evola never overestimated 'intelligence', at
least as conceived of by establishment intellectuals such as Reynolds,
Gold and Podhoretz. These, on the basis of a bourgeois conservative
standpoint, opposed two human types which are basically by-products of
the same bourgeois society, that is to say, on one hand, the
'instinctual man' and, on the other hand, the 'rational man', and did
not see any other alternative to these 'false twins'. Evola does.
Evola's point of reference has always been the 'differentiated man'
which is as far from the 'instinctual man' as he is from the 'rational
man'.
In 'Partisan review', Podhoretz chastised the beats for having claimed
they wanted to "Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill
the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those
incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously
involved with a woman, a job, a cause". From the ideas expounded by
Evola on the subject in 'Youth, Beats and Right-Wing Anarchists' and
other writings of his on this topic, there is every reason to think
that he would have gladly let both sides kill each other, with their
favourite ammunitions : blanks.
Interestingly enough, many current scholars have reached the
conclusion that the beats' novels would never have become so
successful, hadn't they been so narrow-mindedly criticised by American
anti-beats. This is what may be called the catch-51 syndrome : "I am
the AL and the WY". The 'differentiated man', as for him, does not
precisely boost sales.
--- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, Rowan Berkeley
<rowan.berkeley@...> wrote:
>
> This essay offers an early example of cross fertilisation between
the ideas of
> Evola and those of the writers who were to become "the
neoconservatives":
>
> "In what follows we will use to some extent the material consisting
of the
> testimonies and the essays collected in the anthology by S. Krim,
The Beats -
> the most important essays are those by H. Gold, Marc Reynold and N.
Podhoretz"
>